"You may be playing perfectly on the instruments, without any faults, but still you are only a technician. You know the technique perfectly and entirely, but it is not your heart and it is not your being. It is just your knowledge.

"Music can go higher and further away from mind, and then it starts becoming closer and closer to peace and silence. One is a musician only when he understands the sound of silence, and one who understands the sound of silence is capable of creating sounds which are synonymous with silence. And that is the most miraculous thing. Then the musician has come to his full flowering. Beyond this music starts the world of meditation.

"In fact, as far as the East is concerned, the ancientmost sources about music say one thing definitively, and that is that it has been born out of meditation. People who went deep into meditation enjoyed the silence of it, loved the peace that seems to be unfathomable. They wanted to convey that you are far more than you think you are, far bigger than you think you are. You are as big as the whole universe – but how to say it? Words are very poor philosophical concepts – almost like beggars.

"The ancient meditators tried to find some way to convey their peace, their silence, their joy, and those were the people who discovered music. Music is a by-product of meditation.

"But you can go both ways: either from meditation you can come to music as an expression, a creative expression of your experience, or you can go from music to meditation – because music brings you closer and closer to meditation as music becomes immense silence, sounds merging into silence, sounds creating deeper silences than you have ever known. Then you are very close to the boundary of meditation.

"You need not be worried about music. Music is not in the same category as sex – although in the West the modern music has fallen so low that it has come very close to the category of sex. In the West only that music which provokes sexuality in you is appreciated. Sex is the lowest point of your life energy, and if music is used to provoke sexuality, then naturally it has to fall to the same category."