David Rumsey: Your spontaneity comes through very clearly in your music. You have also been quoted as saying that music is next to meditation for a spiritual person, or words to that effect.

Sri Chinmoy: Music and spirituality must go side by side. A Truth-seeker and God-lover pays more attention to God the Creator. Twenty-four hours a day he is ready to pray and meditate. He wants to embody God’s infinite Light. A seeker is more conscious of God, fortunately or unfortunately, than a musician. A musician has the universal language deep within him but he does not know that the source of the universal language is silence. Language is not the source. Silence is the source. Sound is not the source. The source is silence. Meditation helps us to dive deep within. Silence is the source and sound is an expression.

When we enter into a temple, we see the shrine inside it. For me, meditation is the shrine inside the temple. Music is the temple. Without the temple, there can be no shrine and, again, without the shrine, there can be no temple. So, music and spirituality have to go together. Spirituality reminds us of God the Creator and music reminds us of God the Creation. Universal beauty we get through music but silence, Transcendental Silence, we get from meditation. They are like the obverse and reverse of the same coin. But we have to know which one has to be brought forward — the inner divinity or the outer reality. Inner divinity has to come forward to express the outer reality.