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With Shiva, New York, NY (2025)

04/13/2023

Stillness.

If we do not handle the sadhana, which means the action part of our life, properly, our life will not be of much consequence. This does not mean one should aspire to leave a footprint on the planet. Those who were trying to leave footprints, if they did, it becomes obvious that they could never fly. It is not about leaving footprints.

Not geographical spots but human beings should become centers of yoga.

This phase is important for Shiva because he is known for his dancing, but more significantly for his stillness. This is a phase that supports that stillness.

There is perfection in our existence only when we know how to be absolutely still.

Otherwise, you dance, you sing, all this is nice – but how long? Any activity is bound by time. Only in stillness, time has no impact on you. There are various ways to look at why this is so. Shiva means that which is not, which means it is eternally still – Sadashiva. Initially, you can bring this stillness into you by being immobile. Later on, you can be in a flurry of activity and still be absolutely still. Your activity will be an expression of your stillness, not of your compulsiveness. Everything you do will come from this stillness.

You must bring this stillness into your family, into your home. Everything that grows in a space of stillness, including your children, will be of a different quality altogether. Stillness and exuberance are the nature of existence. This is the nature of yoga, the nature of creation, and the nature of what we refer to as Shiva – still but tremendously vibrant. In some sense, even modern science is beginning to recognize that the most dynamic dimension of creation seems to be nothingness. It is possible for every human being to become like this that after you sat somewhere, the place will exhibit an exuberant form of stillness.

When you say “Shiva,” you won’t have to look up. When you say “Shiva,” naturally your eyes will close, because it is all here. That is how far a human being can go. Instead of being a creature, you can become the source of creation. But without Devotion and Sadhana, it doesn’t happen.

This is the time to bring stillness into your life.

04/11/2023

karma is not your enemy. Your unawareness of what is what, is your enemy.

Karma means action or the imprint of action which remains within us. The actions that your father performed are working and kicking up within you not just in your situation, but within every cell in your body. It is not so easy to get rid of your parents! You may have noticed that when you were eighteen or twenty, you completely rebelled against your father or your mother, but by the time you are forty or forty-five, you begin to speak like them, act like them, and even look like them. That is a hopeless way to live because if this generation is going to behave, act, live and experience life just the way the previous generation did, this is a wasted generation. This generation should experience life in a way the previous generation never even imagined. I don’t mean you should do something crazy on the street, I mean the way you experience life can be completely altered. It can be taken to the next level of experience.

The Primal Scream

If I tell you, “You don’t need to do anything, we will take care of you. Just sit and meditate twelve hours a day,” initially it may look like a great fortune, but after a month’s time, you will be going nuts. If you cross that madness, you will cross everything, but most people give up when the madness arises within them. They will freak and try to run away because it is not going to be easy. This is a primal cry of your father, your grandfather, your forefathers and the goddamn bacteria. Millions of lives, all of them will scream to find expression. They want to have their say. They will not let you go free just like that. You cannot ignore them because they throb in every cell in your body.

“Does it mean to say I am hopelessly entangled?” Entangled for sure, but not hopelessly. From being a pashupata – a composite expression of animal nature, starting from that single-celled animal to the highest one – there is a possibility of becoming a pashupati. “Pashu” means life, “pati” means the Lord, the Lord of all life – one can leave all this behind and transcend.

04/11/2023

From Involuntary to Voluntary

One aspect of yoga is to take all those things which are involuntary, into our conscious or voluntary action. Your breath, your heart beat, your liver function – these are involuntary or compulsive actions. Everything that is vital to the system is compulsive or involuntary because nature did not trust you. If any of the organs that are vital to your system were a voluntary process, you might do something crazy!

Involuntary activity is in some way a helpless level of activity. Your body and particularly your brain should become largely voluntary. If it becomes voluntary, your life is made. This is the journey from being involuntary to voluntary.

Are you a volunteer? That is what it means – you do everything consciously, by choice, not compulsively. You just do what is needed. You have no particular way to sit. You have no particular way to do things. In every aspect of life, internal or external, you will do it the way it needs to be done right now. That is effective activity. The rest is wasteful activity.

King of Limbs

The very body is divine as far as yoga is concerned. One aspect of Shiva is that he is Angaraj. Angaraj means the king of limbs. You may be doing Angamardana, which is a process of gaining mastery over the limbs. Shiva is the king of limbs because he has completely mastered them, and now the very body has become divine. If the system, which is moving from unconsciousness to consciousness, becomes 100% conscious, if even the physical body becomes utterly conscious, then this is a divine body. That is what it means when we say Shiva is Angaraj. These limbs can be an unconscious mass of flesh, or they can become so conscious that they are like a divine body. This is about transforming a piece of flesh into a deity.

