“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.

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Relationships fulfil needs

Relationships are formed on different levels, various types of relationships to fulfil different types of needs. The need may be physical, psychological, emotional, social, financial or political—it could be any kind. But to fulfil various needs within a human being, relationships are established on different levels.

Whatever the nature of the relationship, whatever the type of relationship, the fundamental aspect remains the same—you have a need to fulfil. You might say, “No I have nothing to get, I want to give.” Giving is also as much a need as receiving, isn’t it? Yes? I have to give something to somebody—this is also as much a need as I have to receive something. So there is a need, whatever kind of need. Needs may be diverse, accordingly relationships could be diverse.

Now, the moment we form a relationship wanting to fulfil a certain need and if that need is not fulfilled then that relationship goes bad. For whatever purpose, we form a relationship, if those needs and those expectations are not fulfilled, the relationship will go bad. You may claim many things, but when your expectations are not fulfilled it does go bad, isn’t it? So instead of doing too much wishy-washy about it, it’s best to look at it straight and see what is it and how we need to handle it.

Needs stem from incompleteness

The needs within a human being have risen because of a certain sense of incompleteness. People form relationships to experience a certain sense of completeness within. When you have a good relationship with someone dear to you, you feel complete. When you don’t have that, you feel incomplete. Why is this so? You—this piece of life—is a complete entity by itself. Why is it feeling incomplete? And, why is it trying to fulfil itself by making a partnership with another piece of life?

Relationships and impossible expectations

The fundamental reason for that is: we have not explored this life in its full depth and dimension. And although that is the basis, there is a complex process of relationships as such. There are expectations, expectations and expectations. The expectations that most people are creating are such that there is no human being on the planet who could ever fulfil them.

If you take especially this man-woman relationship, the expectations are so much that even if you marry a God or a Goddess, they will fail you. Firstly, because the expectations are so unrealistic nobody, no human being is capable of ever fulfilling them. And unable to understand the expectations or the source of expectations, nobody can fulfil the expectations. But if you understand what the source of this expectation is, you could form a very beautiful partnership.

Expectations change with life

And in the process of holding a relationship, meeting the expectations in the first few moments may be common. But at every step that we take in life, the expectations may become different. These expectations keep changing in people, they are not consistent and they cannot be. One person may be consistent with the same expectation throughout his life; another person’s expectations may be changing because his perception and experience of life is changing.

Now the relationship becomes a great conflict. More conflict is happening within the four walls of the homes, than is happening anywhere on the planet. Only thing is bombs are not exploding, so you don’t hear it. They may be giving each other silent treatment. This is happening because people’s expectations are changing and they are changing at a different pace.

So if you go about doing management and circus with these things, there is no way you can gauge it 100 per cent and have a beautiful relationship. If you try to mind read the other person and constantly try to fulfil his expectations, you will become a wreck. You tried those things, isn’t it? So, if you go like this, it’s an endless circus. To some extent you have to do it, but that is not the basis of a beautiful relationship.

Push-start to self-start happiness

Fundamentally, why have we sought a relationship? Because you find yourself that, without a relationship, in your life, you become depressed. So fundamentally, you are seeking a relationship because you want to be happy, you want to be joyful. Or in other words, you are trying to use the other as a source of your happiness. When you are trying to use the other person as a source of your happiness, what it means is, your happiness is not on self-start.

Let us say, you bought a car for yourself in 1940’s, along with the car you have to get yourself two servants, because morning it needs push-start. If you bought a car in the ‘50s, one servant would do because it was crank-start. Now all your automobiles are self-start.

But your happiness is still on push-start, isn’t it? Somebody has to push it a little bit otherwise it won’t get started. If you put your happiness on self-start, and now if you are happy by your own nature, now relationships will become a means for you to express your happiness not to seek happiness.

Seeking joy v/s expressing joy

If you are forming relationships to seek happiness and trying to squeeze happiness out of somebody and that person is trying to squeeze happiness out of you, now this is going to be a painful relationship after some time. Initially, it may be OK because something is being fulfilled.

But if you have become a joy by yourself and you are forming relationships because you want to express your happiness, nobody is going to complain about you. This is because you are now in the process of expressing your joy not seeking joy from the other person.

So, if your life becomes an expression of your joy, not in pursuit of happiness then relationships will be naturally wonderful. You can hold a million relationships and still hold them good. Now, this whole circus of trying to fulfil somebody else’s expectations does not arise because if you are an expression of joy anyway they want to be with you. But if you are trying to extract joy from them, then they want to avoid you. Shifting your life from pursuit of happiness to an expression of joyfulness is what needs to happen if relationships have to really work on all levels, because they are of many kinds.

Kinds of relationships

Your body is right now made in such way that it’s still in a condition where it needs a relationship. Your mind is made in such a way that it still needs a relationship. Your emotions are in such a way that it still needs a relationship and deeper down your very energies are made in such way that you still need a relationship on that level also. If your body goes in search of a relationships, we call this sexuality. If your mind goes in search of relationships, we call this companionship. If your emotion goes in search of relationships, we call this love. If your energies go in search of relationships, we call this yoga.

