I learned that Sri Chinmoy’s friend Irina Malikova of the Gorbachev Foundation, a close assistant to President Gorbachev, was not at all well. She went for a biopsy, and afterwards I called her, at Sri Chinmoy’s request, to ask the outcome. She described on the phone her experience during the operation and asked if I could please ask Sri Chinmoy the spiritual significance.
Unfortunately after her biopsy Irina could not come out of the anaesthesia for four hours. She experienced what seemed like a strange dream with unusual beings taking her down a long tunnel. She could see at the end of a tunnel what seemed to be a large illumined hall, and the beings kept saying “Come with us, go with us, you will like this.” She felt herself rushing backward down a long tunnel going faster and faster.
All of a sudden, larger than anything she could ever imagine, she saw Sri Chinmoy blocking the tunnel. He stopped her and told her, “Put out your hands and take hold of this.”When she did this, Sri Chinmoy placed in her hands what Irina described as a crystal, very translucent, of an unearthly, beautiful blue. Then he loudly commanded, “Say the magic word.” At first Irina did not respond. At the top of his voice, Sri Chinmoy again commanded, “Say the magic word — NOW!” At that moment, she screamed out the name of her small child, “Dmitriy, Dimitry!” When she did this, she went rushing down the tube in the reverse direction with the greatest speed. The next thing she knew, she was opening her eyes on the operating table, with the doctors and nurses looking over her, with a big light shining behind them.
When I asked Sri Chinmoy if he would please give his interpretation of this experience as she had requested, Sri Chinmoy said, “Her soul was about to leave her body for the other world,” and that he had given Irina back her own soul. He said to Irina, “Do you remember the blue bird when you first came to see me? At that time I showed you your soul.” Irina remembered that the first time she saw Sri Chinmoy, at Aspiration-Ground in New York, he took her to the Sri Chinmoy Track where she noticed a beautiful blue bird. When she described it to others, they said they had never seen such a bird at the track.
When Irina came to New York later that year, everywhere we went she would try to rediscover that particular blue colour, because she said this crystal was an incredibly beautiful blue.As it turns out, she says that she has never been able to recapture that beautiful blue colour.