Joe Rogan: Let’s go with Yoga first.
Sadhguru: “Yoga” in the United States scares me because here, Yoga means you must look twisted like a leftover noodle. The word Yoga means union. We were talking about the soil. You are just an outcrop of soil. You may not realize that because you are sitting on a chair; you are wearing shoes, and you can prance around. But if you were made like a tree, you would clearly understand you are part of the soil.
Most people will only understand that they’re part of the soil when you bury them. Essentially, you’re part of it, but you’re not experiencing it that way. This is not only true with soil – this is true with the entire creation, with the cosmos itself. Today, modern science has come to the understanding that as you sit here, every subatomic particle in your body is actually in communication with everything else. But such an experience is not there in most people.
An Experience of Pure Ecstasy
When I was 25, I burst into an experience where suddenly every cell in my body was dripping ecstasy. I was sitting on a rock and just I burst out like this. For the first time in my adult life, tears were coming. When I came out, what I thought was 10–15 minutes, was actually 4 ½ hours; my shirt was wet with tears.
I thought, “What’s happening to me? Am I going off the rocker or something?” I was super skeptic about everything in the universe. I had questions about the family structure, society, religion, politics, economics, everything.
Joe Rogan: So, what do you think was happening?
Sadhguru: I talked to my closest friends, “Hey, something is happening to me. I’m just blissed out.”
They said, “What’s happening to you, man? What did you drink? What did you pop?”
Then I knew there was no context to my experience. So, I started spending more and more time by myself. And I realized if I just take my hands off my mind completely, every cell in my body just bursts out with blissfulness. I properly established within myself how to do that. Then I sat down and made a plan. “In two and a half years’ time, I will make the whole world ecstatic.” Here I am, forty years later.
A Realization About Time That Will Change Your Life
It took me time to realize that even if you offer people the best thing, they will go round and round around that, not getting the point because they are too deeply invested in something. They don’t realize life is slipping away with every heartbeat. People are not conscious on a daily basis that their time is running out and they need to make the best out of it.
If you are conscious that your time is running out, you would keep yourself in the best possible way. You wouldn’t have time to quarrel with someone, you wouldn’t have time to do nasty things to someone or to yourself. You would do the best to yourself. And naturally, when you’re feeling wonderful, you do wonderful things to everyone around you.
A joyful person is naturally pleasant to everyone. When you are feeling nasty, you will share the same nastiness with other people. So I decided we must somehow share this process with people, and I started building devices. I had been practicing a simple form of Yoga since I was twelve years of age.
An Alignment that Makes You Universal
Joe Rogan: So, this was around the same time that you were having these realizations about the nature of things. They all sort of came together, like it’s a very fortuitous sort of convergence.
Sadhguru: When I look back, it’s all like a set plan. At that time, it was all wonderful accidents happening.
Joe Rogan: Yeah. That’s a thing that happens though sometimes, right? When you’re on the right path, wonderful accidents do sort of seem to happen.
Sadhguru: One aspect of Yoga is to get your body to a geometrically congruent state with the rest of the creation. If you’re geometrically congruent, suddenly your experience is not that of an individual, but that of being universal.
What if You Could Expand Your Sensory Body?
Right now, what is the difference between you and the chair on which you’re sitting? It’s only the sensations which tell you “this is me” and “that is not me.” So essentially, what you call “myself” is a certain boundary of sensations.
If you do anything vigorous or intense, suddenly the boundaries of your sensation is breached and you experience something more. This breaching of sensory boundary is Yoga. If you could spread your sensory body as big as this room, you would experience everything in this room as yourself.
If you make yourself exuberant, either because of joy or blissfulness, the sensory body expands. If you expand your body in such a way that it’s as big as the universe, you will experience the whole universe as yourself. This is Yoga. The twisting, turning, holding the breath, all these things are to loosen up the body in such a way that your physical body and your sensory body are not stuck to each other so that the sensory body can expand.
Essentially, the physical body is acting like a scaffolding for the sensory body, which gives the experience of life. If your sensory body expands, you will experience this whole room or building or town as yourself. This is the purpose of Yoga. Once you experience someone or something as a part of yourself, no one has to teach you any morality. You have no conflict with that which you experience as yourself. This is what Yoga means. There are various mechanisms, actually 112 proper technologies, as to how one can get there.
The Only Four Aspects of You that You Can Work With
Joe Rogan: In your book[1] that I was reading, you talked about the different kinds of Yoga, and you told a very funny story about God getting them all together. What are the different types of Yoga?
Sadhguru: You can employ your body and perform action and do Yoga – this is Karma Yoga. Karma means action – you are using action to attain unity with existence. If you use your intelligence to attain unity with existence, then it is called Gyana Yoga, Yoga of intelligence. If you use your emotion to get there, it is called Bhakti Yoga, Yoga of devotion or emotion. And if you use your energies, it is called Kriya Yoga, the science and technology of refining and expanding one’s energies.
You have a body, you have a mind, you have emotions, and you have life energies within you. These are the four realities. The rest is all imagination. You can only work with what you have. All of us are a combination of these four things – body, mind, emotion, and energy. It’s just that in one person, the body may be dominant; in another person, the mind may be dominant; in another person, emotion.
There are different combinations of the same four ingredients in different human beings. Accordingly, Yoga has to be mixed. This is why the significance in the Eastern cultures of having a live Guru who’s looking at you and making the right concoction.
Joe Rogan: So, they need a Guru?
Sadhguru: See, the word Guru is a four-letter word today in America.
Joe Rogan: Yeah, because there are a lot of fake ones, right?
Sadhguru: That’s why I’m a Sadhguru – it has eight letters.
[1]Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy
Who’s a Yogi?
Joe Rogan: How did Yoga get started? Like, what do you think was the origin of it? It’s obviously very beneficial to so many people to practice it. How did it get started?
Sadhguru: There is nothing in the universe which is not Yoga. In the sense, there is nothing in the universe which is not one with everything else, except the human mind. This is what we’re talking about in the context of soil also. There is nothing on this planet, in this solar system, and in this universe that is unconnected. So, everything is in Yoga. The question is only whether you realize that or not.
If you realize that, if you experience that, then we call you a Yogi. A Yogi means not somebody who’s twisting and turning. A Yogi means one who is experiencing the union right now. Though you are an individual, your experience has gone beyond your individual nature. You’re experiencing the universality of your existence.
