Sadhguru Quotes

If you resist change, you resist life.

When pain, misery, or anger happen, it is time to look within you, not around you.

The fear is simply because you are not living with life, You are living in your mind.

If you ask a tree how he feels to know that he's spreading his fragrance and making people happy, I don't think a tree looks at it that way. I am just like that, and it is just my nature to be like this.

Too many people are hungry not because there is dearth of food. It is because there is dearth of love and care in human hearts.

Krishna says in the Gita, “The worst crime in the world is indecision.

I am not talking about you being a spectator, I am talking about involvement. I am talking about involving yourself into life in such a way that you dissolve into it.

People have fallen in love with words and lost the world. It’s time to regain it.

Learning to listen is the essence of intelligent living.

Every moment there are a million miracles happening around you: a flower blossoming, a bird tweeting, a bee humming, a raindrop falling, a snowflake wafting along the clear evening air. There is magic everywhere. If you learn how to live it, life is nothing short of a daily miracle.

The planet is spinning on time: not a small event. All the galaxies are managing fine; the whole cosmos is doing great. But you have one nasty little thought crawling through your head, and it is a bad day! The problem is you are living in a psychological space that bears no connection with reality. And you are insecure, because it can collapse at any moment.

Do you understand? Man needs entertainment simply to hide his madness. If he was perfectly sane, he would not need entertainment. He could just sit and watch this bamboo grow. He does not really need entertainment.

There is so much adventure that only a youth can experience. Youth is not the time to languish in pleasure - youth is the time for exploration and adventure

Reactivity is enslavement. Responsibility is freedom.

Unless you do the right things, the right things will not happen to you.

The only thing that stands between you and your well-being is a simple fact: you have allowed your thoughts and emotions to take instruction from the outside rather than the inside. On

Confidence and stupidity are a very dangerous combination, but they generally go together.

If you want to become life sensitive, a simple process that you do is this: make whatever you think and whatever you feel less important. Try and see for one day. Suddenly you will feel the breeze, the rain, the flowers and the people, everything in a completely different way. Suddenly the life in you becomes much more active and alive for your experience.

Everything that ever happened to you, you experienced right within you. Light and darkness, pain and pleasure, agony and ecstasy—all of it happened within you. If someone touches your hand right now, you may think you are experiencing their hand, but the fact of the matter is you are only experiencing the sensations in your own hand. The whole experience is contained within. All human experience is one hundred percent self-created.

The whole effort of the spiritual process is to break the boundaries you have drawn for yourself and experience the immensity that you are. The aim is to unshackle yourself from the limited identity you have forged, as a result of your own ignorance, and live the way the Creator made you—utterly blissful and infinitely responsible.

It is our compulsive reaction to the situations in which we are placed that causes stress.

To program the calories you must consume and the number of hours you must sleep is a foolish way to handle life.

The more you try to be special, the more you get hurt. Just be, just melt and become part of the wind around you, the earth around you, become a part of everything. You’re here only for a while. At least when you’re in a place like this, where nobody is going to trample on you, let your defenses down.

Responsibility simply means your ability to respond.

If you eat raw meat, it takes between seventy to seventy-two hours to pass through your system; cooked meat takes fifty to fifty-two hours; cooked vegetables twenty-four to thirty hours; uncooked vegetables twelve to fifteen hours; fruits one and a half to three hours.

The most incredible thing is that you can know everything you wish to know with your eyes closed.

What is happening within you and how you experience your life is entirely your making – your karma.

But to be loving is simply this: a willingness to respond freely and openly. Right now, it may be limited to one or two people in your lives. But it is possible to extend this ability to embrace the entire world.

The logic is simple: if you do the right things, the right things will happen to you even without your intent.

If you handle your entire life with logic alone, you will end up a mess.

Most carnivorous animals do not eat every day—definitely not three times a day! They know the food they eat moves very slowly through their tracts.

An intellectual understanding that is not backed by experiential knowledge can lead to mind games and deceptive states.

The way you eat not only decides your physical health, but the very way you think, feel, and experience life. Trying to eat intelligently means understanding what kind of fuel this body is designed for and accordingly supplying it, so that it functions at its best. Let

Eating natural foods, in their uncooked condition, when the cells are still alive, will bring an enormous sense of health and vitality to the system.

Today people just go on working, working and working. Not because they are creating something fantastic, but simply because they have to work, otherwise they don’t know what to do with themselves.

