Question: Our paper is called Hinduism Today, which you so beautifully rendered into song. There is one question we ask everybody when we start. We ask, "Are you a Hindu?"

Sri Chinmoy: If I use my mind, then I will say I am a Hindu. But the real in me is my aspiration, my love of Truth, my love of God. Therefore I am neither Hindu nor Christian; I do not belong to any religion. When I am wholeheartedly aspiring, I am not a member of any religion; at that time I am cosmopolitan. I am a seeker of Truth and a lover of God, and all the religions I claim as my own.

Each religion is like a home. You live in Hawaii, someone else lives in California and I live in New York. Your home is perfectly right for you and my home is perfectly right for me. But when we pray and meditate, we leave our respective homes and study in the same inner school. At this inner school we come together to pray in the small hours of the morning. We raise our aspiration and see our heart’s inner cry climbing up high, higher, highest. Our Teacher is none other than the Absolute Lord Supreme.

I am a Hindu in the sense that I was born into the Ghose family. But when I am dealing with the world of aspiration, at that time I do not need my surname; I am just Chinmoy. Similarly, once we enter into the spiritual life proper, we do not need Hinduism or Christianity or any other ‘ism’. All the time we are only expanding our oneness. Every day, on the strength of our heart’s cry and soul’s smile, we are trying to serve God the Creator and God the creation.

Again, we have to know that Hinduism is not a man-made religion that binds and blinds humanity, claiming supremacy and sovereignty; it is the code of life. To me, Hinduism is Divinity’s Oneness-Heart-Home. In this Home, Infinity’s beauty at every moment blossoms and Immortality’s fragrance blesses us most powerfully and significantly. To me, a true Hindu is he who can prayerfully claim that he came, he lived, he loved and he became. He came into the world to realise the Absolute Truth of the Absolute Lord Supreme in the Supreme’s own Way. He lived only to please and fulfil God in God’s own Way. He loved God the Creator and served God the creation in God’s own Way. And he became a perfectly surrendered instrument of our Beloved Lord Supreme. To please God in His own Way at every moment, a Hindu life is born.