Don’t Polish Your Ignorance …It May Shine

by Sadhguru

What you normally call ‘life’ is just the constant happening of this transaction. How you transact or communicate with a certain aspect of life fundamentally depends on how you have done it before.

This division of the world, this division of creation has happened to you only because you have identified yourself with this little piece of flesh. You have made the division, which is a falsehood.

A satsangh is that dimension where you are not trying to perceive something; you want to perceive yourself.

satsangh is not meant to be a situation to glorify your ignorance, or to move from one level of ignorance to another. It is to perceive that which cannot be perceived.

If you can simply be here, ignoring everything that you can perceive, you will see something else becomes alive. That something else can be referred to by any name, but here we just refer to it as truth.

The whole process of growing with a guru means being with that which cannot be perceived. You ignore everything that can be perceived so that the subjectivity of who you are suddenly becomes present.

The very process of satsangh means that you go into a state where you do not exist. You cease to exist as a person. You stop identifying with yourself so that the subjectivity becomes everything. There is nothing to perceive. You simply sit there. This is the very basis of everything that you can call spiritual. In order to be this way you need to be in a certain presence. Without an overpowering presence, you cannot drop your own identifications because it is all that you have. You will naturally cling to those things you identify yourself with, starting with your body, your ideas, your likes, your dislikes, your relationships. Without that you cannot sit here as a human being.

If you just sit here and completely strip yourself of everything that you identify yourself with – and if you manage to throw everything down – then you will see there is no such thing as ‘me’, but there is a huge presence. There is a tremendous, overwhelming presence. Unless a person experiences this presence he has not taken any spiritual steps in his ...

When

Surrender

merge with the existence

Freedom

surrender the wall that you have built.

Illusion vs Reality

is just because unless there is pain, most people never look at themselves. They always look far away.

When I say awareness, I do not mean anything other than aliveness. Awareness is aliveness. How aware you are is how alive you are. The difference between life and death is just that.

The reason why you lower your levels of aliveness is because in death there is safety and tremendous security. Though people are afraid of death, they are always seeking it, courting it in many ways, because death is such a relief. They do not have the courage to simply step into it, but they are courting it all the time. They want it, because that saves them from all the turmoil and struggle of life.

In so many ways you are trying to reduce the intensity of your life, of your aliveness. Reducing aliveness means infusing death. You are bringing it into your life in stages because you do not have the courage to just jump into it.

So, the spiritual process means cranking up the aliveness to such a peak that both life and death disappear from you. Then there is no distinction between the two...

An ashram is only for those people who have chosen to be homeless; intentionally they want to be homeless. They have chosen to be orphans and be by themselves. They have everything, but still they chose to be like absolute orphans. They have no need to lean upon anybody.

A being who has experienced himself, or who is experiencing himself beyond those limitations, does it in a very deep way. Every aspect of his life he structures as it is necessary for the role that he has chosen to play. It is a conscious construction. Now when it is a conscious construction, it is just a device and it is not a bondage anymore. Any moment he can just pull it down.

These belief systems give you a great sense of security, which is a great deception. So, the first thing is to recognize that right now you exist as a limited human being, with fears and anxieties. In fact, fear is the most basic and fundamental emotion within you.

Almost every other emotion springs from that. You do not know love. You only know fear. The fear adjustment between two people is called love. How we handle our fears between the two of us, is what you refer to as a love affair.

Clearly, fear exists in you. Whether it is a spiritual process, or your career, or driving on the street, or simply taking a walk, there is fear. Maybe most of the time you are not aware of it and it takes certain extre...

It is not that there was no fear in you to begin with. There was fear in you. It just took a certain painful situation to make you aware of it.

You are in fear in many ways. If you ask me, you are fear itself. It is just that by making certain arrangements in life you try to keep fear beneath the surface. When your arrangements do not work, it pops up, isn’t it? So, fear is also naturally there in every aspect on the spiritual path. It is very natural. If you are aware of the fear, then it is good. It is good that you are aware that you have fear before taking the next step and still you do not succumb to that fear.

Now to overcome this, and to continue walking the path, there is one most essential thing you must have, and that is commitment. To be committed is the only thing you can do. You are incapable of faith. You are really incapable of faith. Please look at this. Your faith is lik...

This is the only way you can rise beyond your limitations and fears. Otherwise every step when fear comes, you will ask yourself, “Should I really do this? No, do I really need this?” And if people around you support this all the time, you will not get anywhere.

Faith means who you are right now is not important for you. Something else has become far more important than you.

This can happen to you. As you go into higher levels of experiences within yourself, a time will come when you say, “If you lead me into hell, it is okay. If you are the devil himself, it is all right with me.” When you become like this, then you will see everything that needs to happen will happen by itself. It is not that I have to do something to you. It will just happen because once you drop the wall, the existence will happen, reality will happen.

We taught you each practice while creating a whole atmosphere around it. Before we taught you the practice, we put other inputs into you, which brought a certain sense of opening in you. That is how the device is structured so that you become committed to it.

What you are doing as yogic practices is just to give you an experience of being a little beyond this physical frame in order to pull down the physical wall, because that is the most difficult wall, and that is the most basic wall. That is the foundation of all the other walls.

