With Shiva

From Involuntary to Voluntary

One aspect of yoga is to take all those things which are involuntary, into our conscious or voluntary action. Your breath, your heart beat, your liver function – these are involuntary or compulsive actions. Everything that is vital to the system is compulsive or involuntary because nature did not trust you. If any of the organs that are vital to your system were a voluntary process, you might do something crazy!

Involuntary activity is in some way a helpless level of activity. Your body and particularly your brain should become largely voluntary. If it becomes voluntary, your life is made. This is the journey from being involuntary to voluntary.

Are you a volunteer? That is what it means – you do everything consciously, by choice, not compulsively. You just do what is needed. You have no particular way to sit. You have no particular way to do things. In every aspect of life, internal or external, you will do it the way it needs to be done right now. That is effective activity. The rest is wasteful activity.

King of Limbs

The very body is divine as far as yoga is concerned. One aspect of Shiva is that he is Angaraj. Angaraj means the king of limbs. You may be doing Angamardana, which is a process of gaining mastery over the limbs. Shiva is the king of limbs because he has completely mastered them, and now the very body has become divine. If the system, which is moving from unconsciousness to consciousness, becomes 100% conscious, if even the physical body becomes utterly conscious, then this is a divine body. That is what it means when we say Shiva is Angaraj. These limbs can be an unconscious mass of flesh, or they can become so conscious that they are like a divine body. This is about transforming a piece of flesh into a deity.

This is the science through which deities are made. By creating a certain yantra, or form, and by injecting energy into a particular form, a stone can be made into a divine force. If a stone can be transformed into a divine force, why can't flesh be transformed into a divine force? It can definitely be done.

There is infinite power in scattering seeds. Whether they sprout, grow, break ground, become trees or not is their Destiny and Karma.
Even if one crosses over the bridge from Mundane to Eternal. My work here will be done.

"Meditation is not about going somewhere - it is falling back into yourself."

The World Will Not Leave A Scratch Upon One Who
Is Meditative.

Of Friendship 🪷

Sadhguru digs down to the very root of the topic and shares what friendship means to him.

I made my first friend at the age of three or four, after they sent me to school. I built such a bond with him, he was more than anything else to me. I still remember his name. I am sure he doesn't.

I had a wide variety of friends, hundreds of friends all over the place, but that’s different. I am talking about the bond that I built with real friends – I always thought it was absolute. But over a period of time, with the experience of life, I realized there are very few people who see friendship like that. Most people see friendship as context-oriented. When you are in school, you have one kind of friend. When school is over, you just drop them and pick college friends. When college is over, professional friends, and whatever else. That's how people look at friendship. I've not been able to look at it like that. I am not disgruntled, but it has been a learning experience about human nature.

My need for friendship was never too much but the moment I formed a friendship, I always thought it was for good and in every way absolute. I've found good friends here and there, but even for them, as life situations change, their needs and their focus on the friendship changes. For me it never changes.

I wouldn't say it is heartbreaking, but definitely it is disappointing that most people cannot form deep relationships in their lives. They can form relationships only according to their needs; they cannot form relationships beyond their needs. A relationship just for the sake of relationship, that is not there in most people. They form a relationship when they need it; when they don't need it, they break it.

I am a little bit of a fool in such matters. Even now if I meet an old school friend, I still approach him the way I knew him at that time. But he is somewhere else, no longer the way he was. Probably they move on with life and I don't. I have always stayed a little outside of it. I valued life that way, so I always kept it that way. I think it continues to be so even today.