(The guru chooses the ripe seeker)
Sadhguru’s response to the predicament has been, “You cannot choose a Guru. Deepen your longing and the Guru will choose you,” - a reality from his own life. Sadhguru’s ways are very unorthodox, if not wild, totally devoid of conformity and other tell-tale marks of one who has been through the garadi of a Guru.
Sadhguru often imparts the most profound teaching with utmost nonchalance. His uncanny sense of humor not only delivers the message, but also gives the seeker the much-needed break from the monotony that often sets in.
where ‘live transmission of the experience’ is the mantra.
Seeker’s Predicament From muses and mystics you did hear Seeming to be the sounds of phantom lands In ignorance’s bind, life like phantom seems Oh, creatures of surface, the depths of life will you ever seek. – Sadhguru
Trapped in layers of ignorance that bind more tightly than any cement or concrete, the seeker’s pain is known only to those who have lived it.
with the Master reflect a rare kind of intimacy, understanding and compassion that spring from the Master’s deep urge to share and deliver.
(Fear as creation of a contracted self)
Seeker: Sadhguru, as I walk this path, I am becoming aware of the many fears and insecurities I have within me. How do I leave these behind and move ahead? Sadhguru: You don’t have to leave your fears and insecurities because they don’t really exist. You keep creating them unconsciously. If you don’t create them, they don’t really exist. Why you create them and how to stop creating them, that’s your question. The fundamental reason why fear has arisen in you is – one way of looking at it is – in this vast existence of which you don’t know the beginning or the end, you’re just a little human being. Being the small entity that you are right now, naturally fear is there. It’s overwhelming; there is fear and insecurity about what will happen to you.
Only when a person begins to experience himself beyond the limitations of his physical body and mind, then this person can become free from insecurity and fear.
Once this spiritual dimension is alive, once you start experiencing yourself beyond the limitations of the physical and the mental, only then there’s no such thing as fear. Fear is just the creation of an overactive and out-of-control mind.
Seeker: Much of the anxiety I experience comes through my relationships. Isn’t it reasonable to expect some understanding from other people? Sadhguru: When you live in this world, there are various types of complex interactions happening. As your field of play increases, the complexity of interaction also goes on increasing.
Seeker: Suppose somebody is in a close relationship with me and is very important to me. Shouldn’t I expect better understanding from them?
Somebody becomes closer and dearer to you only as you understand them better. If they understand you, they enjoy the closeness of the relationship. If you understand them better, then you enjoy the closeness.
In your relationships, you have fought many more battles than this and are still fighting; isn’t it so? This is because your line of understanding and theirs is different. If you cross this L.O.C., this Line of Control, they will get mad. If they cross it, you will get mad. If you move your understanding beyond theirs, their understanding also becomes a part of your understanding. You will be able to embrace their limitations and capabilities. In everyone, there are some positive things and some negative things. If you embrace
all this in your understanding, you can make the relationship the way you want it. If you leave it to their understanding, it will become accidental. If they are very magnanimous, things will happen well for you; if not, the relationship will break up.
All I am asking is: do you want to be the one who decides what happens to your life? Whether they are close relationships, professional, political, global or whatever, don’t you want to be the person who decides what happens in your life? If you do, you better include everything and everybody into your understanding. You should enhance your understanding to such a point that you can look beyond people’s madness also. There are very wonderful people around you, but once in a while they like to go crazy for a few minutes. If you don’t understand that, you will lose them. If you don’t understand their madness, you will definitely lose them.
(Fall in love with the whole situation)
Sadhguru: If you really want the best deals in life, don’t try to make deals. You must be in such a way that your client should fall in love with you in every way. This is not a trick. The deal will happen if it’s necessary; it won’t happen if it’s not. The deal is for both people’s wellbeing, so it must be needed by both of you. Once we live in the world, there are transactions. Some are of a personal nature, others are different.
