I'm generally referred to as a mystic. Well, what's that supposed to mean? If there is something here that you do not know or you are unable to understand, that would become "mysterious" to you. If there is someone here who seems to know and understand things most people do not, that person would become a "mystic".
As a child, one thing that I realized was that I was utterly, absolutely ignorant and everybody around me seemed to know just about everything. I did not know anything at all. So I had to pay enormous attention towards everything. My sense of attention became like this -- if I saw a leaf, I could sit there looking at this leaf, just staring at it for hours. If I sat up in my bed, just staring at the darkness, I could do that for the whole night.
So this attention brought a completely different level of involvement and interaction with just about anything and everything around me, animate and inanimate. But everybody else seemed to know everything and they were going about their life busy and happy while I was staring at every little thing. And they not only knew about what is here, they also knew about other worlds, about heavens, about gods, about everything.
This so intrigued me that I started planting myself outside a major temple in India because I wanted to really see how people would be after having a meeting with God, after having a conversation with God. So I stood there intensely observing every face walking out of the temple. Generally, I heard local gossip. Sometimes in Indian temples, your footwear walks away with someone else and then I would hear people cursing the whole creation and the Creator. I always found people walking out of restaurants had more joyful faces than people walking out of temples. I could not come to terms with this. Then I realized that they had just made up assumptions and belief systems that they were happy with -- either their own or what was handed down to them by somebody else. So I slowly became more and more skeptical about everybody and everything around me, skeptical about social structures, political systems, religious beliefs, even scientific theories because none of them matched with my experience of life.
On a certain day, when I was 25 years of age, I started heading towards Chamundi Hills in Mysore; you must see this place. There is a tradition in Mysore -- if you have something to do, you go to Chamundi Hills; if you have nothing to do, you go to Chamundi Hills; if you fall in love, you go to Chamundi Hills; if you fall out, you go to Chamundi Hills. I had just fallen out and I had nothing to do so I started heading towards Chamundi Hills and I went up and sat on a rock. Till that moment in my life, I always thought, 'This is me and whatever is outside of me is somebody else or something else.' But for the first time, I did not know what was me and what was not me. Suddenly, what was me was just all over the place; the very rock on which I was sitting, the air that I was breathing, the very atmosphere around me, I had just exploded into everything. That sounds like utter insanity. This, I thought, lasted for 10 to 15 minutes but when I came back to my normal consciousness, about four-and-a-half hours had passed. I was sitting there, fully conscious, eyes open, but time had just flipped in my experience. And for the first time in my adult life, tears were flowing down. I'd always been peaceful and happy, that was not an issue, but here I was drenched in a completely different kind of blissfulness; every cell in my body bursting with ecstasy. When I shook my head and tried to get some logical explanation for what was happening to me, the only thing that my mind could say was, 'Maybe I'm just going off my rocker.'
In my skeptical mind, I was not able to come to terms with what was happening so I started conducting experiments. These experiments are too weird to talk about and the results too fairytale-ish for anybody to believe, but one thing that I arrived at was that existence is not human-centric and all human experience is self-made. I realized the basis of my experience is within me, the very basis of my experience is within me, all that I experience comes from me. I shifted from staring at things to sitting with my eyes closed. This was a dimensional shift in my life. I got so fascinated with this human mechanism, I wouldn't want to open my eyes. For days on end, I just kept my eyes closed, wanting to see everything about "myself". And what I realized was, if I take a piece of bread and put it into this system, this piece of bread becomes my body in a few hours and I begin to experience it as myself. This amazing process, as I became more and more aware of it, I saw that the very source of creation, the very maker of this body, the manufacturer of this body is within. Once I saw this, I realized I could re-wire my brains completely in 24 hours, changing myself beyond social upbringing, family situations, even genetic qualities. I could see I could just completely change everything about myself.
On a certain day, in a field hockey game, I fractured my left ankle and I went and sat down. I was in excruciating pain and had a very severe bout of asthma; this pain and this inability to breathe together, they were quite something. At that moment, it occurred to me that if the maker of this body is inside, why is it that I cannot mend this from inside? I sat down with a certain resolve; if this is true, I must be able to allow it to mend itself, otherwise I must be completely on the wrong track. I sat down with my eyes closed for a little more than an hour. When I came out, my asthma left me, never to come back again, and above all, my fractured leg was perfectly okay in a little more than an hour's time.
This intelligence and this competence within the human system exist in every human being but unfortunately remain untapped. So I went about creating systems that people could make use of and thus evolved technologies for inner wellbeing; methods to engineer your interiority the way you want it. Millions of people are making use of these technologies, enjoying the benefits of them, but the essential part of this is that there is such a high level of intelligence and competence on every millimeter of the body, every point of the body. This is completely untapped by human societies. Maybe your ability to determine what happens in the world is limited, but what happens within you is 100 percent yours.
Most people believe that their experience is molded by the situations in which they exist, but all human experience is 100 percent self-created from within. Today modern science is very much in agreement with this. And having realized this, if all experience is created from within, if the basis of your experience is within you, the seat of your experience is within you, what kind of experience of life would you want to have? For yourself, I'm sure you want utmost pleasantness, whatever you may be doing. What you want for your neighbor may be debatable, but what you want for yourself is utmost pleasantness.
On a certain day, a lady went to sleep. In her sleep, she had a dream. In her dream, she saw a hunk of a man standing there, staring at her and he started coming closer, closer, closer. She could even feel his breath. She trembled - not in fear - and asked, "What will you do to me?" The man said, "Well lady, it's your dream."
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Sadhguru will post a weekly column every Monday covering such topics as health and wellbeing, cultivating meaningful relationships, living joyfully, enhancing human consciousness and how to make this planet a better place to live.
Email questions to: MysticEyeHP@ishafoundation.org
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