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The following is an excerpt from the book Inner Engineering – A Yogi’s Guide to Joy by Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev (p.35-36)
Choices that you make out of inability or not life solutions. An inability to be joyful by your own nature can make the simplest issues in life seem like highly complex problems. Right now being peaceful and joyful is made out to be the most significant problem in human existence. In pursuit of human happiness, we are ripping the planet apart.
The reason the simple things – like being peaceful, joyful, loving – have become ultimate aspirations is that people are living without paying any attention to the life process. When most people say “life”, they mean the accessories of life – their work, their family, their relationships, the homes they live in, the cars they drive, the clothes they wear, the gods they pray to. The one thing they miss is life – the life process itself, the essential life that is you. The moment you make this fundamental mistake of identifying something that is not you as yourself, life becomes an unnecessary struggle. The foundations of peace and bliss are not about attending to the external realities of your life, but in accessing and organising the inner nature of your being.
You are capable of experiencing only that which is within the boundaries of your sensation. But if you throw the boundary of your sensation out in an expanded form, you can sit here and experience everyone as yourself. You can stretch it further and experience the very cosmos as you experience your own body.
When this sense of inclusiveness happened to me, I understood that being loving and compassionate is not an idea. To live in empathy is not some esoteric principle. This is the way a human being is made. If you do not identify with anything you have accumulated over a period of time, including your body and mind, you will be able to experience this.
Enlightenment is not attainment or an achievement. It is a homecoming. Your senses give you the impression that you are experiencing the outside, but you have never experienced the outside. When you realise that all that you experience is within, that absolute homecoming is enlightenment.
My life is just devoted to evolving methods so that people can experience this inclusiveness. If we truly have to create solutions that are relevant for all, an experience of absolute inclusiveness has to happen to humanity. And it is possible.
The reason why everyone is not naturally enlightened is simply this: people have categorised the world into good and bad, God and Devil, high and low, sacred and filthy, pure and impure, heaven and hell. These are parallel lines that will never meet.
Once you have fractured this existence within yourself, there is no way to reach a state of enduring well-being and freedom. You have been told to love your enemy. If you first label someone your enemy and then try to love him or her, it’s going to be torturous! Once you have fragmented creation like this, there is no way to arrive at a state of absolute inclusiveness.
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Great learning! Thanks for sharing!
Thank you Megala!