of cars, thoughts and rats.

Continuous comparison,

city life of crowds and competition

no space to hear yourself think

others breathing down your neck

the heat grit smoke dust

choking all life around.

The seat of government and diplomacy,

madness and no mercy.

To thrive: a miraculous task;

most just barely survive.

The dream and drive of making it big,

the unbeatable will to stay alive.

Against all odds the craze continues

rewarding few

crippling many.

Delhi, do you have any idea

of where you’re leading the country?

You are an unsettled head

in an aching body.

You are trying too hard to keep up,

to prove yourself to the world,

and leaving too much behind.

Delhi, in my belly, on my mind:

are you aware of what you’re doing?

Isha has been highlighted in Huffington Post Impact section (what a great surprise!):

For today’s Volunteer Spotlight (and since Earth Day is just a week away), we want to recognize the incredible achievement of the Isha Foundation, who organized over 400,000 volunteers to plant two million trees on a mountain in India in just 25 days. This group of volunteers also set the record for most tree seeds (850,000) planted in a single day (a record they plan to continually break in the years ahead).

Sadhguru seemed surprised when I asked him about how to encourage people to volunteer their time. He replied that people should be even more selfish than they already are; after all, taking care of our environment and others helps improve our own lives.

“We’re not saving the planet,” he told me. “We’re saving ourselves.”

Sadhguru does not believe that this volunteer effort should be the work of a select group of activists.

“It’s everybody’s work. All of us breathe, all of us eat, all of us walk on this planet. This is not somebody’s work, it’s everybody’s work. Unless we get it into people’s minds that this is everybody’s work, you will not accomplish much on this planet.”

In addition to the wildly successful environmental initiative, known as Project GreenHands, Isha’s Action for Rural Rejuvenation works to address economic, agricultural and social mobility problems in rural India.

“Sadhguru is mystical, insightful, beautiful, funny, wise and grounded. I have taken two of his Isha programs, in Los Angeles and Tennessee, and strongly encourage you to explore this program for yourself–it’s not to be missed.”–Anjelica Huston, Inner Engineering Intensive flyer

From an interview with Huston in Vanity Fair:

She is being helped, she told me, by an Indian guru, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, whose name she spelled out for me like a conscientious schoolgirl. “He reminds me of my husband visually. He has the same lovely brown skin and liquid brown eyes. Very handsome. He’s a modern guru. He plays Frisbee on the beach with us.”

“Do you meditate together?”

“Yes, there are about 70 of us, and you sit cross-legged on the floor for about three days and feel like calcification itself. And then, somehow, you feel a little better. Maybe even get thinner and smarter. We go through a series of exercises, which were kind of familiar to me,” she added, and began to laugh. “I had an Italian grandfather on my mother’s side who became a yogi, and whenever we visited him as children we had to stand on our heads and sing, ‘Oh, what a beautiful morning. Oh, what a beautiful day!’”

Mr. Geithner has his work cut out for him, economists and policy analysts in both India and the United States say. Reaching economic agreements between the two countries has traditionally been an arduous task.

“On principle, they both agree on everything,” said Jahangir Aziz, chief India economist at J. P. Morgan in Mumbai. “It always comes down to the nitty-gritty and that’s where things get stuck. Part of the problem is neither of them wants to give the other side an inch.”

Shouldn’t the US go a little easier on India, given the size of its market?

It took nearly 20 years for the United States to lift a ban on imports of Indian mangoes, for example, and a deal to allow energy-strapped India access to American nuclear technology, agreed to in principle four years ago, still has not cleared all the legal hurdles that would let American companies sign contracts here. The two countries remain far apart on American farm subsidies and India’s unwillingness to open its markets to foreign farmers, because they both want to protect their agricultural sectors. The countries’ disagreements there helped to scuttle global trade negotiations in 2008.

A funny & relevant tweet from Sadhguru’s public talk yesterday:

When you start thinking only I am right and everybody else is wrong, this is the first step towards madness.

Surely the US qualifies?

