Sadhguru is an Indian Yogi. So, although he’s obviously a very wise man, he has a completely different way of looking at the world from most Westerners. He thinks differently, looks at the world differently and just comes at things from a different direction than Western self-help gurus like Jordan Peterson, Tony Robbins, or Jim Rohn. Of course, that’s one of the things that makes the quotes you are about to read especially valuable.
Oftentimes, it’s the smart idea that comes out of leftfield or is phrased in a different way that resonates with us and helps us change our lives. Open your mind to these quotes. Read them again if you don’t quite get some of them the first time. After all, they are meant to challenge the way people are meant to think. They also may be just THE thing you need to change your life for the better.
25) “A journalist recently asked me, ‘Do you agree that life is suffering?’ I asked him, ‘If you had a choice, what would you want your life to be: suffering or bliss?’ He immediately replied, ‘Bliss, of course.’ Ultimately, life is neither suffering nor bliss. It is what you want it to be. Life has no inherent quality whatsoever. The choice is always yours. The volition is always yours.”
24) “Suppose none of us had legs—we would all be crawling around quite okay. It is because most people have legs that we believe that one who doesn’t will suffer. If no one had eyes, we would not consider blindness a problem. But now comparing oneself to someone else is the problem.”
23) “When pain, misery, or anger happen, it is time to look within you, not around you.”
22) “The fact is that people make their own lives and societies write their own self-destructive narratives, but we then try to pass the buck to God or destiny. That may be convenient, but it is a foolish and immature way to exist.”
21) “This is why, as a guru, I never bless people with the wish that their dreams should come true. Since dreams are simply based on memory, you can dream only of a more magnified and more improved version of what you already know! If your dreams come true, there is nothing terribly special about that. My wish is that your dreams should be shattered. Only then will something larger than memory manifest in your life. May something you could never dream of happen to you.”
20) “In other words, karma is like old software that you have written for yourself unconsciously. Depending on the type of physical, mental, and energetic actions you perform, you write your software. Once that software is written, your whole system functions accordingly. Based on the information from the past, certain memory patterns keep recurring. Now your life turns habitual, repetitive, and cyclical. Over time, you become ensnared by your patterns. Like so many people, you probably don’t know why certain situations keep recurring in your inner and outer life. This is because these patterns are unconscious. As time goes on, you turn into a puppet of your accumulated past.”
19) “Most people will grow only with pain, not with pleasure. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the truth. Generally, people only go down with pleasure. They don’t go up with pleasure. Please see, the quality of a human being is like this: when life offers more and more pleasures to a man, he doesn’t grow. He goes down. In terms of the real quality of a human being, only when suffering comes, when pain comes, does a man stand up as a human being.”
18) “How much money, how much comfort, does one actually need to live joyfully? Never before have people been as comfortable as they are today. The kinds of comforts and conveniences that even royalty did not have a hundred years ago are available to ordinary people. Yet, it cannot be said that we are happier than our ancestors. Once money becomes part of your identity, a certain fear and discomfort comes along with it, no matter how much money you might have. This is not an intelligent way to live. The very thing that was supposed to bring you comfort and the hope of living happily turns against you. We may succeed in creating outwardly perfect lives, but the true quality of our lives is based on our interiority.”
17) “As karmic bondage builds up, you will naturally try to draw smaller and smaller circles around yourself. At the age of eighteen, most people draw large circles; by the age of seventy, the circles shrink, and people find that they can get along with only a few. By drawing karmic circles, you determine the boundaries of your responsibility. As you keep shrinking these boundaries, you are heading straight toward depression. And yet the human problem is that you are constantly labeling your bondage as freedom! ...When you were eighteen, it looked like you could grow in so many different ways. But as you grew older, it slowly seemed like choices were shrinking. It felt like there was only one way for you to be. As the karmic substance increases in volume, the discerning mind becomes almost useless, because you now work largely by habits, patterns, and cycles.”
16) “Miracles are always within the laws of nature, but those laws are not now on your current level of perception. They involve something that is happening, genuinely happening, though you are not able to understand or grasp how. You see the result, but you are unable to see the process.”
15) “Most people want to rule the world. It is just that because they are half-hearted that they end up ruling only their households! They may not have the capacity, the intensity, the one-pointed focus that is necessary to rule the world. But secretly they wish they could. What makes a tyrant different is that their self-image is powerful. They might believe so strongly that they are going to rule the world that sometimes it almost comes true! This is something many human beings have yet to discover for themselves: that if they create a continuous mental focus toward a particular self-image, it will, in fact, come true.”
14) “The body can become a means for your spiritual growth or it can become a barrier. Let’s suppose some part of your body—your hand, leg, or back, for instance—is in pain. When the pain is acute, it is hard to aspire to anything higher because that pain becomes dominant in your life. Right now if you have a backache, the biggest issue in the universe is your back. Other people may not understand that, but for you, that is the biggest issue. Even if God appears before you, you will plead for your backache to go away! You will not ask for anything else because the physical body has such power over you. When it doesn’t function as it should, it can rob your life of every other aspiration. All your longings just disappear once the body is in pain. To experience pain and still look beyond it takes an enormous amount of strength, which most people do not possess.”
