Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy

by Sadhguru

But above all, it is an important tool that empowers human beings to break free from the compulsive patterns of their lives.

whether you want to realize the full potential of this human mechanism or merge with the larger cosmic mechanism, you need a certain measure of mastery over these five elements. Without this you know neither the pleasure of being an individual nor the bliss of uniting with the cosmic.

Life is a bit like that. It is a complex web, but there is one simple pin. And that is your identity. The play of five elements is highly evolved and complicated, but the key to freedom is your limited persona. If you pull the plug, it just falls apart and you are free.

conscious attempt to refer to it in terms of whatever you consider to be the ultimate or the loftiest ideal in your life,

you instantly see the change as the number of truly conscious moments in your life increases. The air that you breathe, the food that you eat, the water that you drink, the land that you walk upon, and the very space that holds you—every one of them offers you a divine possibility.

approach your food with the reverence that the life-making material deserves and eat it. You will now see how it will behave within you.

Keeping yourself fit and well is not a battle. Do some activity that you enjoy: play a game, swim, walk, run.

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.

Yoga is simply chitta vritti nirodha. That means, if the activity of your mind ceases and you are still alert, you are in yoga.

But Gautama was not the only Buddha. A human being who has transcended his intellect, the discriminatory and logical dimensions of his life, is

a Buddha.

Once you are no longer identified with your mind, you are free to experience life beyond limitations. Being a Buddha means that you have become a witness to your own intellect.

The essence of yoga, as we have said before, is just this—to arrive at that moment where there is a clear space between you and your mind. Once this happens, a life of heightened clarity, perception, and freedom has begun. This is the birth of freedom.

So if you think a hundred percent logically, there is really no possibility of life!

Moments of extreme logic are moments of suicide. Only if you know when logic should be used and when it’s necessary to go beyond it, will your life be beautiful.

this for fifteen to twenty minutes a day. You will gradually become conscious of many things around and within you that you are completely unaware of right now.

This is not an exercise in observation or appreciation. It is an exercise in attention—

The identity around which the intellect functions is called ahankara. To continue with the earlier knife analogy, the hand that wields the knife is identity. Or in other words, it is your identity that manages and determines your intellect. When you use a knife, it is important not just to have a sharp blade, but a stable hand to hold it. Without a stable hand you can end up cutting yourself in a million different ways.

Once you are identified with something that you are not, the mind is an express

train that cannot be stopped.

But if you are able to disentangle yourself from everything that you are not—if you dis-identify, as it were—you will see that the mind turns just blank and empty. When you want to use it, you can; at other times, it will simply be empty...

Irrespective of what you think you are, when death confronts you, every identification falls away.

Any information you have about that which is not a living experience for you, is irrelevant.

Maybe it is very holy irrelevance, but it does not liberate you; it only entangles you!

If you find yourself thinking recurrently about people or things, your identification is essentially with your body.

your thoughts are about what you would like to do in the world, your identification is essentially with your mind. Everything else is just a complex set of offshoots of these two aspects. This is not a value judgment. It is just a way of knowing what stage of life you’re at. How quickly you want to evolve depends on your own choices.

You could just try bringing a certain precision into the physical movements of the body.

For instance, if you see a straight line on the floor, try walking in perfect alignment with that line, maintaining an easy gait. This is not about becoming self-conscious, but about becoming precise or exact. Try this with your body and see. Bring precision into every movement, every gesture. This is one way of dipping your intellect in awareness.

How do you know whether the world exists or not? Only by your experience. There is no other proof. So, awareness is that which can either create or obliterate this existence. That is the magic of awareness.

Awareness is a process of inclusiveness, a way of embracing this entire existence.

You cannot do it, but you can set the right conditions so that it happens.

Don’t try to be aware. It will not work. If you keep your body, thought, emotion, and energies pro...

blossom. You will become far more alive than yo...

While the other elements are within the body, the akashic, or etheric, dimension envelops the physical body—usually up to a distance of eighteen to twenty-one inches. Because this element is still physical, it carries information.

Anything that happens at a certain level of intensity or profundity in your life is written into this field of akash around you.

Once you are in touch with your awareness, you don’t have to try to accomplish anything. You don’t even have to wish or dream, because the best possible thing that can happen to you will happen.

In the yogic lore, it is said that when you learn to access this dimension, you have enslaved the divine!

This means that once you distance yourself from the compulsiveness of your own genetic and karmic information, life becomes unburde...

This is a dimension beyond intellect, beyond ident...

memory, beyond judgment, beyond karma, beyond divisions of every kind. This is the intelligence of existence itself, in which life always happens exactly the way i...

You can try this experiment tonight. At the moment that you move from wakefulness to sleep, make an attempt to be aware. This practice can be done in bed. If you can be aware of the last moment when you make the transition from wakefulness to sleep, you will be aware throughout your sleep.

You will see it is a lot of work. So here is another thing you can do. If you are used to waking up to an alarm, substitute it with a sound, a tune, or chant that reminds you of your awareness. You can easily train yourself to make this association. It can become an alarm for your awareness. Of course, you cannot use an alarm to go to sleep! But the fact of the matter is that unless you completely dis-identify from your body, it is not easy to move consciously from wakefulness to sleep. The first possible moment that you come awake, see if you can become consciously aware of something—your breath or your body, for instance. This will help you later when you want to go to bed. If you achieve waking with awareness and moving from wakefulness to sleep in awareness, you are deathless. This means that when it comes to shedding the body, you will do it in full awareness. Even getting close to that moment will change the way your body and mind function, and will alter the quality of your life quite phenomenally.

Spiritual knowledge or “knowing” was always transmitted like this—not by thought, not by word, but in the same way that bees transmit the understanding of how to build beehives across generations.

Knowing, on the other hand, is a living intelligence. With or without you, it still is. You are either in it or you are not: that is the only choice you have.

I don’t think with my head but with every cell in my body. This makes my thinking an organic, seamless, and integrated process. There is a certain level of integratedness about it, because it involves all of me. I don’t have much thought in my mind at all, unless I choose to think.

Nothing has ever been out of place in this existence. Things have only been out of place in human societies.

Between this piece of life and that piece of life, there can be a comparison. But for the intelligence that is making all life happen, there is no context, no comparison, because there is no other. You cannot say whether it is now in pla...

moving from this small headful of information to a cosmo...

What a tragic choice people so often end up making—choosing the finiteness of the human brain over a ...