India as a culture has invested more time, energy and human resource toward the spiritual development of human beings for a very long time. This can only happen when there is a stable society for long periods without much strife. While all other societies were raked by various types of wars, and revolutions, India remained peaceful for long periods of time. So they invested that time in spiritual development, and it became the day to day ethos of every Indian.

The world looking towards India for spiritual help is nothing new. It has always been so in terms of exploring the inner spaces of a human being-how a human being is made, what is his potential, where could he be taken in terms of his experiences. I don’t think any culture has looked into this with as much depth and variety as India has. Mark Twain visited India and after spending three months and visiting all the right places with his guide he paid India the ultimate compliment when he said that anything that can ever be done by man or God has been done in this land.

So definitely as humanity, today we have reached many peaks in terms of science, economics or technology but if we do not heal the inner damage then all the power that technology has given us will only be used destructively. We are already on the verge of threatening the extinction of the planet. If human beings are not tempered from inside there will always be conflict.

I don’t know about the other gurus traversing the globe, but my endeavor is and theirs should be also, to aim at the political, economic and other areas of leadership. If some element of spirituality enters the life of these leaders, it could change the complexion of the world in a very short time. It is a priority and is beginning to happen but not significantly.

From Kavita Chhibber’s interview with Sadhguru.

India

She wore a raiment of so many a hue An unfamiliar eye would think she is madness true Her children are such multi-flavored stew This amalgamation of culture a heady brew Isn’t man just an outcrop of the land that his forefathers slew It’s antiquated history of blood & beauty knew A faraway visitor here saw what man or god could ever do Now it is time that you & me blow life & breath anew. –Sadhguru

The guru is constantly taking his disciples or devotees for a ride, because if you really tell them what they are supposed to swallow, they will just say this is impossible and run away.             –Sadhguru

From an interview with Kavita Chhibber:

Q: So what is the role of the guru, what should people be looking for? I see most of them churning out old wine in new bottles.

A: I know all the people you have in mind. I know you are a journalist and you will put it everywhere but I have to say this. I will be ashamed to be grouped with them. Guru means one who is the dispeller of darkness. By reading and translating two chapters of the Bhagwad Gita does not make you a guru. There was a time when interpreting a book was important because only one man in the village could read. Now every body can read as we continue to try and create a literate world around us. So why do you want to interpret that book for the people? Let every one read the book themselves and understand it the way they want to. A guru is not here to interpret scriptures and books. He is here to bring out the possibilities within you that by yourself, you may not be able to explore because it may be in a totally different direction from the way you may be looking.

I’m an uneducated guru. I don’t know the scriptures, I have not read the Vedas and I didn’t bother to read the Bhagvad Gita. I’m about life-I’m not about heaven. Its not a popular thing to say, but I believe that the whole effort of the guru should be to help the seeker deepen his seeking, not to give him answers.

If I give you the answers then the only option you have is to either believe me or disbelieve me. If it is me you believe then you are not getting any closer to finding answers to your seeking. If you don’t believe me, you aren’t getting closer either. All you’ll have will be an interesting story that I told you, to tell others, who in turn will tell others and it will all continue to be distorted and add to all those distorted stories that have been going around for years and have messed up people’s lives so badly.

If a human being says I don’t know something, then the possibility of knowing is open in his life. When a man believes he knows something that he does not know he is a mess because he believes something he does not know.

I come from only my experience and the only thing that I know for sure is this piece of life. I don’t know anything else. I don’t know what Rama said or Krishna said. Whatever bits and pieces I heard from my grandmother didn’t make any sense to me. For me Rama was the son of a king who became a king. Beyond that I don’t see anything. The guru should not be talking about Rama or Krishna but about the means by which to deepen the human experience. A human being today lives on the surface of life and the guru’s effort should be to take him to his innermost core.

The Making of a Mystic

I am generally referred to as a mystic. What is that supposed
to mean? If there is something here that you do not know
and you are unable to understand, that becomes mysterious
to you. If there is someone here who seems to know and
understand a lot of things that a lot of people do not seem to
know and understand, that person becomes a mystic. [Laughs]

On a certain day, two cows were grazing on the English
meadow… English cows. [Laughter] One cow asked the other,
“What is your opinion about the mad cow disease?” The
other cow said, “I don’t care a hoot. I’m anyway a helicopter.”
[Laughter] Being a mystic, being a realized being, is just
like this – a cow realizing that it is a cow; and it becomes
a celebrated cow. Holy cow, isn’t it? [Laughter] “Is it that
simplistic?” Let me tell you my story.