This was first published in the February 2010 issue of Complete Wellbeing.

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Extensive research was carried out in the West by people like Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung and Ram Dass [Richard Alpert] among others to find a drug that could give the ultimate high. All of them did notice that there seems to be some kind of breakthrough, but they always reached a dead end; they could not go beyond a certain point. They thought there could be some other drug to do this.

So what does a drug do? Most drugs are harsh and destructive to the system. Marijuana is one of the milder ones and LSD [lysergic acid diethylamide] was considered spiritual. In the ’60s, people considered it to be a prasad from heaven.

That wave of the ’60s and ’70s took the lives of so many youth. When the drugs got them high and dropped them, somebody told them you need to go to India. So, a huge exodus of hippies to India took place. But once the Indian police got cracking, all the hippies moved to Nepal because there was no police in Nepal. Even today, remnants of those die-hard hippies, who refused to change, are hanging around in Himachal Pradesh, Goa, Nepal and the borders of the Himalayas and are still peddling and living on drugs.

So what is the spiritual possibility of this chemical, which gives you an experience of explosion of energies within yourself? The explosion of energy caused by a chemical makes you definitely believe that there is a possibility. But can a chemical take you across? It doesn’t matter what kind of chemical it is, it cannot take you across. But could it give you a taste of something? With great hesitation and a deep sense of concern I am saying this, ‘possible.’ It is that possibility, which is dangerous. If a thousand people take to drugs in pursuit of spirituality, one may experience something genuine. The remaining 999 may just go down the drain. To make just that one person have a glimpse of a spiritual possibility, sacrificing so many people, with them ending up dead or totally loose, crime ridden, out of control, diseased, and broken, is not worth it. But that one person may have some genuine experience beyond the limitations of what is considered ‘mind’.

Now getting on to something mild like marijuana, which people keep propagating by saying “it is harmless, it is nice, it keeps you calm”. It does definitely keep you calm; there is no question about that. But it calms you, and calms you, and calms you and after sometime you become too calm. Without any fire in you, without anything, you will see your mental capabilities just slowly shrink.

The very nature of the spiritual experience is such that whenever you explode into a different dimension of energy, the first thing that happens to you is, suddenly you have enhanced capabilities. But the effect of a drug is just the reverse; whenever it gives you some experience, it reduces your mental capability.

Once Ram Dass travelled to India. He visited Neem Karoli Baba, who is a mystic, a worshipper of Hanuman and a tantric of enormous capabilities. Ram Dass was a hard core LSD user then and could pop two or three LSDs in a day. So he came to this yogi and said, “I got some real stuff from heaven. You take this, everything that is worth knowing opens up. Do you know something about this?” Neem Karoli Baba asked, “What is that? Show me.” So Ram Dass gave him a small quantity. Baba said, “How many do you have? Show me.” Ram Dass had enough to last many months. Baba said, “Give it all to me.” So Ram Dass gave a handful of LSD.

Baba just popped and swallowed them and sat there and carried on with whatever he was doing. Ram Dass was sitting there and hoping that the man would explode and die now. But Baba did not show any signs of having taken LSD. He just continued, just to demonstrate to Ram Dass that he was wasting his life on some stupid stuff and it was not going to take him across.

All the stuff that you need to remain calm or peaceful is available in your body. A recent research into the human brain has yielded some incredible results. After 18 years of research, an Israeli scientist has found that there are millions of cannabis receptors in the human brain. Cannabis is another name for marijuana. So why are these receptors there in the brain? The conclusion that lots of people had come to is that it means all of us must be smoking pot. Because we have cannabis receptors, we have to provide for them. But then he discovered that at different times of day, the body develops its own chemical similar to cannabis. When a person goes through a certain level of stress or whatever, the body develops its own chemical to calm the system. So there is a whole marijuana garden inside the body.

There was no name given to this particular chemical yet, which goes towards the cannabis receptors. So this scientist had the freedom to name it and he wanted to give it a truly relevant name. So he really searched through all the scriptures on the planet, but he could not find a suitable name. Then obviously he came down to India and researched the Indian scriptures and to his amazement he found that the Indian scriptures are the only scriptures, which talk about blissfulness. No other religion on the planet talks about bliss.

Religions talk about sin, fear, guilt and punishment but no religion talks about blissfulness. So he called this chemical in the brain, which moves towards the cannabis receptor as ‘Anandamide.’ So all you have to do is produce a little bit of Anandamide.

Now if you cultivate it properly and you keep it on, you can be stoned all the time without harming your system, without shrinking your brain. All that you need to remain calm, to remain in an extreme sense of pleasure all the time is available to every human being. You just have to explore your own system a little more, that is all.

This was first published in the February 2011 issue of Complete Wellbeing.

