The Source of Joy
Sadhguru, Isha Foundation
THE whole science and wisdom of what we refer to as Inner Engineering means not seeing joy as something that we could achieve in our life, but seeing joy as the very basis of our lives. Is this the only goal of our life? No. Joy is not the goal, it is the square one of your life. Other wonderful things can happen only if this happens. Otherwise, you will live constantly with the fear of misery striking you.
Once it happened in a kindergarten school, the teacher walked into the classroom and found a muddy puddle in the middle of the class, intentionally made by somebody. She looked at it, and asked ’Who made this mess in the classroom?’
Not one of these tiny tots opened their mouth, because even at that age, they had certain camaraderie about not squealing.
The teacher asked again but nobody said a word. Then the teacher thought there was no point pushing it, and she said, ’Let us all – everyone including me – close our eyes. Whoever made this mess, we will give him or her five minutes, just to clean it up and go back and sit. Nobody needs to know who did it, but you must clean it up.’
So, everybody closed their eyes and suddenly the teacher heard a patter of feet, the bucket and some other noises. She gave this enough time, and again heard the patter of feet running back and sitting down. When everything was quiet, everybody opened their eyes to find one more muddy pool, and alongside it was written ’PHANTOM STRIKES AGAIN!’
How many times has this happened in your life? At every stage in your life, you think ’Oh, if I get this job, this is it, my life is made, but just a few years down the line, the same job gave you diabetes and blood pressure.’ You thought ’If I get married, that’s it, my life is made, and you know what happened after that.’
So, at every stage you think ’this is it,’ but life strikes back again and again. Life strikes back because you are not in tune with your own basic existence and not because there is something wrong with creation. You have gotten identified with petty things that you gathered. You have become an accumulation, you have no existence of your own.
Joy is not because you know something, joy is not because you understand something, joy is because the deepest core of you functions and finds expression.
When you sit with me, my energies are such that naturally your physical body, your mind and your emotions get aligned in a certain way, so you feel joyful. It is like how an induction motor works – just the flow of energy in one part induces an energy flow in another part.
But even though the induction is from outside, the actual joy is always from within. In poetic ways we would say ’I will shower joy upon you.’ But no, we cannot shower joy upon you. We can create a situation where you cannot help being aligned in a certain way whereby you naturally feel joyful. Joy is always an inner experience. If it was showered upon you, your skin should feel it first but that’s not how it happens. So a certain alignment happens within you that naturally allow your innermost core to find expression and joy.
For ages, in these cultures, there were scholars, priests and kings, but always, a spiritually realized person was held as the highest. They were held even above gods simply because just their presence was an instrument to set everything right.
In the world, there is nothing else wrong with people except that they are miserable. In whatever they do and they don’t do, they make themselves miserable. They just need an excuse. You will see if you are in a certain level of alignment on a particular day, suddenly you will find all you need is an excuse to burst into laughter. But if you are in a certain level of misalignment, all you need is an excuse to burst into tears and depression.
So you need to understand that whatever you consider right now as the source of your joy, is just an excuse. Joy is the natural choice. You don’t need any teaching or advice or scriptures to make this choice. The very natural choice is joy because that is your original nature, that is not something that you have to desire or pursue or attain. If you fall back into your original nature, joyfulness is the only way you will be.
Ranked amongst the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and a New York Times bestselling author Sadhguru has been conferred the Padma Vibhushan by the Government of India in 2017, the highest annual civilian award, accorded for exceptional and distinguished service.