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A Larger Slice of Life

06 May 2014 20 Comments

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MASTER'S WORDS

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Sadhguru recounts a situation in

Krishna’s life and talks about Grace,
karma and the nature of one’s life on the
spiritual path.

Questioner: Sadhguru, if we assume

Krishna was God himself, why did his
devotees face so many difficulties? And as
for myself, until I laid my eyes upon you,
my life was what most people would
envy. Now still people envy my life, but in
a different way. In fact, it has been quite
a rollercoaster ride for me. If it is not
about making life smooth, then what is
Grace all about?

Sadhguru: You know, Balarama asked a

very similar question when they had to
leave Mathura and were going through
all kinds of hardship, walking through the
forest without proper food or rest: “Why
are all these things happening to us, and
that too with you around?” Krishna’s
answer was, “Don’t you complain when
life is happening to you in great measure.”
It is because you look at certain situations

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as good and others as bad, or certain
situations as desirable and others as
undesirable, that you ask yourself why
these things are happening to you rather
than just seeing life as life. The moment
you step into the spiritual stream, life is
happening to you in great measure, as if
everything is on fast-forward. If you do
not identify one thing as good and
another thing as bad, you will see life is
happening in great intensity – that is all.
There is no such thing as good and bad.
Life is happening. Some people enjoy it –
some people suffer it.

All we can do is to see to it that everyone

enjoys it. On a fundamental level, the
events that are happening on the planet
are of no consequence. Even if a
thunderbolt hits and all of us got struck
and burnt up, I don’t think it is a tragedy
– it is just a happening. “Then what about
Isha Foundation, what about my family
and my children?” For all of them, life
will also happen in great measure,
because we suddenly evaporated. I want
you to look at this beyond the
identification of good and bad. Life is
happening in great intensity – that is all.

If you want to
turn spiritual,
naturally you
are seeking a
When you
larger slice of walk the
life. In fact, spiritual
anything that path, your
you are going for
in life is an effort
inner
to have a larger situation
slice of life. If is on fast-
you were only forward.
eating a thin
wafer of life,
maybe it would
be all sweetness, but it would still only be
a thin wafer. If you took a cake and lived
on the icing alone, after some time,
sweetness would become poison. You
said, “My life was what many people
would envy,” but you know how empty it
was. People who do not have a car think
people who have one have a great
fortune. It is definitely comfortable and
convenient, but it is not a great fortune. If
there were no cars at all, no one would

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desire to have one. The problem is in
comparing yourself with others, in the
sense of “Oh, she has it – I don’t.” If those
who do not have a car do not compare
themselves with those who have one,
walking or cycling is perfectly fine. When
you said, “My life was everybody’s envy,”
it is not a statement about life in its
fundamental sense – it is a statement
about your social situation.

I am talking about life in the sense of

being, existence. Right now, you consider
many things as life that actually have
nothing to do with life in a deeper sense.
This has nothing to do with reality – it is
a mental condition. All suffering comes
from that insanity.

When you walk the spiritual path, your

inner situation is on fast-forward. There
are various reasons to this. One
fundamental reason is your prarabdha –
the allotted karma for this lifetime.
Creation is very compassionate. If it gave
you the whole lot of your karma, which is
called sanchita, in this lifetime, you would
die. Many of you are not even able to
shake off memories of this lifetime.
Suppose I reminded you of a hundred
lifetimes in great intensity, most of you
would fall dead right here, unable to bear
the burden of that memory. Therefore,
nature is allotting an amount of
prarabdha that you can handle. If you go
by nature’s allotment, and we assume
that you will not create any new karma –
which is not true – to dissolve let us say a
hundred lifetimes of karma, you may take
a minimum of a hundred lifetimes. But in
the process of these one hundred lifetimes,
you may gather enough karma for
another thousand lifetimes.

