Desire the highest

Don't try and fight your passions and desires. These tendencies are there within everybody. Past karmas have influences over you and push you this way and that way. Fighting with them is like fighting the demon, Mahishasura. In Indian mythology, if one drop of this demon's blood falls, a thousand Mahishasuras will rise up. Your desires and passions are just like that. If you try and fight with them, if you chop them, they will spill blood, and with every drop, a hundred or a thousand will come up. There is no point fighting them. What you need to do is to educate your passions and desires to flow in the right direction.

Desire the highest in life. All your passions, direct them to the highest. Even if you get angry, direct it only toward the highest. Even with your passion, that is the way to do it. Right now, every bit of energy that you have, you expend it by making it into desire, passion, fear, anger and many other things. Maybe these emotions are not in your hands for now, but channeling them in one direction is in your hands. Maybe when you are angry, you cannot be loving, but the anger itself can be directed. Anger is tremendous energy. Direct it in the right way. Every ounce of energy that you have, every passion, emotion, thought, if focused in one direction, the results can be very, very quick. Things will happen. Once you know there is something higher and you want to be there, there should be no other question about it.

For many people on the spiritual path, spirituality and enlightenment appear to be close one moment, but the next moment it appears to be light years away. So, a certain complacency can come in. They have always told you: "A bird in hand is worth two in the bush." What is there now is better than something somewhere else. What you need to understand is: it is not somewhere else. It is all here and now. It is neither difficult nor easy. It is just extremely simple. Moving from wherever you are right now to the infinite is very simple because it is right here. "Simple" need not necessarily be easy. It is just subtle and delicate. Unless you put your whole life energy into it, it will not open up.

Realization never happens with half-hearted appeals. It has to be everything. Only then it can happen in one moment. It need not take twelve years. If you make yourself intense enough, it is just one moment. After that, life is blessed. You simply live on, whichever way you want, whatever way you choose. But without creating that one moment, going on doing all kinds of nonsense, what is the use?

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.