There are many ways to understand this. One simple way to know this is: today, if you lose your mental peace totally, you will go to a doctor. He will give you a pill. If you take this pill, your system will become peaceful. Maybe this will last just for a few hours, but you become peaceful. This pill is just a little bit of chemicals. These chemicals enter your system and make you peaceful. Or in other words, what you call peace is a certain kind of chemistry within you. Similarly, what you call joy, what you call love, what you call suffering, what you call misery, what you call fear, every human experience that you go through, has a chemical basis within you. Now the spiritual process is just to create the right kind of chemistry, where you are naturally peaceful, naturally joyous. When you are joyous by your own nature, when you don’t have to do anything to be happy, then the very dimension of your life, the very way you perceive and express yourself in the world will change. The very way you experience your life will change.

The spiritual journey is a journey towards clarity, but never towards certainty. When you draw conclusions about beginnings and endings, you are a believer. When you accept that you really do not know anything, you become a seeker. To

To be enlightened is not a condition of certainty. It is to move from limited knowing to boundless unknowing, from gravitas to grace. It is to awaken to a condition of borderless ignorance, of limitless uncertainty. When you are no longer bound by the limitations of creation, you are blessed with the freedom of the Creator. The

Your ideas of good and bad are just a certain level of prejudice against life. The

The path is not difficult. It is very simple. If you are simple, it’s very simple. If you are all wound up, the path is very, very winding. That’s all it is.

Every opinion you have about anything can be a limiting identity.

Bullshit may get you to the top, but it never lets you stay there!

Renunciation, or refusing to identify with that which one gathers (however precious it may be), is the ultimate doorway to knowing.

The identity around which the intellect functions is called ahankara.

When most people say “life,” they mean the accessories of life—their work, their family, their relationships, the homes they live in, the cars they drive, the clothes they wear, or the gods they pray to.

Pain or pleasure, joy or misery, agony or ecstasy, happens only inside you. Human folly is that people are always trying to extract joy from the outside. You may use the outside as a stimulus or trigger, but the real thing always comes from within.

If your sadness is reminding you that you are incomplete, it is good. Make use of your sadness to grow. When sadness sets in, if you become more compassionate, more caring, and more loving, you have some sense in you.

That which knows how to bend will not break.

Believing means you have assumed something that you do not know; seeking means you have realized that you do not know.

Once your intellect gets identified with something, it gets chained to the identifications, and leaves you with a completely distorted experience of the world.

Being responsible is taking ownership of your life. It means you have taken the first radical step to becoming a complete human being—fully conscious and fully human. In taking responsibility and beginning the journey toward conscious living, you are putting an end to the age-old patterns of assigning blame outward or heavenward. You have begun the greatest adventure life has to offer: the voyage inward.

Don’t think of this as your first step or last step. Just be here as a piece of life. That is the best way to be. You are not a young man; you are not an old man. You are just a piece of life.

Karma simply means we have created the blueprint for our lives. It means we are the makers of our own fate. When we say “This is my karma,” we are actually saying “I am responsible for my life.

Man needs entertainment simply to hide his madness. If he was perfectly sane, he would not need entertainment. He could just sit and watch this bamboo grow. He does not really need entertainment.

Enlightenment is not an attainment or an achievement. It is a homecoming. Your senses give you the impression that you are experiencing the outside, but you have never experienced the outside. When you realize that all that you experience is within, that absolute homecoming is enlightenment.

We are the most comfortable generation to have ever lived on this planet. The rub is that we are definitely not the most joyful, or the most loving, or the most peaceful. Why

The walls of self-preservation that you build for today are the walls of self-imprisonment for tomorrow. Boundaries that you establish in your life as a protection for yourself today will feel like constraints tomorrow.

The whole spiritual process is just this: that you are willing to take the next step not knowing where it will lead you. If you are not ready for that, that means you are not ready for any new possibility.

Every human being is longing for involvement. Not for touch, not for a kiss, not for sex, not for anything else; one is basically longing for a deep sense of involvement.

Life should touch you, even if life smothers you, it's better than remaining untouched by life

If you consciously get your body into different postures, you can elevate your consciousness.

I do not know” is the doorway—the only doorway—to seeking and knowing.

It is unfortunate that we have moved from intuition to information.

I want you to understand: however big one is in the world, tomorrow morning if I fall dead or you fall dead, the world will go on just fine—maybe better—without us!

Life has no use at all, declared Adiyogi. It is simply a phenomenon. Little acts have purpose. But life is not framed within the narrow grid of utility. It is beyond frames. It is beyond grids. It is beyond utility. If you have a taste of this existence beyond purpose, of life beyond sense, you are enlightened.

Affluence has not brought misery. The money did not stay in your pocket; it got into your head. Only then misery came to you. Having lots of money in your pocket is good. But if it enters your head, it becomes misery, because that is not its place.

