Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

by Sadhguru

Anger is fundamentally self-defeating. If you look at your life closely, you will find that you have done the most idiotic and life-negative things when you were angry. Above all, you were working against yourself. If you work against yourself, if you sabotage your own well-being, you are obviously choosing unintelligence as a way of life.

The point is that anger is rooted in your false perception that you can change the situation by losing your temper with it. But your life experience tells you time and again that the reverse is true, that you can never change any situation for the better by forsaking your sense and intelligence.

If terrible things have happened to you, you ought to have grown wise. If the worst possible events have befallen you, you should be the wisest of the lot. But instead of growing wise, most people become wounded. In a state of conscious response, it is possible to use every life situation—however ugly—as an opportunity for growth. But if you habitually think, “I am the way I am because of someone else,” you are using life situations merely as an opportunity for self-destruction or stagnation.

The most horrific things in life can be a source of nourishment if you accept, “I am responsible for the way I am now.” It is possible to transform the greatest adversity into a stepping-stone for personal growth. If you take one hundred percent responsibility for the way you are now, a brighter tomorrow is a possibility. But if you take no responsibility for the present—if you blame your parents, your friend, your husband, your girlfriend, your colleagues for the way you are—you have forsaken your future even before it comes.

“My ability to respond is limitless, but my ability to act is limited. I am one hundred percent responsible for everything I am and everything I am not, for my capacities and my incapacities, for my joys and my miseries. I am the one who determines the nature of my experience in this life and beyond. I am the maker of my life.”

There are two basic forces within you. Most people see them as being in conflict. One is the instinct of self-preservation, which compels you to build walls around yourself to protect yourself. The other is the constant desire to expand, to become boundless. These two longings—to preserve and to expand—are not opposing forces, though they may seem to be. They are related to two different aspects of your life. One force helps you root yourself well on this planet; the other takes you beyond. Self-preservation needs to be limited to the physical body. If you have the necessary awareness to separate the two, there is no conflict. But if you are identified with the physical, then instead of working in collaboration, these two fundamental forces become a source of tension.

What are thoughts really? Just information that you have gathered and recycled. Are you really capable of thinking of anything other than what has been accumulated by your mind? All the human mind is doing is recycling old data.

You will find that every thought that arises in the mind has its roots in data you have already accumulated. The data may be gathered consciously or unconsciously. In any case, this basically means your intellect is perpetually immersed in the past. In such a state, nothing new is now possible. And so, the intellect loses its edge and becomes a trap.

When you keep your intellect dipped in this limited, fragmented, accumulative dimension of your mind, you draw conclusions about life that are completely distorted. The more people become engrossed in thought, the more joyless they become.

If you want to reach your ultimate nature through the mind, you need to make the intellect truly discriminatory, in the ultimate sense. This does not mean dividing everything into good and bad, right and wrong, high and low, heaven and hell, sacred and profane. Instead, all it means is learning to discern the real from the illusory, what is existentially true from what is psychologically true.