So today I found an interesting video of a teaching by Sadhguru, which he imparted during a conversation with a YouTuber, Tom Bilyeu. It’s a teaching that interestingly contends, as I try to paraphrase, realizing that we don’t know anything is the beginning of being fully alert and present, which – as spiritual traditions like Hindu yoga and Buddhist meditation teach – is the way to become enlightened. It might seem paradoxical at first blush, as it seems logical that we spend our lives accumulating knowledge and experiences and, by the time we are “senior” this and that, comfortably ensconced in our fields of expertise and established in our careers and life, we can finally call ourselves “knowledgeable,” “experts,” and, henceforth, a “success.” But Sadhguru argues that, that, paradoxically, is not how we live, but how we die.
I am transcribing part of the conversation below:
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Sadhguru: To live here without belonging to anything but is still involved with everything takes a lot.
Most people belong but they are not involved. …Belonging is like an insurance policy. It’s simply that. Involvement takes you to be constantly involved with people around you, it takes you to be conscious and on. But I belong to you, I don’t have to do anything as I already professed I belong to you, I’m married to you, I belong to you, legally it’s settled, so I don’t have to be conscious of you, nor do I have to be involved with you, still I belong to you.
So belonging, believing, or identifying, simply means, you have found a way to sleep through your life. It’s called sleep.
When we say, people usually use this term with animals. If they say, “We’ve put our cat to sleep”, what do they mean?
Tom: For real? It means they’ve killed their cat.
Sadhguru: So I’m talking about sleep in that context.
I believe this, I belong to this, I’m identified with this means, it’s sleep, that means you are partially dead, you’ve made conclusions, which takes away the life that bubbles within you. That’s why people are walking around like they are dying in installments.
Tom: Yeah, so the notion of not knowing, and the notion of responsibility are two things that are really powerful…
Sadhguru: Can I just correct something? Not knowing is not a notion, it’s a fact, okay?
You really don’t know a damn thing about this existence, isn’t it? We don’t even know a blade of grass in its entirety. We don’t know a single atom in its entirety. We don’t know a single cell in this body in its complete context. We don’t. We know some things. We can manipulate a few things. But we don’t know much about it.
Let’s say we turn off all the lights. If the lights are on, you can weasel and just walk around wherever you want in this building. Now we turn off all the lights and make it pitch dark where you can’t even see your own hands. Now, every step you take, will you take it in upmost alertness? Will you be fully awake or asleep?
Tom: Fully awake.
Sadhguru: Fully awake. Why? because you don’t know where your next step is. Just live like this. If you simply live like this, naturally you are on the highway to enlightenment.
Everybody assumes and believe because it’s comfortable to believe in something. The very word belief means that I have concretized assumptions of which I know nothing about. Isn’t it?
Either you know or you don’t know. Where does the belief come from? When you pretend you know what you do not know as “I know,” that’s belief. But you cannot believe something all by yourself, so you need a hundred people around you. That’s why always believers are in groups, seekers are alone.
Tom: Talk to me about a seeker. What is a seeker? Is it something useful to cultivate?
Sadhguru: You don’t have to cultivate this. This is intrinsic to human intelligence if you do not bullshit yourself with all kinds of things you do not know as you know.
It’s intrinsic to human intelligence to seek, isn’t it? You don’t have to teach seeking. You have to teach belief systems. If you don’t teach anything, everybody is a seeker. It’s the nature of human intelligence. It naturally seeks. But people want to seek with the comfort of belief. They want to be in their belief system and then seek. It’s like tying their boat to the pier and then rowing hard.
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