Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

by Sadhguru

Human intellect is mere smartness that ensures survival. But true intelligence is just life and life—and that which is the source of life. Nothing else.

It’s like comparing the complexity of a single computer process with that in the containing operating system.

Freedom—or mukti or moksha—is seen as the natural longing in every human being and our ultimate destination. It is just because we are unconscious of it that we seek to fulfill it in installments, whether through the acquisition of power, money, love, or knowledge. Or through that other great pastime of today—shopping!

We are the most comfortable generation to have ever lived on this planet.

When pleasantness is within, it is termed peace, joy, happiness. When your surroundings become pleasant, it gets branded success.

So, some think it’s in the wine, and others think it’s in the divine, but pleasantness is what everyone’s seeking.

Whatever you feel deprived of looks like the highest aspiration.

When most people say “life,” they mean the accessories of life—their work, their family, their relationships, the homes they live in, the cars they drive, the clothes they wear, or the gods they pray to. The one thing they miss is life—the life process itself, the essential life that is you. The moment you make this fundamental mistake of identifying something that is not you as yourself, life becomes an unnecessary struggle.

The foundations of peace and bliss are not about attending to the external realities of your life, but in accessing and organizing the inner nature of your being.

The physical and psychological dimensions belong to the realm of polarities—pain-pleasure, love-hate, masculine-feminine, and so on. If you have one, the other is bound to follow. But when you move into the fundamental dimension of who you are, you are beyond all polarities.

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.

The walls of self-preservation that you build for today are the walls of self-imprisonment for tomorrow.

The science of using the body to hasten your evolutionary process is hatha yoga.

It must be remembered that the repetitive nature of cyclical movements or systems, which we traditionally refer to as samsara, offers the necessary stability for the making of life.

What kind of food you eat, how much you eat, how you eat, turning it from a compulsive pattern into a conscious process: this is the essence of fasting.

Let the body decide how much it should eat today, not you.

If you have not realized your eternal nature you must at least realize your mortal nature.

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.

Morality is worthwhile because it helps ensure social order, but it is capable of wreaking inner havoc.

There is a significant difference between believing and seeking.

The way you think is the way you feel, but thought and feeling seem to be different in your experience. Why is this so? Because thought has a certain clarity, a certain agility about it. Emotion is slower.

In the yogic culture, there are two aspects to the word shi-va. The word literally means “that which is not.”

the yogic culture offers two ways to reach the ultimate state: becoming everything or becoming nothing; the path of gnana, knowing, or the path of bhakti, devotion.

If you want to experience shi-va, or the dimension beyond the physical, you either come to terms with the laws that govern the non-physical realm or you dissolve into this dimension, because it spells freedom from the laws that govern the physical realm.

Confidence and stupidity are a very dangerous combination, but they generally go together.

It is only a juvenile intelligence that analyzes things and arrives at a conclusion.

Never before has a generation of people known the comforts and conveniences we have today. And yet, we cannot claim to be the most joyful or loving generation in history. A vast number of people live in states of constant anxiety and depression. Some are suffering their failure, but ironically, many are suffering the consequences of their success. Some are suffering their limitations, but many are suffering their freedom.