Ashrita Furman Seeks Enlightenment Through Guinness Records
Ashrita Furman retucked his t-shirt into his jeans, bowed his head and prayed. Then he looked up, not to the heavens, but to a 20-foot-high tower of 71 pint glasses, stacked one inside the other on a wooden shelf against his house in Queens. Furman had secured them against the shelf with three straps. He placed his hands on the bottom glass, at shoulder level, and bent his knees.
It was a bright spring day; there was a chance the glasses would crack in the sunlight. Furman needed them to stay on his chin for 10 seconds, without the stack crashing down on his upturned face. Exhaling quickly, he was ready: ready to balance the highest number of glasses ever perched upon a human chin, ready to break his next Guinness record and, most importantly, ready for enlightenment.
"Okay, release the first strap," he said to Bipin Larkin, a friend standing on a ladder beside the tower. Furman pushed the stack?which moved like a tinkling, reflecting snake?skyward. His muscular arms trembled under the 60-pound weight.
"Release strap two!" He pulled the stack toward him and slowly placed it on his chin.
"Strap three!"
The glass snake suddenly recoiled from the shelf, arching back. Bipin and I started stopwatches as soon as Furman removed his hands from the stack. Seventy-one glasses rested there, clinking as if they were contemplating whether to implode or hold the arc.
They chose to implode. The air burst with cracking sounds as we ran for cover from plunging glass. Collapsing in several places, the stack crashed onto the cement in a glimmering heap.
A minute later, Furman and Bipin were raking shards into a corner that already looked like the debris of every Jewish wedding from here to Jersey. Furman didn't mind that he had failed, though. "My teacher says that every time you break a goal, you set a new one," he said. "That's how you transcend."
Ashrita Furman, the holder of the most Guinness world records as well as a student of Sri Chinmoy, was born Keith Furman in Brooklyn in 1954. He'd always had a fascination for the Guinness records as a boy, but never imagined that he would someday break distance records by pogo-sticking up Mount Fuji and unicycling backwards, or construct the world's largest pencil. By his own admission, he says that he was an unathletic geek.
All that changed when he met the man who would inspire him to break all those records and try for the ultimate goal of transcendence. Furman is one of the 5000 followers worldwide of Sri Chinmoy, the Bangladesh-born guru who teaches a regimen of vegetarianism, celibacy, meditation and athleticism. Furman is one of his closest students and organizes Chinmoy's many events here and abroad.
A poster for a meditation workshop first drew then 16-year-old Furman to Chinmoy, with whom he studied for the next eight years. Chinmoy renamed Keith "Ashrita," meaning "protected by God." Then came Furman's first experience with Chinmoy-style athletics. In 1978 the guru held a 24-hour bicycle race in Central Park. Although Furman had never ridden more than 10 miles at a stretch, he came in third that day, logging 400 miles. "I used all the meditation techniques I learned over the years," he told me. The world records were a natural next step.
Furman consults his guru before each record attempt, and Chinmoy has veto power. "I saw that someone in the book had eaten a tree and I wanted to try that," Furman said. He digested part of a birch that he'd mixed in his blender before Chinmoy told him to stop. While a number of records are his own idea, like underwater pogo-sticking, he breaks many existing records held by others. He'll look through the book until he finds one he thinks he can break, like the glass-balancing.
"Usually during the intensity of the records, I have some really profound experience," he said. Paraphrasing the Bhagavad Gita, he added that "'Water cannot drench the soul, wind cannot dry the soul.' When you're in deep meditation, or during these records attempts, you're basically disassociating yourself from the body and you're really trying to go within." And that, he says, will lead him to enlightenment.
Furman meditates every day and before each attempt. One night last April he said an extra-long prayer before assuming his position under the stack of glasses. That evening the air was cool. With ease, Furman balanced 65 glasses and placed the tower back on the shelf without even one glass cracking.
"Let's go for 71!" Bipin released the straps and Furman held the tower on his chin. At six seconds, the tower began drifting to the left. He sidestepped again, struggling to stay under the column, which leaned over his head. In a breathless moment, it came crashing down onto the patio and lawn. By my count, he had held it for 10 seconds. After months of practicing and hundreds of broken glasses, he had a new record.
Furman cheered and hugged Bipin. But the triumph was bittersweet: the record-break needed to be videotaped, or at least witnessed by the press (as a timer, I couldn't do both). Three of us in his backyard in the twilight didn't count.
A few days later, Furman called to say that he'd arranged for WABC to cover another attempt. He said he would try to emphasize both Sri Chinmoy and his spiritual quest, although he knew the reporter would focus on the "kookiness" of his record obsession.
Sure enough, after Furman balanced a record-breaking 75 glasses for the cameras, the reporter edited out all mention of Sri Chinmoy and spiritual bliss for the segment that aired on the 5 o'clock news.
This August, Furman hurried to break three more records to reach a total of 70, in honor of Chinmoy's 70th birthday. He was going for the fastest peanut-sack mile, the longest underwater jumprope and making the world's largest bouquet of roses. "It's a challenge of achieving the goal of finding your inner strength," he told Newsday. But, as Furman explained to me, this isn't about glory. "It's almost like bliss," he said of performing records. "Like nothing you've ever experienced. It goes beyond joy or pleasure."