Most of us know the paradox: relationships bring our greatest joys and deepest pains, fleeting moments of oneness and recurring friction. We stay because those moments of togetherness feel precious – yet sustaining them seems nearly impossible.
Sadhguru poses an unsettling question: What if the friction isn’t a problem to be solved by finding the “right person,” but proof that we’re seeking union at the wrong level? Here, he offers a different possibility – one beyond body, mind, and emotion.
Sadhguru: Human relationships are a funny thing. Most people cannot live without them, but most of the time, relationships bring more pain than joy, more entanglement than freedom, more acrimony than love. People are willing to sacrifice their whole life for a few moments of rapport, a few moments of oneness, because those moments are so precious to them.
When we sacrifice everything for moments of oneness
Relationships are of so many different kinds. The first relationship for most of us is with the mother – comfort, nourishment, and care. Then perhaps comes the father – support, security, and guidance. Then teachers and friends – learning and sharing. Then spouses, lovers, children, and other relationships within the social structure.
Everything has something to give and something to take. People stay in relationships because a certain emotional need gets fulfilled. Those who logically examine their relationships cannot stay in one.
But there is a certain fulfillment: moments of joy, sharing, and oneness; support and security. Above all, there is the fear of being alone – the major reason why people stay together, not only in marriage but in everything.
Relationships take many forms and dimensions, many levels of meanness and deception. If people hate each other, they do something truly nasty that simply ends things. But when they love each other, their love finds expression as meanness within legal limits.
A woman went shopping, and while searching for her wallet at the checkout, she pulled out a television remote from her purse. The salesperson looked at it and asked, “Why do you carry your television remote with you?” She said, “My husband refused to come shopping with me, so this was the meanest thing I could do legally.”
Trying to fit what cannot fit
In all these relationships – between parents and children, between friends, between spouses, between all kinds of people – what are we really trying to do?
As a person, you are an accumulation of experience and information that has formed certain attitudes – a certain kind of body, mind, emotions, likes and dislikes, and opinions.
And the other person is composed of the same ingredients but in a different way. So it does not fit. There are moments when suddenly everything seems beautiful and compatible – the physicality, the mentality, the emotional aspect – everything seems to click. But the next moment, no matter how hard you try, it does not fit.
This is all two people are trying to do, whether they are friends, parents, spouses, or whatever else: they are trying to fit a body, a mind, and an emotional setup into another body, another mind, another emotional setup.
Two bodies, two minds, two emotions cannot fit perfectly. If you are traveling often enough, it works well because you are not there. If you understand that it can fall into place only in certain moments, you will conduct the relationship accordingly. If you think you can make it fit, it will not work.
If you really want it to fit, your sense of being a body, mind, and emotions has to recede to a large extent. If you become a large sphere of energy, you could fit perfectly well and for good. It could be taken beyond life and death.
Sitting with strangers and reverberating
It is in this context that the traditions have always held the Guru-disciple relationship as being of the highest order. Not because they love each other more than you love your child or husband or wife, but simply because these three essentially individualistic aspects – body, mind, and emotion – have been largely set aside. Now everything fits.
Otherwise, simply because every body is unique, every mind is unique, and every set of emotions is unique, they can never fit into another one perfectly. There may be moments of cohesiveness, but they can never stay that way – no matter what you do.
Most lovers spend their lives quarreling, but they have had great moments of togetherness, which they are addicted to, so they hang on. But if you look at it on average – in any 24 hours, how many moments of ecstasy do you have? Probably very few.
There is a dimension of relationship that is not of the body, not of physicality, not of companionship, not of emotional proximity, but simply of basic life energy. You can sit next to a complete stranger and reverberate together at the energy level. This is a different kind of relationship.
If a relationship is formed at the energy level, you do not have to know the other. No matter which part of the world you are in, I can still have a certain intimacy that is not possible even if you live with someone for fifty years.
Even at the level of energies, each individual’s energy is different. The fundamental aspect of energy is the same, but the flavors it has taken on are different. Instant rapport happens only if you are capable of penetrating that individual flavor and touching a dimension that is universal in nature. It does not need conversation, it does not need any kind of transaction – it is just a union.
The true meaning of Yoga
So when we say, “We will teach you Yoga,” this is what we mean – that we will touch you at your deepest core, and you cannot shake it off. This is not bondage – this is the only way to freedom.
People always understand freedom as exclusiveness – “I do what I want.” If you become exclusive, your very existence becomes a bondage. The only way you can become free is to become inclusive.
The fundamental dimension is inclusion. Not inclusion in terms of “I love you, you love me.” That may work on the surface – maybe it is needed to make you willing. Love is a solvent, not a solution. It dissolves the rough edges in you and brings you a little closer to people so that there is a possibility, but it is not the real thing.
If you do not consciously evolve your ability to form relationships with everything around you at the level of natural union, you will never know the joy of being in this world. You will only know the fear and anxiety of being in this world.
The ecstasy of union
Simply being in this world can be an absolutely ecstatic process if you know this union with everything around you. If you can look at anyone and anything – not feeling love, but feeling them as part of yourself – if you experience the intensity of life, it is an explosion. It will naturally make you all-inclusive.
You will know the very joy of being on this planet only when Yoga in its real sense – union – happens. Yoga does not mean contorting your body. Yoga means union. If you have become very rigid, we bend and knead you so that one day you can be baked. If something is baked without sufficient kneading, it cracks. How beautifully bread rises, or how wonderfully a pot takes shape, essentially depends on how well it was kneaded.
The morning asanas are the daily kneading. If you are sufficiently kneaded, when the moment comes, you will naturally flower. Without this kneading, you will only gape at everything around you without knowing what is happening.
Even right now, what is happening in terms of life is absolutely miraculous and incomprehensible. No matter how much science you know, can you figure out how existence happens? You have silly explanations that fit into textbooks, but you do not really know how existence happens.
And if you pay attention to it, how can you stay away from it?
The price of exclusiveness
Because you exist as a body, as a mind, as a set of emotions, you have become exclusive. If you are exclusive, you are being excluded from the life process – you are being excluded from the Creator’s existence.
The more exclusive you make yourself in your thoughts and emotions, the more excluded from the life process you become. This is happening to the world in a big way. The more educated and cultured people believe themselves to be, the more their ability to smile, laugh, and live decreases. They become so serious – it is almost like they are ready to die.
When you hold relationships, you become even more exclusive. The closer the relationship is, the more excluded from the rest of the world you become. Once you have a partner in your exclusiveness, especially if it is going well, you do not have to look out at all.
Relationships as possibilities
Whether between parents and children, between friends, or between spouses – if relationships do not become a means of achieving union, they are more of an encumbrance than a possibility. They only lead to entanglement.
So relationships are not about compatibility, not about companionship, not about extracting happiness from each other. Relationships are an opportunity to achieve a kind of union that will pave the way for a greater possibility.
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. He is also the founder of the world’s largest people’s movement, Conscious Planet– Save Soil, which has touched over 4 billion people.
