Mistakes and mystics: survival and beyond discourse

Dec 15, 2009, 12.00am IST
SADHGURU.

There are only two kinds of people in the world – mystics and mistakes. If you are seeing life just the way it is, you are a mystic in the world’s eyes. If there are big errors in your perception, you are a mistake considering yourself to be normal.


This may sound insensitive, but if you genuinely want to know, the sooner you do away with all the nonsense in you, the better it is.
If your perception is changing at different times of your life, clearly what you did yesterday or how you saw life yesterday was a mistake. What you are doing now seems to be the right thing to you, but this can change anytime. What you do today may seem like a mistake tomorrow, and what you do tomorrow will might seem to be the right thing. So, there is a mistake in the way we perceive life. When this gets corrected, people think you are a mystic because you are beginning to perceive life in a way that you cannot fit in logic; it is way beyond logic. Logic is just a small part of your life – you can never fit life into it. You can fit logic into your life but never life into logic.


If your experience of life transcends the limitations of sense perception, you are known as a mystic. You experience life in a way that others do not know; you make things happen in a way that they cannot understand, so they call you a mystic – they are admitting that they are mistakes.

There is nothing wrong in being a mistake, but not realising the mistake is the biggest mistake. When you were in the womb, you had eyes, but could not see. You had ears, but probably could not hear – else you would know how it was inside.

At birth, your sense organs naturally opened up for survival. For anything that is beyond survival to open up, it needs striving. As a baby, if you were left all alone in a forest and if something edible arrived in front of you, would you stuff it into your ears? No, you would know where to put it. But would you know how to read, write, to speak a language? That takes some striving. Today, language comes easily to you because of striving.


What is beyond survival does not open up for you unless you strive. All religions and spiritual traditions started off as just this striving. Over time, however, transmitting it through generations things get ritualised and the context is somehow lost. Every religion started off as human striving to know, to experience, to create well-being. If you think you are absolutely right on everything, you become fanatical. If you know that you are a mistake, then you are a potential mystic.


When the survival process is constantly getting more complicated, there is not much room for many to strive to know the truth, to know the basic nature of our own existence. In the last century, in our excitement over achievers who accomplished things that were not possible earlier, we have gone berserk.


Technology is not only about gadgetry but about arranging our lives in a way that the survival process is handled effortlessly and there is time and space to explore other aspects and dimensions – which would not be possible if we were fully occupied with survival. Now for the most part, survival is so organised.


Therefore, invest time and resources to build infrastructure for deeper exploration of yourself. That is where ultimate well-being is, and ultimate liberation.