“How do I practise awareness?” You cannot practise it. How can you practise life? If you were dead you could practise life. If you are alive, how can you practise life? It is just that right now, you are not giving much room for your aliveness to happen because you have given too much significance to what you think and feel. Your psychological process has become far more important than your life process. Why awareness seems to be so difficult is simply because we have let our minds go into endless chatter. If your mind is not chattering, awareness is the natural way to be.

The primacy of existence

People have made their thought process so important. They have even gone to the extent of saying, “I think, therefore I am.” Which do you think is true: you think because you exist, or you exist because you think? You can generate a thought because you exist, isn’t it? We want to shift the significance to the life process. You can play with your psychological process whichever way you want, but it is only because you are alive that you can think.

Once in a while, if I just close my doors and sit in a place for five days, I do not have a single thought for five days. I don’t look out of the window, I don’t read, I don’t do anything. I am simply being alive. This is such a huge phenomenon happening within you, what is there to think about? Being alive is a far bigger process than your stupid thought process.

Anyway, what can you think? You are just recycling the nonsense that you have gathered. Can you think something other than the nonsense that has been fed into your head? You are just recycling the old data you have gathered. This recycling nonsense has become so important that you can even dare to say “I think, therefore I am”, and that becomes the world’s way of life. Existence is, even without your silly thoughts.

Not thinking, just living

If you choose, you can fully be and still not think. Please see, the most beautiful moments in your life are those moments when you were not thinking about anything. What you call moments of bliss, moments of joy, moments of ecstasy, moments of utter peace, these were moments when you were not thinking about anything but were just living.

Which is more important, living or thinking? You must decide this—do you want to be a living being or a thinking being? Right now, 90 per cent of the time, you are only thinking about life, not living life. Are you here to experience life or to think about life? You want to experience life, and you cannot experience life if you are lost in your thought. It is only through perception that you experience. You cannot experience through thought. With the past experience of life, you are cooking up something in your head—that is a thought process. Whatever you think has no significance because your thoughts have nothing to do with reality. They do not mean anything. Everyone can think up their own nonsense whichever way they want. It need not have anything to do with reality at all.

Your psychological process is a very small happening compared to the life process. Isn’t being alive right now more important for you than thinking? But if I trample upon your thought even a little, you are even willing to die for it. People die for their ideas. People die for their thought. People die for what they believe in. Thought has become far more important than the life process because people have not realised the immensity of what it means to be alive.

Logic divides

Because life has been restrained within the survival activity, thought looks grander than life. But it is not so. Thought is just a small happening compared to the life process. Aristotle is considered as the father of modern logic. His logic is very simple and straight—A can only be A, B can only be B. A cannot be B, B cannot be A. Can you argue with this? Logically it looks perfect. But let us look at this.

You are here either as a man or a woman. But how did you come here? Because a man and woman came together. Now suppose you are a woman, does it mean to say your father has made no contribution to you? He does exist within you, doesn’t he? Suppose you are a man, does it mean your mother made no contribution to you? Doesn’t she exist within you? The fact is that you are either a man or a woman, but the truth is you are both. Truth is that dimension which is not logically explainable. It does not fit into logic because logic is always dividing; truth is always unifying. So Where will this logic fit into life?

If you apply your logic too much to your life, all life will be squeezed out of you. The logical aspect of the mind is useful only to handle the material realities of life. If you try to handle yourself with logic, you will be a total mess because fundamentally, if you look at your life absolutely logically, there is no meaning to it.

When you wake up in the morning tomorrow, think absolutely logically. Don’t look at the sunrise, don’t look at the birds in the sky, don’t think of someone you love, your child’s face, or the flowers in the garden. Just think logically. Now, you actually have to get out of bed—that is not a small feat. You go to the toilet, brush your teeth, eat, do some work, eat, work, eat, sleep —tomorrow morning, same thing—over and over again. You have to do this for the next 40, 50 years. Think 100% logically, without looking at your life’s experience—is it really worthwhile?

Moments of extreme logic are moments of suicide, please see this. If we think 100 per cent logically about life, there is really no reason to live; there is really no reason for you and me to exist here. But if you look at one beautiful moment of your life’s experience, suddenly everything is sparked up and you want to live. The logical aspect of your life and the experiential dimension of your life are diametrically opposite to each other. That is why you are struggling with it. If you look at life experientially, there is every reason to live. If you look at life logically, there is no reason to live.

Why does someone commit suicide? Because they refuse to look at the experiences that they have had. If they fail an examination, people commit suicide; their husbands left them, they commit suicide; they lost their property, they commit suicide. People do it for so many reasons. Let’s say, today your husband or your wife left you. If you think logically, “My whole life was to love this person and be with this person, and now this person is gone. Where is the reason for me to live?” If you go logically, you will commit suicide. But if your husband or wife is gone, maybe it is a whole new possibility in your life. Maybe things that you could never imagine will happen to you simply because you are free from one aspect of life. We do not know, but it is possible.

