Don’t Polish Your Ignorance …It May Shine

by Sadhguru

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. Just do what life demands out of you – just that much, and nothing else. Do not try to be aware, do not try to be spiritual, do not try to get to heaven, and do not try to reach out to anything, because since you are a fool, you will do stupid things.

So if you have to become receptive, the first thing for you to see is, “Oh, I’m being stupid”; only then you will listen. When you are in a state of, “I know I am smart, I know what I’m doing,” will you listen to me? In that state, you do not listen to anybody. But the moment it just sinks into you, and not just in your mind that, “I am absolutely stupid. I do not know the beginning or the end of my life. I do not know the very basis of my existence” – then you are ready to listen.

So this step of seeing that “I am foolish” is a step towards receptivity.

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.

So, do not polish your ignorance. Do not come to these conclusions that you have assimilated this knowledge, because no knowledge was given to you. You have invented some knowledge. Isha Yoga is not knowledge. It is just a device. You can employ the device, but you cannot store the device in your head. It is of no use.

You just see how to make your seeking the most important thing in your life, even bigger than your life. If you do that, the rest we will take care of.

When you are truly “I do not know,” there is no prejudice in you, there is no judgment in you. You have just become a being. This “I do not know” is slowly becoming deeper in the last four years for you. It is getting deeper. So deepen it faster. Reach the very root and see “I do not know that you are.” Then the “I do not know” is not just in your head. Your whole being will say, “I do not know.” Every cell in your body will say, “I do not know.” Let it become like that. When it becomes like that, you are not judgmental. You are not judgmental simply because you are not attached to any particular prejudice.

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.

The desire has again sprung up from the wrong identifications, because you are identified with the limited.

“The necessary awareness is absent. That is why the fear of death exists.”

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.

What is this ego? Where is your ego? The nasty part of you is what you call ego. It is just you – when you turn nasty, you call it ego. (Laughs) There is no ego; it is just you.

Right now, please closely examine yourself and see; how much of your body, how much of your mind, how much of your emotions, and how much of your energy is happening the way you want it? Very little. Right now, your mind, your emotions, your energy, and your body are mostly happening the way external situations demand, not the way you want them. If the outside situations are pleasant, you also become pleasant. If outside situations are unpleasant, you also become unpleasant. So, who you are is very deeply enslaved to the situations in which you exist.

So right now you are seeking a certain relationship. I want you to look straight at it. Why are you seeking it? Do not give it all kinds of meanings which do not exist. You seek a relationship because you have a physical need. You are seeking it because by yourself you are lost. You are seeking it because psychologically, emotionally, you need support. You are seeking it because that is the only way you know how to handle your fears and struggles within yourself.

Now ‘dis-identification’ is different. In fact, illusion is just identification. All illusions have come to you only because of your identifications. The moment you think somebody is your husband, you are identified with him. Once you are identified, so many illusions grow about this person, which is humanly impossible for anybody to fulfill. So you have woven many illusions around this person. And when that person does not live up to your illusions, you are disillusioned.

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.

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.

Right now you are in this kind of childish behavior that if situations around you are unpleasant, you will also become unpleasant. Tell me, is there any intelligence in this? Especially if the situations around you are unpleasant, is it not all the more important that you be very pleasant within yourself? But right now you are in this childish mode that if outside situations turn unpleasant, you will make your inside also terribly unpleasant. There is no intelligence in this. Somewhere when it comes to ourselves, we refuse to employ our intelligence. I am not telling you, do not get angry. It is up to you. If it is a pleasant experience, get angry all the time; but generally whenever you get angry, you suffer more than your victim, yes? What is the point? Why would you create unpleasantness to yourself? There is enough unpleasantness in the world however or wherever you walk in the world, you will step into something unpleasant here or there. However you try to avoid it, somewhere you will step into some unpleasantness. Is it a necessity that you have to manufacture your own private unpleasantness? No. So why are you creating things that you do not want? You just do not know what you are doing with yourself; that is the only reason.

There is a very deep misunderstanding in the world about being effective. People think by knowing other people they can be very effective. The idea is, if I know you, I can make this situation go my way. This is the idea, but it is not true. If you know yourself, you can become very effective in the world. If you do not make any attempts to read something or perceive something or judge something, but simply learn to look at everything the way it is, you will see things the way they are. But if you make an effort to read – and sometimes you will, because, after all, you have a mind – you may read certain things. That’s because you have perception, and you can judge. But what will you do with these judgments?

When you are in a certain misunderstanding of life, it is impossible. So, we are using people and loving things. But if people are here to be loved, where is the need to read them? There is no need to read them.

You know the first parable about Adam and Eve? God told them to eat whatever they wanted except from a particular tree – the Tree of knowledge. Knowledge means your impression of things, your reading of the world, not the way the world is. Knowledge means the impressions that you have taken in. The more knowledge you have, the less you experience. So when it comes to life, do not gather knowledge; experience it the way it is right now.

because once you get into that, it is an endless trap. Even if the mind makes judgments about other people, do not attach any importance to them. Because once you start making judgments, you realize there are only two basic judgments: good or bad. There may be many colors to it, but fundamentally, there are only two judgments, is it not? Something is good, or something is bad. You are naturally drawn to, and get attached to, what you consider to be good. Everything that you consider bad, you repel, and negative emotions flow. Once you get attached to something, once your intellect gets attached to something, it gets distorted. It cannot see anything the way it is.

