What are you seeking, Good Life or Ultimate Wellbeing?

Questioner: Sadhguru, those who knew you during the Dhyanalinga consecration process say there have been changes in your personality since that time. What were these changes, and why did you allow them to happen?

Sadhguru: I didn’t just allow it; I did it. Before the consecration, I was on a one-point mission. My whole life – my mind, my body, my energies, my capabilities – everything was on a one-point agenda. With the outside world, I worked in compartments. People only saw a fringe aspect of me. Only when they came to the 90-day program, I slowly opened up a few aspects of me, which were very shocking for them. This nice, young man, who came from Karnataka like the coolness of Kaveri, was suddenly blazing and talking about building a temple! Until then, I had not uttered the word “Dhyanalinga” – not even to people who were immediately around me.

Eighteen years, I had been on a goodwill mission, not saying a word to just about anyone. But not one breath in those 18 years happened without the purpose of Dhyanalinga behind it. Trying to garner and assimilate all kinds of forces – social, worldly, natural, and otherworldly – so that this could be accomplished, I was living many lives within myself and outside myself. When people saw me at different times, they almost thought this is a different man altogether. We thought we will anyway go once the consecration was done, so we didn’t plan much for the future. But when we somehow managed to restructure the body and decided to stay on, with the mission completed, what was left in life was only fooling around.

My sense of aesthetics has always been strong and I am very particular about how things should be, but those 20 years until the Dhyanalinga consecration, I did not even choose the clothes that I wore. Whatever people bought – all kinds of clownish clothing, which was their idea of aesthetics – I just wore without a word. I can’t believe that I actually wore those Lucknowi kurtas that they gave me with this horrible embroidery. Even today, I am getting such items. They all go to the drama cupboard.

My focus was only on Dhyanalinga. All other aspects of my life – what I ate, where I went, what I did, what I wore – did not matter. I was constantly living at the peak. Once the consecration was done, there was no point of staying on the peak. We thought we will come down to the valleys and do what people understand. Suddenly, people found that I can actually joke. Initially, when I was teaching, I just wore my faded denims and a t-shirt, or whatever clothing people gave me. We did not have any microphones at that time. When I taught what you see today as the basic program (in a different format), I walked up and down furiously like a caged tiger.

I was on fire, having a time limit and a mission that I had not been able to complete for three lifetimes. Determined to see that it happens this time around, I moved all kinds of forces in one direction, to the point of fixing which womb people should be born in. People thought they got married because their horoscopes matched or they fell in love, but actually, I had fixed all this. They thought that their child being born was a God-given thing, but all that, I had fixed for them. This manipulation on all levels
left me so intense, focused, and fiery. People hung around me not because they liked me but because they had no choice. They were just sucked into the energy vortex that happened wherever I walked. I was not dressed like a spiritual teacher; I did not behave like one. What I was doing as a fulltime activity was just a minor part of my life. My secret life was elsewhere.

After the consecration was done, I thought I will make my life more like an open book, and that is how it is today. Just about everyone knows what I eat, where I go, what I do. This was a shift from existing at peak intensity to a very relaxed pace of life. People still think this is too intense. If this is my idea of a relaxed phase of life, you can imagine how intense life was earlier.

Some people who were with me at that time wondered at some point what was actually happening, why they were being drawn to me. They took a picture of me, went to Sai Baba, and asked, “See, this is my Guru. Is he okay?” They wanted a diagnosis. He looked at the image and gave a very clever answer: “You should go to this man only if you seek ultimate wellbeing. If you seek a good life, you should come to me.” That is what I am always saying – this is for those who are seeking ultimate wellbeing.