"After juice I listen to a few songs, poetry, music, that I have been listening to for almost thirty years. Those who have lived with me have always been puzzled.

"When I was a student my friends were puzzled – they were the same records. I had an old-style gramophone and a collection of records. When I started playing my records they would escape from their rooms, which were on either side, and they couldn't help but hear.

"They complained to the vice-chancellor. I was called and I explained to him, 'Hearing has two dimensions. One is horizontal. You hear a song; if it is new, you are interested because you don't know what is coming next, what turn it will take. But if you have heard it once, then horizontally it loses meaning. Horizontally there is no excitement: you know perfectly well what is going to come next. And when you know it already, how can you be excited?'

"The horizontal meaning is finished in just experiencing anything for the first time. But I have discovered that there is a vertical meaning too – to everything in life. The songs, the music, that I have heard for thirty years and still listen to, now have no horizontal meaning for me. I know every nook and corner, every nuance – as far as the horizontal lines are concerned they have become almost irrelevant. And when I hear them, a strange thing happens: physically I almost fall asleep, but I continue to hear. And in this state, the words which have been heard thousands of times are no longer significant, but something deeper than the words starts opening up.

"The song is not in the words: it is something around the word, between the words, between the lines, but never in the word itself. If it is authentic poetry then there will be a depth where words are lost: you dive into the meaning itself, the pure meaning. It is more sound and silence. The word is left far behind; the word becomes almost transparent.

"In the East it was discovered thousands of years ago. In English you have one word for reading, study. For reading, in Sanskrit we have two words – adhyayan, which means study, and path, which is not translatable."