Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

by Sadhguru

This longing to become one finds expression in many ways. When you are young and your intelligence is hijacked by your hormones, sex will be the way. When you are middle-aged and your intelligence is hijacked by your emotions, love is the way. When you are old and bereft of hormonal mischief, prayer is the way. But irrespective of age, when you transcend all this and seek the same union on a much higher level of awareness, then yoga is the way.

You may not be consciously aware, but the life within you is longing to break these boundaries. When you want to break your mental boundaries you may long to have a serious conversation or read a book, drink alcohol, take a drug, or do something freaky. To break your physical boundaries you may want to pierce yourself, get a tattoo, dye your hair, or go the old-fashioned way of sex. The intention of sex is great, but the method is hopeless. Pleasure is involved, so it drives two people toward each other, but oneness comes only momentarily. So you try to meet in other areas of emotion and intellect. People are always trying to find common ground: “We like the same ice cream, both of us are blond, both of us play videogames, share the same zodiac sign, and like the same TV shows…” But unless you understand that you can never become one, you will not learn to enjoy the opposite.

An intellectual understanding that is not backed by experiential knowledge can lead to mind games and deceptive states. But if oneness becomes an experiential reality, it will not produce an immature action. It will produce a tremendous experience of life that will leave you transformed forever.

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.

Without logical thinking, you couldn’t survive on this planet. But at the same time, too much logic is suicide. Let us say you wake up tomorrow morning and start thinking a hundred percent logically. Do not think about the sunrise, the birds in the sky, your child’s face, the flowers blooming in your garden. Just think logically. Now, you have to get up, go to the toilet, brush your teeth, eat, work, eat, work, eat, sleep. Again, tomorrow morning the same thing. For the next thirty, forty, or fifty years, you have to do the same thing. If you think a hundred percent logically, there is no reason for you to be alive!

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. Whatever you are identified with, all your thoughts and emotions spring from that identity. Right now suppose you identify yourself as a man, all your thoughts and emotions flow from that identification. If you identify yourself with your nationality or religion, they will flow from those identifications. Whatever your thoughts and emotions, these identifications are a certain level of prejudice. In fact, your mind is itself a certain kind of prejudice. Why? Because it functions from limited data and is fronted by an essentially discriminatory intellect. So, your mind, which should have been a ladder to the divine, is stumbling through endless mediocrity and, on some occasions, has become a straight stairway to hell.

Irrespective of what you think you are, when death confronts you, every identification falls away. If human beings learned to drop these voluntarily, life would be blissful. If you do not encumber your intellect with any identifications—body, gender, family, qualifications, society, race, caste, creed, community, nation, even species—you travel naturally toward your ultimate nature. If not, death will demolish it all anyway. You need have no doubt about that!

The moment you get strongly identified, you lose your perspective on life! Ideas of good and bad, right and wrong are all your mental constructs. They have nothing to do with life as such. What was considered to be moral a hundred years ago is intolerable today. What you think is very good, your children despise. Your ideas of good and bad are just a certain level of prejudice against life. The moment you get identified with your limited ideas of morality you become completely twisted. Your intellect functions around these identifications in such a way that you never see the world as it is. 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.

There is really no such thing as conditional love and unconditional love. There are conditions and there is love. When you talk about love, it has to be unconditional. The moment there is a condition, it just amounts to a transaction. Maybe a convenient transaction, maybe a good arrangement, but that will not fulfill you or transport you to another dimension. It is just convenient. Love need not necessarily be convenient; most of the time it is not. It takes life. You have to invest yourself.

Unfortunately, most human beings are doing much the same thing: they are labeling their compulsions, their limitations, as their choices. If you can joyfully do whatever is needed in a given situation, this is freedom. But limiting yourself to doing only what you like is a horribly compulsive way to live. This compulsiveness is the trick of karma—that ancient word that has been mangled by popular usage across the world.

There are 114 chakras in the body. Two are outside the body and 112 are within the body. Among these 112, there are 7 major chakras. For most people, 3 of these are active; the remaining are either dormant or mildly active. You do not have to activate all 114 chakras to live a physical life. You can live quite a complete life with just a few of them. If you were to activate all 114 chakras, you would have no sense of body at all. The purpose of yoga is to activate your energy system in such a way that your body consciousness is constantly being lowered, so you can sit here in the body, but are no longer the body.

The chakras fall into one of two different dimensions: the muladhara, swadhishthana, manipuraka, and related chakras are more concerned with keeping the body stable and rooted. These are qualities associated with the earth, with self-preservation. When your energies are dominant in these chakras, your qualities are earthy and you are more in the grip of nature. The upper chakras—the vishuddhi, agna, sahasrara, and related chakras—are centers that draw you away from the pull of the earth. They are concerned with the longing for the infinite. They make you receptive to a force that we customarily refer to as grace.

The middle chakra, anahata, is a balance between the two. It is like a transition between your lower and upper chakras, between survival instincts and the instinct toward liberation. It is symbolized by two interlocking triangles, one pointing downward and another upward, forming a six-pointed star. Many religious traditions have used the star as a sacred symbol, because some enlightened beings in these cultures realized their original nature through the anahata, and discovered the interlocking triangles of this chakra within themselves.

The vishuddhi chakra, located in the pit of your throat, literally means “filter.” If your vishuddhi becomes powerful, you have the ability to filter everything that enters you. Or in other words, once your vishuddhi is very active, you grow so powerful that external nature has no influence over you. Indian iconography depicts Adiyogi, or Shiva, with a blue throat, because he is capable of filtering all th...

If your energies move into the agna chakra, located between your eyebrows, you are intellectually enlightened, but st...

The seventh chakra, sahasrara, is actually located just outside the body. For most people, it is dormant. Through spiritual practice or a very intense way of living, you can activate this. If you hit your sahasrara, your experience is no longer intellectual; it is experiential.

The Indian temples were never places of prayer. The tradition was that you had a shower first thing in the morning and went directly to the temple, sat there for a while, and only then began your day. The temple was like a public battery-charging space. Most people have forgotten this nowadays. They just go to temples, ask for something, bum-bounce on the temple floor, and then leave. This is quite pointless. The idea is to sit and imbibe the energies of the place.

Mount Kailash (the mountain peak in western Tibet that is regarded as a sacred place of immeasurable power and antiquity) is the place where the maximum amount of knowledge has been stored for a very long time in energy form.

Kailash is the greatest mystical library on the planet. Almost all the religions of the East hold it as highly sacred. Among Hindus, it is traditionally regarded as the abode of the great god Shiva and his consort, Parvati. The Buddhists hold it holy because three of their great Buddhas are believed to be living there. The Jains believe that their first great master, or tirthankara, attained liberation there. The Bon religion, which is the original religion of Tibet, also considers it deeply sacred.

There are other places of enormous vibrational energy where mystics have bequeathed the fruits of their spiritual practice. Such spaces are innumerable in the Himalayas. A variety of mystics and yogis chose these mountains as their abode. When they lived there they naturally left behind a certain dimension of energy, and as a result, the Himalayas gathered a kind of aura. For example, Kedarnath is just a small temple in the Himalayas. There is no deity there; it is just an outcrop of a rock. But it is one of the most powerful places in the world! If you strive to improve your receptivity and then visit a place like that, it will just blow you away. There are many places like that in the East, but the Himalayas attract the most people.