Sadhguru Answers Questions About Spirituality, Wellness And Everyday Life

Question: How can one tell if a guru is enlightened?

Sadhguru: Don’t go about judging who is enlightened and who is not. The important thing is that you get enlightened. So don’t worry about your Guru because if you worry about him, you will either believe or disbelieve him. If you believe him, you will blindly believe he is God himself. If you disbelieve him, you will suspect all kinds of things. Either way, you will lose the possibility of experiencing him.

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So you don’t decide how an enlightened person should be. Don’t even worry about who is enlightened or not enlightened. Just examine whether whatever path your Guru has given is leading you towards freedom or bondage. If it is leading you towards your freedom, it does not matter whether your guru is enlightened or not; that is not your problem. Go ahead and do what you are required to do. If you start thinking about whether somebody is enlightened or not, it will simply be a waste of your time, mind and energies because you cannot draw any conclusion. Whatever conclusion you draw will only be for self-satisfaction but you will not know the truth because there is no way for you to recognize a dimension that you do not even know.

Question: I have never been inclined to do yoga. My parents keep pushing me, but I am not ready yet. How can I convince them?

Sadhguru: Everything you do is Yoga. Yoga does not mean doing a particular practice or twisting your body. Yoga means any method that you use to reach your higher nature. The technology that you use is referred to as yoga. Everyone uses yoga in so many ways, without realizing it.

If you go and watch a movie, you are doing one kind of yoga because you sit there and watch the movie with an unwavering gaze. This is Dharana, an important aspect of yoga, but it happens without the necessary awareness and organization behind it and so it is disorganized yoga.

In the same way, just looking at a beautiful flower may leave you joyous. When you looked at this flower, you imbibed and included something, got so involved and became very happy. This happened to you because a little bit of yoga happened and you included that flower as a part of yourself. The word “yoga” literally means “union” – making everything into one. So in a small way, you made the flower a part of yourself. There were two and they became one in a way. Yoga happened but in an unorganized way.

With every aspect – your breath, walk or work – you are doing some kind of yoga but in a disorganized way without the necessary understanding. Yoga means we have systemized all that so that you use everything with a conscious attention that you want to move in a certain direction.

Question: I binge-eat a lot. How can I be more conscious of what I’m eating?

Sadhguru: One must eat, but we must eat, relishing the nourishment of what the food offers, with the gratitude of what it means to our life. Simply eating for the pleasure of the tongue determines how soon it comes back to eat us.

This is not to take away the pleasure of eating. The true joy of eating is that you are conscious of some other life willing to become a part of you, to merge and mingle with your own life and become you. This is the greatest pleasure that a human being knows, that in some way something that is not him has become willing to become a part of him. This is what you call love. This is what people call devotion. This is the ultimate goal of the spiritual process.

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Whether it is lust, passion, devotion or the Ultimate Enlightenment, it is all the same, it is just the scale. If it happens between two people we call it passion; if it happens with a larger group we call it love; if it happens much more indiscriminately we call it compassion; if it happens without even a form around you, it is called devotion. If it happens in its Ultimate scale, we call it Enlightenment. 

Food and eating is a demonstration of the oneness of existence. This beautiful process is happening at your mealtime every day. Something that was a plant, something that was a seed, something that was an animal, or a fish, or a bird, just merging and becoming a human being is a clear demonstration of the oneness of the existence, of the hand of the Creator in everything that is.

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