Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

by Sadhguru

So, it is your inability to handle your own system that is stressing you out. On some level, you do not know how to handle your body, mind, and emotions; that is the problem.

Keep the body in such a way that it is not longing to avoid or escape life. Maintain it in such a way that it is longing to come awake.

No. Fear is a result of the incompleteness of your existence. If you have not explored life in its magnitude and multidimensionality, but have limited yourself to the physical body, fear is a natural consequence.

Death is not the end of life. Death is simply the end of the body.

Only when you confront your mortality—the potential but inevitable termination of your physical form—does the longing to go beyond become genuine.

If you tell yourself you don’t want to think a certain thought, that is precisely the first thing your mind will produce! That is the nature of the human mind.

The system of yoga is a technology to create a distinction between you and your mind. There is a space between you and what you have gathered in terms of body and mind. Becoming conscious of this space is your first and only step to freedom.

With the elimination of the fear of suffering, you can walk life full stride, unafraid to explore all that life has to offer.

“You are not just this or that; you are everywhere. There is nothing like ‘yours’ and ‘mine’; everything is you, everything is yours. In essence, everything is one. What you see, hear, smell, taste, touch is not reality; it is all maya, all illusion.”

Universality is not an idea; it is an existential truth. It is individuality that is an idea. Yoga is simply chitta vritti nirodha. That means, if the activity of your mind ceases and you are still alert, you are in yoga.

you are, therefore you may think.

You can “be,” and still choose to think or not think. The most beautiful moments in your life—what you might consider moments of bliss, joy, ecstasy, or utter peace—were moments when you were not thinking

about anything at all. You were just being. Even without your thoughts, existence is.

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? A...

If you want to know the experiential dimensions of life, you will never know them with the petty process of thought. Even if you have the brain of an Einstein, your thought process is still outclassed because thought cannot be bigger than life. Thought can only be logical, functioning between two polarities. If you want to know life in its immensity, you need something more than the intellect.

This is the fundamental choice you have: either you learn to live with creation, or you manufacture your own creation in your head.

The planet is spinning on time: not a small event. All the galaxies are managing fine; the whole cosmos is doing great. But you have one nasty little thought crawling through your head, and it is a bad day! The problem is you are living in a psychological space that bears no connection with reality. And you are insecure, because it can collapse at any moment.

Once you are no longer identified with your mind, you are free to experience life beyond limitations.

Without logical thinking, you couldn’t survive on this planet. But at the same time, too much logic is suicide.

So if you think a hundred percent logically, there is really no possibility of life! Moments of extreme logic are moments of suicide.

Only

if you know when logic should be used and when it’s necessary to go beyond it, wil...

In other words, once your intellect gets identified with something, it gets chained to the identifications, and leaves you with a completely distorted experience of the world.

Once your intellect—or buddhi, as it is termed in the yogic taxonomy—gets identified with something, you function within the realm of this identity.

Or in other words, it is your identity that manages and determines your intellect.

Most of the suffering human beings undergo is not because of external situations.

What is inflicted on them from the outside is minimal; the rest is all self-help!

Moral of the story: when you are so full of bull you should not open your mouth.

The accumulative part of the mind is, to put it simply, just society’s garbage bin. It is merely a heap of impressions you have gathered from outside.

Human perception through the sense organs is always piecemeal. It can give you an illusion of completeness but can never comprehend the whole.

Instead, all it means is learning to discern the real from the illusory, what is existentially true from what is psychologically true.

you soak your intellect in your awareness, the discerning dimension of your mind can turn into a miraculous tool of liberation.

It can become razor-sharp, slice through what is true and untrue, and deliver you to a different ...

Awareness is not something that you do. Awareness is what you are. Awareness is aliveness.

This is the deepest dimension of the mind and one that connects you with that which is the very basis of creation.

Awareness is a process of inclusiveness, a way of embracing this entire existence. You cannot do it, but you can set the right conditions so that it happens. Don’t try to be aware. It will not work. If you keep your body, thought, emotion, and energies properly aligned, awareness will blossom. You will become far more alive than you are right now.

Once you are in touch with your awareness, you don’t have to try to accomplish anything. You don’t even have to wish or dream, because the best possible thing that can happen to you will happen.

This is a dimension beyond intellect, beyond identification, beyond memory, beyond judgment, beyond karma, beyond divisions of every kind. This is the intelligence of existence itself, in which life always happens exactly the way it should, with absolute and unfaltering ease.

make a distinction between knowledge and knowing. Knowledge is essentially accumulated information. All information is only related to the physical nature of existence. Knowing, on the other hand, is a living intelligence. With or without you, it still is. You are either in it or you are not: that is the only choice you have.

The first step toward moving from the trap of the intellect to the lap of a larger intelligence is to recognize that every aspect of life—from a grain of sand to a mountain, a drop to an ocean, from the atomic to the cosmic—is a manifestation of a far greater intelligence than your minuscule intellect. If you take this one step, life will start speaking to you like never before.

Ideas of good and bad, right and wrong are all your mental constructs. They have nothing to do with life as such.

If you want an element of spirituality to enter your life, the first thing you must do is drop these rigid ideas of virtue and vice, and learn to look at life just the way it is.

Avoiding something is not freedom from it. Such morality is based on exclusion. Spirituality, on the other hand, is born of inclusion.

Morality always differs from person to person, according to time, place, situation—and convenience.

world would not be as congested as they are now. If you were naturally joyful, you would go and sit on the beach, or listen to the whisper of the leaves on the tree.

But when you are naturally joyful, you are naturally pleasant with the world around you.

Spirituality does not mean moving away from life; it means becoming alive to the core, in the fullest possible way.

Believing means you have assumed something that you do not know; seeking means you have realized that you do not know.

Yoga is a method that has worked wonderfully for me, and for millions of people. It is an entirely scientific method that originates not in faith or belief but in a profound understanding of the human mechanism.

The reason why success comes so easily and naturally for one person, and is a struggle for someone else, is essentially this: one person has organized his or her mind to think the way he wants, and another thinks against his or her own interests.