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The important thing is you got there; the means of travel is only incidental. This is true with every aspect of your life. But the incidental factors have taken on such phenomenal importance that the basic thing about life has been completely forgotten. The process has become more important than the real thing. We are trying to graduate from one material thing to another because we believe that is happiness.

Don’t follow the herd

It is in pursuit of happiness that you do the entire circus in your life. Different people may have different ideas about how to get there, but everybody is in pursuit of happiness. The human race has been doing so much to achieve happiness and wellbeing on this planet that in this pursuit, we are destroying the very planet on which we live. We must first understand what our idea of wealth is. Is it just about more buildings, more machines, more cars, more… everything?

If I go to the West and ask them, “Why don’t you meditate?” the common retort is, “Oh but we’ve got to pay bills.” I say, “Why do you guys generate so many bills? If your whole life is about paying bills, why generate them? You can curtail yourself and live more comfortably, isn’t it? To pay those bills, you are just working endlessly. What’s the point?” The answer often is, “everyone is doing it.” It doesn’t matter; they are all driven by somebody else. You don’t try to do what somebody else does. When it comes to outside situations, we have not come with equal capabilities. No two human beings are made with the same level of capability. There maybe somebody who can do a thousand things in a day without suffering or being stressed. Maybe you can do only three things in a day; it’s okay.

Limit juggling to what you can

Life places us in many situations where managing things is like juggling. For example, being in the family is a big juggling process. Keep your emotions aside and just look at it sincerely. Our lives have many complex activities. We have various types of relationships and various levels of involvement with different types of people on a day-to-day basis. We are constantly shifting from one type of relationship to another. Initially, maybe you were just juggling with two balls and it was quite simple.

Then you picked up more balls and the juggling became complicated. When you want to take up more activity, there will be more juggling. You can’t help it; that’s the way it is. So once you take to juggling, you had better develop some skill. Otherwise, the balls will be scattered all over the place and you will be freaking out every day because you can’t hold things in place. How smoothly you carry your life simply depends on the level of mastery you have over juggling. This moment you may be on the phone with your business partner and the next moment you may be talking to your wife or your child. Life is like this; it is constantly shifting. You can’t just tune yourself: “Ok, right now I am going to be like this.” So, because of the complexity of this adjustment, if you happen to treat your wife like you treat your business partner, immediately you will be in trouble. Or if you treat your business partner like your wife, you will be in trouble, isn’t it?

So before we enter any situation, you must look at your ability to juggle. “Can I juggle all this and still be happy or will I get lost in the process of juggling?” If you are not much of a juggler, you better remain alone and juggle yourself. Everything comes with a certain pain and pleasure. There is a price to pay in every aspect of life.

So before taking on anything in your life, you must ask yourself: are you willing to pay the price? Every human being has to decide how much of what is right for him. Your neighbour may have a 100-bedroom house—maybe he likes to live in a hotel. For yourself, you must decide how much you need. You don’t do things like him. This is the biggest problem; we are trying to do things like somebody else. That’s the wrong way to approach life. We need to decide how much of what we should do in our lives—how much outside activity or inner wellbeing or social wellbeing would keep our life balanced without ruining us and the atmosphere around us. Unfortunately, such intelligence is missing in the world; we are just going rampant. It is insane the way we are going because the kind of lifestyle the world has chosen is just not sustainable.

Don’t die surviving

Today, if you have enough money, you can go into a store and buy everything that you need for a whole year. It has never been like that on this planet. Survival has always been a great struggle. But now, for the first time, the survival process has become totally organised. Now is the time to find expression to deeper dimensions of being a human. Unfortunately, most people choose to complicate their survival. We still don’t seem to be finished with survival. We want to make the survival process so complex that we will spend the rest of our life fighting for survival.

It is important that you simplify your survival process so that the deeper dimensions of who you are find expression in your life. It is extremely important that you find out what it means to just sit here and reverberate as a piece of life because that is the ultimate ecstasy of being here. And now that our survival is generally taken care of, I think we must cause a wave of bliss wherever we go. And because we don’t do that, we conclude that a human being means being a miserable, useless ‘nothing’.

When you use the expression, “Oh, I’m just human,” it means, “I’m just helpless nonsense.” We need to change the context of what it means to be human. When somebody says, “I’m human” he must mean “I’m ecstatic. I’m capable of wonderful things within myself.” We’ve chosen to make a human being into a miserable worm who just fights for his survival throughout his life. We are capable of organising our survival in such a way that we don’t have to struggle for survival on a daily basis—unless we complicate the survival process.

For most human beings, the survival process itself is becoming a full-time job. Just to earn a living, to reproduce and to die one day, what a fuss they make! Even a worm and an insect with their minute brains handle their survival quite well. Nature has given every human substantial intelligence to take care of his and his offspring’s survival. You are simply overdoing it.