Why don’t you just fall in love with the whole situation? As long as you wish to be in that situation, make it happen like a huge love affair. Why not? That’s how it should be. Only then work becomes effortless. What is it you’re calling a love affair? It’s unconditional involvement and doing whatever is needed. If you don’t have that sense of involvement, you will always try to get the best deal out of somebody. That means you must meet the dumbest people in the world. Intelligent people will never bite your dumb deals.
So do you see that for you to make a deal, you should only meet people who are more stupid than you? If you meet people who are more intelligent than you, there’s no way to get the deal to your advantage. If you just give yourself and see how both of you can be benefited from the deal, then whenever it is possible, it will happen.
Just learn to offer yourself, which is the best possible thing that you can offer to the whole situation. Then naturally people will take it if it’s what they need. God didn’t intend this. You have become a
disciple of the devil if your whole life is about making deals. The devil is always making a deal with somebody. God never made a deal with anybody. Once it so happened that a priest was walking on the street and he saw a man who had just been stabbed.
With no devil, who would come to church?
So don’t go about making deals for selfish reasons. Maybe you haven’t attained to your full Divine nature, but at least in this case let us imitate God for a while. God doesn’t make deals. Deals will be offered to you in so many ways. In a way, everybody is just a businessman. Everybody is trying to pull off some deal: some in the market place, another maybe at home, another maybe in the temple, and a few maybe even with their spiritual process, but everybody is trying to pull off some kind of a deal. When you get a good deal, you are all very civilized and nice but if a deal goes bad, you will yell and scream.
Sadhguru: Who wants something of comparable worth, especially a husband of all things! (Laughs). Wouldn’t you agree Joyce? There’s something called vasanas. Do you know what vasana means? They are certain old qualities and flavors within you. However much you may try to pretend that you’re a very nice and loving person, when deals are offered, suddenly old vasanas will take control of you. There’s an urge to bite the deal. That’s why on the spiritual path we talk about setting a goal. If you set a goal for yourself, you don’t bite any deals on the side and you don’t go off the path. The goal itself doesn’t take you anywhere. In fact, it’s a barrier. It has to be dropped somewhere in the process of growth. The goal is only there to ensure that you don’t make any more deals. It’s not there to get you bound. It’s there to release you from the temptation of deals.
(Yoga as inner technology, not discipline)
Yoga means to be in perfect tune. Your body, mind and spirit and the existence are in absolute harmony.
When you’re happy, your energies always function better. Do you see that when you’re happy you have endless energy? Even if you don’t eat, if you don’t sleep, it doesn’t matter; you can go on and on. Have you noticed this? So just knowing a little happiness is liberating you from your normal limitations of energy and capability.
Now yoga is the science of activating your inner energies in such a way that your body, mind and emotions function at their highest peak.
When your body and mind function in a completely different state of relaxation and a certain level of blissfulness, you can be released from so many things that most people are suffering from. Right now, you come and sit in your office, and you have a nagging headache. Your headache isn’t a major disease, but it takes away your whole capability for that day. Just that throbbing takes away everything.
This is the experience of any number of people who have started doing these practices. It’s the inner technology of creating situations the way you want them. With the same mud that we build such huge buildings, initially people were building little huts. They thought that’s all they could do with it. With the same earth, haven’t we built computers?
Normally, an intellectual person, a thinking person has complete disdain for everybody else. A bhakthi yogi, full of emotion and love, thinks all this gnana, karma and kriya yoga is just a waste of time. Just love God and it will happen. The karma yogi thinks that everybody is lazy and that they have all kinds of fancy philosophies; what needs to be done is work. One must work and work and work. The kriya yogi just laughs at everything. The whole existence is energy.
Suddenly they felt something enormous happening. A huge presence, a fifth presence was there. Then all of them said, “Why now? For so many years we have pursued You and nothing happened; why now?”
how can you become old in spirit? Only by carrying the past, isn’t it? If you carry sixty years of burden with you, you’re sixty years old. If you don’t carry anything, you’re like a newborn. The physical body may develop limitations, but the way you are has no limitations. It simply has no limitations. You are this many years old or that many years old simply because you carry that many years of garbage with you; and this whole thing about celebrating birthdays and remembering that you’re that old is making sure that you fix milestones.