When you are on the spiritual path, you

are in a hurry to get to your ultimate
destination. You do not want it to take a
hundred or even a thousand lifetimes –
you want to hurry it up. Entering the
spiritual process means being willing to
experience life in great measure. Once
you come and sit with me, this is my
blessing too – let everything that is life
happen to you. “What if death happens?”
That is wonderful too. If instead of taking
75 years to get there, you can get there in

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35 years, is it not wonderful? This is not
just a question of logic – this is the reality
of life. This is exactly the statement
Krishna is making in the Gita: If you can
provide them the right kind of situation,
let them get there soon. There is a
beautiful Tamil poem about the wedding
of a bala yogi or a child yogi, and a girl
who was also a great devotee. They
organized a big wedding for 3000 guests.
They got married, and then, the bala yogi,
who was also a great poet, started reciting
beautiful devotional poetry. Everyone’s
attention was on him, and that was
exactly what he wanted. He used this
moment of total attention to dissolve all
of them – they all left their bodies right
there, in the wedding hall. Many hundred
years later, the poet laments beautifully in
a poem: “If only they had invited me to
that wedding, I would not have to
struggle like this. I would also have made
it. I came a few hundred years late. Oh,
will there be another wedding like that for
me?”

He did not
consider 3002
people dying in a
wedding hall as
Grace is
a tragedy. He trying to
saw it as a great pluck you
fortune, that out of the
because of the
bala yogi’s
limitations
presence, all of in which
them attained at you are
the same time. A stuck
spiritual person
does not look at
right now.
events as good
and bad – you
are only concerned about how intensely
life is happening to you. Good and bad are
social phenomena – they have nothing to
do with life. Once you have been initiated
in a certain way, you are not limited to
your prarabdha anymore. If you want to
handle the quota of one hundred lifetimes
right now, naturally your life will happen
with great intensity. If you maintain
equanimity, you will see every event that
happens in your life will bring you a step
forward. If you don’t see this, if you get
influenced by your social situations, then
because of the pace at which life is

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happening, you may think something is
going wrong with your life, which is not
so.

Positive terminology can always be

misinterpreted in a million different ways
because your mind dwells upon it. I
consciously use negative terminology
because you will not misinterpret it. If
you want to be spiritual, fundamentally, it
means you want to end yourself, the way
you are right now. A positive way of
putting it is, you are seeking liberation.
You are seeking your ultimate nature;
you are seeking God; you want to become
unbounded. When you want to be
boundless, you want to cease to exist the
way you are right now. Once you express
this wish and the necessary energy is
invested in you, things will happen to end
you the way you are right now. This does
not mean negative things will happen to
you. It is just that life will move on fast-
forward, at a tremendous pace.

Then what is Grace? In this existence,

energy functions in various
manifestations. It functions as sunlight,
as breeze, as gravity – similarly, it also
functions as Grace. Gravity is trying to
pull you down; the breeze is trying to
blow you away; the sun is trying to burn
you up – Grace is trying to pluck you off
the planet. This is using negative
terminology. If you want to express the
same in positive terminology, the earth is
trying to hug you; the breeze is trying to
cool you; the sun is trying to warm you –
Grace is trying to make you grow. Let’s
go by the negative terminology, because
you will not get attached to it. Grace is
trying to pluck you out of the limitations
in which you are stuck right now. The
limitations include the planet, the people,
the body, the mind, the emotions –
everything. If you have invited Grace and
it is doing its work, if it is pulling you up
but you drop your anchor, you create
unnecessary struggle. If because of the
spiritual process life is happening, it is fine
with me. If struggle is happening, it is
simply because you have invited Grace to
pull you up, but you drop your anchor –
that way, naturally, you will struggle.

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 Editor’s Note: Sadhguru explores the
life and path of Krishna. Watch the Leela
series, available as a free webstream –
one part every week.

Get notified every week

This article is based on an excerpt from

the May 2014 issue of Forest Flower. Pay
what you want and download. (set ‘0’ for
free). Print subscriptions are also
available.

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