Freezing the moment is not the answer


By Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev

Nowadays, people who come to me do not merely ask for blessings. They ask for a selfie! They want to ‘freeze’ the moment, ‘capture’ the guru, as it were.

Whether it is a person, object or knowledge, the rudimentary human mind always wants to ‘possess’ it. The problem with this approach is that you end up with titbits of life, but believe you’ve mastered all of it. You cannot capture a damn thing in this universe. If you are willing, however, you can experience this universe in an unimaginably profound and powerful way.

At a recent event, i was asked why so many mystics down the ages turned to poetry. I said, “To confuse you.” And it is true! There is nothing logical about human existence. For the mystic, poetry is not a teaching in verse; it is simply an outpouring of an illogical but incredibly beautiful inner condition.

Regrettably, the human impulse to capture or freeze life masquerades as knowledge. In religion, mystical outpouring is ‘frozen’ into scripture. In education, poetry is ‘frozen’ into textbooks. In politics, a perspective is ‘frozen’ into ideology. People are always seeking conclusions. A conclusion is a useful peg to hang a coat on. But you don’t spend your life hanging on to a peg, unless you want to be nailed!

When i was eight years old, i already had a billion questions. I could never find anyone who answered a single question without quoting somebody else. I knew that the authority they invoked invariably quoted some other authority. When that authority was from another time zone, it was sanctified as ancient scriptural authority! This made no sense to me. So, i brooded endlessly, and wrote poems that always ended with questions. I could never accept authority as truth. Truth was for me the only authority.

My irreverence should have made me the unlikeliest candidate for spirituality. This is why i tell people: Outsourcing your responsibility to an external authority will not make you more spiritual; it will only make you submissive. The spiritual process is about dropping all assumptions. It is an unbridled seeking – a seeking unchained by tradition, caste, creed, religion, parentage, genetics. If you are a true seeker, you are not seeking heaven, or even God. If the Devil rules the world, you want to find out and meet him! The spiritual journey is about seeking truth, nothing else.

When at the age of 25, i exploded into a state of boundless ignorance on Chamundi Hill, it is not that all my questions vanished. I simply realised the folly of trying to capture truth in instalments. I saw that even if you read all the libraries on this planet, your knowledge would be minuscule compared to this utterly incredible cosmos. Enlightenment does not mean you ‘know’ everything in the universe. It means that your faculty of perception is now so uncluttered that you see everything just as it is. Enlightenment is absolute clarity.

There is a saying in Tamil that the beauty of poetry lies in its deceptions. What it means is that human existence is absolutely unreasonable, and still beautiful. That is essentially the perception of the mystic. I can see a sunset, dissect it and enjoy it at the same time. Creation is beautiful not because the imagination makes it so; not because you possess, freeze, whitewash or decorate it. Creation is beautiful because you have the eyes to see it just as it is. And that is why the mystic turns to verse: not to capture existence, but to embrace it.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.
Raz Patnaik

\"Freezing the moment\" is NOT the right phrase. \"Blind following\" or \"Unquestioning faith\" IS! There is a diff. btwn. using Rhetorics and using r...


Pranams -- whether poetic or routine dry logic.... learned or semi-literate... rich or poor ... here or there.... what we tend to forget it \'truth\' ...

Vinod Dhir

Great words of wisdom but your take is as different as your intellect...many ways to reach the top,your way is your way.I like Sadguru\'s write-ups.