The mind is always about the past that you have accumulated; it is never about what is happening now. It is a useful tool to handle the materialistic aspect of life but if you employ it to handle your whole life, then it’s a total mess.

If you look at it logically, even getting out of bed in the morning will look like a huge feat. Then you have to brush your teeth, eat, work, eat, work, eat, sleep; again tomorrow morning the same thing. For the rest of your life you have to do the same thing over and over again. Logically is it worthwhile? Not at all, isn't it? If you look at your life’s experience, maybe you saw the sunrise and it’s worthwhile. Maybe you saw the birds in the sky, the flowers blooming in your garden or your child’s face, then maybe it's worthwhile. But if you look at it logically, moments of extreme logic are moments of suicide.If you become extremely logical you will become depressed and self-destructive. Right now with a logical mind you are trying to perceive the nature of life. You can try as hard as you want, it is not going to happen. If you want to perceive the nature of your life, you must be willing to look beyond the limitations of the logical mind. Otherwise it is going to be one long, endless, fruitless struggle. It can never get you to a solution. It can only increase the complexity of the problem.This logical mind which is the fundamental instrument through which you are trying to do everything is only equipped to handle the duality of the existence. If you as a being become dual, you become a constant struggle. Once you create this tension, and the more you logically think about it, the more tense you become.All the sadhana, all the meditativeness that is prescribed on the spiritual path is fundamentally to handle this logical mind which is building up a certain level of tension within you. If it is constantly strung tight, then the very life energy in you will become weak and lose its intensity and vibrancy over a period of time.

Life is very, very simple and direct, but the mind is very complex and devious. If you do not pay any attention to it, it will settle down.

Another reason why the mind is going on endlessly – especially when you try to meditate, it takes on a new pitch altogether – is because you have a prejudice against it. You believe, “When I am meditating, no thoughts should come. Even when I am sitting here, I am thinking of something else. What do I do?” It is okay. Whatever your mind is thinking right now – whether you are thinking of Mumbai or mangoes – it does not matter. Just be here like you would sit in a cinema. Simply be with me. Do not worry about what your body and mind are doing.

Why are you so prejudiced against the mind? Do you ever put such conditions upon the body? Do you ever think, “Oh, I am in a spiritual discourse, so my heart should not beat, my blood should not flow.” If your heart stops beating, you would call it an emergency. Then why do you want your mind to stop? Only because you are paying too much attention to it. You are not paying attention to your heart beating, so it is not a distraction. Isn’t your body performing more complex functions than your mind right now? If you pay attention to all that, can you pay attention to what I am saying? No. So you have learned to ignore that. Similarly, it does not matter what the mind is doing once you identify it as a fool. If there is somebody very stupid around you who goes on blabbering, do you not learn to simply ignore him and carry on with your work? That is all you need to do.

Many of you are married, aren’t you? You know how to ignore the other person and carry on with your work, don’t you? If you did not know, you would not be married this long. If you paid attention to every word that was said, and if you reacted to all that, you would not live together. You have learned to pay attention to some things and ignore a lot of other things. So it is okay to treat your mind just like that. Just treat it like a long-time husband. He is saying so many things, but it is okay. Some days he comes home drunk; some days he is upset; some days he is something else. It’s all right. What he says does not matter. You love him; that is all that matters, isn’t it?

Treat your mind like that and you will become very receptive. Don’t try to stop it. Don’t try to fight it, because you cannot fight it. You have no means to fight it. The fight is just a joke because you are fighting your mind with your mind. It is a trickster. If you try to play any game with it, it will trick you. “It’s okay, you play your game,” you can tell your mind, “but I am not going to play the game with you.” Then your mind will slowly recede. Even if it is not receding, there is no problem. Once it does not bother you, even if it plays its own game, you just let it be. If you do this, your receptivity will rise.

