Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

by Sadhguru

One man’s “magic” is another man’s engineering. —ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

“Guru” literally means “dispeller of darkness.”

There are many spurious and dangerously misleading teachings in vogue in our world today. “Be in the moment” is one of them. The assumption is that you could be somewhere else, if you wanted. How is that even possible? The present is the only place that you can be. If you live, you live in this moment. If you die, you die in this moment. This moment is eternity. How are you going to escape it, even if you try? Right now your problem is that you suffer what happened ten years ago and you suffer what may happen the day after tomorrow. Both are not living truths. They are simply a play of your memory and imagination. Does this mean then that in order to find peace you must annihilate your mind? Not at all. It simply means you need to take charge of it. Your mind carries the enormous reserves of memory and the incredible possibilities of the imagination that are the result of an evolutionary process of millions of years. If you can use it when you want and put it aside when you don’t, the mind can be a fantastic tool. To shun the past and neglect the future is to trivialize this wonderful faculty. So “be in the moment” becomes a crippling psychological restriction—it denies our existential reality.

The other phrase that has hardened into cliché through overuse is “positive thinking.” When it is oversimplified and used as some quick-fix mantra, positive thinking becomes a way of whitewashing or sugarcoating your reality. When you are unable to process real-time information and control your psychological drama, you seize on “positive thinking” as a tranquilizer. Initially, it might seem to imbue your life with new confidence and optimism. But it is essentially limited. In the long term, if you deny or amputate one part of reality, it gives you a lopsided perspective of life.

The word “sadhana” in Sanskrit means a device or a tool.

I also saw that language was no more than a conspiracy devised by human beings. If someone spoke, I realized they were only making sounds, and I was making up the meanings. So, I stopped making up meanings and the sounds became very amusing. I could see patterns spewing out of their mouths. If I kept staring, the person would just disintegrate and turn into a blob of energy. Then all that was left was patterns! In this state of absolute borderless ignorance, just about anything could hold my attention. My dear father, being a physician, began to think I needed psychiatric evaluation. In his words, “This boy is staring unblinkingly at something all the time. He’s lost it!” It has always seemed to me odd that the world does not realize the immensity of a state of “I do not know.” Those who destroy that state with beliefs and assumptions completely miss an enormous possibility—the possibility of knowing. They forget that “I do not know” is the doorway—the only doorway—to seeking and knowing.

People think spirituality is about looking for God or truth or the ultimate. The problem is you have already defined what you are looking for. It is not the object of your search that is important; it is the faculty of looking. The ability to simply look without motive is missing in the world today. Everybody is a psychological creature, wanting to assign meaning to everything. Seeking is not about looking for something. It is about enhancing your perception, your very faculty of seeing.

I never considered myself particularly impulsive; I was just life-oriented.

The experience began to happen more frequently. When it occurred, I neither ate nor slept for hours on end. I simply sat rooted to a single spot. On one occasion, the experience lasted for up to thirteen days. I happened to be in a village when it began—this state of overwhelming and indescribable stillness and ecstasy. The villagers gathered around me and started whispering to each other, “Oh, he must be in samadhi” (a blissful state of being beyond the body, well-documented in Indian spiritual traditions). India, being the country it is, there was a traditional understanding of spirituality to which they were heir that I, with my blue denim–wrapped brain, had no clue about. When I emerged from that state, someone wanted to put a garland around me. Another wanted to touch my feet. It was crazy; I could not believe anyone would want to do this to me. On another day, I was having lunch. I put a morsel of food in my mouth, and suddenly, it exploded. At that moment, I was able to experience the miraculous alchemy of human digestion—the process by which an external substance, a piece of the planet, was becoming a part of me.

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! The moment I realized that human desire was not for any particular thing, but just to expand illimitably, a certain clarity rose within me. When I saw that everyone is capable of this, it felt natural to want to share it. My whole aim since then has been to somehow rub this experience off on other people, to awaken them to the fact that this state of joy, of freedom, of limitlessness cannot be denied to them unless they stand in the way of the natural effervescence of life.

Everything you have done in your life so far has been in pursuit of a single thing. Whether you sought a career, started a business, made money, or built a family, it was always because you wanted just one simple thing: joy. But somewhere along the way, life got complicated. If you had been born as any other creature on this planet, it would have been very simple. Your needs would have just been physical. A full stomach would have been equivalent to a great day. Take a look at your dog or your cat: the moment their stomach is full, they are quite peaceful.

The only thing that stands between you and your well-being is a simple fact: you have allowed your thoughts and emotions to take instruction from the outside rather than the inside.

The way out is a very simple change in direction. You just need to see that the source and basis of your experience is within you. Human experience may be stimulated or catalyzed by external situations, but the source is within. Pain or pleasure, joy or misery, agony or ecstasy, happens only inside you. Human folly is that people are always trying to extract joy from the outside. You may use the outside as a stimulus or trigger, but the real thing always comes from within.

All human experience is one hundred percent self-created.

If you were on a desert island without food for ten days and suddenly God appeared before you, would you want Him to appear as a shining light or in the form of bread? In India certain communities worship food as God because they have been deprived of food for a long time. In California, love is God! Whatever you feel deprived of looks like the highest aspiration. The thing to remember is that none of these will settle you in any enduring way. Human life is longing for unlimited expansion, and that is the only thing that will settle you for good.

But to be loving is simply this: a willingness to respond freely and openly. Right now, it may be limited to one or two people in your lives. But it is possible to extend this ability to embrace the entire world.

You have surely noticed that when you are happy, you always function better. You seem to have an endless supply of energy. You can go on and on, even without eating or sleeping. Just a little happiness liberates you from your normal limitations of energy and capability.

The whole point of yoga is to bring you to an experience wherein, if you sit here, there is no such thing as “you” and “me.” It is all me—or all you! Any process that helps you to reach this union is yoga.

So, to experience well-being all you need is a certain mastery over these three dimensions of body, mind, and energy. Being successful in the world depends on your ability to harness these dimensions, according to the needs of your life situations and the activity you want to perform. But yoga is also the science of aligning these three dimensions so that you reach the ultimate state of ecstatic union with life itself. How does one reach this ultimate union? Yoga tells us there are a few fundamental ways. If you employ your physical body to reach this ultimate union, we call this karma yoga, or the yoga of action. If you employ your intelligence to reach your ultimate nature, we call this gnana yoga, the yoga of intelligence. If you employ your emotions to reach your ultimate nature, we call this bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion. And if you use your energies to reach the supreme experience, we call this kriya yoga, the yoga of transforming energies.

You may have noticed this about yourself: when you are feeling pleasant, you want to expand; when you are fearful, you want to contract. Try this. Sit for a few minutes in front of a plant or tree. Remind yourself that you are inhaling what the tree is exhaling, and exhaling what the tree is inhaling. Even if you are not yet experientially aware of it, establish a psychological connection with the plant. You could repeat this several times a day. After a few days, you will start connecting with everything around you differently. You won’t limit yourself to a tree.