Indian yogi and author (born 1957) From Wikiquote, the free quote compendium
My whole work is to enhance people's perception. I have no teaching. I have no philosophy. I have no religion. I have no belief system. All I have is methods to enhance people's perception, because only what you perceive, you know.
The spiritual process is just to create the right kind of chemistry, where you are naturally peaceful, naturally joyous. When you are joyous by your very own nature, when you don't have to do anything to be happy, then the very dimension of your life, the very way you perceive and express yourself in the world will change. The very way you experience your life will change.
When you are seeking happiness through your action, you are always enslaved to the external situation. As long as you are enslaved to the external situation, you will always be in some level of suffering because the outside situation is never going to be hundred percent in your control.
There is something else which needs to be looked at beyond the dimension of the body and mind. If that dimension is not experienced, once you have come in the human form, if you do not experience yourself beyond the limitations of this body and mind, I would say this human form has been wasted upon you. Because to eat, sleep, reproduce and die one day, you don't need this kind of a body, you don't need this kind of intelligence.
Joy 24x7
ISBN-13: 978-8179929148
Your joy keeps crashing down repeatedly. It doesn't matter how many times you think 'This is it', it keeps falling down simply because you don't understand the mechanics of it.
If you are joyful, whatever you do you will do it to the hilt because you have nothing to hold back, nothing to fear, isn't it?
If you use any external activity to create an inner situation, you naturally get enslaved to that external activity, and that becomes the condition for your joy. That's the basis of your slavery and bondage; unless you change that, you will never know joy as a way of being.
Your intelligence is so deeply entangled with the social identification that you have taken on, your brains are not working in line with the life within you; it is working against your own life. That is the source of misery.
If I choose among you, you will feel hurt. But nature has its own way of choosing. Those who are not entitled to something, drop out by themselves.
In the case of Isha, the process will last in a very active way for six hundred to seven hundred years. After that, it will continue in a lowered way. But the energy part of it is indestructible. Though, right now, the teaching looks like the major part, it is actually just a small part in my life. The real work that I do is not in what I am saying or doing around the world. The real work is in the “eggs” that I lay which can’t be destroyed, which will be there forever.
This life for me is an endeavor to help people manifest their divinity.
True compassion is not about giving or taking. True compassion is doing just what is needed.
Awareness is aliveness.
How aware you are is how alive you are.
Memory creates a hallucination of the past, desire creates a hallucination of the future.
As many colors of the rainbow are an outcome of one pure light, the many religions of the world are an expression of one divine source.
Most of the time you are thinking about life, not living life.
Spirituality does not mean going away from life. Spirituality means becoming alive in the fullest possible way so you are not just alive on the surface, you are alive to the core.
The Times of India, 10 June 2009
Whenever you say, "I do not know something," you are flexible. Whenever you think, "I know it," you become rigid. This rigidity is not just attitude; it percolates into every aspect of your life. This rigidity is also the cause of an enormous amount of suffering in the world.
The Times of India, 10 June 2009
How Human beings are, that is how the society will be. So, creating human beings who are flexible and willing to look at everything rather than being stuck in their ideas and opinions definitely makes for a different kind of society. And the very energy that such human being carry will influence everything around them.
The Times of India, 10 June 2009
Even if I erase all your memory, still you will be here. Yes? Your family will disappear, your status will disappear, your business will disappear, everything that you own in the world will disappear. But still you are here. So beyond all the things that you identify yourself with, still there is something called as 'you'. That 'you' is not subject to what you accumulate from outside. But unfortunately that 'you' has been so much covered, so much crowded with other things that you never allowed yourself to look at that. You always thought that what you are identified with is much more important than who you really are. Now if your focus shifts, then the other dimension can start opening up for you.
Eve's Times, June 16, 2009
Faith is not something that you can cultivate. If it happens to you, it happens, if it doesn't happen to you it doesn't happen, that's all. Does it mean to say - "I have to just sit and wait and someday it will fall upon me?" No, it is just that if you understand the fundamentals of living here, in this existence, you will see, for anything to happen, you must create the right kind of situation.
The Asian Age, 22 February 2009
God will not lift a little finger for you, please know, because whatever he has to do, he has done it. His work is not pending. He has done a fantastic job over the creation, isn’t it? He has done a fantastic job. There is nothing to complain. He has put himself into you; beyond that he cannot do anything... Everything that you need now has been given. So, it is your turn to play the game now. Match has started, coach cannot interfere now.
Isha Newsletter, July 14, 2009
Enlightenment never happens. It is there; it is always there. The sadhana that you do is just to see it is there. You are not doing sadhana to construct divinity within you. All you will construct is only ego.
All along, you've been shaping your destiny unconsciously. But you can also work on it consciously. If you make the effort to access your core and realise that everything is your responsibility, and shift your focus inside you, then you can rewrite your destiny.
