I recently finished reading the book Inner Engineering : A Yogi’s Guide to Joy by Sadhguru. It is a fascinating read, rich with Sadhguru’s concepts around inner transformation. I have distilled 15 key insights from the book and wanted to share those with you.
- Positive Thinking. It is a tranquilliser that might initially imbue your life with new confidence and optimism. But it is essentially limited. In the long term, if you deny or amputate one part of reality, it gives a lopsided perspective of life.
- Peace and joy. Most people think peace and joy are the goals of spiritual life. This is a fallacy. Peace and joy are the basic requirements for a life of well-being. Only when you are blissful will you be in the highest state of receptivity, and truly willing to explore all aspects of life. Otherwise, you will not dare.
- Borderless unity. Our physical and social worlds are governed by boundaries arising from an instinct of self-preservation. Our inner world needs none. The whole effort of the spiritual process is to break the boundaries you have drawn for yourself and experience the immensity that you are. To journey from the boundary-based individual body to the boundless source of creation.
- Destiny. Your destiny is written by you unconsciously. But whatever you do in unawareness, you can also do in awareness. To be human means you can mould situations you are living in the way you want them.
- Responsibility. It simply means your ability to respond. Only if you realise you are responsible do you have the freedom to create yourself the way you want to be, not as a reaction to the situations which exist. Reactivity is enslavement. Responsibility is freedom, it offers you choice of actions. Therefore, being responsible is taking ownership of your life.
- Anger. It is fundamentally self-defeating. Anger is rooted in your false perception that you can change the situation by losing your temper with it. But your life experience tells you time and again that the reverse is true, that you can never change any situation for the better by forsaking your sense and intelligence.
- Responsibility & Action. These belong to different dimensions. The ability to respond gives you the freedom to act. It also gives you the freedom not to act. Our ability to respond is limitless but our ability to act is limited.
- What is Yoga? Yoga is the science of being in perfect alignment, in absolute harmony , in complete sync with the existence. You arrive at Yoga only when you realise that your desire is for the limitless. Every human being lives in a perpetual state of insufficiency. The fundamental desire within every human being is for boundless expansion.
- Inside-Out. If you are interested in knowing life in all its depth and dimension, it is imperative that you look inward, not out. The very seat of your experience is within you, but your perception is outward bound. An experience may be triggered by an external stimulus, but its origin is always internal.
- Human Body. The higher possibilities of life are housed in the human body. The physical body is a platform for all possibilities from the gross to the sacred. You can perform simple acts of eating, sleeping, and sex as acts of grossness, or you can bring a certain dimension of sanctity to all these aspects. This sanctity can be achieved by bringing subtler thought, emotion, and intuition. The grossness and sanctity of something is largely decided by your unwillingness and unconsciousness, or your willingness and consciousness.
- Intellect. The problem of our times is that intellect has taken on a disproportionately important role. An intellectual understanding that is not backed by experiential knowledge can lead to mind games and deceptive states. If you want to know life in its immensity, you need something more than intellect. But the same intellect can be sharpened if you allow it to soak in the other aspect of your mind – your awareness, Chitta. If you learn to place your intellect in your awareness rather than in your memory and identification, this tremendous instrument can turn into a wonderful tool of liberation.
- Awareness. It is not mental alertness, it is aliveness. Awareness is a process of inclusiveness, a way of embracing this entire existence. You cannot do it, but you can set the right conditions so that it happens. Don’t try to be aware. It will not work. If you keep your body, thought, emotion, and energies properly aligned, awareness will blossom.
- Karma. It is like old software that you have written for yourself, unconsciously. Once you write a certain type of software, your whole system functions accordingly. Circumstances may change, but internally you are experiencing the same thing over and over again. Life is cyclical, you are hopelessly stuck in the Karmic rut. If you want any kind of transformation, any kind of forward movement in your life, it can only happen if you break the cyclical pattern of Karma.
- Dissolution of Karma. The very process of being is itself a dissolution of Karma. If you live every moment of your life totally, you dissolve enormous amount of Karma. Yoga offers a way to distance yourself not just from your Karma, but from the very source of Karma, which is the discriminatory intellect. It offers you the choice every moment of your existence to be either a victim or a spectator or the very master of your life.
- Kriya. Fundamentally, Kriya means “internal action”. Body is an accumulation of food, and the mind an accumulation of ideas. Even the imprints upon the energy body are an accumulation of the impressions of the five senses. All actions involving these outward expressions are Karma. When you have the ability to perform action with the non-physical aspect of your energy, then it is termed as “Kriya”. Karma is the process of binding you. Kriya is the process of liberating you
The book leaves us with a beautiful closing thought. Our relentless pursuit of external well-being is already on the verge of annihilating the planet. It is only by turning inward that we can truly create a world of love, light, and laughter.
