What I need to do is to just deepen my well. I'm just experiencing life now.

A lot of the book [The Yoga of Max's Discontent] is about karma and rebirth. Things like that are very attuned to my life as an Indian, but when I approach it from a perspective of a Westerner, then I have a skeptical, yet kind of novice view on it. I think that choice really liberated the story to be its own story. A lot of the conclusions that Max reaches on his own are not mine at all. So, I think that allowed the story to take on its own momentum, to have its own propulsive force.

When I started on the path, too, I really thought I would become a yogi in a cave, but I didn't have clarity about my path. When I evolved in the ashram for six months, I learned a lot, but I realized that it was not my natural state of being. So, I came back to the world.

What I do is work for three or four years and then I take a year off, and then I come back again and work for three or four years and then take another year off. It is not about just working and then writing for a year. That is not how it is structured. It is about doing very conscious goal-driven activities for four years and then taking a year off in complete surrender to discover facets of myself that I don't know exist and exploring interests with no commercial value associated with them at all.

I think it is really a personal journey of purification, rather than whether something external is going to be good or bad. Anything external will always live in that polarity - a combination of good and bad.

When I came to the U.S., Kraft sponsored my green card, so I was at Kraft foods and I owed them, I felt. But then as my life purified more and more, I felt that that corporation was not doing the right things for the world. That led me to a company that makes organic baby products. It is very pure in its actions and how it deals with others.

I don't think of the ashram world as being any more spiritual than the corporate world.