Create a Culture of Involvement

 Sadhguru

Sadhguru, should we be open to other cultures or should we stick to our own culture?

First I want you to understand this: what somebody did yesterday is today’s culture, and the mess that you create today is going to be tomorrow’s culture. Cultures were not engineered towards a purpose. It generally happened according to the requirements of the land and the situation that existed at that period.

Don’t choose any cultures. Act intelligently in your life, without identifying with any culture. Every culture has something to offer. If you have chosen to take your life in a particular direction, a certain type of culture is advantageous. If your life is all about enjoying the external of life, turn West. If your life is about knowing the inner dimensions, turn East.

So, the choice is not about which culture. The choice is about what is it that you want to do with your life. What is suitable for your search, your longing, you arrange your life intelligently around that.

If you have chosen to walk the spiritual path, then you need to create a certain type of culture. Wherever there was a genuine spiritual process, uncannily you will see, generally they developed a same kind of culture anywhere in the world, unconnected. If a realized being speaks about how to be, you will see it is almost word by word the same anywhere. But over a period of time, those things get distorted, get influenced by the local cultures and organized forms of religion, and get totally into a different shape and form.

At one time, the whole Indian subcontinent had a culture like the one we are trying to create in Isha: a balanced state of chaos and order. It’s very difficult to manage these two things at the same time. If we want to make everything orderly, it’s very easy. Everything will work properly but the spirit will die. If you make it very chaotic, people will become very spirited but things will collapse. Once things collapse, people also fall apart.

When we say rollercoaster, people usually think it’s a wild thing. Not true. A rollercoaster is more controlled than your car. If you drive your car, it may go off here and there a little bit. Any moment you can go off the road and back on the road. A rollercoaster is fixed on its rails 100%, always on the track, never goes off for a moment. It’s in perfect order but in the experience on the surface it’s a total disorder. Only people who are sitting in it think it’s a wild thing. For people who manage it, it’s a perfect machine, in proper order. It never goes off the track.

So, spiritual culture is always like a rollercoaster. One part of it is perfectly on rails always. The rest of it goes wild. It looks like you don’t want to have anything to do with it because it’s so crazy. At the same time another part of it, the bottom line is fixed so perfectly well that it never goes off the track. It takes a steady stomach to take that ride. (Laughs) If you don’t have a stable stomach, you can’t even sit in it.

You can bring a culture into yourself where, whether it is footwear or a crown, you handle it with the same care and concern. Whether it’s an ant or an elephant, you treat it with same concern. Whether somebody is a king or a beggar, you treat them the same way within yourself. If you learn to do the simple tasks of your life and the most important tasks of your life with the same level of involvement, if you don’t make a distinction that something is dear to you and something not dear to you, that’s a conducive culture for a spiritual seeker. No other culture is good for you.

Life is Calling by Sadhguru

If life is calling you, you must go toward it with utmost passion and involvement, not with hesitation and calculation. This is not the ego's problem of wanting to do something different; it is about living to your full potential. And if you are truly passionate about every aspect of your life, you will realize very easily what you are good at.

It could be that you are good at something that has never been done before, something completely new. But even if you are not a complete original and are doing the same, age-old things, when you do them with utmost passion and involvement, they will raise you to a new dimension of experience.

Problems come when people are passionate about only one thing, or when they are passionate in an exclusive way. This often leads to isolation; living an exclusive existence with very limited involvement will only lead to frustration and pain. What I am talking about is all-inclusive passion. One must be in touch with everything that the five senses can perceive in a given moment and be absolutely and passionately involved. This is true compassion. Compassion is not an attitude of kindness but an instrument of unprejudiced involvement.

The way life happens is first being, then doing and then having. But right now, because people are trapped in their minds, they are always thinking first of having. For example, you may come to a stage in life when you want to have a certain kind of life that includes a certain kind of mate, house or car. Then you think, "How can I have all this?" The moment you start thinking how to get it, people around you start advising you.

So then you start thinking about becoming a doctor, lawyer, software engineer or whatever. Once you are in one of these professions for a period of time, you think you have become something and that is when you start moving against life. You are going the "having-doing-being way," which leads to an endless pursuit of having. This is the basis of an unfulfilled life. You must first establish your way of being. Then, whether you get to have what you desire or not, you will still be wonderful. The quality of your life is decided by your way of being, and what you get to have is only a question of capability and situations that are conducive. If you make this simple shift to "being-doing-having," then a large part of your destiny will be by your will.