One of the biggest problems in the world today is loneliness. It is quite incredible. The planet is teeming with seven billion people, but people are lonely! If someone enjoys being alone, there is no problem at all. But most people are suffering because of it! They are going through serious psychological problems as a consequence. If you are lonely, it is because you have chosen to become an island unto yourself. It doesn’t have to be this way. “I am not responsible” makes you unwilling to get along with anyone—until you can’t even get along with yourself. It often comes to a point when you believe you are not even responsible for what is happening within yourself!

If terrible things have happened to you, you ought to have grown wise. If the worst possible events have befallen you, you should be the wisest of the lot. But instead of growing wise, most people become wounded. In a state of conscious response, it is possible to use every life situation—however ugly—as an opportunity for growth. But if you habitually think, “I am the way I am because of someone else,” you are using life situations merely as an opportunity for self-destruction or stagnation.

Whatever has been the highest experience in your life should become the centerpiece around which your life is structured.

Morality always differs from person to person, according to time, place, situation—and convenience.

Things do not descend upon anything that is not ready to receive them.

If you are not using your mind for self-torture, why would you think of peace?

I couldn’t help noticing that people coming out of restaurants always had more joyful faces than those coming out of temples. That intrigued me.

Today, if you have one depressing thought in you, you will sit depressed. Why? The whole cosmos is going on phenomenally well today, but that does not matter. In your mind there is one thought – not too many, just one – that is bothering you, that will depress you and put you in the dumps.

Living totally does not mean just having a good time. It means experiencing anything that comes your way fully and intensely. The very process of life is the dissolution of karma. If you live every moment of your life totally, you dissolve an enormous volume of karma.

Right now, you don’t have the necessary faculties to know anything which is beyond the physical. If you recognize this, if you understand this, if you accept this absolutely, only then the other dimension opens up.

Reactivity is enslavement. Responsibility is freedom. When you are able to create yourself the way you want, you can create your life the way you want as well. Your outer life may not be a hundred percent in your control, but your inner life always will.

The basic principle is that the very things that can be your downfall in life can be used to raise yourself. If you simply change your perspective, what is down can be up. What is a downward chute can be used as an upward process. Whatever draws you into compulsive nature, you use that to become conscious. You use that momentum to grow.

The only thing you can do is to stop attaching importance to your own ways of thinking and feeling, your thought patterns, your emotions, and your opinions. Don’t attach any importance to them. Then your limitations will become weaker and weaker and one day collapse.

Fundamentally, the basis of yoga is just this: to initiate a process of self-creation where the nature of your body, your emotion, your mind, your energy is consciously created by you. This is what Adiyogi did. He crafted his life in its entirety.

this satsangh?’ You just drop that. You don’t have to get anything, okay? You don’t have to benefit from this. Just waste half a day and go. (Laughter) Really. ‘What should I get out of my meditation?’ Nothing. Just waste fifteen-twenty minutes every day. So do not meditate; just learn to waste some time. Nothing needs to happen. This is not about resting; this is not about becoming healthy; this is not about becoming enlightened; this is not about reaching heaven. All this is just wasting time. When you are not trying to be anything, not trying to get anywhere, you are being.

Love is not a joy; it is a deep wonderful pain. It is a very deep, tearing, wonderful pain. Something within you should tear; not just something, everything within you should tear. Only then you know what love is. If it feels pleasant, that’s not love; it’s just convenience. Maybe you felt a little affection. If you have ever loved, everything inside you tears apart, really tears apart. It’s painful but wonderful. That’s how it is.

Most people will grow only with pain, not with pleasure. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the truth. Generally people only go down with pleasure. They don’t go up with pleasure. Please see, the quality of a human being is like this: when life offers more and more pleasures to a man, he doesn’t grow. He goes down. In terms of the real quality of a human being, only when suffering comes, when pain comes, does a man stand up as a human being.

Similarly, it goes for you, too. You too have the necessary intelligence to live your life to the fullest. Now the problem is that you want your child to be intelligent your way, not his. You want the child to be intelligent the way you understand intelligence. Now, your idea of intelligence is, your child should become a doctor. Maybe he would have made a wonderful carpenter,

There is no such thing as ego; it is empty talk. The nasty part of you, you call it ego. Whenever you get nasty, you don’t want to see, “It is me who is nasty.” You want to say, “Oh, it is my ego.” This is another way of passing the buck. There is no ego. There is just you, and you, loid and you alone.

Many senseless people who don’t even know how they should live are going on producing more children. They have not even learned how they should live. Forget about enlightenment; they don’t even know how to keep their physical body! They don’t know what the human form is. They don’t know how to keep their emotions; they don’t know how to keep their mind in balance. Why are these people going on producing children?

