Love and its splendours
In every human being, there is an aspiration to become more loving and concerned about other human beings. But people are trying to work towards it from the wrong end. People are trying to be loving and trying to be good. If we look at ourselves, we are naturally very loving, generous and wonderful human beings when we are happy and joyful; this is true for everyone. On the other hand, when we are in a state of unhappiness, frustration or any other sense of unpleasantness within ourselves, we may be nasty. So there is no point trying to be loving or pleasant to somebody else — trying to produce good human beings has never really worked. When people are joyful, they are all wonderful human beings. Joy is the best insurance against all evil. So the fundamental thing that human beings have to work towards is to make themselves truly joyful and blissful.
So my whole work is to make human beings truly blissful. Spirituality does not mean going away from life, spirituality means becoming alive in the fullest possible way — we are alive to the core, not just on the surface. If we look at how alive and joyful we were when we were five years of age and how alive and joyful we are today, has the level gone up or down? For most people, it has gone down. With age, physical agility may go down, but the level of joy and aliveness need not go down. If it has gone down, it’s as if we are committing suicide in instalments. This happens because we only focus on certain aspects of life. Without including every aspect, we cannot live a full life.
Unfortunately, most of the time belief systems are passing off as spirituality. The moment we believe “this is it”, we bring a certain rigidity into the very life process that we are; this is not spirituality. The spiritual process is always a quest, a seeking; that is why when we say, “I’m on a the spiritual path”, we say, “I’m a seeker”. When we say, “I’m religious”, we say “I’m a believer”. There is a significant difference because believing means we have assumed something which we do not know; seeking means we have realised that we do not know and this brings an enormous amount of flexibility. Whenever we say, “I do not know”, we are flexible. Whenever we think, “I know,” we become rigid. This rigidity is not just in attitude, it percolates into every aspect of our life. This rigidity is also the cause of an enormous amount of suffering in the world. How human beings are, that is how the society will be. So, creating human beings who are flexible and willing to look at everything rather than being stuck in their ideas and opinions definitely makes for a different kind of society. And the very energy that such human beings carry will influence everything around them.
— Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, a yogi, is a visionary, humanitarian and a prominent spiritual leader. An author, poet, and internationally-renowned speaker, Sadhguru’s wit and piercing logic provoke and widen our perception of life. He can be contacted at www.ishafoundation.org
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