This is the science through which deities are made. By creating a certain yantra, or form, and by injecting energy into a particular form, a stone can be made into a divine force. If a stone can be transformed into a divine force, why can't flesh be transformed into a divine force? It can definitely be done.

04/10/2023

Intensity Of Emotions.

There was a time when the most dominant factor in a human being was his emotion. Today, emotion is not the most dominant part in you but it is still the most intense part in you. Most people are not able to get their physical body to a high level of intensity. It takes a lot of effort to keep the body intense. People can keep the mind intense off and on, but very few people are capable sustaining an intense mind. In energy, people are generally not at all intense. They know only certain moments of intensity, not a steady state of intensity. But emotion can get very intense. If not love, at least in anger you are intense. In some emotion you are capable of being intense. If I cannot make you get intense with love or joy, if I abuse you, you will become intense with anger at least – intense to a point where you will not sleep the whole night. If I tell you, “Please sit and stay awake. I will teach yoga,” you will drop off to sleep. But if I abuse you, you will sit awake the whole night. Angry people cannot sleep, isn’t it? So emotion has always been the dominant factor in human beings.

Devotion is a way of transforming your emotion from negativity to pleasantness.

Devotion is a multiplied and enhanced version of a love affair. A devotee is in an unfailing kind of love affair because if you fall in love with a man or a woman, they do not go the way you expect them to, and it eventually gets into some trouble. That is why people choose God. It is simply a love affair, and you are not expecting any response. Your life becomes utterly beautiful because your emotion has become so sweet. Through that sweetness, one grows. That is devotion.

When you are overwhelmed by something or someone, you naturally become devout. But if you try to practice devotion, it creates problems because the line between devotion and deception is very thin – it will lead you into so many kinds of hallucinations. So you cannot practice devotion, but you can do certain things so that you arrive at devotion.

04/09/2023

There is infinite power in scattering seeds. Whether they sprout, grow, break ground, become trees or not is their Destiny and Karma.
Even if one crosses over the bridge from Mundane to Eternal. My work here will be done.

04/07/2023

Human beings who do not break their self-created boundaries will remain trapped in them.

Breaking your limitations is an essential part of your spiritual growth. This spiritual process is not based on a scripture, philosophy, or dead tradition – it is a living thing. You have to live it every day. I do not want you to miss this possibility because you are getting caught up in day-to-day situations or issues with other people. If you want to move forward in life, it is important to constantly keep account of your growth – ideally every day, but at least weekly once or monthly once.

Ask yourself, “Am I getting better? Am I a little more joyful? Have I grown a little more compared to the way I was yesterday?”

It is time to stop blaming or trying to fix others. Instead, you should grow to your full potential.

People keep close account of their money. It is only a transactional tool – you cannot take it with you when you die. The most precious thing you have is that you are alive right now. If that is the case, is it not worthwhile to keep account of where you are going in life, if you are improving yourself or you are regressing? You do not regress because of what someone else does to you. No one can do anything to you within you. Your boss or your family can make your life a little difficult on the outside. That means they give you more exercise – that’s all. This should only make you stronger.

The biggest problem on the planet has been that if small things go wrong, people blame it on “the small guy” (someone else). If big things go wrong in their lives, they blame it on “the big guy” (God). They themselves do not seem to be responsible for anything. It is time to stop blaming or trying to fix others. Instead, you should grow to your full potential.

If you want your sadhana to be successful, you need to free your mind from unnecessary junk.

If you shift from unwillingness to willingness, from inertia to effervescence, your life will become joyful; your journey will become effortless. And when it is time to die and you look back, you will see you have lived a spectacular life. It is very important to me that this happens for you.

04/07/2023

"Meditation is not about going somewhere - it is falling back into yourself."

The World Will Not Leave A Scratch Upon One Who
Is Meditative.

04/07/2023

An excerpt from Mystics Musings 📚

“Spiritual” does not mean looking up or looking down, or praying or going to the temple. “Spiritual” essentially means you are in an experience which is beyond the limitations of the physical. That means you are in a boundless space. This longing is always there in every human being. Either you are approaching it in installments, or you are consciously going for the Ultimate.

Bo***ge cannot be limitless. Only freedom can be limitless. This is not just semantics and ideas. In terms of life’s experience, don’t waste your time talking about or thinking about freedom or the Ultimate. The body is a limitation, the mind is a limitation, emotions are limitations – but they are also possibilities. Look at what binds you now, and see how to transcend this. This is growth.

