Sadhguru MOTIVATION - #MentorMeSadhguru

Hello, Believe Nation! I made the Mentor Me series with the goal to try to hang around people who've done a lot more than us, who have wisdom and expertise to share. And hopefully the more time we spend watching their videos and being around them, the more of their mindset, their beliefs, their values sink into us to help us become the best version of ourselves. So today we're going to learn from Sadhguru on being motivated. Mentor me, Sadhguru.

I was just thinking about you when I was going over the story of your life and what you do you think your mission is? Like, the purpose, everybody tries to find their purpose. Have you been able to articulate to yourself what it is?

No, I don't have a purpose, and I think it's unnecessary for each individual to have, create, or invent their own purpose. Life has its purpose. Our business is to see how well we can fulfill that.

That's what I like about what you talk about, 'cause so much about anything that's spiritual or religion, apply so much value to the self as opposed to just experience what's already there.

Yes. We are just a piece of life. If this can become a full-fledged life, that's all there is. It's just that because there is no sense of balance and joy and peacefulness in people, people are trying to find a purpose and always a God-given purpose. And what makes each individual think that God is giving you a particular purpose? It's a large creation, you know.

Now, are you talking about consciousness or the physical purpose? Like in the way that an ant serves a purpose in the ecosystem. Consciousness is our own thing.

Consciousness is not our own thing.

No, but I mean in terms of like people sometimes, you know, you do your job as a physical being, and that might be your job.

What's the immediate purpose right now?

Right, but that's it. So do you think that— are you talking about just the physical being or are you talking about something else?