Stop clinging

A while ago, I had a serious squirrel problem in the house. The mother squirrel gave birth to four babies. Three of them got eaten up but the mother doted upon the last one. She would watch her son go all over my things, biting into everything. Here was a mother who was eager for her little one to learn its squirrel business as quickly as possible; she wanted to be free of him as soon as possible. Unfortunately, most human parents don’t have this sense. They want their children to learn the human business as slowly as possible because they don’t have a life of their own. They get some life only by hanging on to their children. And that’s the reason there is so much juggling. Human beings claim to be the most intelligent species. Then our children should be free of their parents much faster than anybody else, isn’t it? But that doesn’t happen because we look at our children as a capital based on which we can live our future lives—when we are alive and also after we are dead. It is because of this that the juggling seems so much of a hassle; not otherwise. Family is not the problem; your own insecurity and your own ‘want’ to cling to things around you is the real problem.

Don’t do anything for fulfilment

Human life does not end with survival; it begins only when survival is taken care of. If we had come to this planet like any other creature, then eating, sleeping, reproducing and dying one day would have been a complete process by itself. Even as a human you need to do all these things. But somehow for humans life doesn’t seem to be fulfilled with them. Whatever action you may have performed, life has not attained fulfilment. In every stage of your life you think, “If this happens, my life will become complete.” As a child you thought, “If I get this toy, my life will be complete.” You got it but after three days, you threw it away. Life did not attain fulfilment.

Then you thought that if you complete your education, life would be complete. That too happened but there was no fulfilment. Then you began to think, “What’s the use of working like a donkey? If only I get married to that man or woman I love, my life would be made.” That happened and then you know what happened.

Fulfilment does not come because of some action you perform. Only if your inner nature is complete, will your life attain fulfilment. Right now, the human condition is such that without knowing anything about the nature of his existence, you are trying to make a living and somehow pass through the world. Your body, mind, emotion and energies are the vehicles through which you travel through your life. Without any understanding, control or subjective experience about them, you are trying to live your life. This is an accidental existence. When you exist accidentally, even if you manage to get somewhere in life, it will only be by accident. So, when a person is going through his whole life in an accidental manner, experiencing anxiety, fear and struggle is natural. Then we go about saying, “Life is a struggle.” Life is not a struggle.

Get a grip on yourself

You are getting stressed out simply because you don’t know how to function smoothly within yourself. You have no control over your own system. If your mind, body and energies were taking instructions from you and behaving the way you wanted them to, you wouldn’t get stressed no matter what was happening around you. You need to do something about this. If this does not happen, you will continue living life by accident and always be hoping that situations work out.

If you are seeking to expand the scope and play of your life, if you are seeking challenging situations, then you have to do something about the way you function. Challenging situations mean that you will face situations that you have no clue about. If you are the kind who gets stressed, naturally you will avoid those situations.

When you avoid those situations, you will naturally avoid all possible growth for yourself. Today, so many people are getting into challenging jobs and are multi-tasking, but a large number of them may not be naturally equipped to handle such situations. This is why we see so many people losing their effectiveness and just breaking up in the process of pursuing their careers—succumbing to burnouts.

If you are constantly looking for challenges in your life, and you don’t equip yourself with an inner stability and an inner sense of joy within yourself by your own nature, you are bound to become a disaster over a period of time. You may be successful in your career but as a human you would have failed because you cannot enjoy the process of life. Such people are no longer joyful or peaceful; they have become stressful. If you are stressful, that means in some way you have failed yourself, isn’t it?

When you fine-tune yourself to such a point that the fundamental faculties function so beautifully within you, then naturally the best of your abilities will just flow out of you. If you really want to bring quality into your life and to perpetuate that quality into life around you, the first and foremost thing that you need to do is to establish your inner realities in a certain way with a certain stability. What is within you—your mind, your emotions and your system should not go through upheavals when facing the challenges of life. Only when there are no inner upheavals and issues can you handle the outside issues well.

Take the first step

So is there a way to create an inner situation? Yes. As there is a science and technology to creating external situations the way we want them, we have a whole science and technology to create inner situations the way we want them. As we have engineered the world, we can also engineer our interiority. Without it, we end up functioning by accident.

The first and foremost step that every human being should take is: equip yourself to make yourself the way you want to be. If this happens, creating the outside will become effortless. You tell me, when can you use your mind and body well? When you are happy or unhappy? When you are happy you can effortlessly handle things, but when you are stressed or unhappy, the same little things freak you out. If you are joyful, going up a mountain is also effortless, isn’t it? It may take a lot of physical effort, but you feel it’s effortless because you are doing it joyfully. When you are doing it joylessly, everything is burdensome. When you are doing it joyfully, everything is effortless.

Effortless does not mean lying on a couch. When I say effortless, I am saying, once you get into a certain state of pleasantness within yourself, once you are joyful by your own nature, everything is effortless. When you are happy, you are willing to run around and do everything because you don’t feel the effort of it. Effortlessness does not mean lethargy; effortlessness means that in your experience, it’s not burdensome.

