I understand you spent time at Sri Aurobindo's Ashram. I was very impressed that all the members of the Ashram are celibate at all ages. Even married, they practise brahmacharya, or continence. I've noticed that many of your devotees don't have children. I'm wondering how you instruct them or inspire them or talk about this area of brahmacharya in marriage.

Sri Chinmoy: It is all based on my personal experience in the inner world, which grew out of my prayer and meditation. Each spiritual Master entirely depends on the adesh, or divine command. At the age of 32 I was commanded by my Lord Supreme to come to America to be of service to seekers here. Most of my students are unmarried. I ask them what they actually want from life: joy or pleasure. There is a great difference between the two. Pleasure-life is always followed by frustration, and frustration is followed by destruction. Once we are really frustrated, our destruction is imminent. But if we get even an iota of bliss from our prayer and meditation, immediately our inner being is swimming in the sea of light and delight. During our meditation, if for five seconds we get a glimpse of divine light, the whole day we are flying in the sky of Infinity and swimming in the sea of delight.
I tell my disciples, "I did not touch your feet and beg you to join our path. No, you saw and felt something in me and I also saw and felt something in you. It was not one-sided-no, no, no! I felt in you a real inner hunger and you felt in me a real elder brother who would show you utmost love and compassion. Once upon a time you were wallowing in the pleasures of ignorance, but now you are aspiring and consciously crying for light. So the only thing that will really satisfy and fulfil you is the inner joy that you will get from your prayer and meditation."
Fifteen or twenty years ago, before they came to our path, some of my students were taking drugs. Once they saw me, when I was giving talks or answering questions or meditating with them, they gave up their drug-life because they realised that this food would not nourish them anymore. They wanted something else. A child of one or two will take mud and clay as his food. Whatever he sees around him, he will eat. His mother will scold him and teach him to eat proper food. Then, when the child grows up, he will want to eat only proper food. In exactly the same way, once we enter into the spiritual life we stop eating the mud and clay of pleasure-life and drink only the inner nectar of divine joy.
Every second we can go higher or go lower, depending upon what we see, do and enter into. I go to many Indian restaurants and eat spicy food; the human in me may like this. But today's food has pleased the divine in me immensely because it was so sattvic. From today's food I got real, divine nourishment, not only because the food was so pure, but also because I am here with Gurudeva and his dearest devotees. In other Indian restaurants I do not hear the Vedic chants; instead I get rock and roll or other undivine music. I am trying to eat, but the lower vital forces and bad vibrations there are trying to pull me down, so I am all the time on tenterhooks. But here I do not have to worry, for who is going to bring whom down? On the contrary, here we are only lifting each other up.