Sadhguru explains the artwork on his book COVID of Karma, a mural from India's Isha Yoga Center painted with vegetable dyes. It depicts bhuta shuddhi, the purification of five elements (earth, water, fire, air, space) that gives control over body and mind. The yogi hanging upside-down symbolizes mastery of air, which Sadhguru says is attainable through practice, not supernatural.
You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Tell me about the COVID of Karma, your new book. It's got interesting art on it, and I was trying to figure it out. Why did you pick the imagery specifically that's on the COVID of the book?
This imagery is actually in one of our meditation halls here in Yoga center in India. Isha Yoga center in southern India. We have a very large mural right across the hall. And some people say this is the largest mural in the world. I don't know about that. But anyway, it's a large mural. This mural is made with, you know, with vegetable dyes and natural paints. And this is depicting the journey of a yogi. When I say journey of a yogi, the entire yogic system evolves out of a fundamental process called bhuta shuddhi. This means the five elements in nature. Earth, water, fire, air and space. These five elements are the basis of life. This is how the yogic science looks at the life and creation. These five elements play in everything from a single atom, to a human being, to the whole planet and to the cosmos. These five elements, we say this is an elemental mischief with five. Such a massive complexity of creation has been made. So the most important aspect of yoga is to cleanse these five elements in the system, in our own system, and then to have mastery over these five elements. Having mastery over these five elements means you have mastery over your body, your mind, and even the situations around you in a way that other people will think is miraculous. There's nothing miraculous about it. Right now you're in Vancouver, I'm in southern India. We are talking to each other. If we had done this hundred years ago, we could have claimed this is a miracle. You could have claimed you are God himself. And I'm sure in Canada they would have believed it at that time. Just got. You got the technology a bit late. If you got it hundred years ago, before anybody else got it, you could have claimed whatever you wanted. So similarly, having a little mastery over your five elements gives you certain capabilities. So yoga starts from there. Because of cleansing, these five elements, this. This sense of individuality can be dissolved. The walls of individuality can be dissolved, and you experience a union. In fact, the word yoga means a union that as you sit here, you're breathing, you are one with the atmosphere, but you don't experience that. If you experience the atmosphere itself as your larger lungs, then this is yoga. Not intellectually, but experientially. As you experience the five fingers of your hand as yourself, you experience the entire cosmos as yourself. This is yoga. So in this direction, cleansing of the elements is most important and having little mastery over that. So what you see in the Karma book is where a yogi is striving to master the air or the moving aspect of the existence. So here he's hanging upside down from a tree that is supposed to depict breeze or wind, and essentially air. We see air, or vayu, as movement. Everything that moves is vayu sat.
