Sadhguru: What decided our success ?

DO NOT try to put up a recipe for your success.

For example, 25 years ago, everyone wanted to become a doctor. If you want to study, the first choice was medicine. Let us say you became a doctor, but then everyone came to a yoga programme and stopped having to go to the doctors. Business will go down. It will no longer be a good profession to go into. Anyway, very few people are becoming doctors because they want to become doctors. There are a few doctors who really want to be doctors, understand the human system and serve people, but others are becoming doctors because they think it is lucrative. It is quite disturbing for me that someone’s sickness is a lucrative business, because you would not want everyone to become healthy.

So, do not put a recipe on your success. Real success happens when you use yourself to your full potential. It does not matter whether you become a doctor or a politician, a yogi or whatever; success means you are living your life to your full potential. If that has to happen, you need perception and an active intelligence. “How do I grow my intelligence?” Don’t worry about that. The important thing is to enhance your perception. If you are able to see life just the way it is, you have the necessary intelligence to conduct it well. If you are not able to see life the way it is, your intelligence will work against you. Intelligent people on this planet are generally the most miserable people on the planet. This is simply because they have an active intelligence, but no perception of life.

People today are trying to broaden their minds, which may make one socially successful, not truly successful. If you want to be truly successful, you must be able to see everything just the way it is, without distortions. If you can see everything just the way it is, life becomes a play, a game. You can play it joyfully and you can play it well for sure. If you can play it well, people will say you are successful.

You should not be aspiring for success. It is a miserable way to structure your life. You will simply cause pain and suffering to yourself and everyone, because your idea of success right now is that everyone should be below you, while you are on top.

This is not success; this is sickness. Never think, “I want to be successful.” Just see how to make yourself into a full-fledged being, and it will find expression. If it finds good expression, people around you will say, “He is a great success!” That is fine. People should recognise that you are a success, but you should not be thinking about how to be successful. That is a very wrong way to approach life.

Once you have come here as a human being, the potential of what it means to be human, all the dimensions of who you are must be experienced. Only then I would say you are successful. And the ability to explore that potential, the daring to explore that potential will come to you when you come to a state within yourself where there is no fear of suffering, that no matter what the life situation is, your experience of life will not alter itself.

dimension of your life. n Ranked among the 50 most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and bestselling author. He was honoured with the Padma Vibhushan, India’s highest civilian award, in 2017, for exceptional and distinguished service.

If you have to find fulfillment, if you have to know the joy of doing something, you will only know it when your action is total – hundred per cent. In everything that you are doing, if you are absolutely hundred per cent, you will notice your action will have a certain sense of exuberance. My activity stretches for almost 18-20 hours a day, seven days of the week, 365 days a year. Maybe in someone else’s mind this would look like slavery. It is not so for me, because I spend my days in absolute exuberance, and that is so for lots of people around me. This is success, if you want to name it that way. But what I would say is, this is life. Life, if lived totally, is success. If it is lived in a meagre fashion, that is not being successful. Once you are here, you must explore, live and experience the full depth and dimension of your life.

Ranked among the 50 most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and bestselling author. He was honoured with the Padma Vibhushan, India’s highest civilian award, in 2017, for exceptional and distinguished service.