Transform the world, start from within

Dec 17, 2009, 12.00am IST
DISCOURSE: SADHGURU.


In every human being, there is an aspiration to become better, more loving and more concerned about one another and the planet. But people are trying to work towards it from the wrong end. People are trying to be loving, they are trying to be good.
When you look at yourself, if you are happy and joyful, naturally you are a very loving, generous, wonderful human being. This is true for everybody. On the other hand, when you are in a state of unhappiness, frustration or any other sense of unpleasantness within yourself, you may be nasty. There is no point trying to be loving, trying to be pleasant to somebody else. When you are feeling pleasant, you are naturally pleasant to everyone around you. The fundamental thing that human beings have to work towards is to make themselves truly joyful and blissful. 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.


People will always find ways to subvert values, morality and ethics. But when you are very joyful, when you are very pleasant within yourself, you are naturally nice to everyone around you. 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 so you are not just alive on the surface, you are alive to the core. If you look at how full of life and joyful you were when you were five years of age and how alive and joyful you are today, has the level gone up or gone down? For most people, it has gone down. It need not be so. With age, physical agility may go down but the level of joy and sense of being alive need not go down. If your level of joy and aliveness is going down, it is as if you are committing suicide in instalments. This happens because you only focus on certain aspects of life, but without including every aspect, you cannot live a full life.


Unfortunately, most of the time, belief systems are passing off as spirituality. The moment you believe something, if you believe "this is it", you are bringing a certain degree of rigidity into the very life process that you are. This is not spirituality.

The spiritual process is always a quest, a seeking; that is why when you say, "I'm on a spiritual path," you say "I'm a seeker." When you say "I'm religious," you say "I'm a believer." There is a significant difference, because believing means you have assumed something that you do not know; seeking means you have realised that you do not know, which brings an enormous amount of flexibility. Whenever you say, "I do not know something," you are flexible. Whenever you think, "I know it," you become rigid. This rigidity is not just in attitude; it percolates into every aspect of your 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.
Discourse: Sadhguru