SF Gazette recently reviewed the book Inner Engineering by Sadhguru. The book was a pleasant read. One of the fun aspects of the book are the stories contained in it as examples of human experience. In fact, SF Gazette staff would eagerly await those stories in the book almost more than the valuable instructions to help individuals improve their lives. The well known and popular sage is indeed blissful as he shares insights. Austerity and penance have been demonstrated as the path to knowledge, which may not be attractive to most. Sadhguru’s approach seems to be about being joyful. Sadhguru provides simple easy-to-apply instructions to help readers get in touch with their inner experience. However, after reading the book and watching youtube videos of his workshops, it might be possible that with the right mentor/teacher/guru one can laugh all the way to enlightenment!
To learn more about his modern expressions, SF Gazette is providing an excerpt from “Of Mystics and Mistakes” yet another easy to understand book written by Sadhguru that we love!
“If you look inward, a different dimension opens
up. Now instead of things getting more complex,
you get to clarity.”
Sadhguru: The biggest problem is the moment you say
“spirituality,” somebody starts talking about God, someone
else about mukti, someone else about nirvana and someone else
about the Ultimate. They are all already up there. You cannot
do anything with people who are already up there. If somebody
is down here, you can do something with them. You can only
take a step if your feet are on the ground, isn’t it? The moment
you talk about God, you are not here anymore; you know it all.
You can only start a journey from where you are. You cannot
start a journey from where you are not. If you are willing to
come down to where you are, then we can see what the next
step is. If you are already on the third step to heaven, what can
I do with you?
In pursuit of knowing that which is not known, science has
gone in one direction. As it progresses, its intention is to
convert everything into knowledge. Everything that is not
known, we want to cull it down into that which is known. So
in the last 100 or 150 years, a phenomenal effort has been
made by the scientific community. We have invented various
instruments that are like third eyes, enabling us to see things
that we could not see. Whether it is a microscope or a
telescope, these are all the third eyes of science. They assist you
in seeing that which you could not otherwise see. But by seeing
microscopic life and by viewing the stars and galaxies, nothing
significant has been known. Life has become more mysterious
than ever before.
If you look up at the sky at night, how many stars do you see?
Have you ever counted them? Did you make an attempt to do
so? When I was young, I made a serious attempt to count, and
I counted somewhere around 17 – 18,000 stars, and then it got
all mixed up. But I thought there must be another 8000 or
more stars. We can probably see 10 – 15,000 stars with our
naked eyes. But today we have powerful telescopes through
which we can see over two billion stars. And yet, has the world
become less mysterious or more mysterious? More and more
mysterious, isn’t it? The more you unravel the scientific
process, the more mysterious this world becomes.
If you looked at a leaf a hundred years ago, it was just a leaf.
Now it is not just a leaf. We know billions of things that are
happening in it right now, and we still do not know the leaf.
We are not able to figure out a single leaf in this whole
existence. This planet is full of trees I am sorry, it is not a
planet “full” – there are very few trees left actually! (Laughs)
But with whatever the number of trees we have left, still we do
not know a single leaf.
So this method of arriving at knowledge – trying to know life
by ripping it open, trying to know life by dissecting it – has not
worked, because the more we look, it is only getting more
complicated. If there was no technological offshoot to science,
no technological benefit coming out of it, science would have
been dismissed as a totally nonsensical effort. Today most
people in the world do not know what science is. They only
know technology, because they are enjoying technology.
Technology is just an offshoot of science, a consequence of it,
but it is not science.
Actually, a mystic has no issues with science. Science is not
different from a spiritual process; I am talking about
fundamental science. His issue is with technology, because a lot
of technology is simply plainly destructive. Trying to do
everything that we can do in this world is a very foolish way of
doing things. The development of technology has been in many
ways most unscientific.
So if we come to science as such, essentially I see it as a thirst
or a longing to know the nature of the existence, which is not
in any way different from the spiritual seeking. It is just the
approach and the methodologies employed which are different,
but essentially both of them want to know the nature of the
Existence.
See, when we say a “spiritual seeker,” unfortunately most
people assume that he is God-oriented. A spiritual seeker is not
God-oriented; if Devil is the chief of existence, he wants to
know that. We want to know what is true; we are not
interested in proving our belief systems, because we don’t have
Any.
So, through my perception, what I see with the scientific
community is that their longing to know is fine, but somehow,
they have crippled themselves by believing that everything that
they want to know will happen through physical means. I feel
this is the main crippling factor in the development of science.
When we talk of “exploring the mystical,” we are not trying to
dig into creation, because if you dig into creation, it will only
get more complex. It will not bring clarity; it will only bring
more complexity. That is why the yogis looked in a different
direction. We looked inward. If you look inward, a different
dimension opens up. Now instead of things getting more
complex, you get to clarity. It is because of this that we say that
those who look inward have a third eye. They see things that
others cannot see. They have brought a new clarity to life.
So this is the fundamental nature of yoga and of mysticism:
only if you become absolute non-existence, you will know
existence. If you go looking around in the existence, you will
not even know a leaf of a tree. If you study the leaf of the tree
for the rest of your life or the next million years, you will still
not know it absolutely. So the only way is, if you become nonexistence,
the nature of existence will become apparent to you.
The whole point of mysticism is to sink into this one (referring
to oneself) because this is creation.
Knowing creation within you makes a wonderful difference for
you. Knowing it within you gives you an enormous amount of
freedom to use your life in ways that you have not imagined; to
use these life energies in ways you never thought possible.
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