So this is what— when people are looking or when people are in pursuit of happiness, they are trying to do specific things that they like. If your life is an expression of your joy, then you are not looking at what you can do, you are looking at what is needed and you do that well. I think that's everybody's business in this world. What is most needed right now, if we can do it joyfully, that's all there is. I want to fulfill my whim and you want to fulfill your whim and there's a whole lot of problem. We're doing a whole lot of unnecessary things on the planet because we're in pursuit of happiness rather than being an expression of joy. At every point in human life, For every intelligent human being who is willing to look at their lives with some sense of openness, questions will arise. Am I— is audio okay? It's coming back to me. Questions will arise, "Am I really doing the right thing? Is my life going to waste?" These questions will arise for every human being, successful or not so successful, it doesn't matter. Only for those who are a bit thrilled by themselves, such people won't get questions. They will address this question on their deathbed. For everybody else, with every step, questions will come up. Is this the way I want to spend my life? Because what you consider as life is just a brief amount of time. If you're joyful, if you're a very joyful and exuberant human being, it's a very brief life. If you're miserable, it's a long life. Because you have noticed in your life, on a given day, if you're very happy and exuberant, 24 hours pass away like that. You're miserable or depressed, then a day seems like an eon. So time is a very relative experience. Those who are successful, reasonably joyful, questions will come up because time is just slipping away, life is just slipping away. Is this what I want to do? Is this the way I want to be? So reinvention. Becomes a relevant factor. Before we reinvent, let's understand the word invent essentially means, in its Latin origins, it means to arrive. To arrive means if you're in a haze of something, If you come beyond that, that's generally considered arrival. And when we say an individual, the root word for the individual is indivisible. That means you are not further divisible. You have become an individual. But that's not happened to most of the human beings on the planet. They are still an accumulation of many things finding expression. If you are sincere enough to look at yourself, unprejudiced looking, if you do, you will see what you consider as myself is a combination of many influences, too many influences. Your parentage, your genetics, your education, your exposure in the world, slowly you have accumulated your persona. Persona or personality is a hotchpotch of many things. You can't arrive as an individual in that. This is why it doesn't matter what kind of personality you have built, there is always a certain sense of lack of ease in these things because it's an accumulated concoction. An individual means not further divisible, that means you have become a being, not a person. Personality is there to work in the world. You need a persona to face the world, but this is an individual being. When I say not further divisible— in the world you do it in so many ways. If you're getting spiritual you will become an expert in dividing yourself into many things. You will always hear language like this. If you're doing something, if you do it the way you want it, it's you. If you're pleasant, it's you. Suppose you turn nasty, you look back and say, "That was my ego." and people will go further and say, "This is my soul, that is my self, that is my atman, that is my paramatman." If there is more than one within you right now, that means you're either schizophrenic or you're possessed. You either need a psychiatrist or an exorcist. You must decide which one. Because there is only one here, but he— this is taking on many forms as per convenience. The most important thing is, an individual re— cannot be reinvented, but has to be discovered, has to be explored, because personality has been invented by you. This being is not your invention. This is creation and the source of creation. When I say the source of creation, if you ate a banana in the morning, in 2 hours' time, this banana transforms itself into human form. So the source of creation is throbbing. Because one is not in touch with that, People are trying to make up their personality. They're trying to invent themselves. If you want to function at your highest level, you should not invent yourself. You must discover the nature of what this is. These things are happening because there is no experience. Of what this individual is, so we are making up things. We make up things by identifying ourselves with many things that we are not, starting from the body. It is obvious that you were not born like this. Were you? It's a question. Were you born like this? You came like this and became this much now. I'm asking, are you all natural birth or did you drop from heaven, please? Hello? All normal birth? Not a heavenly drop? If you're normal birth, you were born like this and now you became like this. Obviously the body is an accumulation. The content of your mind is also an accumulation. Everything that you have is an accumulation. What is an accumulation can be yours, can never ever be you. What you accumulate, you cannot consider that as myself. So fundamentally, because one does not strive, because the society in which you grow up, because the education systems did not make any effort to connect you with the dimension of this individual who is not further divisible, you start identifying with things. The moment you took on identity, your mind works only around what you're identified with. There is a— a very beautiful situation which occurred In Akbar, the emperor, his life, when he was very young, when he was an infant, due to some political situations, he was separated from his mother for a period of time. Because he was separated from his mother, they brought in another woman who also had a child to nurse Akbar when he was an infant. So she had a boy who was a few months older to Akbar, and she breastfed both these children. Later on, Akbar's mother came, and at the age of 12, he was coronated as the king. By the time he was 25, he was known across the known world as a great emperor. Somewhere along the way, he gave a few villages to this boy who was the son of this lady who breastfed Akbar because Akbar felt, "We drank the milk of the same mother, so both of us are brothers." So he gave a few villages to his elder brother. But by the time he was 30, that man lost everything and again penniless. Then one day he got a bright idea. He thought, "My younger brother has become a great emperor. If I go to him, maybe something will come my way." So he came. Akbar was deeply identified with this, "We drank milk from the same mother, so we are brothers." So he welcomed him with the honor that should be given to an elder brother and brought him in and kept him in the court. But he is a village dud who doesn't know one thing from the other. He just looked around at the things that were happening in Akbar's court Akbar had gathered enormous talent of musicians, mathematicians, all kinds of talent. He looked at all this, dazed by this. Then time to leave was coming. Then one day he told Akbar, "See, the reason why you're doing so well here is, "Hey, you got some really smart people around you. If I had such people around me, I would also become a great emperor. Especially you have this Birbal, he is too smart. If I had a man like him with me, I would also build a great empire." Akbar felt very guilty that his elder brother is feeling like this. He told him, "If you want, you take Birbal with you." So, this fellow felt very encouraged and said, "Yes, if Birbal comes with me, I will also become a great