Above all we have to go beyond words and images and concepts. No imaginative vision or conceptual framework is adequate to the great reality.

Perseverance is the essential requirement in the practice of yoga. It has to be done day by day, week by week, year by year, until the mind is brought to the 'still point' where it is open to the grace of God.

This was the very purpose of creation that each unique, individual being should participate in its own way in the divine Being, should realize its eternal 'idea' in God, should 'become' God by participation, God expressing himself through that unique being.

I am rediscovering the whole sexual dimension of life at the age of 86, really. And that also means discovering the feminine. So the whole of this dimension, which I had been seeking for a very long time, is now sort of opening itself up to me.

I suddenly saw that all the time it was not I who had been seeking God, but God who had been seeking me. I had made myself the centre of my own existence and had my back turned to God.

This process of change since my stroke has been very gradual. It is going on all the time... It is partly a physical transformation. The body itself is undergoing great changes. My problem before was that I was living largely from the head; and then after the stroke I got down into the heart.

There is a beautiful expression of this in the Chandogya Upanishad: 'There is this City of Brahman, (that is the body), and in this city there is a shrine, and in that shrine there is a small lotus, and in that lotus there is a small space, (akasa). Now what exists within that small space, that is to be sought, that is to be understood.' This is the great discovery of the Upanishads, this inner shrine, this guha, or cave of the heart, where the inner meaning of life, of all human existence, is to be found.