Caught up in a relentless whirl of your own thoughts and emotions? Sadhguru shares a transformative nightly practice designed to untangle yourself from the day’s mental weight. Discover a way to awaken to a new sense of clarity, lightness, and freedom, for an unburdened experience of life. As you delve deeper, uncover the distinction between existential reality and the narratives we craft within our minds. Sadhguru provides practical guidance to cultivate a life of joyful presence and total involvement.
Question: Sadhguru, how to draw a line between the existential reality and the psychological reality? Also, can you elaborate on living with complete involvement and provide guidance on how to really practice that?
Sadhguru: Since you asked about existential versus psychological… Everything you create – your thoughts, your emotions, your ideas, your opinions, and your philosophies – is psychological. You might have picked it up from somewhere, from your religion, from your culture, from someone else, but it is all psychological. It only works in your head.
If you want to change your perspective, you can try this exercise tonight before you go to sleep: Sit on your bed, consider everything that you have accumulated in your life – your wealth, your money, your clothes, your body, your mind, your relationships, everything – consciously keep it aside, and go to bed as just you. Initially, you may struggle with that, but keep up the practice every day.
When you wake up in the morning, you will be like a fresh life. When you were born, you came with just a very small body; now it has become so much larger. You have gathered all this. When you gather things without awareness – whether it is your body, mind, possessions, or people – it all becomes burdensome. In unawareness, everything sticks to you, and you have to carry it around with you.
Imagine if you were sitting on a chair and it got stuck to you; it would be quite ugly to walk around with the chair attached to your backside. This is the reality for most people; it is just that they do not realize they are carrying around a thousand things.
How beautiful your face was when you were a child. As you grew up, with so many things you have gathered, you should have become even more joyful. But life has become burdensome, and because everyone is like this, you think that is okay – which it is not. Every form of life – from worms and insects to birds, trees, and human beings – is trying to be an exuberant, full-fledged life. But if you mistake the things you have gathered for who you are, you can hardly do anything.
When you misunderstand the psychological process as real, then everything sticks to you. First of all, you need to realize that this is a small little planet in the middle of nowhere, spinning and rotating around the sun. You do not know where it begins, and where it ends. We do not know anything. In this little thing, we are doing circus.
In the context of creation, you are so small. Once you understand that, you will not be too attached to your ideas, opinions, and formulas. But in your head, you think you are big – this is a serious problem. You are not even a speck in the universe.
So, in the night, before you go to sleep, put everything down. Become like you are nothing. In the world, you have to walk around like somebody; that is fine. You can pretend with other people, but you do not have to believe that you are something. Once you do not carry all this mess in your head, then life is wonderful. Just to breathe and sit here is fantastic.
Have you ever been to somebody’s funeral? That man is lying down in a perfect pose. Just the day before, he might have been jumping around for money. If you go and tell him now that he won one thousand crores in the lottery, or that we found a huge ball of gold in his backyard, he will not be interested. You can mention to him whatever he likes – food, women, drink, anything – he will not be interested. The day before, he still might have hopped all over the place for these things.
The only thing that happened to him between then and now is that life was taken from him. Once life is gone, all the other things do not mean a thing to him. Even now, the only thing that you have is life. The rest is all your imagination. If I just take your memory, you do not know who your father or mother is. If I take away your memory, do you know how much you have in your bank balance? No. So, this is all psychological. In society, it is relevant. Within you, it has no relevance.
Let us say we give you a crown. The only thing is, it weighs 25 kilograms – 20 kilograms of gold with a diamond of another five kilograms. You will not be able to walk around nicely with it. Whether we put 25 kilograms of stone or 25 kilograms of gold on your head, burden is burden. In society, some idiots may look at you and say, “Wow! He’s got so much gold on his head.” But your burden is the same. So, your human experience and your social transactions are two different things. It is important that you manage them sensibly, inside and outside of you.
As long as your psychological realities are far bigger than the existential reality, there will be no true involvement. Most people’s whole life is about what they think and feel. Their thoughts and emotions are far more important to them than the reality in which they exist. This means you have gotten life completely wrong. You are only involved with your own thoughts. When you are obsessed with your own thoughts and emotions, how can you be involved with everything, or anything for that matter?
The reason why your thoughts and emotions are so important is that somewhere, you think you are the most important person in creation, the center of the universe. This is why there is so much talk about devotion in the spiritual process. Devotion arises when you hold something or someone else as more important than you. When you hold something or someone as far more important than yourself, involvement is a natural process.
People experience this to some extent when they fall in love with someone. Initially, it is all about that person. But after some time, it is all about you, and about how to use that person for your benefit. Then what was an exhilarating experience becomes entanglement.
When you think you are the center of the universe, you are expecting the universe to be involved with you, not the other way around. The universe is already deeply involved in keeping you alive every moment. If the universe was not involved with you, you would be dead.
The air that you breathe, the planet that you sit on, the water that you drink, everything is keeping you alive. Something around you or within you is keeping you alive. Pay attention to that. If someone held you by the throat, you would pay attention and be absolutely involved with your breath. Right now, involvement comes to you only in extreme moments of pain and danger. If you ignore life, it will bypass you.
A simple breath you take is life-giving. Just a lungful of breath is keeping you alive right now. This is a fantastic, magical phenomenon. But you think it is worth ignoring because you are so self-engrossed in your own thoughts and emotions that there is no way to be involved with anything else.
Without consuming alcohol or drugs, without doing anything, you can be ecstatic. This is a possibility that you must explore. There is something within you which is capable of fantastic things, but you have blocked it right now. It is time to work on that. Our Bhava Spandana program could show you that possibility.
It is worth exploring yourself. But most people open up in installments – they reach a certain peak and then start to withdraw in installments. They choose to become less and less open as time goes by because someone said or did this or that. Such things are a problem because you have remained a limited entity that feels threatened at every point. The more it feels threatened, the more the defense mechanism increases.
There are two fundamental dimensions within a human being: the instinct of self-preservation and the longing to expand limitlessly. Which one are you going to empower? Only if you empower the longing to expand limitlessly, will everything we do make sense to you. If you are trying to concretize your limitations, everything will be against you, or at least it will seem like that in your experience.
Bhava Spandana is not a complete process – it is like a trampoline. When you jump high enough, you can see across the wall. It gives you a view, but you cannot go across the wall with Bhava Spandana. We believe that if you see what is across the wall, you will slowly build a ladder and get across the wall one day. This ladder is Inner Engineering. That is why it is so unattractive – it is all logical. You climb one rung after another. Eventually, you will get across the wall. But the problem is you stand on the third rung, and you think you made it. You do not want to climb every day. Either you remain stagnant or come down.
Bhava Spandana just gives you a view, which seems exciting, but it does not take you anywhere. If you want to know how to get across the wall, there is a system. The system will not be so exciting, but if you build a staircase or a ladder, you will go across.
You need to make the fundamental principles of Inner Engineering a reality in your day-to-day life. If you implement every aspect of Inner Engineering in your life, it will open up the doorway and slowly, things will happen. It will naturally happen for each person at their own pace because it is a complete path by itself.
