The Buddha’s turning point

The story of Gautama, as Sadhguru told it, begins with a father’s fear. A sage had prophesied that the prince would become either a great emperor or a great sage. The king chose insulation – comfort, beauty, an early marriage. Then one day the prince stepped outside and encountered an old man, a sick man, and a funeral procession. He came home and couldn’t unknow what he had seen. “Once you go there,” Sadhguru said, “it’s a point of no return.”

Years of severe sadhana followed. And then, on this Purnima, Gautama attained. Sadhguru described the arc of the seeker’s journey with a teaching often attributed to the Buddha:

“When you’re ignorant, rivers are just rivers, mountains are just mountains, trees are just trees, wind is just wind, water is just water. But once you’re on the path, rivers are not just rivers, mountains are not just mountains, wind is not just wind, water is not just water. But when you attain, once again, rivers are just rivers, mountains are just mountains, wind is just wind, water is just water, trees are just trees.”

War and the survival mind

The conversation turned to war. Sadhguru spoke with the specificity of someone who has spent time with people who have been in it. Violence, he said, conditions the mind to remain constantly alert to danger.

Soldiers who come back to the barracks after days in dangerous situations often struggle, he said. The mind remains on high alert. Where there is no real threat, it begins to create its own.

“Essentially, we are hyping up the survival instinct, but with spiritual process, we’re trying to lower the survival instinct and activate the longing to expand.”

He noted that military budgets are rising across every nation. “Battle is not glorious, it’s gory.” The world, he suggested, is moving in exactly the direction that makes spiritual process more necessary.

Youth, energy, and living fully

He turned, finally, to the young. In affluent societies, he said, young people are not short of energy – they are living out someone else’s script. The right car, the right house, the right sequence of life events. Anxiety about jobs that machines might one day take.

“Life is zest, everywhere you look at it, isn’t it? And you think you need to create zest? No. You just have to be life.”

He told the story of a farm in Tamil Nadu where certain trees hadn’t flowered in years. The owner wanted to cut them down. Sadhguru asked him to wait. A seven-day program was held on the farm. By the end of it, the trees were in bloom. Every living cell on the planet, he said, shares the same basic composition – carbon life, from a bacterium to a human being. “The only goddamn thing you need to do with this life is that it’s full-fledged and it’s free-flowing.”