Sadhguru speaks at the third Bharatiya Chhatra Sansad (Indian Student Parliament) and looks at how Indian culture was crafted as a culture oriented towards mukti or liberation. This was a culture of seeking, not belief he tells us. This is the thread that held this diverse subcontinent together.

Full Transcript:

Sadhguru: I happened to be in Tel Aviv. I was supposed to speak to a group of people and I was to arrive there at noon time and address them but because of some delays in the flight, I landed at six o’clock. Six-thirty is my talk. This is thirty years of Isha; in these thirty years, I’ve not been late to a single appointment till now. (Applause) So, I didn’t want to break that. So, from the airport, I went straight. So I discovered when I went there, I was to speak in a restaurant. You eat in a restaurant. (Laughs) Some restaurants are famous for food, some are famous for the ambience that they set, but some are famous for the conversations that happen in the restaurant. So, it seems in Tel Aviv, the most intelligent conversations happened in this restaurant and not in the parliament. I went there. People were greeting me and one man came and said ‘Shalom.’ I said, ‘What does that mean?’ He said, ‘This means… This is the highest way of greeting.’ I said, ‘That is your opinion, but what does it mean?’ He said, ‘It means peace, this is the highest way of greeting.’ I said, ‘Why would peace be the highest way of greeting unless you are born in Middle East?’ In South India, if somebody comes up to me in the morning and says ‘Peace’, I’ll ask him, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Whatever you’re deprived of becomes the highest thing. If you are deprived of food, that becomes the highest thing. If you are deprived of love, that becomes the highest thing. If all these things are taken care of, one thing that a human being will always long for is to be free from everything. To be free essentially means, to move from a compulsive nature of existence to a conscious nature of existence. This is what is needed right now in our country as a nation.

We evolved a system as to how to develop an individual human being. We never evolved a system as to how to develop a society. This system we called as ‘samskriti’. Today, this word is being dismissed as culture. It is not culture, ‘sam’ means equanimous, ‘kriti’ means ‘to do’; to do life in an equanimous manner. Another meaning for ‘sam’ is exuberance. Another meaning for ‘sam’ is well; to do your life in an equanimous way… in an exuberant way and doing it well. If you do this, everything around you will be okay. Today, we’re trying to impose moral codes upon our society. You need to understand, India is a society without morality because we always relied on stirring up our humanity rather than depending upon the morality. The morality of one person is an obscenity for another person. So, we’ve always had means and ways and tools as to how to stir up the humanity within us and that humanity has been the basis of this nation. It is that fundamental human longing to become free which has been the main thread, which is holding all these multiple cultures together as one nation. Though we, you know, we are being… it is being propagated like India was born in 1947, no… The other cultures everywhere in the world experience this as one nation for thousands of years. Even though there were many political entities, many times over hundred entities… in spite of that, people saw it as Bharat, because they saw these unique people who did not believe in anything particular, who had no moral sense but they were perfectly on the track because they were not a bundle of morality but an effervescent humanity. This has to be brought back into India because when you are a seeker, you are not in collision with anybody. When you are a seeker, there is a certain humility about you because you have not assumed anything. You can become a seeker only when you realize the immensity of ‘I do not know.’ If you realize the immensity that you do not know so many things about the existence… With so much science and technology, we still cannot figure one single atom in its entirety - that is the reality of our existence.