Infectious diseases happen because of external organisms, but chronic diseases are manufactured daily by human beings. When your energy body is in full vibrancy and proper balance, chronic diseases cannot exist in the body. I could introduce you to thousands of people who have gotten rid of their physical and psychological ailments just by doing certain simple yogic practices. These practices are not aimed at the disease. They are just aimed at bringing a certain harmony and vitality to the energy body.

Whatever happens naturally is always right, there is no question about it. It is just that your short-term goals and objectives may not be in tune with what is happening, so you struggle with it. But in the real sense, it cannot be wrong. It always moves in the right direction because Nature does not decide things with thoughts and emotion. It just decides things as per your tendencies. This is not a thought. With thought, you can always make a mistake

Because your self-preservation instinct keeps telling you, “Unless you have walls you are not safe,” unconsciously you keep building them. Later, you struggle with them. This is an endless cycle. But creation is not unwilling to open to you the doors to the beyond. It is not creation’s unwillingness that you are struggling with. You are struggling with the walls of resistance that you have built around yourself.

Modern science tells us that all of existence is just energy manifesting itself in different ways and in different forms. This means that the same energy that can sit here as a rock can lie there as mud, can stand up as a tree, can run like a dog—or be here reading this book, as you. So, you are essentially a morsel of energy that is part of the much larger energy system of the universe. The cosmos is just one big organism. Your life is not independent of it. You cannot live without the world because there is a very deep moment-to-moment transaction between the two of you.

Stress is not because of work—this is important to remember. Everybody thinks their job is stressful. No job is stressful. There are many jobs that could present challenging situations. There could be nasty bosses, insecure colleagues, emergency rooms, impossible deadlines—or you might even find yourself in the middle of a war zone! But these are not inherently stressful. It is our compulsive reaction to the situations in which we are placed that causes stress. Stress is a certain level of internal friction. One can easily lubricate the inner mechanism with some amount of inner work and awareness. So, it is your inability to handle your own system that is stressing you out. On some level, you do not know how to handle your body, mind, and emotions; that is the problem. How

Seeker: So what is social ego, Sadhguru? Sadhguru: Society has its own ego, isn’t it? For every small thing, the whole society gets upset. It need not be wrong. Suppose it’s summer in the United States. Everybody is hardly wearing anything or maybe they are in miniskirts. Let’s say you’re fully clothed. People will get upset: “What is she doing? Why is she all covered up?” Here in India, if you dress like that, they’ll all get upset. So this is one kind of ego; that is another kind of ego. It’s the social ego which is getting upset, and your karma is becoming part of the collective karma. I want you to really understand this with a certain depth. Your idea of good and bad has been taught to you. You have imbibed it from the social atmosphere in which you have lived. See, for example, a bandit tribe, like the Pindaris, who from a young age were trained to rob and kill, they even had gods who taught them skills and brought them success in their banditry. When the British army was let loose on them, they were shot and killed indiscriminately. They were completely bewildered, as in their perception they had not done anything wrong. The Pindari ego was just to be a good bandit. The same happened for the Native Americans also. Among some Native American tribes, unless you had killed a man in your life, you were not much of a man. They collected the scalp of the man and wore it around their neck. So what is right and wrong, what is good and bad, is all about how the social ego functions.

Sadhana Look around. Among your family, coworkers, and friends, can you see how everyone has different levels of perception? Just observe this closely. If you know a few people who seem to have a greater clarity of perception than others, watch how they conduct their body. They often have a certain poise without practice. But just a little practice can make an enormous difference. If you sit for just a few hours a day with your spine erect, you will see that it will have an unmistakable effect on your life. You will now begin to understand what I mean by the geometry of your existence. Just the way you hold your body determines almost everything about you. Another way of listening to life is paying attention to it experientially, not intellectually or emotionally. Choose any one thing about yourself: your breath, your heartbeat, your pulse, your little finger. Just pay attention to it for eleven minutes at a time. Do this at least three times a day. Keep your attention on any sensation, but feel free to continue doing whatever you are doing. If you lose attention, it doesn’t matter. Simply refocus your attention. This practice will allow you to move from mental alertness to awareness. You will find the quality of your life experience will begin to change.

Whatever you wish to do, you must bring yourself to a moment of joy and clarity within yourself. Why I am saying joy is because when you are happy you are not compulsive. When you are very happy and clear, at that time if you look at things and see that “Yes, this is what is more sensible for me” – just do that. It does not matter if it feels like hell; it does not matter if you go through hell for ten years, you just do that, because that is where your wellbeing is. Whenever your emotions go up and down, your mind says many things – that is not important. It says one thing in the morning, one thing in the evening; it says one thing today and another thing tomorrow, that is of no consequence. When you are in differennt states of compulsiveness, if you make decisions as to which way to turn, you will be endlessly lost.