Once a person is at ease within himself, naturally he functions at his best. Bringing this sense of ease, bringing this sense of effortlessness within you is essential. So, if you truly want to enhance the quality of your life, you have to take this step and be willing to invest a little bit of time for your inner wellbeing. If this is done, you will see a remarkable change in the way you function. The necessary technology is there—I call it Inner Engineering, the peak of wellbeing.

Inner Engineering is just this, that you engineer your interiority so that you function effortlessly within yourself. This does not mean you avoid challenging situations. When you are effortless within you, you seek them. Inner Engineering means you learn how to conduct this piece of life. If you know how to conduct it, then according to your ability, you can also conduct the outside effortlessly.

If your wellbeing is constantly under threat, you will not handle the outside well. If you want to handle everything well on the outside, if you want to be successful in your life, you must simply learn how to use these four limbs and a few brain cells; that’s all that’s needed. How vibrant and focused your mind is, how vibrant and healthy your body is, that’s what decides how successful you are.

This was first published in the January 2011 issue of Complete Wellbeing.

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Everything that you have done so far has been in pursuit of joy—whether you went for a job, sought a career, built businesses, made money or built families. The whole science and wisdom of what we refer to as inner nature or inner engineering or inner sciences, is not seeing joy as something that we achieve in our life but seeing joy as the very basis of life. Joy is not the goal; it is the square one of your life. Other things can happen, only if this one thing happens. Otherwise, you will live constantly with the fear of misery striking at you. Anything can happen to you at any moment; that is the way of life.

Right now, if you look at your life, everything that you are doing is in pursuit of joy. You are a joy industry. If you are a joy industry you need to check if, from when you were a child, your production has improved or depleted. Now that you have grown up, have got your own life, your own bank account, your own stuff going, has your joy multiplied, subtracted or divided?

Let us pose a question. In the last 24 hours, how many moments of joy have you known? From yesterday to today, has it improved or has it fallen? Are your joys in profit or loss? Every person should do this like a checkout at the end of the day.

The reason why joy is not a constant factor in your life is because you are trying to handle it from the wrong end. If you want the very way of your being to be joyful, if you want joy to become your quality, you have to understand how it grows, not the other way round. From the other end, while once in a way, you can buy it in the market, it never lasts.

When you came into this world, you came without any investment. So whatever happened with your life, you were in profit. But now, you have no perception of life or life-sense in you, simply an ego-sense. All the time, your one and only problem and the very basis of your misery is that life is not happening the way you think it should be happening. If everything happens the way you and everybody else wanted it to, can you imagine how it would be? The world would be destroyed in no time! Fortunately it’s not happening our way.

If you depend on the outside to bring joy to you, you need to understand that the outside never happens cent per cent your way. It happens only to an extent.

Those who expect an ideal situation are not in sync with external reality. When this is the case, at least one person, you, must happen the way you want yourself to be. If you did happen the way you want yourself to be, joy is the natural choice. This is not something that you have to desire, that you have to pursue, that you have to attain. If you fall back into your original nature, joyfulness is the only way you will be.

Right now, one of the main reasons why you are miserable is, instead of falling back into your joy, you are trying to pursue joy. Not understanding that the seat of experience is within you, you are trying to put all your energies out towards something, as if joy is hanging out there.

The reason why this need to accumulate is so strong is because there is a certain sense of insufficiency. You want to be something more than what you are right now. But even if we make you the king or queen of this planet, you will not stop, you will look up at the stars. You are greedy because your inner nature wants to find boundless expansion.

There is nothing wrong with your greed; it is actually a spiritual process. It is just that you do not give it proper expression. If you want to get there, you need the right kind of vehicle. Something within you is longing for boundlessness. If this longing has to be fulfilled, it cannot be through physical means.

If you are capable of making yourself joyful for one moment—I say ‘making yourself’ because you are either making yourself miserable or joyful—you are capable of making yourself joyful all the time. Have you ever experienced anything called ‘past’ or ‘future’? You remember the past, you imagine the future, but your experience of life has always been in this moment. Right now you are in this moment, tomorrow you will be in this moment, hundred years later if you exist, you will be in this moment. So, this moment is eternity.

The seat of your experience is within you, not outside of you. This is the fundamental shift in understanding that is needed to be joyful. Do not look for a way out, there is only one way—the ‘way in’. Once you become life, there is no way out, you cannot drop out of life. Even if you commit suicide, one more body will form around you, one more, and one more, and one more. There is only a way in; you find that way in and you are out; this is going out through the in-door. If you try going out through the outdoor, you will be unsuccessful.

The quality of your life changes, not by changing its content, but by changing its context. By changing the content, nothing changes. By changing the clothes you wear, the food you eat, the place you live in, the quality of your life won’t change.

You can go to your office because you really want to contribute to what is happening there. If you function this way, won’t they give you a salary at the end of the month? They definitely will pay you. But for 30 days if you keep chanting ‘salary, salary, salary’, you will be miserable for 29 days, hoping for that one day to come, and when it does you will be even more miserable because it does not matter how much the salary, it is never enough. As your salary increases, your lifestyle is already two steps ahead. The question is not about what you do or what you don’t do—how you do it, changes life.

