Question: Is there a higher world where poetry originates?

Sri Chinmoy: Yes. When your consciousness awakens or somehow you enter into those higher worlds, you find that everything is already written. You do not have to be God-realised to go to these worlds. The great poet Rabindranath Tagore, for example, did it. So did Sri Aurobindo, although of course he was God-realised. I started doing it when I was thirteen or fourteen years old. Some of my poems I really did not write; I just saw the words on the wall and copied them down. Quite a few poems that I wrote in 1944 came to me like that. I was seeing the exact words, punctuation, everything. These poems came from that world.

It is not that I have stolen somebody else’s words. They were all prepared in some other world, but not yet manifested in this world. When you get inspiration, it comes from your heart and your mind, and it also comes from another world. You are just the messenger who is conveying it. But what I am talking about is more than that. In the poetry world the words are written — absolutely written.

Sometimes a being will come and dictate. Sri Aurobindo said that one of his books was not written by him at all, although it had his name on it when it was published. According to Sri Aurobindo, a particular being dictated it from beginning to end.