The Hindu way of life

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Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev [1]

One fundamental thing that must be cleared up about the Hindu way of life is that with the term Hindu there is no “ism”. Today the word Hindu has taken a different meaning because of the so-called Hindutva and other such organisations, but the word Hindu essentially comes from the word Sindhu. Anybody who is born in the land of Indus is a Hindu — it is a cultural and geographic identity. It is like saying “I am an Indian”, though it is a more ancient identity than being an Indian. “Indian” is only about 60 years old. Hindu, on the other hand, is an identity that we have always lived with — we call this country Hindustan and whatever we did in this culture was Hindu.
Being a Hindu does not mean having a particular belief system; there is no particular God or ideology which one can call as the Hindu way of life. You can be a Hindu irrespective of whether you worship a man-God or a woman-God, whether you worship a cow or a tree. If you don’t worship anything you can still be a Hindu. So you are a Hindu irrespective of what you believe or don’t believe in. At the same time, there was a common line running through all these — in this culture, the only goal of human life is liberation or mukti; liberation from the very process of life, from everything that you know as limitations and to go beyond that. God is seen as one of the stepping stones; God is not held as the ultimate thing. This is the only culture on the planet which is a godless culture in the sense that there is no concretised idea of God in this culture. You can worship a rock, a cow, your mother — you can worship whatever you feel like because this is a culture where we have always known that God is our making.
Everywhere else people believe that God created us. Here we know that we created God so we take total freedom to create the kind of God we can relate to. If you like the tree in your garden you can worship it and nobody thinks it is absurd. You can worship a stone on the golf course and nobody thinks it’s absurd. If you can relate to that, that’s what you worship because what you are reverential towards is not important; being reverential is what is important.
There is so much misunderstanding about these things because there is a certain dialectical ethos to the culture where we want to express everything in a story or in a song; but in a way, it is a science of how to take a human being to his ultimate potential.

— 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 [2]