How to Become Aware?

Question: What can I do to make myself aware?

Sadhguru: So how to become aware? What is this awareness? Awareness is on many different levels. What you are aware of is all that exists for you. This must be understood. Right now you are sitting here – don’t turn back and see – right now, there is a huge dinosaur standing behind you, but you are not aware of it. Does it exist for you? No. So it does not matter that such a huge animal is standing there, you are not aware of it, so it does not exist for you. Only what you are aware of exists for you. Right now, your awareness is limited to a small aspect of your life. The whole aspect of spirituality means to become aware of everything that you are, so that before you go, you know life, you experience life in its totality. To live and to live totally, that is spirituality. So that you know life in all dimensions, you do not go just knowing a little part of your life. You want to know all of it.

So, if you want to know all of it, how to know? If we have to use an analogy, let us say we turn down the voltage for the lights. Now let us say just one light is there. It just lights up only so much, and only that much we see. If you turn up the voltage, suddenly you are able to see much more because the light has spread. Awareness is just like this. Right now, your energies, your body, your emotion, your mind, everything is functioning with a certain limited voltage. You crank up the voltage, suddenly you start seeing so many things which were not in your experience until that moment.

In a way, to put it very simply, to put it technically, you need to turn up your voltage. You can turn up your voltage simply with your enthusiasm, but that will not take you all the way. There are other kinds of technologies to turn up your voltage in a certain way where all the time you are high.

See, within myself right now, I am absolutely drunk. Not with alcohol, okay? I never touched it. I am totally drunk within myself. Am I balanced enough and logical enough to handle any situation? Yes? So all the time I am fully drunk on one level, on another level I am perfectly sane. If I want to flip, any moment I will flip. If you are like this – inside you are fully charged, outside you are control – this is what is needed in your life if you want to experience life in its totality. You try to exercise control over your life, and you started putting this control over your very process of life, so life is happening like a trickle. Life within you should happen like a huge explosion, but outside it is fully controlled. You will see initially when you go into a phase like this, even the outside tends to happen like an explosion for some time, but within a limited period of time you will gather some control over it. Outside is controlled, inside is an explosion. That is how it should be. Every moment of your life, within you life should be an absolute explosion. Outside of you it is properly controlled. When it is like this, you will get to use your physical body, your mind, your emotion everything that you have to its fullest extent. Things that you never thought you were capable of, suddenly you start doing simply because your voltage is full.

Editor's Note: Excerpted from Life and Death in One Breath
Available in Epub and Mobi formats, Life and Death in One Breath is Isha’s first e-book. In this book, with his extraordinary insights coming from a profound inner experience, Sadhguru reveals that life and death are in fact two sides of the same coin. It is only by embracing both that we can break the shackles of our self-made struggles and be set free.