States-Arkansas

Arkansas (AR). The 25th state to join the Union in 1836

Arkansas factoids: The capital of Arkansas is Little Rock — which is also its largest city. Today’s population in Arkansas is approximately 3 million (averaging around 59 people per square mile). Arkansas’s state tree is the ‘Pine Tree’; its state floral emblem is the ‘Apple Blossom’; its state bird the ‘Mockingbird’; its state fruit is the ‘Tomato’ and its state nut is the ‘Pecan’. Arkansas’s State Motto is: “Regnat populus” (The People Rule).

Activities of Sri Chinmoy in Arkansas (see page for activities in other states)

1974

• March 6, 1974. Sri Chinmoy delivers a lecture entitled ‘Service’, at 12 noon in the Student Union Theater at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas
  • The following Questions and Answers were asked following the lecture published in Fifty Freedom-Boats to One Golden Shore, Part 4
    • Question: What do you concentrate on?
    • Question: Do you respect other religions?
    • Question: How can one work for God?
    • Question: I am a vegetarian but I work as a meat handler. Is this increasing my karma?
    • Question: How do you see the physical body as entering into the scheme of things?
  • Sri Chinmoy related a funny story about this lecture. Remember, he had only been in America a few years and, he admits, he had some difficulties with pronouncing some uniquely American words…
    • When I went to Arkansas for the first time in 1974, to give one of my fifty-state university talks, just two or three minutes before the talk, a professor at the University of Arkansas came up to me. He said, “Sri Chinmoy, you are a godly man. I am so happy that you have come to our university to illumine us.”

      I said to him, “I am so happy to come to ‘Ar-Kan-SAWS’.”

      The kind-hearted professor most kindly said to me, “Sri Chinmoy, it is pronounced ‘Ar-Kan-SAW’, not ‘Ar-Kan-SAWS’. This has nothing to do with your spiritual wisdom, which you have so kindly come to share with us.

      Even now, some of my younger students correct my pronunciation. (…) But, alas, when it comes to ‘Massachusetts’, I still fearfully perspire when I have to pronounce it correctly!

1992

• November 15, 1992. Sri Chinmoy greets President-elect Bill Clinton who thanks Sri Chinmoy for the gift of a song he had composed about him. The previous day, November 14, Sri Chinmoy’s students sang the song as the then-Governor Clinton was leaving the Governor’s Mansion for his morning jog.

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Listen to the melody Sri Chinmoy set for name ‘Arkansas’

(read more about these on the 50-state songs page)

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Among the many songs Sri Chinmoy composed on America, his adopted country, this one is perhaps the most powerful:

America, America, America!
Great you are, good you are,
Brave you are, kind you are.
O my America, America.
Your Heaven-freedom is earth’s aspiration-choice.
With you, in you, is God-Hour’s Victory-Voice.

—Sri Chinmoy
(see https://www.srichinmoysongs.com/america-great-you-are-good-you-are)

The song “America! Great You Are, Good You Are” recording, below, as performed by the Sri Chinmoy Choir:

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