Don’t Polish Your Ignorance …It May Shine

by Sadhguru

Please give it a conscious expression. Instantly you will know, “It is not this or that that I desire, I want to become unbounded. I am not going to settle for this much or that much.”

Insecurity comes to you because you feel like a little person in this vast existence. If you look around, you do not know where it begins, where it ends. So fear and insecurity are very natural.

Only that person who is willing to die can live. If you do not want to die you should not live. It is as simple as that.

So fear of death is just another manifestation of it. It is just pure ignorance because you are identified with the limited form. Your whole life is about protecting the limited form. You have come with certain deep instincts to protect the limited form. The necessary awareness to look beyond, to rise beyond this, is absent. That is the only reason why the fear of death exists.

So these relationships come from a certain compulsion in you, because without fulfilling these relationships you will be nothing.

This happens because your relationship comes from a certain need within you. There is no sense of joy or happiness within you; you are trying to extract it from somebody and that person is trying to extract it from you. Now, this is bound to become a battle;

So, if relationships have to be really beautiful, it is very important that a human being turns inward and looks at himself before he looks at somebody else. Before you look at somebody else, it is very important that you look at yourself in a very deep way. If you become a source of joy by yourself, and your relationships are about sharing your joy, not squeezing joy out of somebody, then you would have wonderful relationships with everybody.

Is there anybody in the world who would have any problems with you if you were going to share your joy with them? But if you are only trying to extract joy from them, then that is where the problem is. Relationships have become a problem because we are not using them to enhance our lives. We are trying to fill the gaps in our lives with relationships. If you are very happy, you have a need to share your joy with somebody. If you are unhappy, then also you need somebody to share your misery with.

it. If your relationship is about extracting something out of somebody, there will be constant trouble. It does not matter how well you manage it, there will be constant trouble. Even if you have an MBA, it will not help. If you have an MBA, does it help you at home? You see, even though you are a great manager of many things outside, your relationships are still a mess. If your relationship was an offering to the person who is next to you right now, then everything would be fantastic.

On the physical level, we are all obviously interdependent. But in terms of your experience, you need not be interdependent. You can be an absolute experience by yourself. The whole world is miserable, but you can still be joyful within yourself. This possibility is always there. It all depends on whether your inner experiences are enslaved or mortgaged to external situations or not.

But right now your relationships are just on ‘push start’. Somebody has to get it going every day for you; otherwise, you will feel down.

So, you have formed relationships, after all, because in life people are interdependent in so many ways. You cannot be handling every aspect of your life yourself. You need people around you. That is why you need relationships; and people are willing to be around you only if you want to offer something to them. If you want to take something from them, everybody is very self-defensive with you.

Relationships are necessary for you to exist in the world. Whether you keep them beautiful or ugly is all the choice that you have. You have no choice about not having any relationship. There is no choice. Maybe you do not get married, or maybe you do not build a family. But still you have relationships with anything and everything around you. So the choice is just this: either you make a relationship beautiful or ugly; that is all the choice you have. Make it very pleasant or unpleasant; that is all the choice you have.

There is no ego; it is just you. Sometimes you are pleasant, sometimes you are unpleasant – that is your nature. You do not know how to hold one particular quality. It all depends upon the situations in which you exist. If outside situations turn nasty, you also become nasty and you call this your ego. It is not your ego; it is just you turning nasty.

your experience, these are the only four realities. These four realities, unless they function the way you want them, nothing will happen in your life by intent; everything will happen by accident. If your physical body does not behave the way you want it to behave, physically you are accidental. If your mind does not behave the way you want it to behave, mentally, psychologically, you are accidental.

The same goes for emotions, and the same goes for energy.

Right now, if somebody tells you when you should get up, when you should lie down, what you should eat, what you should wear, you would consider this slavery. Is it not so? But right now somebody else is deciding how you will be within yourself. Whether you will be happy or unhappy is decided by somebody else. Is this not a most horrible form of slavery?