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Right now, if I lose my balance in body, I will fall off this chair. Sitting is balance. Standing is definitely balance. Standing on these two legs and balancing is not a simple act; you have taken it for granted.

When you were an infant and tried to stand up, you know what it took? You are doing it effortlessly right now. If the body goes little out of balance, then you will see, just to stand is such a feat. Don’t take this balance for granted.

Just like sitting and standing, walking is supreme balance. Just two feet! The way you are walking, do you know how much is involved just to keep you balanced when you walk? It is a big thing.

If you lose balance in your thought, it is called insanity. If you lose balance in your emotion, the very juice of life, it becomes torture, both for yourself and for others. Your body, your thought, your emotion, your activity, everything is beautiful only if it is in balance.

So, how to bring balance into one’s life? What is the basis of this balance? Balance is such that even if you are on the battlefield, you are still balanced.

If your inner balance is absolute, you can harness the external, your body, and your mind, to the highest possible level—and that is all a human being can do.

When it comes to external situations, there is no such thing as perfect balance. Within myself, I may be absolutely balanced, but in activity, it is still a constant adjustment.

There is nobody on this planet who has balanced his outside activity perfectly. I may believe something is perfect, but somebody else says it is nonsense. Isn’t the same thing happening within the family?

You think you got everything organised, you are hugely successful in your life, and the whole world is clapping. But your children stand up and say that you are no good.

So, external situations are always going to need an adjustment—constant calibration depending upon the needs of the situations in which we are placed. Balance will come only if you are physically, mentally, and emotionally balanced within.

This will naturally find expression in your activity. It is not the activity that is balanced. If you can get the physical body and the mind to function at its highest potential, whatever you could do in this world, you will do to the best of your ability, depending upon the opportunity and the situation. That is all you can do.

Externally, how much activity and how we do the activity is not something you should decide. Activity should always be in line with the situation in which you exist and not be about you.

But right now, most people are living here as if the activity is about them. This is simply because who you are has not been established. You are trying to establish it through your activity.

You have heard them say: ‘I think, therefore I exist.’ Look at it, is your existence first or is your thought first? Because you exist you can think, isn’t it?

Once you get into this mode—because you think you exist, because you act you exist—there is no question of knowing a moment of balance in your whole life. Such a thing is not possible. Outside things may be beautifully arranged, but inside is a big mess because you are going on in a completely different mode all the time, you are trying to handle life upside down.

So, when we say balance, what would be your idea of balance? Today, if the day goes off well, would you call that balance? For me, balance means—if I shut my door and sit down for four or five days, I won’t have a single thought in my mind.

I am not trying not to think; if I want to think I have to think, otherwise nothing comes in my mind. I am just empty-headed, because not a single thought arises in my mind unless I think.

That is not the case with everybody. They have not known a single moment of no thought in their life unless they were grabbed by something outside, isn’t it?

It never happened by yourself simply because you are identified with something that you are not. The moment you are identified with something that you are not, thought is an endless process.

So if you want to get to this state, what do you have to do? Your mind has to take instructions from you, that is the most important thing. In many ways, it has been expressed—not just in India but all over the world.

Even Jesus went to the extent of saying this, “If therefore thine eye be single, your body shall be filled with light.” That is, in your physicality, there is always you and me. If you want to balance anything, there must be two, only then balancing becomes a necessity.

If your experience of life has transcended the duality of who you are right now, if you transcend the limitations of the physical, something beyond the physical becomes a living reality and now you have a single eye. You have one eye; you are looking at everything the same way.

Now everything is in perfect balance. You don’t strive for balance anymore; existence is balance. It is only the physical reality, which is fluctuating. Everything else is in perfect balance. It is only the physical, which is going up and down. Isn’t it so?

So, the most important thing in human life is that you transcend the limitations of the physical. You are the only creature on this planet, who has come with that capability; all the other creatures are trapped in their physicality.

You are capable of rising beyond the physicality but not going against your physicality. This is not about rejecting the body; it is about going a little deeper, not remaining on the surface. This is one thing that must happen to every human being.

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But individually, where is the need to go about judging anything? You do whatever you want. Every action has a consequence. If you can joyfully accept that consequence, then do whatever you please. Now you do something, tomorrow when the consequence comes, you cry. If that is so, right now look at your action carefully. The question is not about whether it’s right or wrong. The question is: are you willing to face the consequence? Not just face it, are you capable of going through it joyfully? If not, calibrate your actions.

You can truly enjoy something only if you do not judge it. If you allow it to, it will sink into you. Acceptance is the way to experience. If you resist, you cannot experience. If you pre-judge it, you cannot experience. ‘Oh, all peaches are wonderful.’ Not so. Peaches can be terrible too. So you don’t judge, you don’t take a prejudiced conclusion about anything, you experience everything just the way it is.

