Ojas

Meditation is a way of manufacturing what we call as ojas. When we eat food, digestion manufactures the body in a certain way.

This is important for our physical existence, but the body by itself does not serve any purpose. The body can be a means of great suffering. The body is capable of pleasure also but its limitations will be unfulfilling over a period of time.

In meditation, we are using energy to manufacture something much subtler than the physical body. The process of shifting the life forces into a different level of manufacture, where instead of manufacturing physical body cells, it begins to manufacture subtler energies – which we call as ojas – is known as meditation.

The quality, the intensity and the volume of ojas makes the difference between one human being and another. Why one human being’s presence seems to be so strong and transforming, and another’s weak, is simply because of the ojas he carries with him. A meditator is someone who has set up an industry of ojas.

Right now, it is quite limiting and frustrating not to allow people to go into higher states of energy and ojas simply because people don't have the necessary balance, preparedness, discipline or are still unable to understand the priorities they need to allocate to different dimensions of their life. Quite a few people are experientially open and definitely capable of generating higher possibilities of energy.

But modern life has made people absolutely fickle. People are simply shifting all the time, from this to that, whether it comes to jobs, priorities, education or relationships. In this shifting, a person’s energy also becomes unstable. There are so many things that you can do to dissipate and to destroy the growth of ojas in you. Various types of mental activity can do that.

Certain types of physical activity, excessive sexuality, excessive indulgence in food, too much of stimulants and being in contaminated atmospheres can also do that. Spirituality means, going into processes that can enhance one's ojas and change the very fundamentals of your life – to take a person to a completely different experience and joy within himself, a blissfulness which is not only his, but which will be everybody's around him.

Your meditation is not only about yourself. If twenty-five people become truly meditative, the whole town, without knowing why, will become peaceful. Without having any idea about what is happening to them, there will be a certain sense of settling. The deeper one goes into it, the more of a device he becomes for everybody's wellbeing.

It is not by blabbering good things that true peace and wellbeing will come. Only when people carry the right kind of energy around them, only when their ojas is such that a hundred people can sit under their shadow and experience it, only then wellbeing will truly happen.

Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic and visionary, and a prominent spiritual leader. www.ishafoundation.org