Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

by Sadhguru

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.