If one wants to have absolutely fantastic relationships, no matter where he goes, first he needs to establish himself as a joyful human being, somebody whose joy is on ‘self start’ not on ‘push start’. If by himself he is fine, wherever he goes, he will have wonderful relationships with people. When you are not fine by yourself, you use the other person to fill in the gap; then you will be in constant trouble.

No, you cannot surrender to anybody, because you cannot. You can create deceptions of surrender. Surrender is not something that you do. When you lose your will, you become surrender. Surrender is like an absence. You cannot create an absence.

See, you can create light, but can you create darkness? Switch off the light. Darkness has always been. So surrender is just that, just collapsing into the existence. It is not something that you do. When all your doings stop, you are surrender. When you do Shoonya, you are actually in surrender. If that is not there, there is no Shoonya, please see. Meditation is deep surrender. If you really become meditative, you are in surrender.

So everything that you do is of a limited sphere. It happens and recedes. It happens with great relevance and loses its relevance after some time. Do you see how various things in your life were relevant at one point and how irrelevant they are right now? From the teddy bear to I do not know all that you have extended it to now (Laughs), it has happened, has it not? So everything that you do is like this. It is just a small, brief happening. So surrender is to break this cycle of little happenings and to fall back into the vastness, into the boundlessness of what life is. It is not something that you do with this person or that person. It is something that you become. It is a quality.

Why it breeds much more attachment is that – and we have been again and again going back to this – the foundations of this ignorance, of this whole illusion is rooted in your identification with the body. Now where this body is involved between two people, there this attachment always deepens.

Now the attachment is not to somebody. This must be clearly understood. The attachment is to your body. Because you are deeply attached to this body you get attached to somebody. If you had no attachment to this body, you cannot get attached to anybody. Please see that.

But because you do not know how to handle your interiority, you are using the exterior to handle your interior.

You do anything you want but please understand that for every single action that you perform, there is a consequence. If you can joyously accept the consequence, you do anything you want. If when the consequence of your action comes, you are going to cry, then you have no business doing those things.

Not being identified does not mean not being involved. It just means not being entangled. Being dis-identified gives you absolute freedom to throw yourself into life and do whatever you wish to do with it.

See, people talk about giving happiness and receiving happiness. This is all plain nonsense. You cannot give happiness, and, you cannot receive it. It is just that somebody’s presence may ignite your happiness, but you do not receive happiness from anybody. You are unhappy, and if there is somebody who is very happy it may even become insulting rather than igniting.

The same is true with the interiority. Unless you do the right thing it will not work. Just because you are successful in the world – just because you were born into this family or that family– your happiness and your peace will not work unless you do the right thing internally. As it is true with the outside, it is true with the inside.

To be peaceful and joyful is just natural because that is how your chemistry is. You are no longer enslaved to external situations. No matter what is happening this is the way you are internally. And your body, your mind, your intelligence function at their best only when you are peaceful and happy, yes?

So what happens around you is something you cannot decide yourself one hundred percent. Only to some extent you can decide. At least what happens within you, you must decide.

You must definitely happen the way you want to. If this does not happen, then what is the point? Nothing will be worthwhile because everything becomes a struggle. Every simple act of life has become a struggle for people.

Stress is happening because you are incapable of handling your own system. You do not know how to keep your body; you do not know how to keep your mind; you do not know how to keep your emotions; you do not know how to keep your energies. That is why you are stressed, not because of the job that you are doing.

You do not know how to keep your body, mind, emotions and energy, therefore, everything becomes stressful. If you know how to manage these, nothing is ever stressful.

Because once you are into the intellect, your misery is inevitable. This is the way it works. If you rise above this, you are completely free of it.

Because it is not by solving problems that you get there. There is only one problem, and that is you. If you dissolve this one problem, only then there will be no other problem.

Now, if you create the necessary awareness where you are above the basic function of the mind, if you are a witness to your own mind, and if you are above the process of the mind, there is no such thing as suffering, because all suffering is of the mind. Once you are out of the mind, there can be no suffering.

