Dhyanalinga: Sowing the Seed of Spiritual Liberation

Q: Your teaching is so powerful Sadhguru, so why the need for Dhyanalinga?

Sadhguru: We can teach or impart things to you in many different ways. People come to me in different ways. Some come as investigators, some as students, some as disciples and some as devotees. Investigators want to find out what is wrong. There is nothing wrong, but they want to find out what is wrong – they are not interested in learning. Many investigators came and quite a few of them have slowly evolved into devotees today.

The “Gathering Need”

Students come because they want to learn, they want to pick up something. I call the investigators shit-pickers. They always come to pick the dirtiest out of any situation. They want to pick out what is wrong. Students are also pickers but they want to pick out what is good. This is an old habit from the hunting and gathering days. Man has been gathering, gathering, and gathering, either things, people or knowledge. The need to gather has come because there is a sense of inadequacy and incompleteness. You want to gather something all the time, maybe money, maybe wealth, maybe relationships, maybe knowledge.

People who gather knowledge always think they are better than people who gather money or things, but it is not so. It is just a question of taste – somebody likes toast for breakfast, somebody likes masala dosa, somebody likes a whole meal in the morning. Everybody is gathering whatever is dominant in them.

Socially, one thing is held superior to the other, but actually, gathering knowledge is so much more entangling than gathering money, wealth, people or anything else. Knowledge is the most entangling thing, because the way you think and feel are the deepest attachment within you. People have always thought renunciation means to leave your wife or husband. But the deepest attachment is to your own ways of thinking and feeling. If your ways of thinking and feeling are threatened, you are willing to leave your child, husband, wife, father, mother, anybody. Your own ways of thinking and feeling, that is where the trap is. So gathering knowledge is not any better, but students want to gather knowledge, that is their way.

The third kind who comes is the disciple. The disciple has come to transform himself, he wants to become something other than what he is right now; a pretty good beginning, but a devotee is not interested in all this. He just wants to dissolve. He does not want to exist as himself anymore, he wants to become one with everything. These are the four ways that you can come here.

Transforming Body, Mind, Energy

Depending upon who you are and what your requirements are, we start imparting things in so many different ways. We can transform your body. Every day in the morning, you bend and twist. If you do yoga asanas for six months, you will see, suddenly you are so much more peaceful and healthier. You will see an enormous change in your body and mind, simply because you are doing simple physical asanas. Let us say you practice for six months or one year, and give it up for another six months, then you will be back to square one. If we transform your mind, if you live in awareness for the next six months, there will be a huge change in you, but if in the next two years you live in unawareness, you will be back to square one. The next thing we are trying to transform is your prana or vital energies with kriyas. You practice for six months and you give them up for the next five years, you will be once again back to square one. This period may vary from person to person, depending upon their lifestyles, karmic situations and other aspects.

But if you can impress or imprint something into the etheric body, a substance which is beyond the pranic or the physical energies, you can never destroy it. It is not in your hands anymore. That is what an initiation means. An initiation is not just a set of instructions. So much elaborate care is taken to initiate you into a few minutes of meditation, hoping that you will be in the right level of receptivity and receive this. The seed of it, once it falls into you, you cannot destroy. It does not matter what you do, even if you live the worst possible life, you cannot destroy the seed. If you create a conducive atmosphere, it grows and flowers. If you do not, it will wait.

The Seed of Spiritual Liberation

Have you seen how in summer everything seems to be dry? When you look at the land, it looks so hopeless. Probably a long summer looks like the end of life. But when a few drops of rain come, do you see how it all springs up? They are all waiting. One drop and immediately they are up. Similarly, once something is implanted into your etheric body, you cannot destroy it. That is what an initiation means. That is why so much care is taken about it.

If I have to initiate people like this, I can initiate only a limited number of people at the same time. So we created a device – I would call it a tool. Dhyanalinga is a tool. Sitting in the space of the Dhyanalinga for a while, you start as a devotee, which has a tremendous advantage over Isha Yoga programs. It starts from the other end, which cannot be influenced by the outer situation. If you transform your spiritual body, you will see that this transformation is permanent. Once you are in the sphere of the Dhyanalinga, the seed of spiritual liberation is sown into you. Whether you are willing or not, a believer or non-believer, whether you have come to investigate or surrender, it does not matter. When people sit in this space, this impression will definitely happen, knowingly or unknowingly.

This seed will wait. If the person creates a conducive atmosphere, it will flower very quickly; if he does not, it will wait. It will wait ten lifetimes or hundreds of lifetimes, but you cannot destroy it. This is why we have put so much effort into creating the Dhyanalinga. This transformation works within you on a different level altogether – one which cannot be destroyed, cannot be undone.

After we are gone, what Isha Yoga will become, we do not know. We are taking a lot of care to see that distortions do not happen. We are demanding tremendous discipline and dedication from the teachers. We are putting very hard conditions on them so that distortions are not made. But if whatever Gautama Buddha said or Krishna said can be distorted in a thousand years, what I have said will also definitely be distorted. The Dhyanalinga is the shakthi moola for that – it cannot be distorted. If the whole of Isha Yoga is distorted, it does not matter. If you just go and sit in front of the Dhyanalinga, everything that needs to happen will happen experientially, without saying a word – that is the nature of the Dhyanalinga. Even if a person who does not know anything about meditation comes and sits there, he will become meditative by his own nature. That is the quality of the Dhyanalinga. That is the kind of tool it is.

It has taken an enormous effort to create it. It took three lifetimes for me. It is very hard for you to believe this. It will sound too unbelievable if I tell you the whole saga of what it took to make it happen. People who have been around me have seen all that has happened. That is the nature of this tool. If we go on teaching in the current way, with the kind of safeguards we are creating, we can never reach enough people. So the Dhyanalinga is to just hasten this process. That is why in our eagerness to share, we have created this.

Editor’s Note: June 24 at the Isha Yoga Center will witness the 18^th anniversary of the Dhyanalinga Consecration. Join us for the live audio streaming of the chants that will be offered to Dhyanalinga.

“Mystic’s Musings” includes more of Sadhguru’s insights on the science and significance of Dhyanalinga. Read the free sample or purchase the ebook.