After all, every human being is capable of knowing. Nobody has come impaired in any way. It is just that life never forces itself upon you. This is the way of life. Divinity never forces itself upon you. If you are willing, it is always there for you. If you are not willing, it is not there for you. So all you need to do is create the right kind of willingness and receptivity. Just to bow down and not have a will of your own is the biggest receptivity. It is the easiest way to receive.If you demolish all your limited assumptions and you sit here blank, that is when you are receptive. Then there is a blast of energy, which is true knowing. Knowledge and energy are not two different things. When you receive a certain energy, you also get to know something.

"Mind is madness. Only when you go beyond the mind, will there be meditation" - Sadhguru

GOD has given me so much. yet, everyday i get lazy to pray and read the sai charitra. i love god so much but whenever I am in need of help, i pray. i want to stop this habit. someone please help me.

Namaskaram, I have been wondering about something lately. While doing Shambhavi, during the last phase, in that stillness, it's clear that I am not the mind; I am not the body, but throughout the day, I oscillate between the identity and awareness.
So there is a tug of war happening between awareness and identity. At what stage in the spiritual process does awareness increase to such an extent that it overpowers the identity?
Is it a matter of adding more kriyas or practices that generate more energy, which in turn increases the awareness, or is it about making the identity so small that only awareness remains?
I sometimes think it's because I haven't done shoonya or samyama; hence I'm facing this dilemma. Sometimes I feel I don't have sufficient energy to hold that awareness. I am amazing within myself but still get lost in the thinking process sometimes. I don't stay there for long though
What would be a correct way to approach this?

Only this moment is real in this life. The previous moment and next moment are not there in our experience – they are imaginary. If you want to fully experience the creation or the Creator, that is possible only in this moment.

People are giving you a teaching, you must look at it, what is the basis of this teaching? ‘live in the moment, live in the moment.’ You do one thing – live somewhere else, and show .Can you live somewhere else? Somebody says, ‘live in the moment.’ Okay. Live somewhere else, and show it to me, how not to live in the moment. Is it a possibility? Then why such a teaching? Most of the people on the planet are beginning to understand this teaching as, you do not think about your past or your future. If you do not think about your past or your future, life will teach you a big lesson. If you do not think about your future, or remember the past, will life teach you a very bad lesson, or no? It will! You better think about your future, isn’t it?

It took millions of years to evolve this brain to this level of capability. Now, people do not know how to manage this. Now they are saying, do not use it – seize it, do not think about the past, do not think about the future. The beauty of human intellect is – you can look back a million years, and you look forward a million years, if you want.

So, let’s understand this, that these are all patchy things picked up here and there and doled out to the world for commercial purposes. How can you not live in this moment? Why do you need a teaching, ‘Live in the moment’, tell me? What you need is methods to manage your mind. You don’t need a teaching about life, because you are life! If you are not life, I must tell you how to be life. Are you life? Are you life, or no? You are life, isn’t it? When you are life, why should I tell you what is life? Only methods to see that this life finds its fullest possibility.

You don’t have to teach it to be life, because life – ‘being in the moment’ or ‘seize the moment’ essentially means to be alive, isn’t it? So, you think your mental activity, your intellectual competence and capability is not allowing you to be alive. No, it is the basis of your aliveness, it is the crown of your aliveness in many ways. The life evolved from a very basic form of life to the way it is today, and now what you’re carrying as your cerebral cortex, which makes you think about all kinds of things, this is the crown for the life on this planet, isn’t it? Yes, or no? This is the crown of life, and you want to give it up because you don’t know how to handle it, or it’s not fitting tight enough, or it’s too tight. Don’t do that.

Those who think a lot about their future will only keep thinking about their future. You do not have to think about your future. Do your present well – future will happen to you. If you think too much about the future, the future will get postponed, and then the “final future” will come – which is a funeral.

