The Bitterness of Life
Sadhguru, you have told us many times that if we have bitter experiences in our life, it is because of our past doings. What type of activities shoul
d we do today to avoid future bitterness?
Sadhguru:
The bitterness of any experience is not in what has happened. The bitterness of any experience is in terms of how you have received it. What is very bitter for one person could be a blessing for another person. Once, a grief stricken man threw himself on a grave and cried bitterly, hitting his head against it. “My life! Oh! How senseless it is! How worthless this carcass of mine is because you’re gone. If only you had lived! If only fate had not been so cruel as to take you from this world! How different everything would have been!” A clergyman, nearby, overheard him and said, “I assume this person lying beneath this mound of earth was someone of great importance to you.” “Importance? Yes, indeed,” wept the man, wailing even louder, “It was my wife’s first husband!” The bitterness is not in what is happening. It is in how you’re allowing yourself to experience it, how you are receiving it. Similarly, whatever the past activity or karma is, is also not in terms of action, but in terms of the volition with which it is done.
What is happening with you all, if you are a little open to me or to the teaching, is just that the volition is taken away, so you just do what is needed. That is what awareness means; there is no volition. Where there is no volition, there is no karma. You are simply doing what is needed; that is what acceptance means. That is what unbounded responsibility means, that you don’t have any volition about anything. In every given situation, simply whatever you see as needed, as per your awareness, as per your capability, you just do it. You build karma only with volition; whether it is good or bad, it does not matter. The strength of your volition is what builds karma.
People ask me, again and again, the same question, “What’s your mission?” When I tell them, “I have no mission; I’m just fooling around,” they think I’m being frivolous. They don’t understand this is the deepest statement that I can make about living in the world, because there is no particular volition – just doing what is needed, that’s all. In this, there is no karma. Whatever you go through, there is no karma. Whatever you are doing is just happening, as it is needed. So karma is only in terms of your need to do something. When you have no need to do anything, and you simply do what is needed, there is no karmic attachment to it. It is neither good nor bad.
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Facing Crime
Question: How does one tolerate all the crime that is going on in this world?
It is not a question of toleration. If you tolerate, you will go crazy. You need not tolerate. You cannot reverse what has happened. Remember, you are looking only at the person who is abused as a victim, but the person who is abusing is also a victim in so many ways, because in many ways he is degrading himself. The worst thing that any human being can do to himself is to degrade himself like an animal, which he does for some reason. Though it may give him some pleasure or joy or a feeling of power at that moment, still, in many ways, it is a tragedy for him as well. So it is not that one is a victim and the other, an assailant. Both are victims. Many untoward events are happening in the society; which may not be the act of one or two individuals. Crime is a complex process of many factors and people. So should you allow it to happen? No, you do whatever you can do to see that these incidents don’t happen.
It does not matter what kind of a human being you become, even if you become a super-human being, you will never have absolute control over the external world. Whether it is your institution or your family or the world, you will never have total control over the external situation. But you can have total control over the internal situation. This is always possible. Now, the external has gone out of control, for some reason, people are involved in murder, rape and other ugly occurrences. So, because the external has gone out of control, does it mean that you should allow the internal to also go out of control? If your external situations are going out of control, is it not very important that at least you keep your interiority in control? For. E.g. a person has been involved in a crime because he lost control of his senses. If you are also going to insane with anger and hatred for that man, what is the difference between him and you? He raped, so you want to kill. What is the difference?That does not mean you should not do something about the situation. What you have to do, you do. But when you do it with anger and hatred, it is of no value – whatever you do.
Unfortunately, for most people, fear, anger, hatred, are the most intense situations in their lives. Their love is never so intense, their peace is never so intense, their joy is never so intense, but their negativities are intense. So they experience power in negative situations. As you experience power in anger, the rapist experiences lust as power. It is the most powerful situation that he experiences in his life, where he physically imposes himself on somebody else. He feels powerful. That is why he is going for it. And that is exactly the justification you are giving, to retaliate in anger. It is not different. It is just that the acts are different. One is socially approved and another is not approved. That is the difference. Otherwise both these actions spring from the same basis.
You think you can make a difference by being angry. Why can’t you change the world with love? Why can’t you change the situations with compassion? If not out of love and compassion, you can at least utilize your intelligence to prevent untoward events in the society. The most beautiful things will happen when your actions spring from your intelligence and not from your anger.
How you respond depends on what kind of situation you are in, who you are, what your capabilities are, and what means you have. You cannot respond in the same way in every situation. If you have the power and the means to do something effectively, you can respond in one way. If you do not have the power and the means to respond during that moment, maybe your response will be to keep quiet and see what can be done later. But whatever is done is without vengeance or revenge.
The victim and the assailant are both in some way being degraded in their lives. One person is doing it to himself; another is being subjected to degradation by somebody. You don’t want this to happen to either the victim or the assailant. Only then you can say that you are functioning out of love. Otherwise you are functioning only from your identity as a woman or man, which will not create a healthy world. Since people always act from their identity of belonging to a certain group, or religion, or race, or country, or sex, these miseries happen. You must act without identity and function out of your intelligence.
. All of us cannot respond in the same way to any given situation. It depends on what means we have in our hands at that moment. If you get into wild reactions that spring from your emotions, you will not bring any justice. You will not bring any well-being to the world. You will just counter one evil with another evil. That is not a solution. That is definitely not a solution.
Sadhguru is a Realised Master, Yogi and profound Mystic of our times. A visionary, Sadhguru asserts that peace and happiness is not the ultimate goal of life, but the most basic need in every human being. He developed Isha Yoga as a powerful method for individual transformation leading to human emancipation. A glimpse of his life and work can be found in the books of Encounter the Enlightened and Mystic’s Musings.
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