Question: Guru, what is special about your teachings, or what does your philosophy contain that is special and that man can benefit from?

Sri Chinmoy: I do not want to use the term “special”, but I can say what I stand for. I stand for divine love, divine devotion and divine surrender. I am emphasising the term “divine”. Human love you know. It eventually ends in frustration. Human devotion is nothing short of attachment. And human surrender is made under compulsion, because we are afraid that we will be punished. But divine love and devotion are pure and detached, and divine surrender is not made to somebody else. This surrender we offer to our own highest Reality. We have inside us an unillumined reality and an illumined reality. Our unillumined existence we offer to our illumined existence. We make our divine surrender to our own highest existence. The lowest existence which we now embody we try to offer to the highest, which we also embody. Unfortunately, people have not consciously realised that highest existence yet.