Excerpted from the Sathsang of 3 September 2012, on the occasion of Sadhguru’s birthday.
It has been thirty years since I
realized the meaning and purpose of who I am and what I could do. When I
look back, these thirty years seem like the day before yesterday in my
experience because it has been going too rapidly. The first twelve years
of my life, I was very taciturn, barely spoke, all kinds of things
cooking in my head, you wouldn’t imagine – all kinds. Another twelve or
thirteen years later, yoga became a part of my life, but I became more
and more aware of the world around me, the way it is and the way it
functions. And by the day, I became angrier and angrier.
If you are looking for justice, you will die of anger, believe me.
There is no other way because there is no such thing in human societies,
unless you believe what other people tell you. If you are able to see
how people function, what they do within the family, in the social
structure, in the nation, in the world, you will only die of anger. So, I
was raging within myself. Fortunately, my involvement with finding
expression limited itself to attending revolutionary meetings and
sticking posters at the university. I did not go to the extent of
picking up the gun. A few of my friends did and they went all the way,
one of them became a prominent leader and was killed about two years
ago. I was so angry with the way the world functions – how much
deception, how much injustice, how many uncaring ways of functioning,
how human beings treat each other, how human beings treat every other
creature on this planet. All this made me suffocated and angry.
If the coolness of enlightenment did not happen, I would have died of
anger. There was so much rage in me. I did not display it in my daily
life but I think my blood was not at normal temperature. Inside every
vein in my body, every artery in my body was burning because I saw
discrimination, injustice, deception, just in everything. It took a
certain dimension of perception to look at the other aspect of life –
not just of human beings – but of the creation and the source of
creation. How beautiful it is, how compassionate it is, how absolutely
incredible it is. If that dimension had not opened up for me, whatever
expression my anger found, I can assure you one thing – I would have
been efficient and that would not be good. That is why the spiritual
process is so vital for our existence. Either you have to be insensitive
or spiritual, otherwise you will only be angry.
If you become sensitive, conscious and not enlightened, it is a
horrible place to live. If you are absolutely ignorant, it is quite
fine. If you are enlightened, it is fantastic. In between – I have been
there – it is not a good place to be. So, what does it take? The
spiritual process has always been associated with renunciation. Again,
one badly misunderstood word. People think to renounce means, ‘I have to
give up everything.’ No, it is like you renounced your mother’s womb to
become an infant, you renounced your infancy to become a child, you
renounced your childhood to become a youth, you renounced your youth to
become middle-aged, you renounced your middle-age to become old age, you
renounced old age to become the grave; unless you are already a very
grave person. You will anyway do it. If you do it consciously,
gracefully, then we say that is renunciation. Otherwise, we say it is
entanglement. If you are constantly renouncing – that is, something
smaller is falling away and something larger is becoming apparent to you
– this is renunciation. Renunciation means you gave up petty things and
moved on to bigger things and you continue to do it. This is
renunciation; that you are not an entanglement.
The word ‘Sanyas’ creates a lot of negativity in the social structure
today because Sanyasis have set such a bad example. Not all of them,
many of them have been fantastic – but many chose that as another way of
livelihood. People misunderstood because they saw bad examples. I have
been mulling over this for a long time now, particularly in the last
one-and-half to two years. I know enough about life to know that any
human being, if he remains in the right kind of space, can be
transformed. An Angulimala, a man who chopped off people’s fingers to
count his achievements of robbery and hung them around his neck – he was
wearing a garland of people’s fingers and he had gathered hundreds –
such a man turned around and became a sage. Today, we know that many who
are trapped in prisons have turned into real sages in their own right.
And for us, it has been an absolutely incredible journey. Those who are
teaching Isha Yoga or Inner Engineering know what this means – the kind
of transformation that they see in people in a matter of three or seven
days. There is no better joy than that in terms of doing something in
the world, the way people blossom right there in just those few days.
I know one hundred percent that it does not matter what kind you
bring, if you keep them in the right kind of atmosphere, the right kind
of energy, the right kind of influence, they can be transformed into
something absolutely incredible and beautiful. Sanyas has been spinning
in my head big time, I have been thinking how to bring this forth to
people on a larger scale. Right now, somebody has to be a Brahmachari
for a certain number of years, but that is not going to happen to
everybody. At least your wives and husbands will not allow it, and your
life situations will not allow it.
Sanyas does not mean that you have to go away somewhere. Sanyas means
you are soaked in a constant longing to grow. If you grow, you are
always discarding or renouncing something. Only those who are stagnant
can live without renunciation. Those who are growing are always
renouncing something. If you do not renounce something, you will not
have the next. This is the nature of life. So, an active Sanyas where
people can participate in different ways will open up in the next year
or so. Wherever you may be, you can be a Sanyasi. You may be married but
you can still be a Sanyasi because you have taken a vow, never to be
stagnant.
Every moment, something new should happen in your life. Something old
should fall away. You must renounce something old and something new
should happen to you. If not every moment, at least every day it
must
happen because if you do not soak yourself in a certain longing, the
Grace will go missing in your life. If there is no longing in you, even
if the most beautiful things are around you, it will not enter you
because the longing is missing.
To create an opportunity for people to be constantly in a space of
Grace, to be soaked with this energy, we will create an opportunity
called ‘Kshetra Sanyasa’ which means that you take a vow never to leave
the energy space. Three dimensions of Kshetra Sanyasa of different
levels of intensity will be set up in the coming year.
Love and Grace,
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