Getting into Guinness: One man’s longest, fastest, highest journey inside the world’s most famous record book
to highest. And even in the highest, there is no end to our progress, for God Himself is inside each of us and God at every moment is transcending His own Reality.”
Chinmoy had a colourful athletic past of his own, and to demonstrate what the heart’s ceaseless yearning could achieve, he embarked on a series of Guinnessesque feats throughout his lifetime, minus the certificates and official recognition. An avid runner and weightlifter, he completed numerous marathons and ultramarathons, and in 2004, at age 73, bettered his personal record by lifting 66,647 kilograms (146,931 pounds) in one day. In 2002 he lifted 1000 lambs over his head during six days in New Zealand, and the following week hoisted 100 cows. In 1988 he launched a programme called ‘Lifting Up the World with a Oneness-Heart’, to honour people he felt had made a notable contribution to the world or humanity. For the next six years he took the programme’s name quite literally, and lifted 7027 such honoured individuals over his head - always with one arm. It is easy to see where Ashrita gets his inspiration from, not just spiritually but also for creating wacky feats of strength. His teacher also organized a biannual World Harmony Run to promote peace, a relay that spanned some 17,700 kilometres (11,000 miles) and 80 nations, undertaken to create goodwill between the people of the Earth. Chinmoy’s torch has been passed on during the run by the likes of Sting, Carl Lewis, Muhammad Ali, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II.
Chinmoy was equally earnest about art and writing, and claimed to have completed more than 100,000 paintings in less than a year, including more than 16,000 in one day. Likewise, he is responsible for countless volumes of poems, essays and plays. To spread his message, Chinmoy hosted concerts, lectures and public meditation sessions, like the one Ashrita first attended, all free of charge.
Sri Chinmoy’s affect on Ashrita was profound, and even today, 30 years after his first taste of limitless physical and spiritual prowess, Furman prefaces almost every comment with ‘my teacher believes’, ‘my teacher showed me’ or ‘to honour my teacher’. In fact, the serial pursuit of Guinness World Records has been Ashrita’s platform to publicly promote Chinmoy’s spirituality and draw attention to his cause - and he has been very successful at it. He wears a Sri Chinmoy T-shirt or singlet for every record breaking attempt and rarely fails to give credit to his teacher. For this reason, his job is as a manager of a health food shop in Chinmoy’s domain, where he is given exceeding flexibility. For years he has moonlighted as the travel manager of his guru’s orchestra, organizing concert tours and travelling the world with them, slipping in record-breaking feats along the way, often at the same exotic locations he dreamt of as a young boy.
Shortly after attending that first meditation with Chinmoy, Furman became a devoted follower, eventually dropping out of both Judaism and Columbia University to pursue spiritual fulfillment. On his website, Ashrita recalls his early experiences. “Sri Chinmoy radically altered the way I looked at things…. My teacher’s philosophy of self-transcendence, of overcoming your limits and making daily progress spiritually, creatively and physically using the power of meditation, really thrilled me! However, I was a bit unsure about the physical part in my case due to my lifelong commitment to nerdiness!” Sensing Furman’s reluctance to use his mind to expand the limits of his body, in 1978 Chinmoy told him to enter a 24-hour bicycle race through New York’s Central Park. As Furman told me, “It was basically ‘just participate, you don’t have to do great.’ I was in my early twenties and I had never been athletic my entire life, so I figured okay, I’ll participate.” At 1.8 metres and 75 kilograms (five feet ten inches and 165 pounds), and practising no physical activity, he had low expectations. Little did he know that fuelled by an inner spirit discovered during the race, he would complete a stunning 652 kilometres (405 miles), with no training, far more than most avid amateur cyclists could accomplish even with preparation and today’s much better equipment. In fact, while Ashrita had no idea, he had actually made a pretty impressive run at the 1978 Guinness World Record for all-day cycling, at just under 766 kilometres (476 miles).
My whole discovery of this revolved around that bicycle race. It was really a life-changing time for me, and I learned that it had nothing to do with my body. I learned that I could use the body as an instrument, as a way to express my spirit and also to make spiritual progress. The idea of using the spirituality to make progress at another level was just totally foreign to me, so this was a major breakthrough. That was the moment, when I kind of stumbled off the bicycle after being on the road for 24 hours, and I just remember making a commitment that I was going to break Guinness records, because it had always been a goal of mine as a kid but I never thought it was possible to do that. Not for my own ego, but to tell people about meditation, and that’s where it all started.
It did not take Ashrita long to make his mark on the book: with just his eleventh record, set in 1987, he earned a special and unique spot in the 1988 edition, a title he still holds that no one else ever has. His website reprints the original telegram from the book’s first editor, Norris McWhirter, congratulating him. It reads “ASHRITA FURMAN OF JAMAICA, NY HAS ESTABLISHED A VERSATILITY RECORD BY SIMULTANEOUSLY HOLDING GUINNESS RECORDS IN TEN UNRELATED CATEGORIES. WARM CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR ELEVENTH RECORD.” This was his decathlon, a feat not lost on the media. In an article titled ‘In pursuit of excellence, sort of’, Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper recognized the feat but noted, “On the other hand, we hear the nitpickers say querulously, this could turn out to be the dumbest decathlon of all time. Admittedly, it is difficult to think of any situation calling for any more than two of Mr Furman’s accomplishments at one time.”
Most of Ashrita’s copious press since has been more flattering. The Toronto Star called him the ‘King of World Records’. The New York Times dubbed him Guinness’s ‘King of Strange Feats, All for Inner Peace’. It was the Christian Science Monitor that chose ‘Mr Versatility’, the nickname that has stuck and continues to grow ever more accurate year after year.
If there is one thing the book’s weird history has demonstrated time and again, it is that no matter how eccentric the intent, getting into Guinness is never as easy as it sounds, even for Ashrita, who despite clearly being the best at it, still fails now and again. Like the time a shark crashed into him while he was attempting to break his own underwater juggling record - in full scuba gear. Cracking the pages of Guinness certainly was not easy at the outset, and despite his middle of the night inner-reflection while cycling and the ah-hah moment when he realized his calling, the book, for a time, would elude even his best efforts.
It wasn’t that easy. It took a few trials and errors before I actually got in. The first thing I tried was pogo-stick jumping because it was the one thing I was good at as a kid. But it was crazy because I had that incredible experience with the bicycle and figured ‘okay I can do that again with no training’. So a few months later I had found out the rules for pogo-stick jumping and got a bunch of pogo sticks and called the media and went out there with no training. The record was 100,000 jumps. It was crazy but I had so much faith in the system, the chanting, the visualization, all these things I had done on the bicycle, so I just went out there, and after three hours everything was hurting. I had decided to do 24 hours of pogo stick jumping because my teacher had done a 24-hour painting marathon and I wanted to honour that. It just shows you my faith, that I was going to go out there for 24 hours with no training. It worked. I did it, the record was 100,000 jumps in 15 hours and I passed that in just 13-and-a-half hours, and then I kept going, because at exactly the moment I broke the record, I started hearing these screams, very weird noises in the park. It turned out they were peacocks in the Central Park Zoo, and it was very eerie because in Indian mythology peacocks represent victory and at the exact moment I broke it they started. The peacocks weren’t anywhere near us, there is no way they could have heard us. It was like a cosmic moment. I was in a lot of pain but I kept going.
He did 131,000 jumps in those 24 hours, but afterwards record officials disallowed his attempt on a technicality. As with many marathon endeavours, rules