There are only two kinds of people in the world says Sadhguru, mystics and mistakes. A mystic is one who perceives life in a way that is beyond logic. Sadhguru explains that logic can fit into life but life cannot fit into logic. Nothing wrong in being a mistake, he says, but not realising you are a mistake is the biggest mistake.

Full Transcript:

Sadhguru: What’s a mystic? (Laughs) There are only two kinds of people in the world, mystics and mistakes. (Laughter) If your perception has made a mistake you're a mistake. If your perception has gone beyond the mistakes and beginning to see life just the way it is then you are a mystic, to put it very simply. If you're seeing everything just the way it is, you are a mystic in the world’s eyes. If there is large mistakes in your perception, you're a mistake. Am I being too cruel to you? Am I being too cruel to you? If you want me to tell pretty things I can say, I'm capable. I can say nice things about people but if you want to know, the sooner you knock out all the nonsense in you the better it is. If you're… if you're genuine, wanting to know then you must knock out all the nonsense today, not tomorrow. If your perception is changing at different times of your life, obviously what you did yesterday or how you saw life yesterday was a mistake. What you was (are) doing now is the right thing. But suppose this changes tomorrow, this was a mistake, tomorrow is the right thing - isn't this happening all the time? So, there's a whole big mistake about the way we are perceiving life. When it gets corrected people think you're a mystic because you're beginning to perceive things which… you're beginning to perceive life in such a way that you can never fit it into logic, its way beyond logic. Logic is just a small part of your life, you can never fit life into it. You can fit logic into your life but never life into logic.

When your experience of life has transcended the limitations of the sense perception then you would be known as a mystic, because you can make things happen… you're experiencing life but that others will not know, but you can make things happen in a way that others cannot understand, so they call you a mystic, which means they are admitting they are a mistake. (Laughs) Nothing wrong in being a mistake, but not realizing the mistake is the biggest mistake. Because when we were born, our sense organs naturally opened up because that is needed for survival. Whatever is needed for survival were opened up the moment you were born. I want you to know this, when you were in your mother’s womb, though you had eyes you could not see. Though you had ears you could not hear - otherwise you would know how it is inside. Only after you were born, at the moment of birth your sense organs got opened up because that’s necessary for your survival outside. That was not necessary for your survival in the womb. Only to survive in the world the sense organs are a must, so they opened up. But anything that is beyond survival if it has to open up it takes a little bit of striving. For example, suppose let’s say when you were born as an infant, you were left in a forest and you never came in touch with human societies. If something edible arrived in front of you, you would take this and stuff it into your ears? Is that so? Somebody is saying yes - they’ve been attending lot of spiritual discourses, they have learned to say yes, yes, yes, to everything. Would you stuff it into your ears? You would know where to put this, isn't it? But would you know how to read, how to write, how to speak a language, would you know? No. That took some striving. Today, language is just flowing out of you like this but I want you to go back when you were two-three years of age. They asked you to write that damn A or Aa - oh, what a complicated nonsense this was! You wrote it a thousand times to get it. Isn't it so? Yes or no? Just the alphabet A, how many times did you write it before you got it right? Hundreds of times, isn't it? Because of that striving, today (gestures) it flows like that.

So, anything that is beyond survival doesn’t open up for you unless you strive. All the religions, all the spiritual traditions that you see on the planet are just this striving. Unfortunately over a period of time transmitting it from generation to generation, generation to generation, things get twisted out and end up being just a heap of rituals and belief systems. Otherwise every one of them started off as human striving to know, human striving to experience, human striving to create well-being for himself; somewhere it gets twisted out. Everybody who is a mistake is a potential mystic. If you're not a mistake then you're a lost case, you're a fanatic. (Laughs) You think you're absolutely right on everything, you’ve become fanatical. If you know that you're a mistake then you're a potential mystic.