Sadhguru, Isha Foundation
The first and most fundamental responsibility for every person is to become a joyous human being. Because no matter what you are pursuing in life, whether business, money, family or spirituality, it is just an attempt to be happy. You have always understood that to be happy means you must be able to do what you want to do, what you want to achieve in the outside world. Being happy and peaceful is considered the ultimate aspect of a successful life, but it is really the most fundamental aspect of life. Being well means to be peaceful and happy. The level of happiness and peace may vary from person to person but what all people are aiming for is to feel happy. Some are conscious about it, some are not, but the fundamental goal of every single action a person performs is to be well, to be happy in his life.
In many ways people’s happiness is dependent on the external situation. When you are dependent on external situations, you will never know true joy in your life, because you will never have absolute control over the outside. When you seek happiness through your action, you are always enslaved to the external. When you are enslaved, you will always be in some level of suffering. It does not matter what a person has, he will still long to have something else all the time. Until a man finds the inner basis of happiness, he will always live as a beggar.
Whatever you understand or experience as happiness, or love, or peace in your life has a certain inner basis. Today if you lose your mental peace your doctor will give you a pill. These chemicals enter your system and make you peaceful, maybe for just a little while. Or in other words, what you call as peace is a certain kind of chemistry within you. Similarly what you call as joy, as love, as suffering or fear, every human experience has a chemical basis within you. The spiritual process is just to create the right kind of chemistry where you are naturally peaceful, naturally joyous. When you are joyous by your own nature, then the very dimension of your life, the very way you perceive and express yourself in the world will change. The very way you experience your life will change naturally.
Please see, your life will not attain fulfillment by some action. In every state of life you thought, ‘If this happens, my life will be complete.’ You got that and three days later threw it into the dustbin. Life did not attain fulfillment. Fulfillment will not come because of some event or some action. Only if your inner nature is complete, you will attain fulfillment. The whole process of yoga is to make your interiority absolutely in your control. It is a possibility to move from a state of external enslavement to inner completeness, which is the state of unboundedness. If your inner nature is unbounded, your life is also unbounded. You can either sit with your eyes closed or you can perform different action – both ways your life can be complete. When a man has reached this state within himself, where his actions are only to the extent required for outer life situations, then he is a complete person. If within you, your inner nature has attained fulfillment regardless of the external situation, we can say that you have become unbounded. This is a state of true happiness.
First we need to know that the basis of our misery is that we have established ourselves in untruth. We are deeply identified with that which we are not. Somewhere along the way we have gotten identified with things around us. We have got identified with our body and mind. That is the source of suffering. Spirituality is simply the process of disidentifying with what we are not, to shed the layers of conditioning so that we know what we are NOT. When that is completed, we arrive at something that cannot be discounted. This discovery will be the recognition of divinity, and we will see that there is no reason for misery in the world.
(Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic,
visionary and bestselling author. He was conferred the Padma
Vibhushan in 2017 for exceptional and distinguished service)