From Stagnation to Radiance

“Everybody on this planet can live well, if only some people were not storing up for one hundred lifetimes.

I am not against well-being, wealth, or comfort, but I’m against stagnation because if you stagnate you could as well be dead.”

—Sadhguru

The Theerthakunds – the old Theerthakund which we will call Chandrakund and this one which we will refer to as Suryakund – are just energy forms. They simply reverberate all the time. They are always on, like sunlight, whether you are a plant or an insect, a worm, an animal or a human being, everybody according to his quality can benefit. A plant may flower, birds and insects may sing and dance; different life forms may do different things but the sun is not exercising his intelligence, he is simply on. So, these are like that they are simply on. They cannot distinguish between this and that. That is why the kund being separate for men and women is good, because they do not even recognize whether you are a man or a woman.

The fundamental difference between the other consecrations we have done in the yoga center is that, these are just energy forms, with no specific intelligence, but constantly on. The other consecrations are much more complex. They take life, because to put a specific intelligence into an inanimate form takes a certain level of life – it costs life in a big way. After this consecration I’m very well, because this is easy to energize. This we have done very joyfully, without any hassles.

Shiva himself said that when women outnumber men on this planet, at that time Kali Yuga will come to an end. Right now here [referring to the number present at the consecration] women clearly outnumber men. When Kali Yuga ends the next yuga is supposed to bring forth better people. It will bring forth devas. The word ‘deva’ literally means a radiant being.

Essentially, all life upon this planet is solar-powered. It is just that some life holds what comes to it; some life radiates what comes to it. If you choose to radiate, you become a deva. If you hold back you become a rakshasa^[1]. Not because you do something that somebody thinks is bad do you become a rakshasa. You become a rakshasa because you have no sense of giving.

Giving does not necessarily mean this or that; just that your life process is a giving. When you are this way, giving will happen the way it needs to happen. It is not that you have to think, ‘Where should I give? How much should I give? What should I give?’ That calculation destroys everything. If there is a certain sense of giving in everything that you are, if you become a giving, you become a deva. Sitting here, consecration after consecration, if you continue to remain a rakshasa – ‘what can I get’; ‘what can I get’ – you will get a stone in the end or maybe nobody will even bother to put a stone.

If you transform your life from ‘What can I get?’ to ‘What can I give?’ if every moment of your life is a process of giving, you become a deva. Giving is not about developing an attitude. If you allow life to happen, it is a giving. The nature of life is like that. If it holds it becomes stagnant. Only if it keeps flowing, this is a beautiful experience.

If you horde life, if you become a stagnant life, it is a miserable life. You will have everything, yet you will have nothing. You will have more than everybody but you will have nothing in your experience, because life is not in quantities. Life is only in the intensity of experience. ‘How much do I have’ doesn’t make your life big or small; how intensely you are experiencing it right now, is what makes your life big or small. There is no sense of holding back, because you have looked at life a little more carefully and you understand there is nothing here that you can give since there is nothing here that you brought. Everything has only been taken, no giving business.

Why we are doing something, that could have been done very simply and easily with a certain level of privacy, with such a large number of people, is to transform you into devas, so that you become a process of radiance, you become like a mirror which reflects everything. ‘If I give away everything what’ll happen to me?’ The whole world will become yours that is what will happen to you.

I have had the privilege of meeting and seeing all kinds of beggars. I have seen various kinds of beggars: crippled beggars, blind beggars, malnourished beggars, well-fed beggars, and billionaire beggars.

So this was a real beggar on the street. He had collected a few kilograms of rice for the day. In India a lot of people don’t give money to the beggars, they give grains. Giving rice is a very common practice. He had collected quite a bit of rice for the day, in his bag. Then he saw a fine chariot coming and thought, ‘Oh a rich man, maybe I’ll go and beg. If he is generous he may give a gold coin, something.’ He went there to beg. A really radiant being got down from the chariot; a fabulous looking man. Just when the beggar was about to beg, the man put his hands in front of him and said, ‘Bhiksham dehi,’ he is begging. He thought, ‘Oh my God.’ The tradition is, if somebody stands in front of you and asks something, you should not deny him. For a human being to come to a place within himself where he has to beg, once he has put himself into such a despicable place, you must give him something. That’s the tradition.

The beggar looked at him and said, ‘Okay, you look rich but you’re begging, as per my tradition and culture I can’t say no.’ So he took out one grain of rice from his bag and gave it to the rich man. That man took it and went. The beggar came home, storing up the rice. Then, as he was pouring the rice into a container, he saw one grain of rice had turned into solid gold. He sat and cried, ‘If I only had put my whole bag into that man’s hand, I would have had a bagful of gold.’ That’s how life is.

It doesn’t take much for a human being to live well. Only because you’re trying to imitate somebody else it takes a lot, otherwise it doesn’t take much. Everybody on this planet can live well, if only some people were not storing up for one hundred lifetimes. They know the wretched lives that they are living; they will come back for a thousand lifetimes, that’s why they are storing up. It is just that the next time they come, they can’t claim what they’ve stored up.

This whole process of life has been completely misunderstood. I want you to look at your lives – from the moment you get up till the moment you fall asleep – how many moments of exuberance do you have? And how many moments of calculation do you have? This shows whether you are a stagnant life or a radiant life. I am not against well-being, wealth, or comfort, but I’m against stagnation because if you stagnate you could as well be dead. To drag this body on a daily basis without experiencing any sense of exuberance of life, not feeling like a blossoming but feeling like a stagnant pool is a most torturous way to exist.

This process of consecration, of being in such energy spaces, is about shifting your life from being a stagnation to a radiance. These petty calculations that you have, are of no use. Life is not a transaction, but a phenomenon that you need to experience and witness. If you give your life to everybody around you, everybody will take care of you.

Those who have witnessed this consecration, if in some way it has touched you, you have to go and set fire to the world in whatever way you can by becoming a deva, a radiant being.

Love & Grace,

Sadhguru

Excerpted from Suryakund Consecration sathsang on Dec 22, 2012

^[1] rakshasa – lit. a demon