If you think hundred percent logically, there is really no possibility of life. Only if you know to what extent your logic should go and where it should not go, your life will be beautiful. If you become absolutely logical, there is no beauty to your life. Everything becomes bare and no good.

A dimension beyond thought

Logic is essential only to handle the material aspect of life. If you want to know the experiential dimensions of life, you will never know it with your petty thought. Even if you have Einstein’s brain, it is still a petty thought because thought cannot be bigger than life. Thought can only be logical, functioning between two polarities. That is too small. If you want to know life in its immensity, you need something more than your thoughts, your logic, or your intellect. Only if you open up that dimension, you will taste life in its larger proportion. Otherwise, you will know only the physicality of life. With thought, you can know the physical and use the physical, but you will not penetrate anything other than the physical.

It is because the world has given so much significance to Aristotle and his tribe that all the sciences have developed in the physical dimension. With this, much comfort has come. You may be thrilled about how many things your computer or the internet can do, but if you really look at it, it has not done anything to your life. It has brought comfort and convenience, but ultimately, it has not brought you any joy. It has not taken you to any higher dimension of experience or existence.

In spite of all this exploration, no new dimension has occurred to you because the instruments of exploration that you are using are too limited. They are just logical and intellectual, so there is no way you will touch another dimension of life. It is not possible. I appreciate the enthusiasm, but it is as if you were trying to go to the moon with a bullock cart. It doesn’t matter how hard you beat the bulls it is not going to get there.

If you beat the bulls really hard, may be you can climb a mountain on the bullock cart, but you cannot go to the moon. Either you learn this out of your intelligence, or life will maul you and teach you a lesson slowly.

The choice is yours.

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Sadhguru: There is no need to control anger. Right now are you angry? No. So why should you control something that does not exist? How can you control something that does not exist?

Anger is a certain level of unpleasantness, both for you and everyone around you. Most of the time, you suffer more than your victim. And when you get angry, you could do the most idiotic things of your life. It is definitely not an intelligent way to exist.

Being angry about something or the other comes from a strong sense of likes and dislikes. This comes from a very deep identification with a certain way of thinking and feeling, which according to you, is the best way to live, think and feel. When someone is not in line with that, you get angry with them. As your likes and dislikes and your identifications become stronger with something or the other, all that you are doing is excluding the existence. If you say, “I like this very much,” you are excluding the rest of the existence in a big way at that moment. The stronger the like or dislike becomes, the deeper the exclusion becomes. Anger overflows because you have not included someone or something as a part of yourself. The very process of liberation is to include, not exclude. In inclusion, you become liberated. The day when everything, the whole existence, is included in you, you are liberated. In exclusion you become trapped, you become separate.

You do not wish to be angry, of course, but it is happening because you are ascribing an outside source for what is happening within you, and that is not true. Just see that anger is something that you are creating. Why are you creating something that you do not want? There is only one basic cause, you are ignorant of yourself. If you knew how your system functions and how to manage this system, why would you create anger? Anger is not only damaging the external situation, it is also damaging the internal situation. People are causing enormous amounts of anger within and creating health problems for themselves. Accordingly, consequences will happen for external situations.

Channel your anger for something better

For every action that you perform, there is a consequence. You cannot avoid the consequence. When you cannot avoid the consequence, action should be controlled. They can be controlled only if a human being is controlled within himself or herself. When one is in perfect balance, only then will one perform harmonious action. Still, there are always consequences. There are enough consequences in the life process as it is, you do not have to go about creating new consequences for yourself. Especially if situations around you are rotten, is it not very important that you keep yourself in the most pleasant possible manner and see how to spread this pleasantness around you?

If your actions were coming from your intelligence, this is how you would act. If situations around you are hopeless, it is all the more important that you keep yourself as beautiful as possible and see how to make the situation happen the way you want. Whatever you are, that is what you will spread around you. If you are angry, you will spread anger. With anger, more unpleasantness will come into the situations around you.

Choose joy over anger

Anger is enormous intensity. Intensity is the only thing that man is seeking. The reason why all the thrillers, action movies, and sports events are so popular is because people want some intensity, somewhere. The only way they know how to be intense is either through physical action, or through anger, or through pain. The very reason why drugs and sex have become such big things in the world is because somehow, people want to experience some intensity at least for a few moments. Intensity releases you from many things. Anger could also release you from many things, but the problem with anger is, it is not pure intensity within you; it gets entangled with the situations around.