He was a saint, not knowing, not carrying the burden of the past. Moment to moment, just see the weight of the load you’re carrying.
With this limitedness, why do you get into this nonsense about deciding what’s good or bad? The moment you say something is bad, you can’t stop disliking it, can you? Can you say, “This is a bad person, but that’s okay with me”? On the surface you may say it, but if he gets closer to you, though
initially it is just dislike, later it will turn to hate. The moment you identify something as good or bad, you’re just dividing the world.
Your division is because of your stupidity; it has got nothing to do with reality. Good and bad are always according to your ego requirements. If you go by this, you enslave yourself to the dualities of life; you divide the existence. So the question of turning spiritual never arises.
(Knowing what’s needed by becoming non-opinionated)
Seeker: Sadhguru, most of the time, in any given moment, I don’t seem to know what’s required of me. I am clueless in thought, emotion and action. How does someone truly know what’s needed in any given moment? Sadhguru: If you are sitting here as a bundle of thoughts, opinions, and emotions, you will never know what’s needed. Most people are like this. What you call a human being is not really a being; it is just a bundle of thoughts, emotions, and opinions that were gathered from elsewhere.
He will always come to the wrong conclusions about life. When you don’t know what’s happening with life, you will only drive your life with your thoughts, opinions and emotions.
It’s not education or wealth which can open or close you; it’s just how you relate to them.
If you’re seeing them only as a means, only as tools for access, then they are in no way barriers. In fact, they can be very useful because they bring you so much understanding and so many possibilities and in many ways your life is more free. So by themselves they aren’t barriers, but you can make them into barriers if you wish.
Seeker: Master, will the teachings and practices you’ve given to me help me break my rigidity and flower? Sadhguru: I am glad you understand that it is your rigidity which has prevented your flowering. You can become rigid in many dimensions. During the practice of yoga asanas you realize how rigid you are physically. It takes a little more awareness for you to know the rigidity in your mind and emotions. Somebody who’s very rigid in his thoughts and emotions believes that he’s perfect because he doesn’t allow room for any other way of looking, thinking, or feeling. When you meet this man, you think he’s pig-headed, but he thinks he’s perfect. Similarly, there can be rigidity in your energy. For someone whose energy is very fluid, the very first day of the simplest yoga kriya, and the energy will start moving and transforming, whereas for another person, even after practicing it for a long time, nothing seems to happen. This simply depends on how malleable the energies are. The rigidity in all these dimensions isn’t really separate, they’re all interconnected. The rigidity in one dimension manifests itself into the others.
Every advantage that comes to most people only ends up as a curse. Money, influence, comfort, intelligence become only curses to most people. They actually come as blessings but you turn them into curses. You’re not using your intelligence to reach the peak of your consciousness, to become peaceful and loving. You’re using your intelligence to drive yourself crazy. For example, you think it would be very nice to be a peasant. They seem to be very simple. It looks romantic to you, but if suddenly you become a peasant, you would curse the whole world.
just watch whether you are for the Creator or against the Creator, every moment in your life. If you see this, everything will be settled.
The path is very simple, but because you’re there, it becomes extremely complicated. Nothing moves within you. You become rigid, as if rigor mortis has set in. You need the Master’s Grace to quell the madness of your mind. If you allow this, then the path is too simple, as the path is the destination.
(Ego suppresses energy to preserve itself)
You have kept your energies suppressed to such an extent, the mind has become so oppressive that it suppresses life to the point where nothing moves except what’s needed to support the ego. Your energies are moving only to the extent that is convenient for your ego; a little more energy and the ego will burst. The moment energy rises within you, everything is dissolved. The ego knows it very well. That’s why it has kept it suppressed. If you don’t have any energy, then again the ego will become very weak. When all energy is cut off, the ego will feel very weak and it doesn’t like that. So it just allows the amount of energy which supports and feeds it well. If the energy becomes too much, the ego will be shattered. If Kundalini begins to rise, everything will be shattered and nothing will be left. You will be just a force merging with everything around you. You won’t have a will of your own anymore. Since you’re not willing to surrender your will, we’re prodding you through this sadhana to provoke your energies.