You do not have to make a decision right now with the limited experience and exposure you have to life. You just have to equip yourself – build your body, brain and your ability to grasp things at the highest level. We do not know what will come our way. And nothing needs to come our way. Maybe we will create something that no one did till now.

If you start thinking right now, "What should I do in the future?" you will do some silly thing that people have already done. People's idea of future is, "I will become a doctor, I will become an engineer." This is just about having a better livelihood.

Most educational institutions these days are totally insensitive to any kind of genius.If you show any kind of capability, they do not like it. They want you to just do this, this and this. If you do something else, they say, "No." Many people on the planet who have done incredible things are unfortunately those who dropped out of school. This is not because they had

an aversion to school but because the school had an aversion to genius.

You have to recognize the genius. The mundane will anyway happen. Somehow, everybody will find a job. That is not the point. As a life, what great things happened to this life, is what matters.”

Do not worry about your future. Just do the present really well. Future will blossom.

Sadhguru demystifies the fundamental Yogic process of bhuta shuddhi, or cleansing the five elements of earth, water, air, fire and akasha. He goes on to explain why the elements need to be cleansed and how the process enhances one’s life.

Article | May 6, 2024

Bhuta Shuddhi – The Fundamental Yogic Practice
The Significance of Bhuta Shuddhi or Cleansing the Five Elements
Why Do the Five Elements Need Cleansing?
Five Elements and Karma
Bhuta Shuddhi - Breaking Free from Karmic Imprint
The Benefits of Doing Isha Bhuta Shuddhi Practice
The Right Way to Do Bhuta Shuddhi for Maximum Benefit
A Deeper Mystical Insight Into Bhuta Shuddhi

Bhuta Shuddhi – The Fundamental Yogic Practice

Sadhguru: What you call as “my body” is just a manifestation of five elements – earth, water, fire, air and akasha (space). If you know how to organize these five elements properly within yourself, then there is nothing more to life. In terms of health, wellbeing, perception, knowing and enlightenment, everything is handled if you know how to keep these five elements properly. The most fundamental practice in the Yogic system, which is the basis of everything else that we are doing, is called bhuta shuddhi. “Bhuta” refers to the pancha bhutas or the five elements. “Shuddhi” means to cleanse that. If you learn to cleanse the five elements in the system, that is all there is. In terms of spiritual practices, whether you do yama, niyama, pranayama, asana, dharana, dhyana, samadhi or shoonya, essentially all of it is coming from the fundamentals of bhuta shuddhi. All other Yogic practices are an extract from the pancha bhuta system of Yoga. 

If you cleanse the elements, you will live a wonderful life. But if you are beyond that, the best thing is to forget about living a beautiful life and just transcend life, because living a beautiful life is a more complex situation than transcending. Transcending means to go beyond it. What is beyond is not bothered by so many complexities of the physicality. But if you want to be in the physical and still above it, that takes a little more mastery over the physical. If you have no mastery over the physical, you will get enslaved to the physical. 

If you do a certain level of cleansing for the elements, then you attain to what is called bhuta siddhi, which means you have mastery over the elements. Once you have mastery over the elements, you not only have mastery over the body and mind, but over the very creation. 

The Significance of Bhuta Shuddhi or Cleansing the Five Elements

Everyone has some kind of capability with the elements, otherwise you would not even live a normal life. How well organized the five elements are in your system decides how firm, stable and organically strong this body is. There is a whole system of practices to take charge of the five elements within you. Some are direct, others are roundabout. Bhuta shuddhi can be practiced in a most simplistic way or in a highly sophisticated way. Or if you do not know how to do it yourself, someone can perform something which everyone can benefit from. There are bhuta shuddhi rituals such as the Pancha Bhuta Kriya happening in the Dhyanalinga every month. If you do not know how to do it, someone else will do it; you just sit there in the presence and benefit from that.

