Blissfulness Is Just the Beginning
The moment I say “spirituality,” people say, “Yes, I want to be peaceful.” Don’t walk the spiritual path for peace. You don’t have to be on the spiritual path to be peaceful. A drink will do it. Or if you go climb a mountain and sit there, it will happen. If you eat full stomach, you will sleep peacefully. It is a shame that so-called spiritual teachers around the world are going about telling people spirituality is about being peaceful. The longing for peace has essentially come from troubled minds, minds who are torturing themselves—for them, peace is a big commodity that they have to seek. If you are not using your mind for self-torture, why would you think of peace? Would you seek exuberance of life or would you seek peace?
You ‘rest in peace.’ If you want to be peaceful, you must be dead. Now is the time to live. [For] people who have lost control over their mental faculty, what should have been a miracle has become a misery manufacturing machine. If you are blissful by your own nature, then the important thing is, you are not the issue anymore. There may be other issues in existence—you can look at them; but if you are an issue yourself, what other issue will you take into your hands? When you are no more an issue, then you are willing to dig into the whole existence and see what it is all about.
Mysticism evolved only in those places where people learnt the technology of being ecstatic by their own nature. For you to experience a little bit of pleasantness within you, if you have to drink, dance, do some other crazy thing, then you will never explore any other dimension of life because keeping yourself pleasant itself is a great challenge and a fulltime job. For most people, the pursuit of happiness has become the goal of life itself. Happiness is not something that you achieve. It is something that you start with, the square one of life. As children, we all started joyfully without any hassle. So do not understand the spiritual process as peacefulness, joyfulness, or even blissfulness.
There was a time when we believed that whether the tree in your house bears fruit or not depended on God’s will. But we took charge of these things. Now we know if this tree is not bearing fruit what the problem with it is, what to do with it; slowly, we figured out all these things. So, when you understand that if your Self has not blossomed, it has got nothing to do with anything except that you are not doing the right thing with yourself—it is as simple as that. When we understand that, a spiritual process actually begins.
So, once you are not an issue, being peaceful, joyful, or blissful is not an effort anymore; then naturally you want to know what is behind everything. This is not an induced quest. It is very natural for human intelligence to seek. The spiritual process is not a conscious choice; it is a kind of compulsive behavior. But unless you handle it consciously, it will not yield. Longing for the boundless is compulsive, but unless you become conscious, it will never work.
If you want to know, experience, and be able to handle other dimensions of life, it is very important that you have no rigid structures in your mind. The biggest thing in the existence is not some God sitting somewhere. The very life process itself contains the creation and the Creator. If you are willing to go beyond the surface substance of what you call yourself, suddenly everything is malleable. Here and There, Now and Then are all mixed up. The individual and the universal are no more different. Unless one experiences the universality of one’s nature, I would say, human form is wasted. To eat, sleep, reproduce, and die, you do not need a human body, intelligence, and awareness. Every worm or insect can fulfill that better than a human being.
| Named one of India’s 50 most influential people, Sadhguru speaks before millions annually around the globe, including to prominent leadership forums such as the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, TED, and the World Peace Congress. From ground-breaking yoga programs to projects for rural communities and the environment, Sadhguru’s Isha Foundation (www.IshaFoundation.org) serves as a thriving model for human empowerment, which is reflected in the Foundation’s special consultative status with the UN. |
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