10 Enlightenment - Life the Way it is 11

Chapter 1
The Experience

In the modern era, the word Enlightenment is perhaps

most associated with Gautama Buddha. Gautama’s quest
that led him to steal away from his sleeping family in the
dead of the night, the arduous life that he subsequently led,
and the culmination of it all in the now famous Bodhi tree
experience, and the establishment of the Buddhist order
that let loose the largest spiritual wave that humanity had
ever seen, is all imprinted too well in the mind of a present
day seeker.
It is interesting to contrast this with Sadhguru’s case. As
a child, Sadhguru was anything but spiritually inclined.
When his family visited temples, he would rather be thrashed
for defiance than take off his shirt to enter and “pray to God.”
As a youth, English education brought Western thinking
into him. Blue jeans and The Beatles were his constant
companions. Piercing reason and hard logic reigned
supreme over anything subtle that came from the East.
So it was when he was living a life that was hardly ascetic
or sage-like that it happened to him. And it happened to him
rather unasked. But, perhaps, Nature did not want to make