As a child, one thing that I realized was that I was utterly, absolutely ignorant, and everybody around me seemed to know just about everything. I did not know anything at all. So, because I did not know anything, I had to pay enormous attention towards everything. My sense of attention became like this – if I saw a leaf, I could just sit there, looking at this leaf for hours. If I sat up in my bed, just staring at the darkness, I could do this
for the whole night.

This attention brought a completely different level of involvement and interaction with just about anything and everything around me, animate and inanimate. But everybody else, because they seemed to know everything, could go about their life happily without paying attention to anything. Then I realized that even they did not know anything. It was just that they had their assumptions and belief systems that they were happy with; either their own ones, or what was handed down to them by someone else.

And they not only knew about what is here, they also knew about other worlds, about gods, about heavens and things like that – and here I was struggling to figure out what is what. This so intrigued me that I started planting myself outside a major temple in Mysore1, because I wanted to really see how people would be after having a meeting with God. So I stood there, intensely observing every face that was walking out of the temple. Generally, I heard local gossip. Sometimes in Indian temples, your footwear walks away with someone else, and when that happened, I heard people cursing the creation and the Creator. [Laughter] I found that people walking out of restaurants always had more joyful faces than people walking out of temples. [Laughter] Divine versus dosa – dosa seems to win. [Laughter & Clapping] I could not come to terms with this. I slowly became more and more skeptical about everybody and everything around me. Skeptical about social structures, political systems, religious beliefs, even scientific theories –because none of them matched with my experience of life…

On a certain day, I went to Chamundi Hill. There is a tradition
in Mysore [City in Karnataka, India where Sadhguru was born and brought up]– if you have something to do, you go to Chamundi Hill. If you have nothing to do, you go to Chamundi Hill. [Laughter] If you fall in love, you go to Chamundi Hill.
[Laughter] If you fall out, you go to Chamundi Hill. [Laughter]
I had just fallen out and I had nothing to do, so I started
moving towards Chamundi Hill. [Laughter] I went up and sat
on a rock. Till that moment in my life, I had always thought,
this was me, and that was somebody else or something else.
But there, for the first time, I did not know which was me and
which was not me. Suddenly, what was me was just all over the
place. The rock on which I was sitting, the air that I breathed,
the very atmosphere around me – I had just exploded into
everything. That sounds like utter insanity… This, I thought,
lasted for 10 to 15 minutes, but when I came back to my
normal consciousness, I had been sitting there for about four-and-a-half hours – fully conscious, eyes open, but time had
just flipped in my experience. For the first time in my adult life,
tears were flowing. I had always been peaceful and happy, that
was not an issue, but there I was drenched in a completely
different kind of blissfulness, every cell in my body bursting
with ecstasy. When I shook my head, trying to get some logical
explanation for what was happening to me, the only thing that
my very smart mind could say was, “Maybe I’m just going off
my rocker.” [Laughter]

As this experience deepened and started repeating itself,
if I just sat there, what were moments for me, seemed to
be hours for others. On a certain day, I happened to sit in a
certain place. I actually thought it was about 25-30 minutes,
but when I came to my normal senses, 13 days had gone by,
just sitting there. India being what it is, a whole crowd had
gathered; garlands around my neck, people touching my
feet, somebody wanted to know what would happen to his
business, somebody else wanted to know when his daughter
would get married. [Laughter] All the things that I hated were
just happening around me, and I had to move away from this
place, just to avoid this crowd around me. One thing I realized
was, everything that I had believed was me suddenly was not
me. This body had always been me, and suddenly I found
this was just an accumulation of food that I had eaten. What I
accumulate can be mine, but can never be me. This mind was
just a huge heap of impressions. A distance arose between me
and my body, between me and my mind. This also facilitated
a certain experience within me, that the equation of time and
space was suddenly not applicable for me anymore. I was
seeing that what is here is there, what is there is here. Past,
present and future got mixed up. It was one majestic chaos,
but utterly beautiful.

