Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

by Sadhguru

Once your thoughts get organized, your emotions will also get organized.

Gradually, your energies and body get organized in the same direction as well.

Eventually, once your thoughts, emotions, body, and energy are channeled in one direction, your ability to create and manifest what you want is incredible.

If you generate a powerful thought and let it out, it will always manifest itself.

If you simply commit yourself to creating what you really care for, now once again your thoughts get organized in such a way that there are no hurdles. Your thoughts flow freely toward what you want, and once this happens, the manifestation of your desire is a natural consequence.

To create what you really care for, your desire must first be well manifested in your mind.

So, first explore what it is that you really want. Once that is clear and you are committed to creating

it, you generate a continuous process of thought in that direction. When you maintain a steady stream of thought without changing direction, it will manifest as a reality in your life.

But if you look at this carefully and with absolute sincerity, you will realize that the way you think is the way you feel. But it is also true that the way you feel is the way you think.

So, the way you feel and the way you think are both activities of the mind.

It struggles. If it is sweet now, it cannot turn bitter at the very next moment. It takes time to turn around. It has a wider turning arc. Depending on the strength of your emotion, maybe it will take three days or three months or three years, but after some time, it will turn around.

Emotion is just the juicier part of thought. You can enjoy its sweetness, but it is largely the thought that leads the emotion, whether you recognize it or not.

Emotion is not entirely steady. Your emotion also chatters, goes this way and that, but it is less agile than thought. Since it takes longer to turn, and its intensity is usually substantially greater than thought, it often seems as though thought and emotion are

different. But they are no more separate than sugarca...

But there are people whose thought is very deep. They don’t have much emotion, but they are very deep thinkers.

Thought and feeling are not different.

The endless nature of human desire is an expression of longing for infinite nature or life beyond physical existence.

Devotion means dropping the dualities of like and dislike, attachment and aversion.

It means “what’s fine” and “what’s not fine” do not exist for you anymore; everything is fine. When a devotee says “God is everywhere” or “everything is God,” he is essentially saying “everything is fine.” By believing that God is everywhere, he or she arrives at a deep state of acceptance that is transformative and liberating.

But without the right understanding and wisdom, walking the path of devotion can lead to all kinds of delusions.

The end goal is not just intoxication. This blissful state eliminates the fear of suffering. In this state of nameless ecstasy, there are no concerns about self-preservation. This is what makes a human being capable of being and acting in a way that can sometimes seem superhuman to others.

Only when the gnawing anxiety of self-preservation is completely eliminated from your mind would you dare to explore life. Otherwise you only want to protect it. Once the fear of suffering is dropped, you can plunge into any situation without hesitation. Even if you are damned to eternal hell, you will happily go there because you have no fear of suffering!

As long as the fear of suffering persists, you will not dare to explore the deeper dimensions of life. Only this body needs to be protected; nothing else within you needs protection. If you are willing to drop the ideas, philosophies, and belief systems you are currently attached to, you can re-create your entire life with the very next moment.

What you do or do not do is in accordance with the circumstances you are in. Our actions are always molded by the demands of external situations. But love is an inner state, and how you are within yourself can definitely be unconditional. Acts of love can become tedious and stressful over a period of time. You realize love is not something that you do; love is the way you are.

is only a juvenile intelligence that analyzes things and arrives at a conclusion. If your intelligence is sufficiently evolved and mature, you realize that the more you analyze, the further away you are from any conclusion. If you go deeply into any aspect of life, you will move further and further away from any conclusion. Life becomes more mysterious than ever before.

If you manage these two instruments of body and mind consciously, then your experience of life is one hundred percent of your making. All you need to do is create a distance between you and everything that you accumulated from outside.

But it is possible for you to put it down. It will still be your companion, but at least it won’t be that burdensome! It is definitely possible to create some distance between you and what you have gathered. You can use it when you want, but you need not be identified with it. If you cannot maintain this distance, your whole vision of life will be clouded.

Life can be tasted and transcended only when there is a distinction between the psychological and the existential.

The spiritual process means a return to life. It means following the deep intelligence of your life energies. There are many ways of recognizing which way your life energies want to go. If you dis-identify with physiological and psychological processes, you will clearly see this. It is only when you consciously head in the direction of your life energies that you find equanimity and harmony. It is only in such a stable state that you would dare to explore the highest levels of exuberance and venture into the deepest mysteries of life.

Pain is bad enough; why make it worse with suffering? Suffering is entirely self-created.

And every human being has the choice: to suffer or not to suffer. It doesn’t take much intelligence to choose the latter.

If you can joyfully do whatever is needed in a given situation, this is freedom.

So, the quality of your life is always decided by how you experience life, not by what life offers you.

Denying, suppressing, or avoiding life brings more bondage than freedom.

If you were

alone on this planet, what would you want for yourself? Ask

Intellectual realization can bring you to a certain state of peace and stability within yourself, irrespective of what is happening outside of you.

This is what yoga is also about. This is what every spiritual practice is about. When you want to attain yoga or Zen, you have to drop your load, discard everything on the way, remain free, stand upright. It is important. With your load, you may never do it. And what is the goal of yoga? Consciously take on the whole load once again. And now it no longer feels like a load!

Similarly, the more profound your understanding of the human mechanism is, the more magical your life will be. In every culture, there have been a few people who performed certain actions that made others believe in miracles.

If joy is not the ambience of your life, even life’s most pleasurable activities become burdensome.

You cannot transform the world without transforming the individual.

Your joy, your misery, your love, your agony, your bliss, lie in your hands.