emperor." Then Akbar called Birbal and said, "My elder brother wants you to go with him. You go with him and do whatever you need to do with him." Birbal's eyeballs rolled, "What is he going to do with this fool?" Then he said, said, "My Lord, why me? I will send my elder brother with your elder brother." And Akbar also was relieved because he didn't want to lose Birbal, so he asked this fellow, "Is it okay if Birbal's elder brother comes with you?" The fool thought, "If Birbal is so smart, his elder brother must be super smart." And he said, "Yes." Next day morning is the send-off party, the full assembly of the court. He is leaving, the brother, elder brother. Birbal walked into the court with a bull on the rope and Akbar looked at this and said, "What is this?" He said, "My Lord, you wanted my elder brother to go with your elder brother. Here he is." Akbar got really angry, "Are you trying to insult my brother?" He said, "No, my Lord, we drank milk from the same mother." The moment you get identified with something, You're intelligent, she's just wrapped around this identity. It is because of this identifications, not one, many, a complex web of identities, you become a person instead of being an individual. A person means a mess. There is no person with clarity. A personality means it's a mess of things. So many things put together, hotch-potch, depending upon what you are exposed to, you become a certain kind of person. But beneath this, if you have to gather all this, there is something more fundamental, which is the individual. The individual being is there, that is why these accumulations of stacks of accumulations are possible. These accumulations can be analyzed, broken down. But the individual cannot be further broken down, it's indivisible, that's why it's an individual. I think for long periods of time, human societies have suffered this struggle for survival. When you want to survive, your ability to discriminate is the most important quality, otherwise you don't survive. Till we create kind of societies where everybody can survive, This cannot be put to rest. So this is the reason why Eastern societies did not bank so much on intellect but on intelligence. There's a distinct difference because probably in English language there is no words to describe different aspects of one's intelligence. In Sanskrit language, there are at least 8 dimensions of your intelligence. So intellect is just one of them. Intellect is very useful for survival process because it gives you discriminatory capability. If you allow your intellect to find out anything— suppose you want to know this flower through your intellect, you will see the only thing you will do is pull it apart and try to know it. Dissection is the way of the intellect. So if you want to know your mother, Please don't dissect, okay? That's not the way life happens. If you want to know life in its entirety, you need other dimensions of intelligence. Because intellect has given ability to survive and a certain sense of dominance over others, we have become devotees of intellect. Intellect is a wonderful thing, no question about that. But you need to understand, human intellect functions only from the limited data that it has gathered. It cannot explore anything entirely new. You can only project from what you know to another dimension, and you can never project into an unknown dimension through what you know. Right now, that's the reason why— I would say Western societies have been on a treadmill for a long time. They run a lot and they get fit, but they don't go anywhere. Fitness happens, of course. Okay, now when we talk about human identity and false association with certain stereotypes, why do we always strive to be a certain stereotype? I mean, why does everybody in Pennsylvania want to have a big house with a white picket fence? Why is that the status of having arrived? Because this is a society— this idea of role model is essentially from the West. So, a few months ago I was being interviewed by someone from here and this lady asked me, "Who is your role model, Sadhguru?" I said, "I don't roll with the models." Such an idea never occurred to me. It never occurred to me, "How should I shape myself, in whose image?" That never occurred to us because the East is always looking at how to turn inward and discover the deeper potential in you, never going out to be like somebody else. This is something which is there in the natural ethos of India that you cannot be somebody else. You can never ever be someone else, you can only be yourself. And how to make this yourself into your full potential, full-blown growth is all. The traditional yogic examples go like this, if a mango tree looks at a coconut tree and thinks coconut tree is taller and aspires to become a coconut tree, it will become a no-good mango tree. So, every life is unique in its own way and has its own place. The only thing that life has to do is to find the necessary nourishment to get full-blown growth. If you become a full-blown yourself, and that's all you can do, otherwise you will become pretentious. So the problem is, once— once you go by your intellect— these two things are very connected— once you go by your intellect, you will have a whole lot of information, but you don't know anything. This is modern education. You have a whole lot of information with you. Everybody is rattling out what— in a dinner party you can see people saying exact distance between planet Earth and, you know, planet Mars and everything, but what relevance is it? It is just that you can gather information like this. When you have information, you have a false sense of feeling that you know everything, but you know nothing. It may help you in the financial market to have information, but with life, What is needed is not information, what is needed is profoundness of purchase that you have into life. You need traction into life, experiencing life. You cannot know it. If you read a book and you think you know life, or you figure out something in your head and you think you know it, no. You have to experience it. The profoundness of your experience is what makes this life. So, if you go by the intellect, imitation is a natural process, and that's how the role models come. Can I tell you a story? Please. I always seek your permission because the moment I start, "Once upon a time," a lot of people think it's bedtime, you know, because that's the only time somebody told them a story. So this happened in early 20th century. In 1910, there was a man whose name was Topiwala. Topiwala means a hat seller. You know, people's second names indicate their trade sometimes. So he's going from village to village, town to town selling hats in the tropical heat. One afternoon he felt tired and he went and sat down under a tree, opened his meager lunch, ate and dozed off. After a little while he opened his eyes. And to his horror, all the hats were gone. He looked all over the place, no hats. When you— you do everything possible, when you don't know what else to do, people pray. So he looked up to pray and he saw a bunch of monkeys sitting there, all hats on. So he screamed at them, they screamed back at him. He abused them, they abused in their own language. He picked up whatever he could and threw it at them, they picked up whatever they could and threw it back at him. Not knowing what to do, out of sheer frustration, he took his hat and flung it on the ground. All the monkeys took their hats and flung it on the ground, and he picked them up and went about his business. 