So my skeptical mind, not able to come to terms with it, started
conducting experiments. These experiments were too weird
to talk about and the results too fairytale-ish for anybody to
believe, but one thing that I arrived at was that existence is not
human-centric, and all human experience is self-made. Most
people believe that their experience is molded by situations
in which they exist, but actually, all human experience is 100%
self-created from within. Today, science is beginning to agree
with that. And having realized this, if all experience is created
from within, if the basis of your experience is within you, as it
is, what kind of experience of life would you want to have? I am
sure you want it to be utmost pleasantness, whatever you may
be doing. What you want for your neighbor may be debatable,
but for yourself, definitely you want utmost pleasantness.

As I realized the basis of my experience is within me, I shifted
from staring at things to sitting with my eyes closed. This was
a dimensional shift in my life. I got so fascinated with this
human mechanism; I would not want to open my eyes. For
days on end, I was just keeping my eyes closed, wanting to see
everything about myself. What I realized was, if I take a piece of
bread and put it into this system, this piece of bread becomes
my body in a few hours and I begin to experience it as myself.
As I became more and more aware of this amazing process, I
saw the very source of creation, the very maker of this body, is
within. Once I saw this, and I could see that I could re-wire my
brains completely in 24 hours, changing myself beyond social
upbringing, family situations, even genetic qualities in me, I
could see that I could change everything about myself. In 24
hours, I was a different person. In another 24 hours, I was yet a
different person. I was like a conscious schizophrenic trying out
different things.

On a certain day, in a field hockey game, I fractured my left
ankle, and I went and sat down in a place. I was in excruciating
pain and by then, I had also become a chronic asthmatic and I
had a very severe bout of asthma. This pain and this inability to
breathe together, they were quite something. At that moment
it occurred to me, if the maker of this body is inside, why is it
that I cannot mend this from inside? I sat down with a certain
resolve – if this is true, I must be able to allow it to mend itself;
otherwise, I must be completely on a wrong track. I sat down
with my eyes closed for little more than an hour. When I came
out, my asthma had left me, never to come back again. And
above all, my fractured leg was perfectly okay in little more
than an hour’s time. This intelligence and this competence,
which is not just about thought process, exists in every human
being, but unfortunately remains untapped.

Armed with this experience, I started creating methods and
systems through which every human being could access
that intelligence and that capability within the system, which
can make a piece of bread into a human being. What I went
about creating are technologies for inner well-being, methods
to engineer your interiority the way you want it. Millions of
people are making use of it, enjoying the benefits of this.
But the essential part of it is that there is such a high level of
intelligence and competence in every millimeter of the body,
every point of the body – not just in the thought process. This
intelligence within the human system is completely untapped
by human societies.

As I went further into this process, I looked at the question,
“What is it that determines what is me and what is not me?”
I am capable of taking a piece of bread and making it into
myself. If I look at this body, it is just a piece of this planet that
I have borrowed – then why is this and that separate? I found
that it is just the boundaries of sensation which determine
what is me and what is not me. Here there is sensation, so this is
me. There, I don’t feel a sensation, so that is not me. As I looked
at these boundaries of sensation very, very closely from within
myself, I realized that they can either be expanded, or even
made smaller than what they are right now. You can sit here
and not feel anything that is happening around you right now
– this happens in sleep to some extent – or you can sit here and
extend the boundaries of your sensation to the whole hall. And
anything that is within the boundaries of your sensation, you
will always experience as yourself. This glass of water here is
not you – that is very clear – but if you drink it, you just include
it into the boundaries of your sensation, and it becomes you.
So, if you expand the boundaries of your sensation, you can sit
here and experience everybody in this hall as yourself. You can
stretch it further, and experience the very cosmic scape like you
experience your own body.

