Questioner: I’ve heard you talk about how everyone should live in a consecrated place. What are the advantages of living in a consecrated place?

Sadhguru: A few years ago, I was in Lausanne at the Blue Brain Project. The project is a phenomenal effort to map the human brain and understand the potential it carries. What they have uncovered is quite phenomenal for the scientific community, but it is a cruel joke on the yogis because we have been saying this for thousands of years. When human beings, out of whose brains all these damn supercomputers came out, said it, people said “No. Such things are not possible.” But now that machines are saying it, everyone is giving a thumbs up.

Today, there is enough proof to clearly say that irrespective of your genetics, irrespective of who your father or grandfather was, irrespective of the information that you carry in your DNA, you can rewire your brain completely in a moment. The scientists don’t know how, but they see that it is possible because everything is so flexible and mobile inside. Everything can be changed.

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In Indian culture we have always said that many human beings lived better than gods. When gods had problems they came looking for the sages. These are not just stories. There are many real life examples. People who have been reared in a certain atmosphere have shown phenomenal capabilities. This is a culture where mathematics was never really pursued as an academic subject, yet the greatest mathematicians have always come from India. You got a zero from India. Without a zero, what mathematics would you do? And in more recent times, Ramanujan came from Tamil Nadu. He looked at every aspect of nature, closed his eyes, looked at himself and wrote formulas. Even today, many of the top scientific physical theories are explained by Ramanujan’s formulas. There are still so many of the formulas which are yet to find a theory.

There is an inner strength in Indian culture that stems from a whole science and technology of inner wellbeing – right now the whole world is crying for it. They have outer technology with which they have done wonderful things on the outside, but they are struggling inside. This is a technology we have known for thousands of years. It is from this context that this whole culture evolved.

God-making

You see temple towns where they built huge magnificent temples that we would not dare to attempt even today with all the machinery we have. The whole state of Tamil Nadu is built like this. Every significant town in Tamil Nadu had a grand temple and around that, a little town. Because the kind of dwelling you live in is not important. Whether your house is 10,000 square feet or just 1000 square feet is not going to make an ultimate difference in your life, but being around a consecrated space is going to make a phenomenal difference in your life.

Consecration is a live process. It is like this: if you transform mud into food, we call this agriculture. If you make food into flesh and bone, we call this digestion. If you make flesh into mud, we call this cremation. If you can make this flesh or even a stone or an empty space into a divine possibility, that is called consecration. Today, modern science is telling you that everything is the same energy manifesting itself in a million different ways. If that is so, what you call the divine, what you call a stone, what you call a man or a woman, what you call a demon, are all the same energy functioning in different ways. For example, the same electricity becomes light, sound and so many other things, depending upon the technology. So it is just a question of technology. If you have the necessary technology, you can make the simple space around you into a divine exuberance; you can just take a piece of rock and make it into a god or a goddess. This is the phenomenon of consecration.

An enormous amount of knowledge about this dimension of life was perpetuated particularly in this culture, and this was held as the most important thing. Because it does not matter what you are eating, how you are or how long you live, at some point a need will come that you want to get in touch with the source of creation. If that possibility is not created across the planet and is not available to every human being who seeks, then society has failed to provide true wellbeing for a human being.

Do the Evolution!

Wherever you spend time, those spaces must be consecrated. There is a certain beauty. Your evolution need not stick to the Darwinian scale. You can simply leapfrog and go if you live in a charged space. We can actually scientifically establish this. In just one day of initiation, like brahmacharis and others who are going into various other processes – not just the basic processes, but people who live in the ashram who are going through many other things – in a single day we can show a phenomenal change happening in their brain function, in their physiological function, and in their genetic material.

This is the significance that when someone takes brahmacharya or sanyas – he will do the kriya that he is supposed to do after his parents are dead, when the parents are still alive, because he is even washing off the genetic material from his system. His father has no influence anymore. “Maybe my nose looks like my father’s nose but none of his stuff is in me. I cleaned it up.” That is what a sanyasi is saying.

The very fundamental building blocks in the system can be changed very rapidly if one lives in a consecrated space. If you want to produce generations of enhanced human beings, you need this kind of space. Otherwise, only by accident or by personal dint someone may become something, but you will not produce a generation of beautiful people. This culture produced a galaxy of knowledge, a galaxy of enlightened beings. Every generation produced this simply because they took care of a number of aspects like this.

If a large number of people are constantly touched by consecrated spaces, human beings would blossom with a completely different sense of wholeness, homogeneity and organic way of looking at life, and above all as full-fledged human beings.