Our life energies are the most basic and the most powerful aspect of human beings. Though most people are unaware of it, whichever way our energies play, that’s the way our bodies and our minds and our emotions play. So, once we get the energies—the fundamentals—moving in one direction, we can make sure that our bodies, emotions, and minds are also moving in that direction. -Sadhguru
Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
The word ‘yoga’ literally means ‘union’. When you experience everything as one in your consciousness, then you are in yoga. -Sadhguru
Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
When you destroy the walls of falsehood that you have built, everything becomes one. Only when you merge with the existence, you are free. As long as you and the existence are separated there is no such thing as freedom. -Sadhguru
Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
Hata yoga is a way of working with the body, disciplining the body, purifying the body, preparing the body for higher levels of energy. All of us are alive; all of us are human beings, sitting here. But all of us do not experience life to the same intensity because our energy levels are not the same. Our pranic energies are not the same. Different people experience life in different levels of intensity. -Sadhguru
Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
What you call as creation is just (energy). Everything is the same energy. The rock is the same energy. God is also the same energy. This is gross; that is subtle. As you make it more and more subtle, beyond a certain level of subtleness, you call it “Divine.” Below a certain level of grossness, you call it animal; further below that you call it inanimate. It is all the same energy. -Sadhguru
Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
Constantly all around us, one substance is being made into another. This transition and this transformation is happening all the time. If you make mud into food, that's called agriculture. If you make food into a human being, this is called digestion. If you make a human being into mud again, we call this cremation. If you transform the physical into the non-physical, that's called consecration. Why the need to transform the physical into non-physical? Because that's your longing. When you say ‘I want to walk the spiritual path’ what you're saying is, ‘I want to touch something which is non-physical.'–Sadhguru, Mahima Consecration, USA, Nov 7, 2008
Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
Just sitting silently for a few minutes within the sphere of Dhyanalinga is enough to make even those unaware of meditation experience a state of deep meditativeness. - Sadhguru (on the Dhyanalinga meditation shrine at Isha Yoga Centre, India)
Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
This is an attempt to create a space that will witness mystical dimensions that have never been witnessed in this part of the world. -Sadhguru (on Isha Institute of Inner Sciences, McMinnville, TN USA)
Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
Affluence has not brought misery... Having a lot of money in your pocket is good, isn't it? If it enters your head it becomes misery because that's not its place. It should be in your pocket. If it's in your pocket, there are many wonderful things you can do in the world. It is a means, and it is a tremendous empowerment. -Sadhguru
Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
A leader is someone who takes a chance on the destiny of a large mass of people. He's a leader because he is capable of organizing and directing situations to the desired goal. But that only happens if a leader has some mastery over himself. -Sadhguru
Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
Right now, the bane of the world is just that human beings are working with limited individualistic ambition. Instead of working with ambition, if people work for a deeper vision of life for themselves and for everything around them, there is no need to scale anything down. -Sadhguru
Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
How deeply you touch another life is how rich your life is. -Sadhguru
Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
Our lives become beautiful not because we are perfect. Our lives become beautiful because we put our heart into what we are doing. -Sadhguru
Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
Why are you stingy about your desires? Why don't you be magnanimous? Why don't you be infinite in your desires? It is not just about 'I want to be well.' I want you to be really greedy about your ambition and desire and say: ‘I want the whole existence to be well. I want all life to be well. -Sadhguru
Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
This project is not just aimed at improving the economic conditions of people... It is a way of inspiring a human being to stand up for himself, to raise the human spirit. -Sadhguru (on Action for Rural Rejuvenation rural relief program)
Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
Trees and humans are in an intimate relationship. What they exhale, we inhale, what we exhale they inhale. This is a constant relationship that nobody can afford to break or live without. -Sadhguru (on Project GreenHands mass tree planting initiative)
Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
The basic purpose of life and the basic purpose of education is to enhance one’s boundaries of perception. I don’t want the children to just survive after ten years of schooling here. They must blossom and flower wherever they go. -Sadhguru (on Isha Vidhya rural education project)
Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
If you are wired to your memory, repetitions will happen and redundancy will come; but if you are paying attention, that changes your ability to look at things
So for a leader, it is very important that he is in the best of emotions within himself all the time because everything that he does, affects so many people. So there, our (India's) leadership has not worked at all, especially in the last five years. When leaders are insecure, leaders are fearful. He will then do what is good for him only. Only when he is joyful, when his experience of life is not affected by what's happening around him, he will do what is needed. We want leaders who will do what is needed, not what they need.
Vasudev has been one of the pioneers of "environment spiritualism." At present, he is leading a massive plantation campaign - Project GreenHands in Tamil Nadu. The plantation drive had started two years ago and since then there has been a gigantic increase in the green cover in Tamil Nadu.
The Pioneer, 11 June 2009
The Isha Foundation set up by yogi Jaggi Vasudev in Coimbatore in 1992 aims to plant 114 million trees in Tamil Nadu by 2010. In 2006, the Foundation entered the Guinness Book of World Records by planting 852,587 saplings in 6,284 locations across Tamil Nadu in one day The foundation, which has 250,000 volunteers across 150 centres, also conducts Isha yoga programmes that are popular across the globe.
(from the article - The most powerful indians in 2009)