2013, December 21st. Another man was going around selling hats, his name also happens to be Topiwala, and one afternoon he went and sat under a tree, ate his elaborate lunch—21st century, you know—and promptly fell asleep. After some time he woke up, hats gone. He didn't look here and there, he looked straight up. A bunch of monkeys were sitting hats on. He got up and jived, they all jived. He made funny faces, they made funny faces. He had all the fun he wanted to have. When he was done, he picked up his hat and flung it on the ground. A baboon of a monkey quickly came down, picked up the hat, walked towards him, gave him a tight slap in the face and said, "You idiot, you think only you had a grandfather?" So there is substantial evidence that There is evidence that monkeys are evolving, okay? Now, once you go by the limitations of your intellect, you are still a hunter and gatherer. Maybe instead of gathering pieces of meat and leather and bone and tooth of animals, today you gather information, you know the distance between Mars and Sun and this and that. Maybe you gather, but still The nature of the intellect is to gather. By gathering, if you gather so much, somebody who has this much, in front of that person, in comparison to that person, you look better. But in the— in the experience of life, you will not feel any better. So if you have gathered that much, if somebody has gathered this much, then in front of that person, you feel like nothing. So gathering is always by comparison. Your own gathering has no meaning. It is only in relation to somebody else's gathering being more meager than yours. Or in other words, in some way you start enjoying somebody else's incapability or failure or whatever. So, this is the nature of the intellect because it survives on what you have gathered. If you want to succeed in our life, which will play a major role, Guruji? Faith, God, your own efforts? Effort or luck? Or winning election. If you want to win an election, that also, luck is also important. Faith, God, luck, effort. Maybe all of them. But in what proportion? So when you say fate, obviously it's something that you cannot do anything about. When you say luck, again obviously it's something that you cannot do anything about. When you say God, again it's something that you cannot do anything about. So only thing that's in your hands is effort. So put your 100% into your effort, What happens, happens, isn't it? So don't leave proportions of your energy and your capability to luck, God, fate, all these things. That's not your business. If there is such a thing, it will act. Your business is only effort, isn't it? Just do that. Effort has to be incisive in the sense It should be focused, calibrated. Simply if you make effort, it's foolish effort, isn't it? Just labor is not going to get you somewhere. Right kind of action, the right timing, right place, all this is important, isn't it? So for all these things to happen, You need perception and intelligence. So that's all you must do in your life, constantly looking for ways to enhance your perception and your intelligence. Rest will anyway happen. This is one thing that unfortunately humanity is not doing. They are trying to become capable of something Do not try to become capable of something. Just enhance your perception and intelligence, whatever comes your way. Right now, let us say it's like this, you know, this is happening in the world all the time. Everybody wants to become a doctor. Not now, if— 25 years ago it was so. If you want to study means first thing is medicine. If you don't get a seat, what's next? Engineering. Don't get a seat, what? Next thing, next thing, like this. So let's say you became a doctor and let us say everybody came to the yoga program and they stopped going to a doctor. At least your visits to the doctor has come down, isn't it? Has it? Has it come down or no? For sure it's come down. So business will go down. It will no more be a good profession to go into because very few doctors are becoming doctors because they want to become doctors. Others are becoming doctors because they think it's lucrative. Isn't it? Isn't it so? Most people are becoming doctors because they think somebody's sickness is a lucrative business. It's a very— I don't want to go into other aspects, it's quite disturbing for me. There are a few doctors who really want to be that. They want to understand the human system and they want to Serve in that direction, that's great. Suppose everybody became healthy, you don't want that, isn't it? Yes, you don't want that. So do not try to put up a recipe for your success. Success is only when you are able to use yourself to your full potential. It doesn't matter whether you become a doctor or a politician or a yogi or what the hell you become is not the thing. Success means you are living your life to your full potential. That's what success means. If that has to happen, You need perception and an active intelligence. "How do I grow my intelligence?" Don't worry about that. Right now, 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. Most 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. So one thing, one most important thing that people have not worked at is to enhance their perception. They are trying to broaden their mind, that's not the point. That will only make you 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. You can play it joyfully, you can play it well for sure. If you can play it well, people will say you're successful. You should never think, "I want to be successful." Don't ever think, "I want to be successful." Just see how to make this being into a full-fledged being. People will say one day, "Oh, he's successful, he's a great success." You should not be aspiring for success, it's a miserable way to structure your life. But every human being should start the process of turning inward, otherwise when moment of death comes, all you will have is belief systems to hang on to. And everything that you believe, everything that you think matters to you right now will not matter to you if the next moment is death. And I'm sorry to remind you, but anyway you will die. It's not my wish. I'll bless you with a long life, but anyway you will die. Is it okay? You need to understand this is the fundamental of turning inward, that you realize that you're mortal. You realize that you have come with an expiry date. You realize you're racing towards it. If you remind yourself of this, how can you not look at life more profoundly? How can you? Only because you think you're here forever, you can forget about it. It doesn't matter what you think. You think you come to the talk, you think you're going to go home, you think you're going to this place or that place, but as far as your body is concerned, it is walking straight to the grave. Yes or no? You think so many things, this is all your nonsense. But the reality is your body is walking straight to the grave, not missing a step. Yes or no? Yes. We'll bless you with a long life, but if you understand and if you're constantly conscious that I'm mortal, there is no way you cannot look at deeper dimensions of life. You naturally will.

Just a quick note as you guys watch and listen to this, this video. If Sadhguru says something that really resonates with you, put it in the comments below with quotes around the outside so we can keep track of what you really resonate with. Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed. I love to know your thoughts in this video. Did you like it? Did it move you? Which clip resonated the most with you? Leave in the comments below and I will join in the discussion. Also, those people who've been leaving quotes from this video, if there's some that really resonate with you, give it a thumbs up and show some love. Finally, I want to give a quick shout out to Arturo Bobea. Arturo, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book. Really means a lot to me. For those of you watching, if you want your chance at a shout out in a future video, make sure to grab a copy of the book and also email in the receipt so we can keep track. Thank you guys so much for watching. Continue to believe, or whatever your one word is, and I'll see you soon.