Sadhguru More Than a Life
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
SADHGURU MORE THAN A LIFE W t This is the extraordinary story of Sadhguru— a young agnostic who turned yogi, a wild motorcyclist who turned mystic, a sceptic who turned spiritual guide. Pulsating with his razor- sharp intelligence, bracing wit and modern-day vocabulary, the book empowers you to explore your spiritual self and could well change your life. It seeks to re-create the life journey of a man who combines rationality with mysticism, irreverence with compassion, ancient wisdom with a provocatively contemporary outlook and a deep knowledge of the self with a contagious love of life. Described as ‘a profound mystic, visionary humanitarian and prominent spiritual leader of our times’, he is equally at home in a satsangh in rural Tamil Nadu as at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In his early years, JaggiVasudev (or Sadhguru as he is now known) was a chronic truant, a boisterous prankster, and later a lover of motorbikes and fast cars. It is evident that the same urgency, passion and vitality echo in his spiritual pursuits to this day, from his creation of the historic Dhyanalinga—the mission of three lifetimes—to his approach as a guru. In Sadhguru s view, faith and reason, spirituality and science, the sacred and the material, cannot be divided into easy binaries. He sees people as ‘spiritual beings dabbling with the material rather than the reverse’, and liberation as the fundamental longing in every form of life. Truth for him is a living experience instead of a destination, a conclusion, or a matter of metaphysical speculation. The possibility of self- realization, he strongly believes, is available to all. Drawing upon extended conversations with Sadhguru, interviews with Isha colleagues and fellow meditators, poet Arundhathi Subramaniam presents an evocative portrait of a contemporary mystic and guru—a man who seems to pack the intensity and adventure of several lifetimes into a single one. Sadhguru More Than a Life ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM ANANDA PENGUIN ANANDA Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Group (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in Penguin Ananda by Penguin Books India 2010 Copyright © Arundhathi Subramaniam 2010 All rights reserved 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 ISBN 9780670085125 Typeset in Adobe Garamond by InoSoft Systems, Noida Printed at Chaman Offset Printers, Delhi This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser and without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above-mentioned publisher of this book. Contents Preface vii Introduction 1 ‘Pure Awareness and Madness’ 17 The Beginning of the Journey ‘Falling Upwards’ 24 Lifetimes Three ‘This One Will Graze Human Beings’ 30 The Black Sheep Who Turned Shepherd The Man Who ‘Went Up and Never Came Down’ 77 From Motorcyclist to Mystic ‘Compassion as Conspiracy’ 101 Preparing for Harvest ‘When the Divine Descends, You Just Accommodate’ 138 The Deepening Pilgrimage, the Darkening Night ‘If You Drop Your Fruit Willingly, Stones Can Be Minimized’ 181 Countdown, Crisis, Denouement vi Contents ‘Time to Graze the Valleys of Life’ 205 The Master, the Man and his Message ‘The Ball Game’ and Beyond 234 The Master Plan Postscript 239 Preface This book is a subjective account of one man’s life journey—or more accurately, life journeys. It is emphatically not a biography, if the word evokes expectations of an authenticated catalogue of dates, times and events. It is based on my conversations with the subject, with those acquainted with him, as well as on archival material from the Isha Yoga Centre in Coimbatore. When the subject happens to be a mystic, one inevitably enters the realm of the hyper-subjective. I have relied largely on Sadhguru’s version of events—inner and outer—in the early part of his life. Subsequently, I have relied on the views and impressions of those who happened to be around him as his mission as a guru unfolded. I decided to implicate my own journey as a seeker in the story primarily as a contextual device. It also seemed only fair to give the reader an idea of my own position (with its implicit biases and limitations) rather than assume a bogus omniscience as storyteller. It became increasingly apparent to me as the narrative progressed that it would be impossible to play the consistent role of an impersonal third-person narrator. As a result, I have consciously inserted myself into the tale at certain points, to ask my share of questions and counter-questions that I assume several readers will share. I am grateful to all those at the Isha Yoga Centre who delved into personal memory and shared some of their deepest life experiences with me. This book would not have been possible without their viii Preface generosity, their honesty, their insight. There are as many versions of Sadhguru as there are people who know him, and I encountered many simmering potential biographers on the way. This book claims to be no more than one non-definitive version of Sadhguru’s life and the birth of Isha. Hopefully, there will be others. My special thanks to Maa Gnana at the Isha Archives who attended to my many diverse requests with unflappable calm and an unwaveringly radiant smile; to Swami Chitranga and Swami Devasatwa who helped design the cover; and to Ravi Singh and Kamini Mahadevan of Penguin for the sensitivity and attention that they brought to the birthing of this book. I am grateful, above all, to Sadhguru for the freedom he allowed me over this manuscript, for his ability to home in on detail without turning micro-managerial—and for the almost terrifying elan with which he leaves his life ‘open, allowing readers of all persuasions to draw their own conclusions. Introduction I thought gurus happened to other people. Let me confess to my snobbery right away. I thought they happened to a certain kind of safari-suited Indian man and his docile status quoist wife. I thought they happened to those who knew the finer points of ritual red-tapism and pundit protocol, those who knew how to dive at holy feet and look ecstatic at satsanghs. That’s true on one level, but a somewhat facetious level, I admit. Let me also say that as a seeker (with my own share of torment and yearning), I had read enough to know all that stuff about masters appearing when students are ready. But what are the chances anyway of a master appearing on a peak-hour Mumbai local? Or at a poetry reading? Or a city bookshop or theatre or cafe? And what are the chances of a master speaking my particular language, figuring out my convoluted inner geography—my simultaneous need for guidance and dislike of guides, my need for a vocabulary that is sacred and yet secular? And what about my ability to turn mentors into tormentors? No, gurus didn’t happen to contemporary urban women. Psychotherapists happened to us. Books and conversations happened to us. Wittgenstein-and-Kierkegaard-and-Krishnamurti spouting friends happened to us. Gurus belonged to another era, another world—a simpler world where there were simpler divides between the leader and the led. The only guru I could envisage was the sage 2 Sadhguru in a B-grade Indian mythological movie with a candyfloss beard and an air of constipated benignity. Dead gurus were fine. They left behind words that provoked, challenged. That was a manageable bequest. But live gurus were unthinkable. Or to put it another way, I knew I didn’t have the qualifications—social, cultural or historical—to deserve them. Existential qualifications? I thought I had some. That is, if qualifications meant an absence. The unease, the out-of-kilter feelings, the lwhat-does-it-all-add-up-to’ questions, the sudden fear of death ‘on dawn visits to the bathroom’—I’d been there, done that. And while some of those clammy moments could be addressed by a poem, or love, or sex, or travel, or a book, or even chocolate, I knew there were others that couldn’t. And yogis? I thought they were a bit like unicorns. Near mythic. I thought they were to be found in remote Himalayan caves or in exotic spiritual literature (like Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi). The only yogis I knew of were the kind who held classes two days a week to ‘beat stress’ and ‘combat diabetes’.