Enlivening the Living Space
“Punya Pooja is about getting you into an energetic space where you become alive to life, because only life enlivens life.”
—Sadhguru
Q: Namaskaram Sadhguru. My question is regarding the Linga Bhairavi Punya Pooja. I had it done at my home a few weeks ago. Can you help me understand how this Punya Pooja works? The entire pooja seems to be very different from the traditional poojas which are normally done.
Sadhguru: You have not seen any traditional pooja. Largely you have seen professional poojas. This is not a professional pooja. The Maas who come to your homes are not professional priests. They put their life into it to make it happen. So what is this Punya Pooja, and why does it create the impact that it does?
You know what is punya? Unfortunately, what is referred to as punya and paapa have been badly misinterpreted over a period of time. Punya and paapa mean those type of actions which increase the effervescence of life within you or those actions which move you towards the inertia of life or in other words, actions which move you towards life and actions which move you towards death. When I say death, not just physical death – you can die in so many ways.
How long has it been since you watched a full-moon?
When is the last time you watched a sunrise?
When is the last time you actually sat down and watched a flower blossom? Have you ever done that?
There are many fantastic phenomena happening in the process of life. Every day, every moment, it is happening. Most of the humanity is dead to it. They are dead to the moon, dead to the sunrise, dead to the sunset. Only when something becomes acute, or they have to get up in the early morning and go to work, then the sun gets in their eyes. This has happened because the psychological space has overtaken the cosmic space. Your own silly mental creation has overtaken the Creator’s creation.
Becoming Alive to Life
Punya Pooja is about getting you into an energetic space where you become alive to life, because only life enlivens life. That is the only way it can be enhanced. You must understand, if you have to stay alive, you have to consume life. Whether you consume it in the form of a vegetable, legume, grain, animal, bird, fish or whatever, essentially you have to consume life to keep this life. It is always about life eating life not necessarily in the form of ingestion. Every moment the whole existence is just this. The very cosmos is a living space, and this is just life into life into life into life, one form into another, another form into another.Punya Pooja is about getting you into an energetic space where you become alive to life, because only life enlivens life.
What is the significance of being alive to it? The significance is just that you are a life. What is the benefit? This is your psychological nonsense you think there must be a benefit. I want you to look at this: you were born, you have lived this far, I will bless you with a long life, but anyway one day you will die. After you have died, we will look back and see, what was the use of this person, being born and going through all this stuff and dying one day? There is really no use. The only useful thing ecologically seems to be your death, because you and I make good manure, you know.
What is the use of life? There is no use. What is the meaning? That is the most beautiful thing there is no meaning. If there was a damn meaning, and if you found it, what would you do after that? You would have to hang yourself. There is no meaning. It is an endless state of effervescence. If you experience it, you know life. Otherwise you know only your silly thoughts and emotions.
Keeping Your Home Alive
The Punya Pooja is to enliven your home. The space in the house should become alive. If you have lived in your home in such a way that every moment you are “on” with love and light within you, then no Punya Pooja would be needed. But today, you have built homes which are so large that it is very difficult to make them alive just by living. If you just had a one-room house, and you live in great sense of love and joy, then you can easily keep it very alive, but today your house has ten or fifteen enclosures. It is very difficult for any human being to keep it alive. Once in a way, if you do not enliven it, if you slowly enter certain parts of your home you will see it feels like being in a coffin. Some parts may be alive; usually I find kitchens are alive because that is the only place something is happening.
If Punya Pooja is performed at least once a year, the space around you will be alive and it will support you. Can you not live beautifully in a coffin? You can, if you are capable of it, but not everyone is. They need external support. This is the idea of creating consecrated spaces. Punya Pooja is a way of consecrating your entire home, every part of it, so that there is some sense of aliveness and energy. But we cannot consecrate your home in a permanent way because your house is not built to that geometry. It does not have that kind of material to hold the energy forever.
If we enliven a home, which is built with brick or stone, it will easily stay vibrant for one or two years. In an American home, particularly those constructed largely with wood and lots of insulating material inside, if nothing alive is happening in the house, or if the people living there are depressed, then this Punya Pooja may deplete in a matter of six to eight months. It will not stay for very long because the material used does not support that. But it also depends on you how you are. However the material is, if you are fine then you can live well.
Improving the Energy Situation
Another factor is re-circulated air. No one opens a window or a door anymore. The same air is being re-circulated all the time, with a very minimal amount of movement and aliveness. If you have lots of plants and trees around you, and if you keep the windows open, they will take care of the Punya Pooja for you to quite some extent. But most of the houses are shut off, with re-circulated air going on all the time.If you have lots of plants and trees around you, and if you keep the windows open, they will take care of the Punya Pooja for you to quite some extent.
People are not moving about joyfully. Either they are staring at their computer screen, or they are depressed, or they are sleeping. Inertia, stress, and tensions of various levels slowly build up in the space and can overwhelm a person. With any number of people, you will see, if they are feeling sick, particularly if they are feeling psychologically oppressed, if they just walk out of that space then they will feel great. If they move to another place, they will almost become healthy. Not everyone who is suffering from psychological problems is pathologically ill most of them are victims of the situations in which they exist.
The energy situation is one of them, and an important one. So is this some kind of tantra? The word has acquired a weird connotation in the West, but the word “tantra” literally means technology if you are referring to it in that sense, yes, otherwise it is yoga.
We have taught you a kriya to keep your body enlivened all the time. But the larger wood work of your home, how to keep it alive? If your kriya is too fantastic, if your Shambhavi Mahamudra is like an explosion within you, then if you just walk around the house, maybe the space will get fixed. But if you are not like that, then it is good to make use of the support of Punya Pooja. It is a wonderful process.