04/04/2023

Keep Things Aside

Just do this before you go to bed. In the last three minutes, keep aside everything that you have gathered – the body, the content of the mind, and the small things. Do not ignore small things; these small things are big things. I have seen how people are carrying their own private pillow because it is very important. Your pillow, your footwear, if you have relationships, everything that you have gathered – keep it aside and sleep.

If you manage to sleep like that, you will wake up with something else altogether different. You will wake up with much more light, energy and possibilities than you have imagined possible. Just sleep as life – not as a man or woman, not as this and that. Simply keep everything down.

We want to use sleep as a platform for awakening, to become one with all that is real – not as a way to become inert, dead, and away from all that is real. Improving sleep quality does not mean sleeping like a stone. But actually, a stone is the wrong example, because in my experience, stones are very alive – a lot more alive than many human beings. “Sleeping like a log” would be a better expression, because a log is dead – it is not a tree anymore. This is not about sleeping like a log, but about sleeping in a live manner – being awake and asleep at the same time. If you bring even a small percentage of this element into your sleep, you will naturally become meditative over a period of time. Meditation, not as an act but as a quality, will become a part of your existence.

Shambhavi Mahamudra
We have tried to bring this aspect into people’s life in so many ways, starting with the Shambhavi Mahamudra. Shambhavi means twilight – you are between day and night, night and day. Twilight means you are asleep, but you are awake; you are awake, but you are asleep. Changing the quality of our sleep – not the quantum – is the necessary foundation for someone to become a Yogi. In wakefulness, you must be fully awake but if you check the parameters of the body, it must be asleep. In sleep, your body should sleep, your mind should sleep, but you must be awake.

04/04/2023

Of Friendship 🪷

Sadhguru digs down to the very root of the topic and shares what friendship means to him.

I made my first friend at the age of three or four, after they sent me to school. I built such a bond with him, he was more than anything else to me. I still remember his name. I am sure he doesn't.

I had a wide variety of friends, hundreds of friends all over the place, but that’s different. I am talking about the bond that I built with real friends – I always thought it was absolute. But over a period of time, with the experience of life, I realized there are very few people who see friendship like that. Most people see friendship as context-oriented. When you are in school, you have one kind of friend. When school is over, you just drop them and pick college friends. When college is over, professional friends, and whatever else. That's how people look at friendship. I've not been able to look at it like that. I am not disgruntled, but it has been a learning experience about human nature.

My need for friendship was never too much but the moment I formed a friendship, I always thought it was for good and in every way absolute. I've found good friends here and there, but even for them, as life situations change, their needs and their focus on the friendship changes. For me it never changes.

I wouldn't say it is heartbreaking, but definitely it is disappointing that most people cannot form deep relationships in their lives. They can form relationships only according to their needs; they cannot form relationships beyond their needs. A relationship just for the sake of relationship, that is not there in most people. They form a relationship when they need it; when they don't need it, they break it.

I am a little bit of a fool in such matters. Even now if I meet an old school friend, I still approach him the way I knew him at that time. But he is somewhere else, no longer the way he was. Probably they move on with life and I don't. I have always stayed a little outside of it. I valued life that way, so I always kept it that way. I think it continues to be so even today.

04/03/2023

Kashi - The Tower Of Light

The word “Kashi” literally means to be luminous, or more particularly, a tower of light. Mark Twain said that Kashi is older than legend. Nobody can ever decipher the date of this place. When Athens was not even thought of, Kashi was. When Rome did not even exist in people’s minds, Kashi was. When Egypt did not exist, Kashi was. It is that ancient, and it was built as an instrument in the form of a city, which brings a union between the “micro” and the “macro” – this little human being can have the phenomenal possibility of uniting with the cosmic reality and knowing the pleasure, ecstasy and beauty of becoming one with the cosmic nature.

There have been many such instruments in this country, but to create a city like this is a mad ambition – and they did it thousands of years ago. There were 72,000 shrines, the same as the number of nadis in the human body. The whole process is like a manifestation of a “mega human body” to make contact with a larger cosmic body. It is because of this that a whole tradition came up that if you go to Kashi, that is it. You do not want to leave the place because when you get connected to the cosmic nature, why would you want to go anywhere else?

Today, our idea of science has become the new iPhone. But if you want to look at it as science that is towards ultimate human wellbeing, this is it. You cannot do anything better than this. It is not a religion or a belief system. This is human ingenuity as to how to access the beyond. This is the most phenomenal effort ever made on the planet. There is no question about that.

04/03/2023

Geese say cheese at IshaYogaCenter!

With Shiva

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