Now, I want you to get this right: there is no life's calling, but life is calling, both from within and without. Only when you truly respond to the call of life will you know life in its entirety. Only when you know unprejudiced and absolute involvement with the universe, with every atom in the universe, will you explore, experience and know the full scope of who you are. And in being absolutely involved, you need not be limited by your past experience and capabilities -- you can imbibe and have access to the great storehouse of knowing that is the very nature of the universe. It is also through this absorbed, unadulterated involvement that one can know the true nature of the self, which is boundless. The way we are is more important than what we do and have.

Why Sport is Actually a Spiritual Pursuit

Being a sport means you are willing to play. Willing to play means you are involved or alive to the situation in which you exist, and that is the essence of life. If there is anything that is truly close to a spiritual process, in the normal course of life, that is sports. Swami Vivekananda went to the extent of saying, "In kicking a ball or playing a game, you are much closer to the Divine than you will ever be in prayer." You can pray without involvement, but you cannot play sports without involvement, and involvement is the essence of life.

But when people involve themselves in what they do, they often get entangled. Anything that you associate with, you tend to get identified with. The moment you get identified with something that is not you, you have invested in a system of hallucination that will look and feel real. Once you have invested in a hallucinatory process, your mind will be one continuous mental disorder, as a hallucinatory process can be kept up only with unceasing activity of the mind, and hence, one ends up turning a miracle into madness. The mind is a fabulous miracle; you could hold the universe in it, but generally it ends up as a source of all human misery and the basis of madness and suffering.

When people get entangled, they feel ugly within themselves and they will make sure everybody else has a taste of this ugliness. So the fundamental of any sport or game takes care of this; that is, if you want to play a game, you must have the fire of wanting to win but also the balance to see that if you lose, it is okay with you. You never play a game to lose, you always play a game to win, but if you lose, it is all right with you. If you maintain this fundamental with every aspect of life, you are a sport. And that is all the world expects from you, that you are a sport. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, whatever kind of situation you are in, you are still a sport.

Photo: Isha Foundation

The sacredness of a sporting event is that individuals rise beyond their limitations, achieving a state of abandon that is usually known only at the peak of spirituality. Thus, we have always included sports in our yoga programs. All of our programs have an element of play -- as to play is to live, and to live is to play.

净空法师 修止观最好的地方

The Secret To Surfing the Waves

--by Ani Tenzin Palmo (Jul 16, 2007)

Listen To Reading!

What we need is to be interested and to watch, but not interfere or be caught up in what we are thinking. Don't think of the past, don't anticipate the future, don't get fascinated by the present. See it as it is. Just be there with it. A thought is just a thought. An emotion is just an emotion. It is like a bubble. It will burst and another one will come up.

When we first begin to put this into practice the mind begins to split. We develop what is called the observer, the witness, the knower. This is an aspect of the mind. It is still just mind, conceptual mind, but it is a mind which is standing back and looking at what is going on, as if at a distance. In itself, this is not ultimate reality, because it is still a dualistic mind. But it is a vast improvement on the way we normally think, because it gives us the space to see a thought as a thought and an emotion as an emotion. Then we can decide whether this is a useful thought or emotion or not. We know it for what is, rather than being absorbed in it. We no longer identify with it.

If we develop this inner awareness, which is like an inner space, we can ride the waves of life. People imagine that to be a meditator you have to always live in very tranquil situations and that you are likely to be inundated if a turbulent situation arises. This is true for beginners, just as it is for someone who is learning how to surf. At the beginning, they have to stick to the small waves otherwise they will be bowled over. But an expert surfer looks for the big waves. The greater the waves, the more fun, once you have your balance. The secret is to be balanced, to be poised. To be a good surfer you need to be neither too tense nor too relaxed, just balanced. This is what we need in our practice, too.

When we develop this inner space, everything takes on a dream-like quality. Not dream-like in the sense of being sleepy, but in that it is no longer so solid, so real, so urgent. It has a quality almost like an illusion. You don't take it quite so seriously, because you are not so totally involved in it. Now when we have that sense of stepping back and seeing life with a degree of clarity, we are able to respond to situations which arise with freshness and spontaneity, instead of our usual automatic response, which is like pressing a button on a machine. We begin to respond naturally and in an appropriate manner.

--Ani Tenzin Palmo, From "Reflections on a Mountain Lake"

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