How to Live a Life of Adventure
The following is a transcription of a spoken discourse. To maintain the style and authenticity of Sadhguru’s spoken words, we have retained the original language instead of conforming it to our standard style book.
In your life, you can have ventures, or you can have adventure. Adventure means that you do not know where your next foot is going to be. That means there is danger. If there is no danger, there is no adventure.
The Greatest Adventure
Adventure need not necessarily mean you have to go out and conquer the world. In fact, adventure means you have surrendered what you like and dislike, what is “mine” and “not mine.” Adventure means to surrender oneself to things which are beyond us.Climbing Mount Everest may look like a great adventure but straddling the peak of your consciousness is a much bigger adventure. Some freaky ambition of proving who you are is not adventure.
The greatest adventure is not about climbing a mountain, riding a motorcycle, or jumping off a mountain. The greatest adventure in life is that you break at least one box in your head every day. Even if you are riding, flying or doing something else, the adventure is only in stretching beyond your limitations. And no one can deny you this. Whether you are working from nine-to-five in an office or doing something else, no one can deny you this. If you break one bondage every day, depending upon how many heaps of limitations you have, some day you must get liberated. It is bound to happen.
How to Live a Life of Adventure?
Question: Namaskaram Sadhguru, my name is Abhimanyu and I study in the second standard. I saw your bike ride video in America. You are really cool, and you ride so fast! I love it. I really want to ride with you. My question is: are you okay with the idea of a kid being your pillion rider?
Sadhguru: Well Abhimanyu, you know that you are the namesake of the very famous Abhimanyu who was Arjuna’s son. He was a brilliant young boy—very adventurous, and brave as they come. Unfortunately, his life ended too soon because he was in a bit of a rush. He grasped how to penetrate a formation in the battlefield, but he was not patient enough to understand how to get out. So, he got killed as a young boy—a brave young boy, still celebrated, but unfortunately, the adventure did not turn out well.
I want you to understand what is exciting you. I am riding a motorcycle and that is exciting for you, but adventure is not just upon a motorcycle. When you start stretching to break limitations—physical, mental, emotional, and perceptional limitations that you have—then you are in adventure mode. There is no specific activity that you can call an adventure. It is the way you conduct an activity.
A lot of people are very excited when they get a new job. But after some time, they suffer their job. People are very excited when they go to a new place, but over a period of time, with a little bit of repetitiveness, it gets boring. Do not ever look for exciting activity. There is a way to make any activity exciting; that is what you should look at. You can make the littlest things in your life very exciting. All that it takes is that you are seeing how to go beyond certain limits that your body, mind, emotions and your very perception sets upon you in every simple activity.
When I was your age, what intrigued me was that if I see a tree, “Why am I unable to see what is behind it?” Or if I looked at my finger, “Why am I not able to see the other side of it?” I did not know all these theories of light, of how it reflects and so that is how you see. But I wanted to somehow bend my eyes and see. My eyeballs would not go out and do that, but then I saw that in the process of seeing something, more than fifty percent of what you see is in your mind. It is your mind which sees, not your eyes. Your eyes take an image inside, but the process happens there. If you refine that process, you can see at least fifty percent of what your eyes cannot see. I paid attention and this became a very big adventure for me. Simply sitting and staring at something became a big adventure. Someone who looked at me from outside may have thought that I am doing something very dull, but it was the greatest adventure because I was stretching myself.
In a way, this is what Yoga means. People are stretching every morning. If you get to stretch a little more, it is a big adventure because something exciting and tremendous happens in that process.
| Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, and visionary, and a prominent spiritual leader. An author, poet, and internationally renowned speaker, Sadhguru is the founder of Isha Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to human wellbeing. (www.isha.sadhguru.org) |
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