So nothing is stopping you from enjoying it, but you don’t have to pass a judgment. Whatever you think about that which is not yet, amounts to prejudice, doesn’t it? A prejudiced conclusion will lead to distortion of perception. Let’s say you came from the United States right now. You came to India, landed and met one wonderful person. ‘Oh! Indians are so wonderful&’ We have surprises for you. Or you met one nasty person at the airport ‘these horrible Indians&!’ No, that’s not the reality either, is it? In a moment you enjoyed something, that’s fine—relish that. Where is the need to make a conclusion? Instead of living an experience, you are trying to make knowledge out of it.

Knowledge has taken away your ability to experience and perceive life the way it is. According to a story, God told the first man and woman do what you want, eat what you want, but do not eat from this particular tree—Tree of knowledge. And your teachers, your parents insist you must eat from the tree of knowledge.

By eating the fruit of knowledge, man fell; because the more knowledge you have about something, the less you experience it. Anything that you have mental conclusions about, you cannot experience. This is what has happened to you about everything—because you have forgone conclusions about it, you cannot experience it.

Many years ago, I met a scientist at a food research institute, who had spent over 27 years doing research on apples. He had every kind of apple from everywhere in the world in his laboratory, in different conditions—preserved properly, rotting, and so on. He hadn’t tasted an apple in the last 27 years! Simply because he knew everything about it. But you think, you don’t know an apple till you put it your mouth. That’s the best way to know it, isn’t it? But he knew everything about it. In the same way, you can know about life without knowing anything about it.

So whether it’s a peach or an apple or a person or a tree or any experience, you don’t have to draw a conclusion. Just experience it for what it is. It will go deep inside you. What we are referring to as divine has not touched you because you have too many conclusions in your head. What you call as knowledge is just your conclusion about life. That’s why they said Adam ate the fruit of knowledge and fell, because the moment you eat the fruit of knowledge you fall from the experience and the grace of life. Now acceptance simply means experiencing everything just the way it is. Not making conclusions about it. You need knowledge about material things, but you don’t need knowledge about life, and you cannot have knowledge about life.

See, right now there is somebody here you met 25 years ago, somewhere. That somebody was doing something you did not like. So you thought this person is not nice; but now you find this person sitting right here in front of me. Now the moment you see him, your mind says: ‘Oh my God he is not nice, why is he here?’ In 25 years time this person might have become the most beautiful human being on the planet. Possible? But your mind will say he is not nice, why is he here? Because you have knowledge about him, you have no way of experiencing him right now the way he is. Among all of you, is there anybody here who is 24 hours good or 24 hours bad? You are constantly oscillating, isn’t it? So whatever conclusions I make about you, suppose I conclude that you are bad, I am wrong. Suppose I conclude that you are good, I am bound to be wrong, isn’t it? So don’t make conclusions, just experience everything the way it is. That’s when you know life.

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Is there any other problem in your life? If you look at your thought process, is there any consistency to it? Looking at it from that perspective, aren’t you glad the world is not happening the way you think it should happen? “No, no, but my situation…”

The situation is not the problem. Even if you are placed in the most horrible situation, you can handle it gracefully. People have, haven’t they? People have even walked to the gallows gracefully. Let me tell you an incident.

This happened in Austria in 1939—at the time when Hitler was picking up Jews and packing them into concentration camps. There was a girl who was 13 years of age. She belonged to an affluent Jewish family of about 17 members that lived in one large home. One fine morning, soldiers walked into their home, occupied the house and took the adults and children away separately.

The 13-year-old girl and her 8-year-old brother were taken to a railway station. It was the beginning of winter and it was cold in Austria.

Children of an affluent family now on a railway station platform for three days… their parents were gone and they didn’t know where…soldiers with guns pointing at them. It was bad, but children are miserable only for a little while.

After that, they find something to kick around and start having fun. So the boy started playing a little bit of football. After three days, a train came—a goods train, not a passenger train—and everybody was pushed into the wagons. At the next station, the boys and girls were separated and taken away.

Five-and-half years later, in 1945, the girl came out of the concentration camp to discover that all members of her family had perished, including her little brother. At that moment, the only thing that she remembered was the last moment she had spent with him; how ugly she had made it for him.

She had boxed his ears, punched him in the face and said ugly things because he had lost his shoes. This made her resolve, “From today, it doesn’t matter whom I meet I will speak to them in such a way that if it happens to be the last time I speak to them, I will not regret it.”

So even the most horrible situations can make a human being what she or he is; no matter what situation you are placed in, you can make it either your boon or your curse.

If you are aware, if you are in touch with your self, you can make your life even if you are placed in hell. Otherwise, even if you are placed in heaven, you only make a mess out of it. Who told you that you are not already in heaven? Is there any confirmation that you are not already in heaven? Can you prove you are not there? No.

So why do you think there is another place which is better than this? This horrible idea that there is another place better than this has been created by people who have made a hell out of themselves.

