Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

by Sadhguru

It is time to make yet another distinction. Responsibility is not reaction but it is not action either. Responsibility and action belong to different dimensions. The ability to respond gives you the freedom to act. It also gives you the freedom not to act.

It puts you in

the driver’s seat of ...

Can you act upon everything in the world today? No, but you can respond to everything in the world today. Action has to be judiciously performed, depending on a careful analysis of resources—strength, capability, energy, age, situation. Your ability to act is always limited, but there are no limitations on your ability to respond. If you are willing, you can respond to just about anything.

responsibility does not mean unbridled action. Far from it.

entire oceans rise in response to the cycles of the moon,

But you can respond to the moon. In fact, you already do. You can just choose to do it—willingly, consciously.

Your ability to respond is the way you are. Only your ability to act is connected with the outside world.

responsibility is “response-ability,”

The only reason you are not experiencing the life process in all its majesty and profundity is your current state of mental resistance. Your psychological structure is a stone wall.

It is only out of long aeons of habit that you are refusing to fly free.

Life has left everything open for you. Existence has not blocked anything for anyone.

If you are willing, you can access the whole universe. Someone said, “Knock and it shall open.” You don’t even ha...

door. It is open. You just have to walk throu...

This is the sole purpose of the spiritual process. The life and work of every spiritual guide, across history and across culture, has been just this: to point out that the cage door does not exist. Whether you fly or choose to remain...

In taking responsibility and beginning the journey toward conscious living, you are putting an end to the age-old patterns of assigning blame outward or heavenward.

So, what is love then? It is just your own quality.

You are only using the other person as a key to open up what is already within you.

You are now capable of being loving and blissful without doing anything in particular, just sitting here, no matter how anyone in the outside world behaves. Once you experience this inner freedom, you will never experience insecurity in your life again.

“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.”

The whole effort of the spiritual process is to break the boundaries you have drawn for yourself and experience the immensity that you are.

The aim is to unshackle yourself from the limited identity you

have forged, as a result of your own ignorance, and live the way the Creator made you—utterly blissfu...

Once you choose to become conscious of this simple fact—my ability to respond is limitless

suddenly life within you reorganizes itself in a completely different way. You move into higher and higher levels of freedom within yourself.

Life is now a wonderful and exhilarating journey o...

Don’t simply believe what you are reading. The only way to find out whether something is true or untrue

is to experiment with it. Stop the internal debate and simply put it to the test. The yogic path is not a path of inherited belief; it is the path of experiment.

If you sustain this awareness of your limitless nature for just one full minute, you will achieve a tremendous transformation. A minute may seem very simple, but you will see it will take a certain level of application to arrive at this. Just one minute can elevate you to a different dimension of experience and function.

Right now, your awareness is erratic: this moment you are aware and the next moment, you are gone. It is okay. Every hour, remind yourself. Experiment with this awareness, allow it to deepen and see what happens.

That is all it takes to touch the Creator—just willingness, nothing else.

Every human being lives in a perpetual state of insufficiency. No matter who you are or what you have achieved, you still want a little more than what you have right now.

This is human desire. But

the fundamenta...

within every human being is for boundl...

The science of yoga is, quite simply, the science of being in perfect alignment, in absolute harmony, in complete sync with existence. The many fluctuations of the outside world have their impact on each one of us. But yoga is the science of creating inner situations exactly the way you want them. When you fine-tune yourself to such a point where everything functions beautifully within you, naturally the best of your abilities will flow out of you.

Modern science tells us that all of existence is just energy manifesting itself in different ways and in different forms.

Although everything in the universe is the same energy, it functions at different levels of capability in different forms.

With the same material with which people made earthen pots we now make computers, cars, and even spacecrafts! It is the same material; we have just started using it for higher and higher possibilities.

from the same material of this planet, what an incredible journey has been made, from an amoeba to a human being!

It is the same with our inner energies. Yoga is the technology of upgrading, activating, and refining these inner energ...

The first sheath or layer to which yoga draws our attention is the physical body—the annamayakosha, or more literally, the

food body.

What you call the “body” right now is just an accumul...

The second layer is the manomayakosha, or the mental body.

So, the third layer of the self is the pranamayakosha, or

the energy body. If you keep your energy body in perfect balance, there will be no

there is a fourth layer called the vignanamayakosha, or the etheric body.

“knowledge.” Vishesh gnana means “extraordinary knowledge”—that which is beyond the sense perceptions.

This is a transient state. It is neither physical ...