These elements are the basis of your creation. If you have even a minor mastery over them, you will start living in ways that other people think is magical. But there is nothing magical about it. Right now, let us say you drink water. The water does not look like you or resemble you, but if you drink this, it becomes you. This itself is magical. Your disease got cured; that is not a miracle. This water becoming you is a phenomenal miracle. Once you are capable of performing this miracle, you should be capable of many other minor things like fixing an ailment or fixing something that you damaged – because you are creating the whole body from inside using the four elements. Unfortunately, it is happening unconsciously. One can bring consciousness to how these four elements are becoming the human body. 

Why Do the Five Elements Need Cleansing?

Questioner: Why do the five elements need to be cleansed?

Sadhguru: If you pick up some water from the gutter, you may think it is impure, but it is not. There is much more life in gutter water than the water you drink from the bottle. It is just that that is not conducive for you. In human understanding and language, we call water as pure only if it is conducive for us. But gutter water is very pure for many lives. With the so-called pure water, you have killed all that life. All those other creatures think your bottled water is lifeless water, not pure water.

Purification essentially is in the context of human beings, not in terms of the element itself. Similarly, for many chemicals that are used as pharmaceuticals and various types of medicines, there is an industrial version and a medical version, because what is meant for human consumption and what is used for other purposes are different. This does not mean that the industrial version is impure. It is just that it is not in a condition which would work best for you. When we refer to the elements, we are speaking in the context of what is more conducive for us. In that context, we need to purify the elements. 

Five Elements and Karma

The body, the world and the universe are all a play of five elements. If the elements do not acquire other qualities or possibilities, there is no way you can create so many trillions of manifestations with just five. They are naturally receptive in nature. Today, we know that we can influence them. We can change the quality of the water, air and the food that we eat just with our intention, emotion or thought process. The five elements within you which make this body are deeply influenced by a certain gathered layer of information which is generally referred to as the karmic substance. Without it, the elements would not behave in a particular way within you. Every human being would have been the same if there was no specific information. What you call as your individual self is essentially a certain volume of information and the fundamental way that it is stuck onto you is through the elements, because there is nothing here apart from the elements. 

Cleansing the elements is about making it free of the accumulated information or the karmic substance. If this is not done, then you will be a strong individual but you will never know how to breach this boundary that you have set for yourself. If you cannot cross the boundary that you have set up, that is a foolish way to live. You set up a boundary without knowing why and you cannot cross it after some time and you start claiming, “This is how I am!” This is not how you are. This is what you made yourself to be.

Cleansing becomes relevant when freedom and liberation become the goal of your life and you want to extend yourself beyond these boundaries. If you want to be a concrete ball, there is no need to cleanse at all. Concretization of karmic processes will make you rigid, and rigidity will bring enormous amount of suffering. You do not need a calamity to happen; you are a calamity by yourself. This is simply because the imprint is so deep that you behave in predetermined, compulsive ways. The same situation has happened a thousand times, but the next time it happens, you still react almost the same way. It takes a certain amount of awareness and shaking you up to respond in a different way. Bhuta shuddhi is to do it at the most fundamental level. 

Bhuta Shuddhi - Breaking Free from Karmic Imprint

If we cleanse your mind in the morning, by afternoon you will have a whole new world again. It is really a waste. This is why no importance is given in the Yogic system towards your psychological structure. It does not care about what you think and feel because if you change it today, within a few hours you will change it back into something else again. 

We are only interested in the body. This is why Yoga calls everything as body – physical body, mental body, energy body – but no mind, because the psychological activity which you have given enormous importance to is of no consequence or significance. Depending upon the type of information imprinted within you, whatever is your karma and samskara, that is how you think and feel. Everything happens that way. If you prune the tree, it will sprout back with vengeance but if you handle the root, it will be gone. We are interested in handling the root and the very root of karmic imprint is in the elements. 

