Joel Martin: Let us talk about your spiritual path. Perhaps you can explain to us exactly what your path is?

Sri Chinmoy: Mine is the path of the heart. It is founded upon divine love, divine devotion and divine surrender. Here I am using the word ‘divine’. In the case of human love, we finally come to realise that it eventually ends in total frustration. Human devotion is nothing short of attachment. And human surrender is done under compulsion. We are compelled to offer our surrender to our superiors.

But divine love is something totally different. It grows within us like a flower; petal by petal it blossoms. It is like a river that is flowing into the sea. Divine devotion is our inner urge to do something with utmost sincerity, purity and divinity. There is a supreme cause, and we have to fulfil it on the strength of our divine devotion towards the cause itself. Then, divine surrender is the surrender that we make to our own highest part. Each individual has two realities: the higher reality and the lower reality. The lower reality is still unlit, obscure, impure; whereas the higher reality is all divine, all perfection. So we consciously try to bring our lower reality into the higher one for its illumination. This surrender is not made to somebody else, to a third person. No, this surrender is made to one’s own highest self.