Knowing Yourself, Inside and Out - with Sadhguru

Responding to a question on turning inward, Sadhguru asks, are we even sure what is inside and what is outside of ourselves? The first step in understanding, he explains, is to leave aside things we don’t know and work towards clarity of perception.

Questioner: I have been seeing your videos in YouTube, this is the first time that I am seeing you live. So, I have a basic questions, which will help everyone here. Everyone talks about, you know, knowing ourselves and the first step is going inside and then the way to go inside is meditation and when I try to…

Sadhguru: Whatever it may be. What you accumulate can be yours, cannot be you. So, this body (Gestures) is an accumulation. What you call as my mind, the whole content of the mind is accumulated, depending upon what you are exposed to in your life. So your body is a heap of food, small or big. Your mind is a heap of impressions, again small or big. Between these two heaps, where the hell are you? So, inside, outside – leave these words because when it comes to language, there is only that much leeway, so within that, maybe different people are trying to use it in different ways, we don’t know in what context they used. You put everybody into one bundle and said, “All of you said this.” I don’t know who these all people are. Different people employed different methods around them, looking at the people around them, what was best suitable for the people around them, accordingly they would have worked most probably. If they are genuine, they would have worked with the people around them, not with concepts from somewhere. What… Looking at an individual person, you will do something, what works for that person. What you do with this person (Gestures) may not work for another person, you’ll have to do something else with that person but you are talking about a generic inward, outward. So, first determine what is inward, outward. Everything is outward right now. The world is outside, body is also external material, ev… all the material in the mind also is external so what is this inward you are talking about? Then you will immediately say atma, paramatma, soul, this one. Now you are going into belief system. You don’t know! You know you have a body, yes? Hello?

Sadhguru: I’m not questioning whether it’s true or false, let’s not go there at all, but it’s belief, it’s not yet in your experience. If you talk about something, which is not yet in your experience, to put it bluntly you’re just a bloody liar, that’s what it means. But because lies are holy, lies are written in scriptures, lies are repeated by all kinds of people who dressed in different ways, which are supposed be holy though ridiculous. Because of this, you are not supposed to...

Yogi, mystic and visionary, Sadhguru is a spiritual master with a difference. An arresting blend of profundity and pragmatism, his life and work serves as a reminder that yoga is a contemporary science, vitally relevant to our times.