The Benefits of Doing Isha Bhuta Shuddhi Practice

https://preview.redd.it/f0a9hfxdpgth1.png?width=1000&format=png&auto=webp&s=57a421bfdc1695341e0eac1db8106f0798d48234

Bhuta shuddhi means you want to lose yourself. It does not matter whether it is good, bad, ugly or beautiful, you want to lose everything that you have built so that the Creator’s creation will stand up and shine within you. It will take a certain amount of work. The bhuta shuddhi that we teach is very basic. If you want to do more serious forms of bhuta shuddhi, it is not something that you do on the side; it becomes your entire life. But even if you do a very minor version of bhuta shuddhi, you will see the change that happens in you is permanent. There is no tendency to fall back, and that is important. Otherwise, everyone changes for three days and again they fall back into the rut. That will not happen when you assist whatever else you are doing with the bhuta shuddhi practice. 

If you keep up the bhuta shuddhi practice, however small the practice is, you will see as time progresses, its impact is undeniable. Suppose you do six months of Yogasanas and give it up for one year; everything will be back as it was. If you do a powerful process like Shakti Chalana Kriya, its impact will be there, but if you do not do it for a certain period of time, it will turn back again. You do Shoonya meditation for some time and if you do not do it for a certain period of time, it will slowly turn back. But that is not the nature of bhuta shuddhi. If you do bhuta shuddhi, nothing seems to be happening because it is very fundamental and slow. But as long as you hold this body, it stays with you. It will not go because it is on a very fundamental level. That is the significance of bhuta shuddhi. If you do not hold a profession and if you do not have family either, then we can start a more serious form of bhuta shuddhi because it will take a lot of time. 

The Right Way to Do Bhuta Shuddhi for Maximum Benefit

Often, human beings are doing some kind of bhuta shuddhi unconsciously, unknowingly and unintentionally. For example, there are leaders who change the atmosphere around them by their sheer presence. There are many people – not only spiritual ones – who, when they walk into a room, change the atmosphere there in an instant. This is a certain amount of bhuta shuddhi, performed unconsciously. If you can do it consciously, it is far more result-oriented. There are other aspects of energy that one can influence and thereby change the atmosphere, but this does not impact other people as profoundly as when the elements rearrange themselves because of a certain presence of energy and intention. 

The idea of practicing bhuta shuddhi is to rearrange the way the elements function within you. You want to change the intention with which they function within you. If the elements within you function in the same way as they function in the earth or a tree, it is not useful to you. In the human system, the elements function in a particular way. We want them to function that way and to transform themselves into higher possibilities. 

In fact, in every individual, the elements function in a unique manner. The traditional medical systems in the East have always identified these individual differences. Their diagnosis is not based on the disease or ailment that one has, but on how each individual’s system is constructed. There is no common prescription for everyone. Unless the doctor is able to look at each individual and identify what is needed for that particular person, the treatment does not work as well as it should. The treatment is according to how this particular body and human mechanism functions, and how it is arranged within itself, not based on the symptoms of a certain ailment. In other words, in Eastern systems, the treatment is never symptomatic, whereas the allopathic system is 100% about symptomatic treatment. If five people have the same symptoms, all five will be given the same medicine. But in Siddha and Ayurveda, if five people have the same symptoms, they will be given different types of medicine because the medication is for that particular system, not for the ailment. 

These five elements coming together and producing something so complex and fantastic is a tremendous love affair. Bhuta shuddhi should not happen like an exercise but like a love affair – with absolute involvement. It should happen with a sense of devotion and love. Your mind, emotions, energy and physical body – everything should be involved in this. Without this involvement, you still may get certain physical benefits, but you will not know the full depth and dimension of the process. If you give yourself totally to it, this simple process can change the fundamentals of your life. 

A Deeper Mystical Insight Into Bhuta Shuddhi

The body is a play of five elements; so is the world; so is the universe. Everything is a play of five elements. Unless you want to explore mystical dimensions, you do not have to bother about akasha. Among the other four, seventy-two percent of the body is water, twelve percent is earth, six percent is air, four percent is fire and the remaining is akasha. To live well, four elements are enough; the fifth one (akasha) is not relevant for people who just want to live well. 

