Is it possible to live fully without getting caught up in our identities? Sadhguru challenges our fundamental understanding of the arrangements we make in life. He reveals how excessive identification – even in our closest relationships – can lead to suffering, suggesting instead a shift towards a conscious alignment with the fundamental intelligence that underlies all creation.
Question: Sadhguru, you asked us to drop our identities or get rid of them. Does this mean that we should all become brahmacharis? How can one be married and not be identified with their spouse? What's the way for householders to attain?
Sadhguru: Are you trying to find a way out of your marriage and want me to help you?
How can you live sensibly with anyone if you are overly identified with something or the other? This is why most wonderful relationships turn into hell after some time: you are so horribly identified that you have forgotten why you came together. The identity of that relationship has become bigger than the purpose of the relationship.
Being here without identity does not mean you have to be given a title. If you look at brahmachari as a title, you are also badly identified. Only others should say you are a brahmachari – you should simply be.
Brahmacharya means you are on the path of the Divine. It means you do not have an agenda of your own. You want to go by the Creator’s plan. A brahmachari has realized that their own plans do not seem to take them anywhere, just round and round. They think, “If the Creator could make all this, if I go by his plan, definitely he will render me somewhere else.” A brahmachari lives in that trust.
No matter what arrangements you have made in your life, trusting the Creator’s plan is the best way to live because your own intelligence is insufficient to cause a dimensional shift in your life. Your intelligence may be good enough to survive in this dimension and do a little better than someone else. Maybe you have a little more money, wealth, or whatever else. But that is not good enough.
Because your intelligence is of this dimension, it is not good enough to penetrate and transcend it. To transcend this dimension, you have to go with the intelligence that is the basis of all dimensions and that which is not. If you place yourself in its hands, you will flow. This intelligence is everywhere – outside and inside, it is the same.
Even in this dimension, you cannot conduct the activity of your kidneys; it is too complicated for this brain. When this is the state of most human beings, a few of them realized that there is no point in them going round and round, doing their own thing, and they became brahmacharis. They have come to understand that this is not as simple as it seems; now they are striving to become like that.
Some are married to a man or woman. Some are married to their wealth, cars, or homes. Different people are married to different things. The brahmacharis may slowly get married to the Yoga Center. On a physical level, everyone makes arrangements. Brahmacharis also made an arrangement here. It is a simpler, less complicated arrangement, but they are not without an arrangement.
Your marriage, relationships, work, career, wealth, or whatever else are arrangements. Arrangements are made to enhance or facilitate our lives, not to restrict and destroy them. If we know this much, whatever arrangements we have chosen are okay if you can make them work. If they are not working, you should know what to do.
Remember that all arrangements are made with the hope and intention to enhance your life, not to entangle it. And do not think that if you are married, you must be identified. It is not because of identity that it is beautiful. It will turn ugly only because of identity. Will it work better if you are conscious that this is an arrangement we have made to enhance and beautify our lives? Or will it work better if you get horribly identified? Only if you are conscious will it work better.
