Yogi, mystic and visionary, Sadhguru is one of the most influential people of our times. Not subscribing to any particular teaching, philosophy or religion, Sadhguru's offering to humanity is based on an experiential knowing of life.
A speaker and opinion-maker of international renown, Sadhguru has been a primary speaker at the United Nations and organisations such as Microsoft, Google, Stanford and Harvard.
A New York Times bestselling author, Sadhguru has over 200 books to his name. He has 11 million Instagram followers and 25 million YouTube subscribers across languages. In 2022, his videos were viewed 3.51 billion times.
We were privileged enough to pose a few questions to Sadhguru, and we are sure you will be as enlightened by his answers as we were!
Q1. AS THE CUSTODIANS OF THE FUTURE, WHAT WOULD YOUR MESSAGE BE TO THE YOUNGER GENERATIONS?
Youth means a lot of energy. In terms of energy, what a youth can do, a child or an older man cannot do. But unbridled energy without stability and direction is always destructive. So whether they are in academics, vocational training, or simply doing whatever they wish to in their lives, if only youth were a little more stable, this energy could be put to better use for their own and everyone's well-being. Youthfulness will go to waste if there is no stability. Only those who are stable can use whatever quality and talent they have to the fullest extent. Therefore, the most important thing that needs to happen to youth on the planet is to become meditative. Before the youth manage businesses, nations and the world, it is extremely important that they learn to manage themselves.
The whole process of yoga is the science of inner management, where you create an inner possibility where being blissful, joyful, and peaceful is by your own nature, not because of something that happens around you. So your life is no more in pursuit of happiness but an expression of your happiness.
Q2. WHAT IS YOUR SECRET TO BUILDING AND POSITIVELY INFLUENCING THE GLOBAL COMMUNITY?
If the world has to improve, better technology will not do that. Human beings have to upgrade themselves. There is no such thing as enhancing a society because "society" is just a word, "nation" is just a word, and "world" is just a word. Without transforming individual human beings, there is no transformation in the world. Unfortunately, no one is willing to invest any time or life to make this happen. Everyone wants an instant solution. Going on the streets and protesting for two days will not change the world. If the world has to change, the first thing is a willingness to invest time in your own transformation. Only if you are willing to invest time for your transformation will you be willing to invest time for other people's transformation because you understand its value. If you are not willing to invest time in your own transformation, where is the question of doing anything for anyone's transformation? If you do not know the value of what it is experientially, you will never invest. Investing in a spiritual possibility, a possibility beyond one's physicality is the only ultimate answer. If you want long-term benefits, you must make long-term investments.
Q3. WHAT IS CRITICAL FOR TODAY'S ENTREPRENEURS TO KNOW WHAT NO ONE IS TELLING THEM?
Leadership on the planet today is mainly driven by personal ambition. Is there something wrong with ambition? No, it is just that ambition is an exaggeration of the existing. If you know wealth, you want more wealth. If you know power, you want more power. So ambition is just an exaggeration of the existing. The business leadership must develop a new level of vision, where it thinks not as a small entity but as a possibility in the world. Vision, as the word itself suggests, is essentially a new possibility. Vision is always inclusive. Ambition is aggressive. Vision is an embrace. Ambition is a conquest. If I conquer someone, they become mine unwillingly, and they will do everything possible to make my life miserable. If I embrace someone, they become mine willingly, which makes all the difference. If we go about business as usual, people say we have only fifteen or twenty years left on this planet.
It is time we structured our businesses so that they are more inclusive in how we function. After all, the human need and the human ambition itself is not to take but to expand and grow. You can say you have grown only if you can include all eight billion people in your business. At least, that should be the goal. Only when that is the goal can we say it is visionary. Ambition is about more. Vision is about all. We have to move from more to all.
Q4. WHAT ARE THE FIRST FEW STEPS A PERSON CAN TAKE TO FIND THEIR TRUE ESSENCE?
Knowledge is accumulated information. What you call a cookbook or a textbook is just
that – accumulated knowledge. When we have to do something physical or material – whether cooking your meal or manufacturing cars – we need accumulated knowledge because we have to use the past experience of the lives of so many other people and all the generations which have lived on the planet. Knowing, on the other hand, is neither intellectual nor accumulative. If you pass a flowering plant and know its fragrance's chemistry, that is one dimension of knowledge. If you know the experience and ecstasy of that fragrance, that is another dimension of knowledge. But if you become the fragrance, that is knowing – a knowing that is 100 per cent experiential, 100 per cent alive, here and now.
When it comes to life, which you are, you cannot have knowledge about it because it is life – you have to perceive it; you have to know it now. If you come to a conclusion about life from accumulated knowledge, it will become prejudiced knowledge.
It will not allow you to experience anything afresh. To conduct life, you need clarity, not knowledge. Knowledge should not encroach upon your clarity of perception. If it does, you will not see anything the way it is. The old knowledge will constantly superimpose itself. Nothing new will ever happen to you. If you want to know yourself, don't read a book written by someone and accumulate knowledge. Instead, you need to look within. When the creator is throbbing within you every moment, you must look within. If you turn inward, everything that needs to be known can be known.
Q5. ARE WE ALL MEANT TO GET ALONG, OR IS IT BETTER TO HAVE DIFFERENT OPINIONS, EVEN IF IT CAUSES MORE CONFLICT?
Differences add colour and dimension to our life. Our problem with other people is always that they do not think and feel like us. But imagine if there was one more person like you in your house – could you live there? That would be a horror! Fortunately, no one else is like you. But you are complaining that they are different. So you are complaining about that which is adding colour and dimension to your life, that which is good for you. You are complaining because there is no sense of inclusiveness. If you had included the other as a part of yourself, you could enjoy all these differences.