Water is seventy-two percent of your body. It is in sync with the planet; approximately seventy-two percent of the planet is water. That is how life has evolved. The nature of the planet has manifested in your body in many different ways. When you eat food, you must always eat food where the water content in the food is over seventy percent. This one thing that western societies are ignoring and paying a huge price for. A vegetable is over seventy percent water, a fruit is over ninety percent water. If you want cleansing to happen, you must eat fruit. If you just want to maintain the body as it is, a vegetable does this. Almost any traditional Eastern cooking naturally has over seventy percent water, because they were aware of this. If you drink water, it does not work like that; the food should have over seventy percent water content. 

All these four elements have memory. Particularly earth and water have a very strong sense of memory. Today, modern science has explored this in a big way and they are proving to you that water has tremendous memory. Much research has happened about water. Water behaves in a certain way depending upon the type of memory it carries. This is why people are going to consecrated spaces or temples and dying for a few drops of water, because the water has the memory of the divine. Teerth is water which has the memory of the divine. You want that water which has a good memory to go into you. 

If you just make the waters within you sweet, you will become seventy-two percent okay. If you do another twelve percent of earth, you are doing great with eighty-four percent. If you maintain air, you are doing great with ninety percent. If you want to purify fire, it is much more work. 

There are five dimensions of fire. There is reproductive fire, digestive fire, mental fire, heart fire and inner fire. These five are difficult to work for ordinary people. It takes a lot of discipline, but the three can be worked out. The reproductive, digestive and mental fires can be worked out very easily, with little effort. The other two will take much more to work with. If you just purify these fires, then you are no more an ordinary person. You are not just a healthy, happy person; you are much more because once you have mastery over the fire element in you, then you are touching the akasha. You are just one step away. Suddenly you are not just an ordinary human being, something else is burning with you which is most people in the world do not know. Our objective is that everyone should know it. If you took charge of the fire in your groin, the fire in your belly and the fire in your mind, you could do many miraculous things with this life. You could live consciously and by choice rather than be a slave of compulsiveness. This is not about denying yourself this or that. This is just about everything happening by choice, not by compulsion.

Editor's Note:  

Isha Bhuta Shuddhi Practice

Learn the practice from an Isha Hatha Yoga teacher. Click here to find a Hatha Yoga teacher near you.

Bhuta Shuddhi Kit

Required to learn the Isha Bhuta Shuddhi practice. The kit is available in a beautiful handcrafted copper box and organic cotton bag. Click here to order online. 

Bhuta Shuddhi Refills - Bhoomi and Camphor

Bhoomi represents ‘earth’ in the five elements of bhuta shuddhi. This bhoomi is from a specific region in the Velliangiri Mountains where Sadhguru has spent time in sadhana. It is purified and consecrated before being offered for use in the bhuta shuddhi process. 

Click here to order online. 

Camphor or karpooram is also known as chandrabhasma or moon powder in Ayurveda. It is used for the fire element during the bhuta shuddhi process. According to traditional systems of medicine, camphor purifies the air by acting as a natural insecticide, and may also help in relieving chest congestion. This pack of camphor that can last for 3 months, is composed of natural ingredients. When lit, these crystals burn without leaving any residue. 

Click here to order online.

The personality is always outside dependant. Then what does it mean to be the way we want to be?

We can't be as a person anyhow we want as per our wish. Because everything outside molds it every moment in so many ways.

That simply implies we can be in such way that is completely untouched by anything outside at all. Which also means we are not our persona. We are beyond it.

As long as we be as persons we can't remain untouched by other's doing. We all are connected in one way or the other. So, what one does definitely sets an impact over others.

But, if we remain in a state within where not even our personality reaches then we could be just how we want to be. Without any disturbances.