Sadhguru Answers Questions About Reading, Personal Change, And The Power Of Yoga
· Free Press Journal
My grandparents used to read a lot. My parents read often. In this generation I see very few readers. Would this have any impact on society?
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Sadhguru: Reading as a habit and as a culture must be nurtured. The impact of reading is completely different from watching videos or playing computer games – it is not the same thing. It exercises your mind and your insight in a completely different way. Hopefully, the younger generation will be brought into reading more than watching videos or something like that. The audio-visual media can be very educative and it is powerful in its own way, but reading has more intricacy and depth to it. There is more profoundness to reading compared to watching a cinema, playing a video game.
If the larger public was reading more than what they are doing right now, if they just sat down, focused on something and read, they would be much quieter, more thoughtful and would look at life with a little more depth because you are doing a kind of dharana. You are remaining focused on something – that is dharana. It is a kind of sadhana because it definitely enhances the way your mind functions. Today, with the fascination for electronics overtaking everything else, it is very important that we as a society don't lose the culture of reading.
Right now, the main problem with people is just that they have lost the intricacy of looking at life with more depth. There is no profoundness to life. People look at everything on the surface and I think that is encouraged by certain kinds of audio-visual media. I am not against it because it is a great media by itself, but most of the time I don't think it is a substitute for reading.
I have tried to fix my life a few times. Whenever I see progress, I slip back into old ways. Why does this keep happening?
Sadhguru: Beyond the identity that you call as “myself” is a certain amount of energy functioning in a particular way. What kind of expression this energy finds is what your life is right now. This energy can become misery or hatred. The same energy can become love, joy or ecstasy. At different points in your life you have felt this same energy finding expression in different ways. Whichever way the external situations were, accordingly, you reacted to that. This is how your energy found expression in different ways. Or in other words, your life energies are in deep enslavement to the external situation.
As long as this is so, you are bound to live like an accidental person. If situations around you are conducive, you are loving. If situations around you boil, you also boil. The basic aspect of being human means that everything in you should happen by choice not by compulsion. If you had a choice as to what kind of expression this energy should find right now, what expression would you offer it? Love and joy; there is no question about it.
No one needs to teach you to choose to be joyous. Life has already chosen that. Finding a conscious expression to your life energies is the important aspect of being here as a human being.
How will I benefit from doing Yoga?
Sadhguru: The whole process of yoga is to make yourself less physical and more fluid. For example, right now, suppose you take ten pots. If they are burnt clay, you cannot make anything out of them. If you break them, they become pieces. Now, suppose there was some process to turn this burnt clay back into un-burnt clay. Now you could take a little out of each of these ten pots, put that together and make an eleventh pot out of them.
Similarly, right now, your life energies are established as an individual. Yoga is about making yourself and your life energies more malleable. What is referred to as Samadhi is just this, where your contact with the body is minimized to the last point. Only a single-pointed contact is there with the body. The rest of the energy is loose and uninvolved with the body. Once your energies are like this, you can do so many things with it. When your energies are stuck and identified with the body, there is nothing much you can do. All you can do is produce thoughts, emotions and some physical action. But once your energies become free from physical identification, it becomes fluid and you can do so many unimaginable things.