The twain shall meet

[1]

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev [1]

If you go by the ways of the body, it knows only self-preservation and procreation; it is incapable of anything else. These are the only two aspects of the body.
If you go by the dimension beyond the physical, there is the longing to become boundless. Unfortunately, most of the time, trying to find physical expression to become boundless leads a man to all kinds of insatiable activity. If someone’s body is aching you cannot make them sit, can you? The body is aching. “Enough,” it says, but no, you must go to the top of the mountain and come down, because you always want to be a little more than what you are. This is a never-ending longing. This longing is not seeking for a little more; it is seeking for an ultimate expansion.

It seems like a conflict between the instinct of self-preservation and the longing to become boundless. These two forces are not against each other, but when you look at it from a physical perspective, when your whole perception is limited to the physical, they seem to be in conflict. These two aspects come into conflict because of a strong identification with the physical. Once you get deeply identified with the physical, these two fundamental forces — one that helps you to root yourself well on this planet and another which is supposed to take you beyond — instead of working in collaboration, they unfortunately come into a conflict. They needn’t be in conflict. And we fail to see it. All the struggles of humanity in terms of “should I be spiritual or materialistic” come from this ignorance.
Because of this ignorance, a human being is in constant turmoil, in constant struggle between the physical and that which is beyond the physical. Though he is also physical, though he also has the compulsiveness of the physical, he has the consciousness of not being physical. And this consciousness sets him apart from other living beings.
Any method that you employ to enhance and heighten the presence of the non-physical within you, the presence of that which is the source of creation within you, is yoga. All of yoga, every kind of spirituality that you can find, I refer to it as yoga because it is all different types of yoga — either done systematically or blindly, but still it is yoga. All these yogas became necessary because of the seeming conflict between the physical and that which belongs to a dimension beyond the physical. I would not really call it a conflict. If one is identified with the physical, then there seems to be a conflict between these two fundamental forces, which make a human being what he is right now. But if one has the necessary awareness to separate the two, then there is no conflict.

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev is an internationally renowned spiritual leader, poet and speaker. He can be contacted at www.ishafoundation.org