When this sense of inclusiveness came into me, I suddenly
realized that to be loving is not somebody’s teaching, to be
compassionate is not an idea, to be in empathy is not some
esoteric principle; this is the way a human being is made, if
only he does not constipate his consciousness with limited
identifications with things that he is not. If you do not identify
with anything that you have accumulated over a period of
time, including your body and mind, every human being is
capable of this. When it comes to external situations, each
one of us is differently capable, but when it comes to inner
situations, every one of us is equally capable. No human
being is better endowed than the other when it comes to
the inner realm. It is only in the external situations that we
are all differently capable. If this inclusiveness enters human
life, if you can sit here and experience people around you as
yourself, I don’t think I have to teach you to be good; I don’t
think I have to teach you to love; I don’t think I have to teach
you to care. Because caring for yourself is very, very natural –
this is ingrained within the very nature of the existence. This
inclusiveness definitely has to touch humanity. So, this became
my life, my work and my endeavor to develop methods so that
people can experience this inclusiveness.

If this inclusiveness is experienced by humanity, particularly
by the leadership, by people who wield power and different
kinds of responsibility in the world, definitely we could find
solutions for everything. Today for the first time, we as a
generation of people – this is very significant – are capable of
addressing every human problem on this planet. Nourishment,
health, education, ecology – you name it, we can address it all.
We have the necessary resources, capability and technology,
but whether we are going to do it simply depends upon how
inclusive our experience of life is. If you stand here and you
experience this planet as yourself, I don’t think I have to tell you, “Take care of it.” Every human being would do his best. When we do not have this inclusiveness, what we could do, we will not do. In our lives, if we do not do what we cannot do, that is not a problem, but if we do not do what we can do, we are a disaster.

My hope and my work is just to see that we, as a generation of
people, do not become that kind of a disaster; that what we
can do, we will definitely do. And right now, what we can do
compared to what we could do 100 years ago is so incredibly
different, but what is missing is an all-inclusive consciousness,
an all-inclusive experience of life. If only we bring this about in
the leadership, in the people, only then we will seek solutions
that are relevant for all; otherwise we will only be dabbling, and
in the name of creating solutions, we go about creating more
and more problems. If we truly have to create solutions that are
relevant for all, an experience of absolute inclusiveness has to
happen to humanity. And this is possible.

“Individual transformation is the way to global transformation.”–Sadhguru

For those of you who may not recognize this icon, it was popularized by Obama during his campaign for ‘change’ in America. Sadhguru has said, though, that change is temporary whereas transformation is permanent.

“If I show you a seed and say, this will become a great tree, if you don’t know the connection between a seed and a tree you will only see it as an insignificant little seed that can never transform into a huge and strong tree. Disbelief is all you will feel. But if you nurture it, you will see the seed transform itself into a strong tree.”

From a Q&A session posted on Kavita Chhibber’s site.

Check out the below video, “Sacred Seed”:

All of us are given a seed that has the possibility of boundlessness. You are very careful and good, so you preserve the seed. I destroy the seed and make it into a tree.–Sadhguru

If you want a sacred seed to sprout and prosper you have to weed the place, cultivate the land, manure it, and you have to make sure enough water and sunlight finds its way. If you are afraid of the harshness of the sunlight and avoid it, you will also avoid the life-nourishing warmth of the sunlight. In your enslavement to the instinct of self-preservation you would like to avoid the sunlight; go stand in the shade. But you will miss the warmth of the life-nourishing light, too. That which is the basis of life is also that which ends life. That which burns also bakes. If you’re a good cook, you bake. If you’re a bad one, you burn.–Sadhguru

From India Today: “Because he’s the intelligentsia’s favorite guru…Because he has captured the imagination of the world with his ideas for a better future…” Click here for the pdf & here for the online version.

Unfortunately, because of India’s status in world affairs, I’m sorry to say that I’m not sure this ranking will make a huge impact in the global arena. But nonetheless, it’s recognition of the important work that Sadhguru and Isha Foundation is doing! And, if, as the headlines keep declaring, India rises to the global super-power that it’s destined to become, anything can happen..

“A world full of love, light and laughter – its time has come.

Let us make it happen.” - Sadhguru