Selected Materials from Book - Inner Engineering by Sadhguru

"People think spirituality is about looking for God or truth or the ultimate. The problem is you have already defined what you are looking for. It is not the object of your search that is important; it is the faculty of looking. The ability to simply look without motive is missing in the world today. Everybody is psychological creature, wanting to assign meaning to everything. Seeking is not about looking for something. It is about enhancing your perception, your very faculty of seeing." p15.

"... it is life that is the ultimate intelligence. Human intellect is mere smartness that ensures survival. But true intelligence is just life and life -- and that which is the source of life. Nothing else." p21.

"If you had been born as any other creature on this planet, it would have been very simple. Your needs would have just been physical. A full stomach would have been equivalent to a great day. Take a look at your dog or your cat: the moment their stomach is full, they are quite peaceful.

But when you come into this world as human being, things change. An empty stomach is one problem: hunger. But a full stomach? A hundred problems! When our survival is in question, it is a big issue in our lives. But the moment it is taken care of, it doesn't seem to mean anything. Somehow, for a human being, life doesn't seem to end with survival; life begins with survival." p25.

"What do we consider to be a state of well-being? Very simply, well-being is just a deep sense of pleasantness within. If your body feel pleasant, we call this health. If it becomes very pleasant, we call this pleasure. If your mind becomes pleasant, we call this peace. If it becomes very pleasant, we call this joy. If your emotions become pleasant, we call this love. If they become very pleasant, we call this compassion. If your life energies become pleasant, we call this bliss. If they becomes very pleasant, we call this ecstasy. This is all that you are seeking: pleasantness within and without. When pleasantness is within, it is termed peace, joy, happiness. When your surroundings become pleasant, it gets branded success. ... So, essentially all human experience is only a question of pleasantness and unpleasantness in varying degree. " p27.

Most people think peace and joy are the goals of the spiritual life. This is a fallacy. Peace and joy are the basic requirements for a life of well-being. If you want to enjoy your dinner tonight, you must be peaceful and happy. If you want to enjoy your family, the work that you do, the world that you live in, you must be peaceful and happy. Peace and joy are not things you attain at the end of life. They are basis of your life. If you consider peace to be the ultimate goal, you will only "rest in peace"! p.33

"only when you are blissful will you be in the highest state of receptivity, and truly willing to explore all aspects of life. Otherwise, you would not dare, because if keeping yourself pleasant is a big challenge, you can't take on other challenges." p34.

"you have been told to love your enemy. If you first label someone your enemy and then try to love him or her, it's going to be torturous! Once you have fragmented creation like this, there is no way to arrive at a state of absolute inclusiveness." p36

"The quality of our lives is determined by our ability to respond to the varied complex situations that we encounter. If the ability to respond with intelligence, competence, and sensitivity is compromised by a compulsive or reactive approach, we enslaved by the situation. It means we have allowed the nature of our life experience to be determined by our circumstance, not by us."p50.

"Responsibility simply means your ability to respond...Reactivity is enslavement. Responsibility is freedom... Your ability to respond is the way you are... Responsibility is about being... to be loving is simply this: a willingness to respond freely and openly." p53.

"Resentment, anger, jealousy, pain, hurt, and depression are poisons that you drink but expect someone else to die." p58.

"the whole process of yoga is to take you, step by step, and stage by stage, from the known into the unknown. It is a hundred percent empirical science. It does not ask you to take anything on trust. It urges you to experiment every step of the way...Yoga tells us that we are actually composed of five "sheaths" or bodies: physical, mental, energy, etheric, and bliss body."p77.

When you are feeling pleasant, you wan to expand; when you are fearful, you want to contract. Try this: sit for a few minutes in front of a plant or tree. Remind yourself that you are inhaling what the tree is exhaling and exhaling what the tree is inhaling. Even if you are not yet experiential aware of it, establish a psychological connection with the plant." p94

It is significant to slow down your breath. p104

If over 30.. our body and brain work at their best only when the stomach is empty... you eat food for energy, buy if you eat a big meal, do you feel energetic or lethargic? .. your system cannot digest cooked food as it is; it needs certain enzymes to do so... when you cook the food, generally eighty to ninety percent of the enzymes are destroyed... If we ate foods with the necessary enzymes, the system would be functioning at a completely different level of efficiency and the conversion ratio of food to energy would be very different." p127.

"The body knows only survival and procreation. And it is walking straight to the grave every moment, nowhere else." p150

"I think, therefore I am." vs. "you are, therefore you may think." p161

"Do you want to be a living being or a thinking being? Right now, ninety percent of the time, you are only thinking about your life, not living it. Have you come into this world to experience life or to think about it? your mental process is very small happening compared to the life process, but right now it has become far more important. It is time for humanity to shift the significance to the life process once again. The need is an urgent one." p162

"The moment you pump in some energy, the mind becomes active, but it is often scattered...When you maintain a steady stream of thought without changing direction, it will manifest as a reality in your life." p191

"The way you think is the way you feel, but thought and feeling seem to be different in your experience. Why is this so? Because thought has a certain clarity, a certain agility about it. Emotion is slower. Today, you think this is a very wonderful person ... suddenly, he does something that you don't like, and you think he is horrible. you thought tells you he is horrible, but your emotion cannot change immediately. It struggles... It takes time to turn around... It is not useful to create this conflict between head and heart. Emotion is just the juicier part of thought...It is best not to create polarities within yourself. That makes for civil war and schizophrenia. Thought and feeling are not different. One is dry. Another is juicy. Enjoy both." p193