Mind is your Business and Body the Greatest Gadget (2 Books in 1)

by Sadhguru

If a knife has to cut through anything effortlessly and well, it is extremely important that whatever it cuts through does not stick to it. If the residue keeps sticking to the knife, after some time this knife becomes useless.

once your intellect identifies with something or the other, it gets chained with the identifications. Once this happens, you have a completely distorted experience of the mind.

My mother was a very devout and dedicated woman. For her, her whole life was her husband and four children. She never thought about herself. She just gave her life to us.

“If I was born in the next house, would you still feel like this about me?” It hurt her very much. She broke down and went away. I did not intend to hurt her.

Your identifications are so very deep with big things and small things. Once you are identified like this, your mind is a mess of a circus. It will never rise to any great peak; it will just be a mess.

“Circus” is not a negative word. A circus is a hugely coordinated symphony of actions. And that is how the brain is functioning. The accumulated mass of information is what we generally refer to as the mind, and its activity comes from that very information. This information has a basis beyond your birth.

elaborate care was taken about how a pregnant woman should be, in what kind of atmosphere she should be, and under what kind of influence she should and should not come. She was not even allowed to meet certain people. Only those people who were most loving, wise, and intelligent were allowed to meet her. She was not exposed to any kind of negative emotions or negative situations because that is the time when you can teach the child which is in deep sleep and just forming. Because there is such a sense of deep sleep, it is very easy to teach. When a person is awake, there are any number of distractions.

your mind exists only in its activity. If you take off the activity, it does not exist. It is not a physical object.

When you were a child, it didn’t matter to you what reproductive organs a man or a woman carried. But the moment hormones started playing within you, you could not think of a world beyond that.

And you will see, beyond a certain age, when the play of hormones goes down, once again it doesn’t matter. When you look back, you cannot believe you were the one who was doing all that.

So, there is nothing wrong with the content of your mind if you do not get identified with it. If you get identified with it, it makes you feel filthy because everything in the world is there in your mind and now it is sticking to you.

This is why in yoga, so much stress has been laid on asanas, because if you just learn how to keep your body absolutely still, then your mind will also become still.

You are alive only to the extent you are aware. And to what extent you are aware, only to that extent something is in your experience.

Once in a while, if I just close my doors and sit in a place for five days, I do not have a single thought for five days. I don’t look out of the window, I don’t read, I don’t do anything. I am simply being alive. This is such a huge phenomenon happening within you, what is there to think about? Being alive is a far bigger process than your stupid thought process.

Anyway, what can you think? You are just recycling the nonsense that you have gathered. Can you think something other than the nonsense that has been fed into your head? You are just recycling the old data you have gathered.

the most beautiful moments in your life are those moments when you were not thinking about anything. What you call moments of bliss, moments of joy, moments of ecstasy, moments of utter peace, these were moments when you were not thinking about anything but were just living.

Your psychological process is a very small happening compared to the life process. Isn’t being alive right now more important for you than thinking? But if I trample upon your thought even a little, you are even willing to die for it. People die for their ideas. People die for their thought. People die for what they believe in. Thought has become far more important than the life process because people have not realized the immensity of what it means to be alive. Because life has been restrained within the survival activity, thought looks grander than life. But it is not so. Thought is just a small happening compared to the life process.

If you try to handle yourself with logic, you will be a total mess because fundamentally, if you look at your life absolutely logically, there is no meaning to it.

Logic is essential only to handle the material aspect of life. If you want to know the experiential dimensions of life, you will never know it with your petty thought. Even if you have Einstein’s brain, it is still a petty thought because thought cannot be bigger than life.

They are also saying that if there is no past information in your mind, you actually cannot see something.

If you think information is illuminating the life of a gnana yogi, you are wrong, because anyway he cannot see anything for nuts.

“A devotee has no agenda of his own. His only objective is to dissolve into his object of devotion.”

It would be better for you to use the other faculties also now, because devotion is unavailable to you. Not because devotion is bad. Devotion is the quickest way. It has always been, and it always will be. But it means you have to remove yourself – you have to uproot yourself. Only then it works;

Devotion as an ultimate vehicle will not work in your present state of mind. It is not possible for you. You are too committed to your body and your intellect. You cannot drop them all of a sudden and become a devotee. Devotion as an act is vulgar.

Devotion as a way of life is wonderful. If you go the way of devotion, you have to see whether it is something that works for you. It does not work because you are a thinking person. Thinking people cannot be devout.

Your concern is only about human suffering and human wellbeing, so you notice only that. You do not notice the suffering that animals are going through. People think it is only they who are suffering, but the way human beings are living, they are making everything in the existence suffer.

Tantra does not believe in creating what you want in terms of the physical existence around you, but is focused on creating forms and identities which will function way beyond your own intelligence. Tantra is essentially focused on creating a mind higher than oneself, making an intelligence beyond one’s present capabilities become available.

In yoga, we have always talked about 21 different realities that can happen simultaneously. Right here, right now, there are 21 realities going on without any geographical distance. It is just that it is not in your experience.

The distinction is just this – you have imagination which is unconscious, not a conscious process. If you could do the same hallucination consciously and empower it with your energy, it can become reality.

If there is a doubt that you are hallucinating, it is better that the benefit of doubt is given to hallucination than to your experience, because if there is a genuine experience, some transformation will happen by itself. If it is hallucination it is anyway a waste of time. So if you are in doubt, it is better to simply see that you are hallucinating because once you start crediting hallucination as real, then you will have no control over it. It will just go wild.

The whole process of yoga is to transcend the limitations of the mind. As long as you are in the mind, you are ruled by the past, because mind is just an accumulation of the past.

You don’t really have to work it out because when you are playing with your karmas, you are playing with the non-existent. It is a trap of the mind. The past does not exist, but you are dealing with the non-existent, going about as if it is a reality.

Patanjali nailed it this way – “To rise above the modifications of your mind, when you cease your mind, when you cease to be a part of your mind, that is yoga.” All the influences of the world are entering you only through the instrument of the mind.

We could not even grasp the simple shape of the planet when we were on it. Only when we took off, we could see it clearly. The same goes for your mind and the nature of your existence. Only when you create a little distance between you and the mind, only when you create a little distance between you and the body, you perceive the nature of the body and the mind.

if someone says, “you are out of your mind,” don’t feel insulted. It is the highest compliment. They are saying you are a Buddha. People usually understand “out of the mind” as madness. Madness is of the mind. As long as you are in the mind, you cannot escape the madness.