Sadhguru Answers Questions About Brahmacharya, Sports, And Seeking Enlightenment

Question: Namaskaram, Sadhguru. Powerful beings like Hanuman and Adi Shankaracharya did phenomenal work in their lives, and people credit that to their brahmacharya. What is the potential of being a brahmachari?

Sadhguru: Brahmacharya means being on a path towards Brahman – the source of creation, so that you can transit into a dimension which we refer to as Shiva – that which is not.

Brahmacharya is like getting into a rocket. To break all existing limitations and go to another dimension, it needs an enormous amount of fuel. And as the rocket is going up, it has to drop weight.

If you want to not even go to Brahman but use Brahman as a walkway to the Divine, you need lots of energy. When you need that kind of energy, you need to contain the most energy-dissipating processes in your life. As you go, you must drop as much weight as you can – your ideas, your philosophies, everything.

Brahmacharya means to power yourself in such a way that everything that dissipates energy is broken – to such an extent that the biology and other things around you cannot hold you down. All the energy that is being created is going in one direction.

If a single cell can make another human being, it must have immense potential. Something that is that potent could be transformed into great fuel if you want to shoot up and go beyond the physical dimension, which is a power by itself. If you want to cross the physical dimension, you need to engage your body in a completely different way. That is why brahmacharya, though there are many more aspects to it.

Question: Sports are vital to the holistic development of young people, fostering physical, social and emotional health as well as teamwork and sportsmanship. How can we create a movement that will drive the youth of our country towards sport and also make our society more sporting in nature?

Sadhguru: The best thing about sport is you cannot do it without absolute involvement. The essence of life is in our involvement. Sport demands involvement. You can go to school or college without involvement, you can go to your office without involvement, you can even get married without involvement, but you cannot do sport without involvement – nothing will happen the way you want it.

When you kick or hit a ball, or shoot a bullet, it will not go where you want it to go unless there is absolute involvement. In society, whatever does not happen, you can cover up by blaming someone else. But in sport, it stands out starkly – in your face – that you are responsible for what you are doing.

This is the best aspect of sport. Should this come into our life? Absolutely! How to make sport a part of this nation? For India to be a sporting nation, the 65% of India in the ruralscape has to be involved. For this, we're conducting Gramotsavam where thousands of villages participate in sport. I request all our senior sportspersons, who have passed their professional sporting life, to help take this to the whole nation and bring sport into rural India.

Sadhguru Answers Questions About Science, Spirituality, And Symbolism

Question: Can you please explain the difference between seeking and desiring, in terms of enlightenment or self-realization?

Sadhguru: When it comes to enlightenment, the distinction between seeking and desiring is very important in the sense that you can only desire that which you know. You cannot desire that which you do not know; though you do not have it, you still know it. But when you use the word ‘seeking,’ it always comes from ‘you do not know’ which is why you are seeking to know. Seeking comes from a certain state of innocence, a certain void from which you want to come out.

Desiring comes with a foregone conclusion, ‘This is how it is going to be when I get it.’ You have already created the object and are trying to reach toward it. But with seeking, you have not created the object yet. You do not know what it is, you are just finding your way. It is a huge difference. If you have already created the object, it is something you have created and are trying to get. But seeking is just a searching – you do not know what it is, you are just seeking.

If you desire, you have already made a conclusion about what it could be; and that conclusion is not it. So when it comes to enlightenment, you can only seek.

(In his Ask Sadhguru column, the spiritual leader talks about intelligence being important to live life sensibly)

(Sadhguru is a Yogi, mystic, visionary and a New York Times bestselling author. He is also the founder of Conscious Planet – Save Soil)