Mr. Edwin Ross: In India, what was your function or business or pursuit, Sri Chinmoy?

Sri Chinmoy: I stayed in a spiritual Centre for twenty years, and God gave me the gift to write poems and articles. I also happened to be a good athlete. These are the secondary or subsidiary parts of my life. But I wanted to be a seeker of the Infinite, so right from my childhood I started meditating and concentrating in order to realise God — that is to say, face to face — to be one with His Will at every moment.

Mr. Edwin Ross: You say that right from childhood —

Sri Chinmoy: Right from childhood.

Mr. Edwin Ross: You wanted to be a seeker of the Infinite. How does a child obtain this kind of ambition? This seems, I must confess, very remote to a Western way of looking at things.

Sri Chinmoy: This is not ambition; it is the inner urge of our psychic being. The psychic being is the representative of the soul. When the psychic being feels that the time is ripe for the aspirant to be aware of God, then it comes forward. It pushes and it gives the inner urge to the human being to aspire and to realise the mission of his life — in other words, to be a conscious instrument of God in order to take part in His divine Play. We call it the divine Lila.

The time comes when one aspires to be a conscious instrument of God in one’s life. Everybody is an instrument of God, but one who aspires is a conscious instrument of God. According to his development and spiritual growth, he tries to manifest in his own being, as well as in the other aspiring souls, the possibilities of the full manifestation of God here on earth.