13) “With the same material that we build huge buildings today, initially people were building little huts. We thought we could only dig mud and make pots or bricks out of it. Now we dig the earth and make computers, cars, and even spacecrafts out of it. It is the same material; we have just started using it for higher and higher possibilities. Our inner energies are similar. There is a whole technology of how to use this energy for higher possibilities. Every human being must explore and know this. Otherwise, our lives become very limited and accidental.”
12) “Sex is natural; it is there in the body. Sexuality is something you invented; it is psychological. If sex is in the body, it is fine, it is beautiful. The moment it enters your mind, it becomes a perversion – it has no business with your mind. Sex is a small aspect of you, but today it has become huge. For many, it has become life itself.”
11) “Resentment, anger, jealousy, pain, hurt, and depression are poisons that you drink but expect someone else to die. Life does not work that way. Most people take lifetimes to understand this simple truth.”
10) “When unpleasant things happen in our lives, we can become either wise or wounded – that is our choice.”
9) “The planet is teeming with seven billion people, but people are lonely! If someone enjoys being alone, there is no problem at all. But most people are suffering because of it! They are going through serious psychological problems as a consequence. If you are lonely, it is because you have chosen to become an island unto yourself.”
8) “If terrible things have happened to you, you ought to have grown wise. If the worst possible events have befallen you, you should be the wisest of the lot. But instead of growing wise, most people become wounded. In a state of conscious response, it is possible to use every life situation—however ugly—as an opportunity for growth. But if you habitually think, “I am the way I am because of someone else,” you are using life situations merely as an opportunity for self-destruction or stagnation.”
7) “The rub is that memory is not just a glue. It is also a boundary. It offers you form and definition, but over time, that very form becomes a limitation, and the definition becomes a wall. You are gradually fettered by the definitions you seek to acquire. You joyfully celebrate these definitions—perhaps of family, clan, tribe, class, gender, religion, culture, language—but over time these definitions harden into rigid markers of identity. Before you know it, you have crafted your own prison. Whether gilded or iron-barred, a cage is still a cage. The tragedy is that you are imprisoned by walls of your own making. These are walls and bars you have erected unconsciously, and which now do not allow you to escape. You are the builder, but you have now imprisoned yourself in your own home. Your creation that was a source of sanctuary and identity has now turned into a carapace. You have spun such a cocoon of confinement around yourself that now you cannot fly free. You have become your own jailer.”
6) “It is important to see that whatever seems determined in your life has been determined by you unconsciously. You have written your own software. Depending on the way you have written your software, that is the way you think, that is the way you feel, that is the way you act, and that is what you invite into your life. Depending on the kind of “fragrance” you emit, you attract life situations. Some people seem to constantly attract pleasant situations; others seem to constantly attract unpleasant ones. Or perhaps you see this in different phases in your life. In some phases, wonderful things seem to keep happening; in others, adverse circumstances keep recurring. Now, this simply depends on what you have in your karmic reservoir. Today you have rotten fish, so you attract some terrible situations; tomorrow you have flowers, so you attract better situations. One thing that we are trying to change through yoga (and hopefully, this book) is the kind of fragrance you throw out into the world.”
5) “The dead are trying to live through you in a host of different ways. Make no mistake about it. Look at your own life, or at the lives of those around you. For many people, having children is a way of immortalizing their genetic material, a way of ensuring that they live on after their time. This is their legacy—one that they hope will live on for posterity. So do not underestimate your ancestors either! They are also trying to live through you. This is the self-perpetuating nature of genetic memory. We owe a great deal to our ancestors. But if we are to live on this planet as independent full-fledged lives—not as puppets of our forebears—we must first find ways of becoming individuals.”
4) “The solar cycle is a period of 4,356 days (nearly 12 years). Someone who lives according to the solar cycle leads a life of great health, well-being, alignment, and minimal friction. As the length of a karmic cycle decreases, life becomes progressively more unbalanced. If your life runs in three- or six-month cycles, you are in a serious state of psychological imbalance. The same inner upheavals or life situations will keep recurring every few months. If your life is determined by a twenty-eight-day cycle—the lunar cycle, which is also the shortest one—you could well be considered deranged or psychotic.”
3) “You have the choice and ability to be any way you want in a given moment. That is the freedom and the curse. Most human beings are suffering their freedom.”
2) “Whether you go after sex, money, or love, boundlessness is what you are looking for. When a large part of you is still unconscious, the longing remains and you do not find the fulfillment, the ultimate. If boundlessness is what you are looking for, why not approach it directly?”
1) “It is easier to change your thinking than to change the world. Changing your thinking will definitely change the world.”
Wow, number 21, "my wish is that your dreams be shattered," now that is hard to swallow. I dream often of heaven and of life eternal in a glorified body, based on what I've read in the Bible. I do NOT want that (call it what you will, maybe my "plan") to be shattered; is it different from what the Yogi is talking about because it involves accepting a gift offered to us by our creator? I guess this is one of the reasons I avoid quotes from leaders of other religions, Christ warns us to avoid man's philosophy. That said, I found some of the other observations that he made to be interesting and eye-opening. Thanks for posting this, John.
This was great! A new or fresh perspective brings clarity for me, and I appreciate that so much!