Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy

by Sadhguru

Just work at removing from the mind the idea that thought is intelligence.

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.

If you take this one step, life will start speaking to you like never before.

If you want an element of spirituality to enter your life, the first thing you must do is drop these rigid ideas of virtue and vice, and learn to look at life just the way it is.

The nature of your mind is that whatever you

are averse to dominates it.

Avoiding something is not freedom from it. Such morality is based on exclusion. Spirituality, on the other hand, is born of inclusion.

If your humanity were active, there would be no need for morality at all.

Morality always differs from person to person, according to time, place, situation—and convenience. But wherever humanity has found its expression, at any time in history or in any culture in the world, it has always been the same and will always be.

On a superficial level, in terms of our values, morals, and ethics, each one of us may be different. But if you know how to pierce a person deep enough to touc...

But if you want to kindle the humanity in a person, it takes much more involvement. It means giving yourself.

Humanity will also bring social order, but it requires no external enforcement whatsoever.

If you were naturally joyful, you would go and sit on the beach, or listen to the whisper of the leaves on the tree.

Spirituality does not mean moving away from life; it means becoming alive to the core, in the fullest possible way.

With age, physical agility may diminish, but the level of joy and aliveness need not. If your level of joy and aliveness is declining, you are committing suicide in installments.

There is a significant difference between believing and seeking. Believing means you have assumed something that you do not know; seeking means you have realized that you do not know.

This brings an enormous amount of flexibility. The moment you believe something, you bring a certain rigidity into the very life process that you are.

if you have a good seed and if you create the right atmosphere, it will sprout.

Creating the right atmosphere of body and mind is the only work. You do not have to do anything else.

If your humanity is stirred, you are a beauti...

“me” versus the “other.” It is in this space of division and separation that all crime and negativity is born.

So, striving for the infinite is an insurance against all negative tendencies.

you energize it, it becomes active but scattered. If you energize it further, it is no longer scattered, but starts oscillating. If you energize it further, it becomes one-pointed. If you energize it still further, it will become conscious.

And if your mind

is conscious, it is magic; it is a miracle; it is a bri...

one person has organized his or her mind to think the way he wants, and another thinks against his or her own interests.

A well-established human mind is referred to as a kalpavriksha,

samyukti. This is a skillfulness that arises out of equanimity.

If you generate a powerful thought and let it out, it will always manifest itself. For this to happen, it is important that you do not impede and weaken your thought by creating negative and self-defeating thought patterns.

There is an alternative to faith, which is commitment. If you simply commit

yourself to creating what you really care for, now once again your thoughts get organized in such a way that there are no hurdles. Your thoughts flow freely toward what you want, and once this happens, the manifestation of your desire is a natural consequence.

So, first explore what it is that you really want. Once that is clear and you are committed to creating it, you generate a continuous process of thought in that direction. When you maintain a steady stream of thought without changing direction, it will manifest as a reality in your life.

Realizing the power of chitta is called chit shakti, a simple and powerful process through which you can access the very source of creation within you.

is largely the thought that leads the emotion,

Devotion means dropping the dualities of like and dislike, attachment and aversion. It means “what’s fine” and “what’s not fine” do not exist for you anymore; everything is fine. When a devotee says “God is everywhere” or “everything is God,” he is essentially saying “everything is fine.”

Thus, he or she arrives at a deep state of acceptance that is transformative and liberating. Bhakti is all-encompassing and all-inclusive; it does not discriminate. This is the nature of the ultimate reality as well.

Devotion is a tool to transcend the dual nature of logic. But instead of transcending logic, one may end up denying logic altogether. So, standing on a stable platform of logic before going into the fluid state of devotion becomes important.

Conversely, many people believe that devotion has no place in the logical realm.

But if the scalpel of logic you employ is very finely honed, you can cut through something, and still seem to leave it in one piece. When a fine swordsman uses his sword to cut a tree, it is said even the tree should not know; it should still stand as one. If your intellect becomes this refined, you will find devotion fits in perfectly with your logic.

Devotion can be very beautiful, joyous, ecstatic, but without the clarity of knowing, it could lead to stagnation. On the other hand, without emotion, spiritual practices can become barren, dry, and lifeless. Without bhakti, gnana becomes simply a hairsplitting exercise.

As I said earlier, if you want to experience a mountain peak, you either elevate yourself to that level, or simply look up. The devotee knows that if you manage to ascend to meet the peak, you...

the valley, you hold the entire mountai...

This blissful state eliminates the fear of suffering.

this state of nameless ecstasy, there are no concerns about self-preservation. This is what makes a human being capable of being and acting in a way that can sometimes seem superhuman to others.

Only when the gnawing anxiety of self-preservation is completely eliminated from your mind would you dare to explore life. Ot...

Once the fear of suffering is dropped, you can plunge into any situation without hesitation. Even if you are damned to eternal hell, you will happily go t...

“You say everything is fine in heaven, so what will I do there? Let me go to hell and do something to help others, because anyway I cannot suffer.”

Only this body needs to be protected; nothing else within you needs protection.

If you are willing to drop the ideas, philosophies, and belief systems you are currently attached to, you can re-create your entire life with the very next moment.

Love is a quality, not something to do with somebody else.