The Balancing Act
Life is balance. Everything that you see as life, everything that you see as yourself is beautiful only when it is in balance. Your body, your thought, your emotion, your activity, everything is beautiful only if it is in balance.
Sitting is balance, standing is balance, walking is supreme balance. Just two feet! The way you are walking, do you know how much balance is needed? Do you know how much is involved just to keep you balanced when you walk? It is a big thing.
If you lose balance in your thought, it is called insanity. If you lose balance in your emotion, you know how horrific it can become. Emotion, the very juice of life, if it loses balance, it becomes torture, both for yourself and for others. Isn’t it?
So, how to bring this balance into one’s life? What is the basis of this balance? Balance is just that you are made such that even if you are in the battlefield, you are still balanced. If your inner balance is absolute, you can harness the external, your body, and your mind, to the highest possible level—and that is all a human being can do.
When it comes to external situations, there is no such thing as perfect balance. Within myself, I may be absolutely balanced, but in activity it is still a constant adjustment. There is nobody on this planet who has balanced his outside activity perfectly. I may believe this is perfect, but somebody else says this is nonsense. Isn’t this happening within the family?
So external situations are always going to need an adjustment. It constantly needs to be calibrated depending upon the needs of the situations in which we are placed, but if you are physically, mentally, and emotionally absolutely balanced within you, this will naturally find expression in your activity. It is not the activity that is balanced. If you can get this physical body and this mind to function at its highest potential, that means whatever you could do in this world, you are doing to the best of your ability, depending upon the opportunity and the situation. That is all you can do.
So, when we say balance, what would be your idea of balance? Today if the day goes off well, would you call that balance? For me, balance means that if I shut my door and sit down for four or five days, I won’t have a single thought in my mind. I am not trying not to think; if I want to think I have to think, otherwise nothing comes in my mind. I am just empty headed, because not a single thought arises in my mind unless I think, but that is not the case with everybody. They have not known a single moment of no thought in their life unless they were grabbed by something outside, isn’t it? It never happened by yourself simply because you are identified with something that you are not. The moment you are identified with something that you are not, thought is an endless process.
So if you want to get to this state, what do you have to do? Your mind has to take instructions from you, that is the most important thing. In many ways, it has been expressed—not just in India but all over the world. Even Jesus went to the extent of saying this: ‘If therefore thine eye be single, your body shall be filled with light.’ That is, in your physicality, there is always you and me. If you want to balance anything, there must be two, only then balancing becomes a necessity. If your experience of life has transcended the duality of who you are right now, if you transcend the limitations of the physical, something beyond the physical becomes a living reality and now you have a single eye. You have one eye, you are looking at everything the same way.
Now everything is in perfect balance. You don’t strive for balance anymore; existence is balance. It is only the physical reality which is fluctuating. Everything else is in perfect balance. It is only the physical which is going up and down. Isn’t it so?
So, the most important thing in human life is that you transcend the limitations of the physical. You are the only creature on this planet who has come with that capability; all the other creatures are trapped in their physicality. You are capable of rising beyond the physicality but not going against your physicality. This is not about rejecting the body, this is about going a little deeper, not remaining on the surface. This is one thing that must happen to every human being.
| Named one of India’s 50 most influential people, Sadhguru speaks before millions annually around the globe, including to prominent leadership forums such as the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, TED, and the World Peace Congress. From ground-breaking yoga programs to projects for rural communities and the environment, Sadhguru’s Isha Foundation (www.IshaFoundation.org), serves as a thriving model for human empowerment, which is reflected in the Foundation’s special consultative status with the UN. |
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