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

If you handle the physical without logic, you will be a fool. But if you try to handle life itself logically, once again you will be a fool. Do you understand?

Why people go on struggling is because they logically make some things work in their life. Because it worked well, they try to extend this logic to every aspect of their life, and they just mess themselves up completely. Somebody else operates some other part of life illogically and it works well. They try to extend this to all aspects of life, and again it becomes a mess. They do not understand that the physical needs logic. For that which is beyond the physical, logic is useless.

So the mind should be sharpened, but the problem with you is that the moment you have a sharp mind, you become terribly identified with it.

So love is not to be logically dissected and seen, because emotion cannot be subject to reason. It is a certain aspect of you. At the same time there is a reason behind it because the way you think is the way you feel. Now if you think this is a very wonderful person, you will have sweet emotions towards that person. If you think this is a horrible person, you will have nasty emotions towards that person. You cannot think this is a horrible person and have sweet emotions, or this is a very beautiful person and have nasty emotions. It is not possible because the way you think is the way you feel.

To people who simply gulp food, food does not do the same thing to them as to people who eat it with involvement. You try one meal like this, and one meal the other way, and you will see how the quantity of food drops if you eat it with involvement. With your being totally involved every moment with the food that is being chewed in your mouth, you will see that the quantum of food will drop to one-fourth of what you usually eat. That is all the food you actually need. You eat the other three quarters because you do not even know that you are eating.

The way in which your body functions and the way in which your mind functions has really nothing to do with your self-realization. But to make the effort to go beyond the limitations of body and mind, you must know the pain of the mind. You must know the suffering and frustration of the mind. If you do not know the suffering and frustration of the mind, you will not seek anything beyond that.

For many of you the bank of memory that you carry is much more important to you than what is happening to you now. “No, I cherish my past.” You do not cherish your past. You are full of fear so you cling to the past. So memory creates a hallucination of the past. Desire creates a hallucination of the future.

If fear rules, you will see that the past will be very important for you. But if desire rules you, the future will be very important for you, and life that is here becomes unimportant.

I want you to understand this. When I sit here and speak, I see many people nodding their heads as if they agree with everything that I say. They do not agree with me. It is just that what I am saying agrees with something of their past. There are some people here who find that what I am saying does not agree with their past, nor with their sensibilities, so they are just trying to be as expressionless as possible. There are some others who find that what is being said is utterly true, but the truth seems to be threatening, so they look glum and morose. Every time such people sit with me, it feels like we are in a funeral. (Laughter) I sit here peeling away life; I am peeling away all the things that you hide within yourself and all the bull that you call as secret; I am peeling it away because the peel just does not matter.

So, if you are serious about your spiritual path, you can talk about work, about politics, about cinema, but you do not talk about your life. You question your life, but never make statements about your life. The very fact that you say, “I am on the spiritual path,” means you have already admitted that, “I do not know a damn thing about myself.” Yes? So when you do not know a damn thing about yourself, you do not talk about yourself, or your life. If you just shut your mouth about yourself and your life, you will see the path becomes so much clearer and easier. When you are full of bull (Laughs), you only question life all the time. Never make statements about it.

“You are the way you are only because of yourself, nobody else but yourself.”

You. Do not talk about others. What made you unaware? You did. Did somebody else make you unaware or aware? Right from day one since the day you ended up in the Isha Yoga Introductory, we have been constantly trying to point at you, because you are trying to scatter yourself all over the place so that you can never be recovered. If you say I am unaware because my father was a drunkard, or I am unloving because my mother was like that, or I am not intelligent because my teacher was like that, then you are finished. Look at your life now. Your parents are divorced; your teacher is dead, and if we want to change you, we have got to recover all those guys. Now, you are the way you are only because of yourself, nobody else but yourself. If you see this you can make yourself what you want right now. Instead of lamenting over something that happened or something you imagined happened in the past, try to do something about yourself.

If you just exist here as life, pure life, life will naturally go to its ultimate nature. You are creating a big distortion and a huge hurdle in the process of life reaching its natural goal, by becoming a thought, by becoming an emotion, by becoming ideas, by becoming opinions, by becoming prejudices, anger, hatred, this and that.

So when we say a ‘spiritual process’, we are trying to allow it to happen as quickly as possible. If this has to happen, you do not have to call for God to come and help you. You just have to become life and life alone and nothing but life.

“Anything in existence, if it travels at the speed of light, it becomes light. Travel at the pace that I move, and you will become me.”

I will just do what I have to do with total involvement. So start from this end. Learn to conduct the day – no matter what the quality of the day, no matter what kind of people you meet, what kind of situations you face – with the same sense of involvement, with the same dedication to little things and big things. Just do everything with the same sense of involvement and energy, without paying less attention to one thing and more attention to something else. Pay total attention to everything. Start from this end. It can happen. Just do that. Did you ever see me paying less attention to one person and more attention to another person? Or did you see me pay more attention to one issue than the other? You did not. And whatever the situations have been, or whatever the kind of people, you did not see me get irritated or agitated. Start from that end. Travel at the speed of light and you will become light. Travel at the pace that I move, and you will become me.