Sri Chinmoy (commenting on the songs): You give joy to millions and billions of people. He who gives joy to countless people has to have a heart of Infinity, so you have that heart. You give joy to countless people. Therefore, you must have a universal heart that gives you the capacity to give joy to boundless, boundless people.
Richard Gere: Thank you so much for those lovely songs. Not only are these beautiful songs, but he wrote them in six flats, which is really a difficult key to write in.
I didn’t know at all what to expect here. I was coming to see Guru, but I didn’t expect to have such a momentous occasion unfold here. Yet I’ve known of Guru’s work for some time, and certainly not directly from Guru, but from his students. It has always been very inspiring when we see them around the world and the good works that they do – talented musicians and writers and people who’ve been doing wonderful things, but not just in themselves. Somehow they carry a very deep love and compassion inside their hearts, and it seems to infuse everything that they do. And I can see now, meeting Guru, where that comes from.
You know, I have a step-daughter and I have a son, and my step-daughter’s about 13. She’s becoming a teenager, going through those difficult years when kids are almost impossible to be around. She doesn’t talk to me or her mother much, like most teenagers, but last night she came in the middle of the night to our bed, and she was just a frightened little girl. She’d been having nightmares, and we asked her what they were about. She said, “Oh, it was about snipers, snipers everywhere.” Snipers were getting in the house, and snipers were everywhere.
I said, “Honey, it’s very easy. You just have a very strong light inside of your heart, and this pure white light comes out from your heart and touches these snipers, and they turn into Buddhas, and they can’t hurt you then.”
That of course is what we all are. We’re really Buddhas, and we might appear to be difficult or snipers in some way, kind of emotional assassins sometimes, and we get angry and we do difficult things. But really we’re creatures of light. We’re Buddhas. And whenever I remember that myself, all of my problems dissolve and go away. It’s in the strength of our teachers that we know that and we remember that, and I can see in the faces of all these students here that Guru is a great teacher.
I can see the artistic mind that’s at play here – I mean, the metaphor of lifting up the world one by one. If Guru lived to be a million years old, I’m sure eventually every person on all the planets would be here to be lifted up.
Sri Chinmoy: I have lifted six thousand five hundred people.
Richard Gere: So you have six billion to go on this planet. But that’s really all of our jobs, isn’t it, to lift everyone else up. I think it’s a really wonderful metaphor here, and a wonderful gift that you’ve all given me. I thank you, Guru, very much for this and for the continuation of all the fine work that you’ve done over many decades. I’m sure you’ll continue for many, many, many decades to come. Thank you very much for this wonderful event today. Thank you.
After the ceremony, Sri Chinmoy accompanied Richard Gere to the Pilgrim-Museum.From:Sri Chinmoy,Only One Reality Sri Chinmoy, Agni Press, 2025
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