You made a hell out of yourself so now you want to go to heaven. If you make a heaven out of yourself, if you are ecstatic, why would you want to go anywhere? Wherever I go, it doesn’t matter to me.

So see how to make a heaven out of yourself. Otherwise, even if you are living in heaven, you will only suffer. Especially if everybody is happy, if all your competitors, your enemies, your neighbours and your mother-in-law are having a good time, you may suffer a lot.

A lot of people are suffering because somebody else is having a good time. This does not apply just to a few sick people; it applies to the majority.

If you are walking on the street and somebody is driving a car, you suffer. If everybody was walking, you would be okay, isn’t it? If everybody was poor, you would be okay; somebody is rich, that is a problem.

You are suffering somebody’s joy and somebody’s wellbeing simply because there is no joy within you. You think pulling that man down or getting on top of him is going to bring you joy. No, that is not going to happen.

This is like Shankaran Pillai. He had a baby in the house but didn’t have livestock. His wife constantly nagged, “We have a child but we don’t have a cow and no milk.” Frustrated, he went for a walk and then he came across a house that had eight cows and two children.

He thought, “Why eight cows for two children?” He walked in, took one cow and walked away. After some time, the police arrested him and took him to court.

“I didn’t steal anything. This cow has been with me for a month; this is my cow,” Shankaran Pillai emphasised. The lawyer insisted, “See, this cow was in somebody else’s house.” Shankaran Pillai said, “Wait! Two years ago, my wife was also in somebody else’s house—her father’s—now she is my wife.

Are you disputing that?” “No,” said the lawyer. “Then what’s the problem with the cow?” The lawyer said, “It’s not the same.”

The owner of the cow added, “I can produce two witnesses who have seen you stealing this cow.” Shankaran Pillai said, “That’s nonsense! I can produce 100 witnesses who have not seen me stealing this cow. How is that?”

So, you don’t know whether this is really heaven or not. What if it is and you missed it? Suppose this is heaven and you never realised it—what a horrible way to live. And I am telling you, it is, because the basis of your experience is within you.

If you take charge of that, you can make heaven out of it right now. Your intolerant neighbour, the noisy child next door, your mother-in-law, all these people have been added so that there is a little spice in your life, for excitement—but it is actually heaven.

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If we feel like a complete human being in our body, mind and spirit, that is when we are really healthy. There are many people who are medically healthy, but not healthy in the real sense because they do not experience a sense of wellness within themselves.

If one has to experience this sense of wholeness and oneness, it’s important that one’s body, mind, and above all, one’s energy functions on a certain level of intensity within themselves. Now, physically, as per medical terms, one may be healthy, but energies may be lethargic.

One doesn’t know why things don’t happen in life the way they should, both inside and outside; this is simply because one is not taking care of the well-being of one’s energy.

For every physical or psychological situation that you go through in life, there is an energy basis, which in turn, has a chemical basis. In a way, modern allopathic medicines have become just chemistry.

For every problem that arises in your body, you are just trying to take in some medicine, a chemical, and come to some kind of balance. If you use one chemical to bring down one aspect, or enhance another, there is also a side effect to this.

For this side-effect, there is an antidote; for the antidote there is another antidote, it’s an endless chain. Whatever is happening on the chemistry level in your body is only controlled by the way your energies function.

Because a man has got excess acids within him, you ingest some alkaline medicine into him. But why does he have excessive acids? Because of the way his mind, his body, and above all, his energy functions.

So in yoga, when we say health, we don’t look at the body; we don’t look at the mind; we only look at the energy—the way it is. If your energy body is in proper balance and full flow, your physical body and mental body will be in perfect health.

There is no question about it. Keeping the energy body in full flow is not about cures. It is about going to the foundation of your energy system and activating it in a proper way—building a foundational yogic practice that establishes your energy in such a way that your body and mind are naturally fine.

When it comes to health, no human being gets to live in perfect conditions. The pressures of life, the food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink, all these affect us in many ways.

The more our activities are in the world; the more we’re exposed to many things that can throw our chemistry off balance and create health problems. But if the energy in our system is properly cultivated and kept active, these things will not have an effect. Without a doubt, the physical body and the mental body will be in perfect health.

Life functions in many ways. Let us say you don’t know anything about electricity—you don’t even know what electricity is. This hall is dark. If I tell you that if you press a button, the whole hall will be flooded with light, will you believe me?

No. Now I just do it, and light appears. You will call it a miracle, isn’t it? Simply because you don’t understand how electricity works. Similarly, right now, medical sciences are limited to knowing just the physical body.

If anything happens beyond that, you think it’s a miracle. I call it another kind of science, that’s all. Life functions in so many ways. You have just limited yourself to the physical and the logical. This life energy in you created your whole body—these bones, this flesh, this heart, this kidney and everything else. Do you think it cannot create health? If your energies are kept in full flow and proper balance, it is capable of creating much more than just health.

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