The foundation of all the other barriers that you have created in your life is the body. Only because you have a body, ‘me’ has become a separate entity. This piece of flesh is the foundation of all the other walls that you have built. So with the yoga practice you are digging up the foundation. Without doing anything, if you simply go on digging the foundation, one day the wall can collapse. It is possible. But if while you are digging the foundation, you also start knocking down the other stones on the top, the possibility of the wall collapsing becomes faster. So your commitment is that you are pulling down the walls consciously all the time.

So, if you realize, “I am a fool,” just do not do anything. Do not try to be spiritual. Just be. Just live, and it will happen. If you still think you are very smart because you know that you are a fool, then you try to do many things. If you are truly aware that you are foolish, then you should not be doing anything.

Man means strength, physical strength, survival. When your survival is under threat, man is supreme. Then there is no room for the feminine. At such times, you push the feminine to the corner, and make everything masculine, because when survival is under threat, everything becomes masculine, and it has to. Masculine is good for survival. But if you want to receive something more, you have to become feminine. I repeat, do not understand masculine and feminine as physical bodies.

So please deepen this awareness of being stupid. Do not try to be smart. When you see, “I am truly stupid”, intelligence has descended upon you. It takes enormous intelligence for a person to see the stupidity of who he is. Only an idiot thinks that he is smart. An intelligent person is aware of his foolishness. Let it sink deeper so that you do not have to play a game to prove anything.

A game is a tool for you to dissolve into, not to prove who you are, not to establish yourself. But we have forgotten about the game. Instead, we are only pursuing victory. We are not playing a game. When you play like this nobody wants to play with you. Nobody, no sensible human being will want to play with you if your interest is only victory and not the game.

Just play, simply play, then there is no problem. You will see that play becomes a process of dissolution. It is victory, which makes your ego stand up, not the game. The game is always dissolving. It makes you merge into a certain process.

Presence cannot be practiced, it cannot be created. If you allow it, it will happen. So from the simple meditation that has been taught to you in the form of Shoonya, to everything else, it is just to bring you that sense of allowing – just learning to keep yourself aside.

Feeling the presence truly means that it simply becomes your life breath. “How can I make it that way?” You cannot make it that way. If you make yourself less and less and less, the presence becomes more and more and more in your life.

So, the very device of accepting a guru in your life is this: suddenly your life no longer revolves around you. You are a secondary person in your life. You are not the hero in the drama. If suddenly somebody else is the main person in your life, and you are just a side role, then this presence becomes a living thing, like your life breath.

Whether you accumulate diamonds, people, things, money, knowledge, it is all the same: it is just different ways of constructing your ego. What materials you use to construct varies from person to person, but you are always using external inputs to construct. That is not the purpose of yoga.

So, the knower is ‘myself’, but what you are calling myself right now, in the immediate sense, is just the accumulation of knowledge and impressions upon this knower. So, however much you accumulate, still the knower keeps receding further and further. You are still only gathering objects; the subjectivity is missed.

See, for your mind to run continuously, you need input; without fuel it cannot go on. Constantly you are giving that input, is it not?

And you are not attached to any particular prejudice simply because your identifications with things and people around you have weakened. That is the only way. That is the process. The reason why somebody is free of prejudice is that his identifications are not too strong. The moment your identification is strong with something, you are naturally prejudiced towards that. Whether you are for it or against it, you naturally become prejudiced.

Love must be an outpouring of who you are. It cannot be practiced. If you are practicing it, it is just the currency that you are using to get what you have to get in your life. It is just the currency that you are using to cunningly squeeze things out of somebody else. You cannot practice it.

Doing whatever simple practices that you are doing, with these tools slowly your identifications have come to a point that even if somebody bombs you, you are not bursting with fury. You are still able to see things with sense: simply looking at things the way they are, without a reaction within you. That is fine. It is not everything, but it is good.

So, when you experientially become a zero – zero means ‘shoonya’ – that is it. You like to walk the path step by step, and play the number game. It is good that, at least, you are walking in the right direction, not climbing upwards. You are stepping downwards. (Laughs) From multiplication we have come down a little bit. You were trying to multiply your life, but now you are subtracting things from your life. It is good. It is beginning to happen. That is the spiritual process.

Desire is just an anxiety to enhance yourself. Whether the desire is to acquire money, things, or people, or to do something, the desire is just an anxiety to enhance oneself.

Why do you have a need to enhance yourself? It is because somewhere there is a strong and constant feeling of inadequacy. Unfortunately, 99% of human activity is coming from this inadequacy. So man has to enhance himself with activity. He has to do something. So, desire is just that.

Desire is unconsciously trying to push you toward your unbound-edness. Because somewhere this unbounded nature got identified with the limited body, from then on desire is constantly working to take you towards the unbounded. So, all the desires that come up within you are expressions for this longing to become unbounded. But it is done through limited physical dimensions. It may be money, wealth, jewels, or it may be singing or whatever else.

The physical is always limited, isn’t it? It can become big but it cannot become unbounded.

So if you bring awareness to the process of desire, if you bring awareness to the mechanism of desire, to the way it is functioning within you, you will see your desire is only about becoming limitless. If you give a conscious expression to this deep longing for expansion within you, then we say it is a spiritual process.