When you live in a society, there are bound to be differences in thoughts and reactions. Today we talk about freedom of speech with a proviso that no one should speak against me or against what I believe. That is immature. When someone says something, listen to it and see if what they are saying is true. If it is, if something needs to be corrected, fix it. If not, enjoy the gossip it generates. That is all there is. When your reasoning matures, you learn to accept everything because you understand the process of life. As a result, you will have more life sense in you, not just logical sense.
Q6. IN YOUR OPINION, CAN WE CHANGE OUR DNA OR ESCAPE THE IMPRINTS FROM THOSE WHO CAME BEFORE US?
Energy interventions can completely change the influence of genetic and evolutionary memory within us. These two dimensions of memory restrict and influence us in ways we cannot consciously figure out. So becoming free from that or disconnecting from that is a very important aspect of Yogic practice. I can show you many people whose faces change within twenty-four hours after they go through powerful spiritual initiations. The way they look will be quite dramatically different from the way they looked twenty-four hours ago. That is how much change can happen in the physiology.
I know best about my own experience. When things happened within me over forty years ago, everything about my body changed. Things changed that were distinctly noticeable for other people. I had passed the age when the voice should change, but my voice changed in a very different way. The shape of my eyes changed. My gait changed so dramatically that I tried to get back into my old way of walking but could not. In many ways, the shape of my body changed in subtle ways. The shape of my brain changed for sure; there is no question about that.
Q7. WHAT IS THE BEST COUNCIL FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT TO DEEPEN THEIR RELATIONSHIPS WITH THEIR LOVED ONES?
You must consider all the relationships you hold in your life as an expression of joy, not an extraction of joy. For this to happen, you must first become joyful by your own nature. Focus on becoming an exuberant overflow of joy. Yoga is a science of establishing your interiority so that you are naturally peaceful and joyous by your own nature. If you are happy by your own nature, your interactions will become a means for you to express your happiness, not seek happiness. If your life becomes an expression of your joy, not in pursuit of happiness, then you can hold fabulous relationships with every kind of person, irrespective of who they are.
Q8. WHAT TECHNIQUE IS GOING TO RESET CONSCIOUSNESS FOR HUMANITY RIGHT NOW?
"Consciousness" is a highly abused word. It is used in many different ways. Let me define what we refer to as consciousness. As a piece of life, as a body, you are a certain amount of earth, water, air, fire and ether or akash. And there is a fundamental intelligence which puts all these things together in a particular way to make life out of it. The same ingredients that are lying there as mud sit here as the life you are. What an incredible transformation! There is a profound and unimaginable level of intelligence that can make simple things like air into life. Whether it is a tree, a bird, an insect, a worm, an elephant, or a human being – everything is made up of the same simple material. We call this intelligence that makes life happen "consciousness." What you call consciousness is not an act, an idea or even a quality – it is the very basis of creation.
Essentially, we do not raise consciousness. We raise your experience so that you become more conscious. All of us are conscious to some extent. The question is to what degree you are conscious. You do not have to raise your consciousness – you have to raise yourself to find access to it and experience it. Consciousness is there all the time. Otherwise, you would be unable to convert your breath and food into life. You are alive – that means you are conscious. But so far, you only have minimal access. As your access improves, your sense of boundary expands. If you become identified with consciousness, you will experience everyone as yourself. This is where yoga can play a vital role. Yoga is not a practice, an exercise or a technique. The word "Yoga" literally means union. In one's experience, everything has become one. The science of yoga is a profound science of human interiority that enables one to be in perfect alignment and absolute harmony with existence. As a system of "raising consciousness" and empowering humanity to live in a state of abiding well-being and freedom, no system is more comprehensive than this one.
Q9. WHAT CAN EVERY INDIVIDUAL DO TO HEAL THE DAMAGE THAT HUMANITY IS DOING ENERGETICALLY?
If a certain percentage of the world truly becomes meditative, particularly if the leadership experiences this, there will be a dramatic change in how the world functions. Right now, we have the necessary technology, resource and capability to address every basic human problem on the planet. Never before in the history of humanity was such a thing possible. The only thing that is missing is inclusive consciousness. The solution is to enlarge one's perception of life from individuality to universality. This is what yoga can do.
Q10 - IS LOVE AN IMPORTANT FACTOR WHEN DEALING WITH FELLOW COLLEAGUES, STAFF, BUSINESS PARTNERS, CLIENTS AND ALL THOSE WE DO BUSINESS WITH? AND, IF SO, IF YOU CANNOT 'FEEL THE LOVE', SHOULD ONE INSTEAD NOT WORK WITH THAT PERSON?
There is a lot of talk about loving the people who irritate you. Instead of pretending to love them, just see that they are irritating you and look at why they are irritating you. They are irritating you simply because they are not the way you expect them to be; they are not the way you want them to be. So do not deceive yourself. Just see that this irritation is happening because you have already decided what is right and what is wrong. If they behave differently, it will irritate you first; you will get angry and hate them. These are all natural processes. It happens simply because you are expecting everyone in the world to be like you.
It is very good that everyone in the world is how they are. Out of this whole mass of people, if you take any human being, that person is absolutely unique! No other human is being like them anywhere on this planet. There never was one, and there never will be another such person. This is an absolutely unique human being. If you recognise that there is only one person like this, that they are such precious material, how can they irritate you? It is an absolutely unique human being. There is no other human being like them. And it is such a miracle for you that you know this human being who is absolutely unique.
If you see this, where is the question of irritation? How can anyone irritate you if you open your eyes and look at life? Only if you are simply blind to life will you get irritated. The only way you will become an outpouring of love is by seeing the uniqueness of everything in creation.
We are profoundly enlightened and educated by this shared knowledge and insight, and thank Sadhguru for sharing his wisdom with us all!
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