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It is not necessary that only your anger should propel you into action. The most intense experience you have had in your life is probably anger. That is the reason why you are sanctifying anger, because it propels you into action. Unfortunately, you have never known the intensity of joy or love. But love and compassion can also propel you into action very gently, but very wonderfully and effectively. At work and at home, would you like to live with angry people, or peaceful and joyful people? Obviously you would want to live with peaceful and joyous people. Please remember, everyone around you is expecting the same thing. Every human being around you is always expecting to live and work with people who are peaceful and joyful.

The post Here’s how to deal with your anger and rage appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

Loss and logic

Let’s apply logic to its ultimate end in your life. Imagine you wake up one morning and lying down in your bed, you think 100 per cent logically; you don’t look at your life’s experiences. Do not think about the sunrise, do not look at the birds in the sky, do not think of your child’s face, or the flowers blooming in your garden, or anything. Just think logically.

Now you actually have to get up, that’s not a small feat. Then you have to go to the toilet, then you have to brush your teeth, then you have to eat, go to work, eat, work, eat, sleep… the next morning same thing. Next 30, 40, 50 years you have to do the same things everyday. Think logically, 100 per cent logically. Is it worth living? That’s why you become depressed.

Feeling empty

Also, with depression you’re never empty [like many people believe]. With depression you’re empty of things that you would want to have, but there is all other kinds of stuff going on, isn’t it? You’re only denied of things that you want. You want to be joyful, that is not there, but some other nonsense is going on at an enormous pace in depressed states. You try to drug yourself to emptiness, but still it doesn’t happen. With the drug, the sharpness of the pain is not there; it sort of dulls you a little bit. But even with the drug, you cannot take away the nonsense that’s going on.

But depression is not emptiness at all. In moments of depression, are you empty? So much is going on, but you’re empty of what you would like to have, that’s all. That’s why you are thinking or terming it as emptiness.

Depression is not natural

You think depression is natural. Once you declare that depression is a natural process, what is the way out? There is no way out. See, when you were born, as a child what was natural to you? For most human beings, except a few rare ones, to be joyful was natural. So do not declare depression as natural.

To be unhealthy, to be depressed, to be joyless, maybe you have a large company with you, you have the majority with you; but still it doesn’t make it the right or natural thing. It doesn’t make it effervescent with life. This is not the way of life; it is the way of the mind.

Life is enthusiastic

If you allow life to live, life is always exuberant. Just look everywhere—whether it is a plant or an animal or a worm or whatever—just see with how much intense life is going on in the world. Just dig under the lawn and see how much is happening. Is there anybody depressed out there? There’s tremendous enthusiasm.

Look at the little grass, uproot it and see, just see with the kind of enthusiasm that has gone into the root system. You put one little plant on top of that roof and just give it a little mud and nothing else. From there it will just keep two leaves for survival; it will put one single root down and run over 25 metres. Do you think it ever gets frustrated? Life energy knows no frustration.

Frustration is psychological

It is a limited mind, which knows frustration; because the limited mind works out of expectations, false expectations. When your expectations are not in line with life as such or when they are fanciful psychology and not life phenomenal, then—when it doesn’t get fulfilled—mind feels this is the end of the world.

So your getting frustrated is purely a psychological phenomenon. It’s not a life phenomenon. Even now mentally if you get frustrated and your mind says ‘no good living, let me die’—just close your mouth, hold your nose for two minutes and see; the life within you doesn’t say let me die, it says let me live.

So anything that you do against your own life is simple ignorance and stupidity. But right now you have gotten yourself into a mental state where you begin to work against your own life. Frustration, discouragement, depression means just this: you are working against your own life, but now depression has become celebrated around the world—intelligent people must be depressed. If you don’t have any depression, you are not intelligent. It’s almost coming there.

I say only if you are stupid, will you get depressed. If you are intelligent how would you be depressed? Where is the room for depression if there is intelligence? Only because you have put your intelligence on freeze, is there room for depression, otherwise there is no question of depression or frustration.

That’s all you can do

This incident happened in the great Christian reformer Martin Luther’s life. Because all his efforts had gone waste, he was totally discouraged and depressed and was sitting in great sadness and depression for three days. His wife was a very intelligent woman. On the fourth day, she went into the bedroom, wore black clothes; mourning clothes, and came and stood in front of him.

Martin Luther looked at her and he said, “Why are you wearing black clothes like this?” She said, “God is dead.” He said “What? How can God die? God is not dead.” She said, “No, God is dead, that’s why I am mourning.” He said, “No, that’s not possible.”

She said, “If you believe God is not dead, why are you sitting so depressed? Before you came into this world everything was going fine. After you go, everything will go on fine. When you are here, why don’t you just do your best and get lost?” That’s all you can do.

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