[Sadhguru] What is enlightenment?
If..whatever I say you tend to misunderstand, whatever I say you are bound to misunderstand,
but let me see how to create minimum amount of misunderstanding.
This is the reason why most enlightened beings never spoke.
Because the moment you speak, you are bound to be misunderstood.
That’s the reason I don’t speak about any other dimension of life.
I am only talking about methods.
When you get there, you will know.
Now, you want to see New York City.
If I go on talking about New York City, you still don’t know.
So, I am just trying to build a car for you.
You get in and go there.
When you go there, you will know what it is.
Till then, whatever I speak, you are bound to perceive it in all kinds of ways.
Everything that you understand, you always understand it only from what you already know,
that’s the basis of your understanding.
That understanding is of no consequence when we are talking about a completely different
dimension of life.
Now, what enlightenment means for you would be, suppose you are here,
you are here right now, you are in the body, but you don’t belong to the body.
You have a mind, but you don’t belong to the mind.
You have a family, you don’t belong to the family.
You are in the world, but you don’t belong to the fam...… to the world,
but at the same time, everything is a part of you.
You are not in conflict with anything.
You are…, everything is a part of you, but you yourself don’t belong to anything.
How would it be?
You cannot imagine, isn’t it?
So, in terms of your experience, how would it be?
Suppose, you spent a lifetime without ever knowing what’s fear, what’s anger,
what’s jealously, what’s hatred, what’s anxiety, you are blissful all the time,
you are intoxicated all the time.
At the same time, you are fully alert.
How would it be?
Did you ever get drunk?
No?
Tch…
Okay.
All the time you got drunk, but all the time you are fully wide awake and alert.
Even if you fall asleep, you are wide awake, but even if you are awake, you are still in
deep sleep.
Am I making some sense to you?
No?
So, enlightenment means you have broken the barriers of the physical.
The limitations the physical has imposed upon you, you have broken that.
Now, don’t seek enlightenment right now because for most people
or for over ninety percent of the people who reach that stage,
the moment of enlightenment and moment of leaving the body are same.
Once your energies reach such a peak, you can’t hold onto the body.
You will drop the body anyway.
So, moment of enlightenment and moment of leaving the body are same for most people.
Only somebody who knows the tricks of the body,
who understands the mechanics of the body can hold onto it.
Otherwise, they have to employ something else to hold onto it
because most people who attained have not gone into that kind of sadhana.
They are only learning to drive the car.
They are not learning how to build the car.
So, they cannot retain the body.
They will have to play various dramas to hold on to the system.
For example, you heard of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.
Hmm?
Ramakrishna is an uneducated man.
That’s the advantage he had.
No influence of education on him.
He is like a village bumpkin, but a crystalized consciousness.
So, he is very simple.
He is very significant for United States because the first yogi who came to United
States in 1895, he came to Chicago, okay.
Hmm?
[Participants] 1893.
[Sadhguru] 93?
1893, Swami Vivekananda landed up in Chicago.
See, he came here looking for you.
And the other yogi who really made some impact in the country was Paramahamsa Yogananda.
He also is a disciple of Ramakrishna’s disciple.
So, both of them have the same lineage of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and both of them came
to United States.
So, Ramakrishna was God-like.
People saw him God-like.
They worshiped him as God.
Very simple man, like a villager he is.
He has no education, no sophistication - simple, but he is God-like.
People could not miss his divinity.
But he was mad about food, crazy about food, you know.
He is talking to a group of people, his disciples, half way says “Please wait, I will come.”
He will run into the kitchen and ask his wife, “What’s cooking today?”
Sarada, his wife was ashamed of this.
“How can you be like this?
People see you God-like and you are mad about food.
Even I am not bothered about food.
Why are you bothered about food?”
Ramakrishna would say, “That’s okay, but what’s cooking?”
One day, she really got angry with him and she said,
“I am ashamed.
I am just ashamed of you the way you are.
People are worshiping you like God and you are mad about food.”
That day he told her, “One day, when you bring the thali…”
Thali means in India in that part of the country is a large plate.
In India, people eat in such big plates.
A large plate where food is prearranged and brought.
Ramakrishna always sat on a swing that is also unique thing for India probably.
We have swings which are like eight…
eight feet long.
You can sleep on it, and you know, he always ate on this swing.
“One day when you bring the food, thali to me, if I look away,
if I don’t show any interest in the food, you must know there are only three more days
left.”
This happened seven years after this incident.
One day, she brought the thali and he looked away.
Then she immediately knew.
She broke down and cried.
He said, “No.
No point crying.
Time is up.”
He just used a conscious desire for the food as a hold… way to hold onto his body.
He doesn’t know any other systems of yoga to hold on.
So simple method.
He created a conscious desire for the food all the time.
Everything else has been lost because without desire you cannot exist in the body.
Everything else has been gone.
Now, there is a conscious desire.
Every day, consciously he is thinking about food all the time just to keep himself in
the system.
This kind of conscious desire, you can drop it anytime.
When you feel it’s done, you can just drop it.
So, moment of enlightenment and moment of leaving will be same.
So, that’s why we work people up to a certain point and peg them down there on the last
step, so that they serve their natural course of
life in a very beautiful way and when the time comes,
we can release them from that.
It will be nice to send them right now, but it will be nice to have evolved people on
the planet.