So your sadhana isn’t about getting somewhere. It’s just a way, a method to unleash a flood so enormous that it wipes away your petty creations and leaves you as the Creator intended you to be.
The more you try to be special, the more you get hurt. Just be, just melt and become part of the wind around you, the earth around you, become a part of everything. You’re here only for a while. At least when you’re in a place like this, where nobody is going to trample on you, let your defenses down. Let it be. Forget your comforts, your sensibilities, your likes and dislikes. Leave all that nonsense and be with me. Live like the snakes.
The very purpose of putting a group of people together like this is to help you understand your likes and dislikes, which are the basis of all the limitations you have set for yourself as a person. Take a careful look at your personality; you will see it is just a bundle of likes and dislikes. These likes and dislikes have risen from your enslavement to the duality of life, which is the bedrock of ignorance.
Whatever you identify as good you can’t help liking and whatever you identify as bad you can’t help disliking.
Seeker: If I am on the spiritual path, how do I deal with family members or friends who are making it very difficult? There seems to be a fine line between comforting them and telling them to grow up, or just to open their eyes, or even to just bang them on the head. How can I deal with a situation like this? They’re not in total acceptance even though they say they are, and they continue to demand too much out of me. Sadhguru: Everyone has to handle the reality according to their choices. For whatever you may choose, there is a consequence. Don’t be in a fool’s paradise and believe that you can get away without paying a price. For everything there’s a price.
Someone in your family wants to go to the mountain; you want to go to the beach. The same problem will be there. Isn’t it? So it’s not about your spiritual path, it’s just incompatibility with where you want to go, and where you don’t want to go. Your spiritual path isn’t in conflict with anybody.
If you want to hit the peak of your consciousness, all the energy that you have has to be focused in one direction.
So don’t be obsessed; be possessed by the path. There’s nothing else for you; everything else is just to get you there. Only when it becomes like this, your spiritual path means something.
Every breath, every step, every act that you perform in your life becomes a spiritual process. Only then there’s no conflict.
If you eat, you eat only because you want to know. If you drink, you drink only because you want to know. If you work, you work only because you want to know. Then there is no conflict.
(Seeing the chain is the beginning of liberation)
If you’re chained right now and if freedom has to come some day, the first and foremost thing to see is that you’re chained. If you’re refusing to see that you’re chained, the question of liberating yourself never arises. So when you realize that you’re chained, there will be pain, there will be suffering, there will be struggle, there will be confusion. Now old memories will say, “I was better off before.” This is the way of your mind.
as a part of your survival technique, memory has a way of erasing certain unpleasant things and making the past always more pleasant than what’s there right now. This is a trick of survival. Otherwise, psychologically, you will crack up.
True liberation is when nobody can take away anything from you; and that which can’t be taken away from you is your blissfulness, your inability to suffer.
Gautama repeatedly said, “I don’t want to go to heaven. I want to go to hell.” People thought he was crazy, but that’s how a liberated man will be. “What’s my problem with hell? Anyway they can’t make me suffer, so I will go to hell.” This man is free, isn’t he? So if you’re confused and clear, that’s good. “When will all my confusions go away?
All I am asking you is to get involved. This ‘let go’ has become a mantra for all kinds of people, for drug addicts, for sex maniacs, for fatalists, and for people who are afraid of taking their life into their hands and creating what they should. For all these people, ‘let go’ has become a good formula. “Oh, we have let go.” You have left your lives in the hands of the planets and stars.
Then you have to split hairs to do things, simply because love is missing. Trust means unconditional love.
There have been husbands, wives and lovers who have come together again for lifetimes because their love was so strong, but that is very rare.