"This sensitivity of the poet is essential to arrive at the definition of the ultimate experience as 'Truth, Godliness and Beauty.'

"But there are other mystics also, who are not poetic…because to be a poet takes a certain talent. Everybody can be a mystic, because the mystic is our very being, the unfolding of the mystic rose within us. But not everybody can be a poet. Poetry is a talent, though it comes very close to mysticism. So either the poet becomes the mystic – then comes the definition Satyam-Shivam-SundaramSundaram – or the mystic suddenly finds himself filled with tremendous beauty and starts singing and dancing out of his spontaneity. He may not be linguistically right; that is not his concern….

"Meera, Kabir, Farid – they were not poets from the very beginning. They became poets when the experience happened. Perhaps a talent that was dormant in them became suddenly active as they opened their hearts to the universe. Everything opened. An immense poetry – which no poet can write, because the poems are not compositions; they are their heartbeats, they are their very life – started flowing through them.

"But there are other people who have attained to the ultimate: for example, Gautam Buddha or Socrates or Pythagoras or Lao Tzu. They are not poets. They don't have that talent of being a poet, either in the beginning or at the end of their experience. Their definition is bound to be different.

"The experience, remember, is always the same. But the expression will depend on the individual.

"The second most important definition, which is in the same category as Satyam-Shivam-Sundaram, is Sat-Chit-Anand. Sat means truth; Chit means consciousness; Anand means bliss. Certainly, in any definition, truth is going to be the essential part that cannot be dropped. It is the experience of ultimate truth – just as in the first definition, in the second definition sat remains the most prominent. But two new things come in: consciousness and blissfulness.

"The first definition, although beautiful – tremendously beautiful – will not become the experience of many, because the talent to be a poet is rare. The second definition is going to be the experience of many more."