Entering the spiritual path means you have become conscious of your suffering. You were suffering unconsciously; now you have become conscious of it. Conscious suffering is always deeper than unconscious suffering, but it is good; at least you’re conscious about it. As long as you haven’t become conscious, the suffering will always remain. Once you have become conscious, it need not remain forever. There’s a possibility, isn’t it? Entering the spiritual path is a possibility, being with a Guru is a possibility, that’s all it is. If the possibility has to become a reality, the first thing is that you’re willing to see everything the way it is. You’re at least willing to recognize your limitations. If you want to hide your limitations, where’s the question of liberation? Where is the possibility? You have destroyed it completely, isn’t it?

If you are exuberant by your own nature, if life has become exuberant, activity is just a consequence. But if your life is not exuberant, and you are trying to crank it up with activity, then activity is the means. This is the big difference. Either you dance and arrive at a certain state of exuberance, or because you are exuberant and you cannot contain it, you dance. Is it because there are flowers that the plant and the root came up like a support to the flower? Because there is a beautiful flower, this plant and its root grew, so that it can have a nice pedestal? Is that the way a flower happened? Because the exuberance in the stem could not be contained, it flowered, isn’t it? This is the way life should happen. If you try to live the other way, it is going to be a very hard life.

To be human means you can mold situations you are living in the way you want them. But today most people in the world are molded by the situations in which they exist. This is simply because they live in reaction to situations they are placed in. The inevitable question is, “Why was I placed in such a situation? Isn’t it my destiny?” Whatever we do not want to take responsibility for, whatever we cannot make sense of logically, we label “destiny.” It is a consoling word, but disempowering. To mold situations the way you want them you must first know who you are. The crux of the matter is that you don’t yet know who you are. Who you are is not the sum total of accumulations you have made. Everything that you currently know as “myself” is just an accumulation. Your body is just an accumulation of food. Your mind is just an accumulation of impressions gathered through the five senses. What you accumulate can be yours, but it can never be you.

It is not about what you are doing. It is just that you are doing it in an unwavering way. You are just unwavering, you have become one pointed. It does not matter what it is – if you want to be a butcher, be a butcher in an unwavering way, it will open up. Just not wavering for a moment. What you have decided in a moment of clarity and joy, just sticking onto it, without wavering a little bit. Nobody can deny it to you. Every day you are off and on, off and on, it does not happen. Every day when your thoughts and emotions fly this way and that way, you keep changing your mind. Changing your mind, changing your mind, you will go in circles – endlessly in circles. One who changes direction too often is obviously not interested in going anywhere, isn’t it? You know the world is round, so whichever direction you go, it does not matter; as long as you go without changing direction you will make the journey, isn’t it? You will complete the journey. If you change your direction, it will put you into an endless state of being lost.

Modern physicists have accepted that all existence is fundamentally energy. But now they also acknowledge that there is something else that they have no instrument to measure. They have begun to realize that there is a dimension of energy that seems to hold everything together. They recognize its existence, but have no clue to its nature. Since they are not able to perceive it, they call it ‘dark energy’. For now they concede that it constitutes 73 per cent of the universe. (It will take time and evolution for them to see that it is, in fact, a lot more than that!) They also tell us that at the centre of our galaxy, and presumably of several others, is a ‘black hole’ which is constantly sucking creation in. At the centre of a black hole, they say, is a singularity, a place where creation and destruction happen simultaneously. In fact, scientists seem just one step short of saying: Shi-va!

All the loving acts that two human beings are capable of, the simple act of holding hands can often become the most intimate. Why is this so? Basically, because the nature of the hands and feet is such that the energy system finds expression in these two parts of the body in a very singular way. Two palms coming together have far more intimacy than the contact between any other parts of the body. You can try this with yourself. You don’t even need a partner. When you put your hands together, the two energy dimensions within you (right-left, masculine-feminine, solar-lunar, yin-yang, etc.) are linked in a certain way, and you begin to experience a sense of unity within yourself. This is the logic of the traditional Indian namaskar. It is a means of harmonizing the system. So, the simplest way to experience a state of union is to try this simple namaskar yoga. Put your hands together, and pay loving attention to any object you use or consume, or any form of life that you encounter. When you bring this sense of awareness into every simple act, your experience of life will never be the same again. There is even a possibility that if you put your hands together, you could unite the world!