Right now, you are wrongly identified with many things that you are not, so the mind is just running crazy. Once you are identified with things that you are not, you try to hold your mind; it is not going to work. You try as hard as you can; it is not going to work. There is no other way. If you dis-identify yourself with everything that you are not, then you will see the mind is simply a blank space. If you want, you can turn it on, otherwise it is off.

Ninety percent of the time you are only thinking about life, not living life. And what nonsense can you think about life? Life can only be experienced. What you think is all coming from the data that you have already gathered. Whatever data, no matter how much you have gathered, is still a very limited possibility. From that limited possibility you go on thinking, thinking, and thinking…

It is not by thinking that you know life. It is by the clarity of your vision that you know life. This will happen to you only if you are not identified with anything. Only then can you have involvement with everything, without entanglement. You are deeply involved with life, but you do not know any entanglement because you are not identified with anything. Now you see that your mind can be turned on if you want; otherwise, it is off. That is how it should be.

There is no need to judge. You just have to judge situations. You do not have to judge people.

So, these different expressions are fine; they are beautiful, but they will not find fulfillment. They are very sweet, but they will not find fulfillment, and can turn very bitter. So because we see that expression through the physical body or through the mind or through the emotion does not find fulfillment, we are working upon your energies. With this, you can very easily find fulfillment, because here you do not need anybody else’s cooperation. If you want to physically fulfill this, or mentally fulfill this, or emotionally fulfill this, you need the cooperation of the whole world in some way. But energy-wise, if you want to fulfill it, you do not need anybody’s cooperation; it is just you.

The root of your love is in the desire, yes? The root of your hunger and sexuality, and ambition and your spiritual longing – everything is rooted in desire. And desire is only the longing to expand and include something else as part of yourself.

Involvement just puts you in line with what you wish to do and brings awareness into your life, and into whatever little things that you do. If you do something without involvement, you will do it in an unaware way.

Clarity should allow you to flow through your life effortlessly. Clarity should also allow life around you to happen at its best. If you are very clear about what life is, you will ensure that life around you happens beautifully.

Truth is not a conclusion. Truth is not somewhere you go. It is not a destination; it is just a living experience. You cannot get to truth. You can never get to truth but you can become truth. If you drop all your nonsense, you are truth. If you drop all your limitations, you are that; but you can never get there. It is not a conclusion. You just become truth. If you are willing to see life, experience life beyond all the limitations that you have gathered in the process of life, then you are truth.

If you are life, the basis of life must definitely be somewhere accessible to you. Whether it is rooted here, or in the sky, or anywhere else, it must be rooted somewhere, isn’t it? It must be connected; that which is life must always be in touch with the source of what it is. Getting to the very source of who you are is truth. It is always there; it is just that it is covered up with the heap that you have gathered in the form of your body and your mind.

This is not because there is something wrong with your life; nothing has gone wrong yet in the day. It is simply because that is the nature of the mind. If you allow it to rule you, that is how you go; there is no other way. It does not matter whether life situations are going well or not going well.

If you learn how to keep the mind aside, then there is a continuous stream of sense flowing from beneath the mind, from beyond the mind. But from the mind, continuous sense can never come. It can only come in flashes.

These flashes can be an inspiration, but can never offer guidance. You can never depend on a light which goes on and off, to walk somewhere, can you? If it is on, then you can walk. An on-and-off light can be just an inspiration to tell you, “Okay, there is something called light.” But that light is no good; it will not make a good torchlight for you; it just goes on and off at its own will. It just tells you there is something called light which is worth pursuing, that is all.

joy is what you are seeking, if ecstasy is what you are seeking, you must just see that you operate your life energies the way you want them; your life energies should function the way you want them to function. If they were, misery would not arise in your life. So that is what you need to do right now. You need to see that your body, your mind, and your life energies function the way you want them to function.