Vibrant Sadhana, Vibrant Life – Making Your Sadhana Grow

Questioner: When I first came to the Inner Engineering program, I came with such madness for you and the whole process. But over time, the madness has been waning. Can you explain this, Sadhguru?

Sadhguru: It takes a lot of discipline to maintain this madness. If this madness has not touched you, if life – the process of life and that which is the source of life – has not overwhelmed you in some way, it means you have never lived. You have existed, but you have not lived.

When you first came to the Isha Yoga or the Inner Engineering program, the process was a bigger experience for you than anything you had ever known. I have not waned – you have waned. I am still the same, still exuding the same thing. Initially, the process overwhelmed you in the sense that it took away what you consider as “myself.” Look carefully at what it is that you consider as “myself.” Your personality is actually just a bundle of likes and dislikes.

Essentially, the difference between your personality and that of the person who is sitting next to you are your likes and dislikes – this makes you “different kind of people.” “Your kind of people” means both of you like the same things. In the process of living, most people slowly push themselves to a corner where they hardly like anything. If you hardly like anything, you will become angry and bitter. If you do not like anything at all except yourself, you will become insane. Even medically, the first sign of insanity is you start thinking no one is okay except you.

We brought you the madness and magic of spiritual process. Do not choose medically certified madness instead. When the doctors check you, you must be 100% normal. When you close your eyes, you must be mad. If they check you and certify you as mad, it is not good. But as you make the process of like and dislike very strong, you are going towards certification.

This madness that drew you here is the magic of life. As a human being, you cannot fly like a bird, run like a tiger or even hop like a grasshopper – in that sense, you are a crippled creature. But this crippled creature can close eyes and go to another dimension of life. Because there is consciousness, we can touch you with another dimension of life, which is not just life but the source of life. Due to lack of words, because it cannot be defined within the limitations of logic, we call this state “madness.”

If you had a profound experience and someone asked you to define it, you could not, because it would defy all definitions. You are guilty of systematically destroying it over a period of time. This is the technology of destroying the magic: The first thing is you start making judgments – what is good, what is bad, what you like, what you don’t like. When you were a child, everything was magical. As you grew up, you have destroyed it with stupid definitions of likes and dislikes about everything. Again and again, you have made the same mistake. If you want to correct it, you can correct it now.
 
Sit with me today the same way you did on the first day. Even now, I am the same – nothing has changed. It is just that only those who can keep their nose clean can breathe easy. The air is not getting crummy – you just got to blow out the stuff that got stuck in the airway. That is all it takes. You will be amazed as you were amazed then, when you first came to the program and suddenly everything lit up. The lighting is not from outside. It is just that there is someone here who made you willing to blow your nose. And you did. On that day, if I told you to sit in a certain way, you did so. But now you are selective.

If you do one thing, you do not do the other, and vice versa. Therefore, sadhana has vanished. One thing about sadhana is, it is not a device that you can build – it is a device that you can make use of. There are so many devices like this in your life. You definitely cannot build a watch for yourself, can you? Even if I give you 10 years, you cannot build a watch that shows the time. But probably, in 10 minutes, you can learn how to use a watch, no matter how complex it is. The same goes for almost every little thing. Can you make your own spectacles? The whole world would get distorted.

The way we teach, the sadhana always comes with the Inner Engineering process as a basis. We have never taught Shambhavi or Shoonya meditation alone. To teach Shambhavi, we spend seven days with you. To teach Shoonya meditation, we spend four days with you. But now because you have become a “senior” meditator, you think these things are not needed for you. Without this basis, without removing the soot from your mind, the process would not have worked the way it first did.

Now once again, you have limited yourself through your thought process and your emotions. So, every time before you do Shambhavi, give yourself a crash course of Inner Engineering for two or three minutes and implement it each day. Even today, it will work. Or another option is, if it was such magic, you definitely remember how you sat with me on that day. Just sit like that with me right now. In the next 10 minutes, I will still have you trembling with nameless ecstasies, even today, because the fundamentals have not changed.

Your mind is stuffed up – too many opinions, too many ideas, too many likes and dislikes. Fundamentally, what we taught you in Inner Engineering or Isha Yoga is to sit here in an unprejudiced way, without an opinion about anything – simply willing to look at life the way it is. The whole process is towards being able to be just a piece of life, not some other nonsense that you are trying to make yourself believe to be. If you sit here as a piece of life, you will experience that madness even today.

However, if you sit here as a firmly established man or woman, American or Indian, I cannot do anything with you. I do not wish to do anything with you because it is a waste of time. If you are stuck with limited identifications, there is nothing to do with you in terms of spiritual process. We cannot make you explode with a different dimension within yourself. That is only possible if psychologically, emotionally, energy-wise, you have pulled down the boundaries. And this is what the Inner Engineering process did for you. If you have reversed the whole process, it is time you take the program again. Those of you who feel that you initially had a blast of an experience, and slowly it has waned away, go back to where it worked for you. Get back to Inner Engineering. Do not just go and sit in the back – enroll yourself for the program again. Go through it like it is the first time.

Even today, if I go and sit in an Inner Engineering program, I am bursting within myself. It is not that I have to sit there to experience this, but in spite of that – I must have taught a thousand programs or more – the moment I uttered a few things – in English language, not some mantra – everything within me will fly. And it should for you too if you sit with absolute openness. Do not think about how to become open – just give yourself a crash course of Inner Engineering every day, three minutes before you start your practice. You will see the sadhana will grow. Sadhana is a device that will grow unless you killed it. Shambhavi Mahamudra for example, if you have practiced it for eight to ten years, by now it must be a bomb – not exploding you alone but also whoever is around you. The very atmosphere around you should crackle if you have allowed it to grow. If you are working towards killing it, it does not actually die, but it pretends to die.

Without preparing the soil, even the best seed will not grow. We prepared the soil and sowed the seed, and it burst forth. Now you have to maintain the quality of the soil and water it every day.

Do not think that if you did it once on the initiation day, it must keep growing. It does not work like that. But you cannot kill it entirely. If you make yourself willing now, it will work right now. You do not even have to wait until you do Shambhavi tomorrow morning. You can make yourself alive right now by doing the preparation and giving yourself a crash course of Inner Engineering. Right away, things will start happening within you.