Confusion and Clarity on Spiritual Path 
Sadhguru
addresses a very common issue for spiritual seekers – confusion on the
spiritual path. He looks at why confusion is a constant companion and
what it takes to use this mix-up productively.
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Sadhguru: When we make an
attempt to cross the threshold of where we are right now and move into
other dimensions of experience, a few things get mixed up. If you do not
develop the necessary discrimination and balance within yourself,
handling this mix-up can lead to lots of confusion. You step into a
spiritual process and suddenly you don’t know where you belong – you are
always confused. It is good if you are confused. It means you are
constantly stepping into new territory. If you live with the familiar
forever, there will be certainty but there will be no progress.
No Backward Steps
It is like swinging on the trapeze. When
you are swinging on your own trapeze, it is fine. When you let go and
try to catch the other, that in-between space is terrible because you
are neither here nor there. This is the predicament of people who want
to explore, know, and experience other dimensions of life. They want to
know the other side but they are unwilling to release themselves from
the familiar even for a moment, so the struggle becomes unnecessarily
long. If you let go of your trapeze and jump, the trapeze on the other
side is always in place so you would catch it. But instead, if you just
swing and swing, if you loosen the grip or hold it with your little
finger but never let go, it is torturous.
It is good if you are confused. It means you are constantly stepping into new territory.
When I talk about leaving the familiar to
explore the other, it does not mean you have to leave your home or
office and go somewhere. It is an internal process. Internally, leaving
things that you have been attached to and identified with. You took the
step of turning spiritual only because you felt insufficient. Suppose
you were happy and absolutely fulfilled just eating your morning
breakfast and drinking coffee, you would not have tried anything else.
Somewhere, a realization came that this is not enough. You want to know
and experience something else. This is not about demeaning your present
existence. This is about seeing the limitation of where you are so that
you can move to the next step of life.
So when this state of mix-up happens, you
are neither here nor there; there will be confusion. You might have
heard of the hippie movement during the 60’s in the US. People wanted to
break everything that was familiar and try to live their life in some
other way. All conventions of society became so suffocating, they wanted
to break this and do something new. In many ways, they were very
genuine people, but they did all the wrong things. They got so mixed up
that it became the most confused and tortured generation for a long
time. But the longing and their sincere effort to break away from what
they know and step into something that they do not know was wonderful.
That generation was a tremendous possibility, if only they had had the
right kind of guidance. Not much of this movement happened in India, but
especially in the United States, it really swept the country in a big
way. When they did not know what to do and how to break their
limitations, they got into alcohol, drugs, and all kinds of things. One
of the reasons was, to take away distinctions. So probably for the first
time, men and women started dressing in similar ways.
After having made the effort to step into the unfamiliar, there is no point in stepping back into the familiar.
A hippie couple like this came to the
Indian embassy in New York because India was one of the big destinations
at that time. Because everybody was after mukti or nirvana, lots of
people queued up to come to India because India was a promise of
something else. So they came to the Indian Embassy where Shankaran
Pillai was the concerned officer. He looked at this couple, couldn’t
make out which is the man and which the woman. Then he asked, “Which one
of you has a menstrual cycle?” The hippie said, “No man, I got a
Honda.”
So stepping into a spiritual process is
like that – things get mixed up. After having made the effort to step
into the unfamiliar, there is no point in stepping back into the
familiar. That’s a backward step. When things get mixed up, don’t step
back. If you are stepping into unfamiliar territory on a daily basis,
you will always be confused. This confusion needs to be handled properly
and productively, rather than becoming a self-defeating process. You
just need more vision to see things clearly. The ability to see life the
way it is does not come free. You have to do the necessary things to
get the discrimination. It won’t happen by accident.
Making the Process Joyful
If the spiritual process should not be
painful, if it has to become a joyful process, one way is devotion. If
you are a devotee, confusion is not a problem. But such a thing is not
possible if your mind questions everything. If that is so, the next
thing is to be able to clearly see what is true and what is not, not
from past experiences and conditionings of life, but out of a very keen
sense of discrimination. If you want to do this, first of all you should
have developed a razor-like intellect so that you can cut things clean
and see. If you have a blunt knife, you cannot do this. It will mess up
everything. It won’t give you a vision of anything.
You
crank up your energy to such a pitch that your mind says something, your
emotions say something else, but your energies are so cranked up it
doesn’t matter.
If you are unwilling to cut up what is
familiar and see the basis of why you are inclined towards it, you will
not step into the unfamiliar. Unless you begin to see the hollowness of
where you are right now, you will not begin to seek something else
strongly. If the longing is not strong, you will hang in between
forever, in limbo. The longing will not become strong unless we open up
our lives, dissect everything and see what it is; what it is worth, what
it is not worth. It is not about making it meaningless. It is not about
making it ridiculous. Not glorifying it, not making it filthy, just
seeing everything the way it is. If you see everything the way it is,
you will see there is no point in stopping in one place, you must move;
this will become very clear.
If these two things are not possible, you
must give yourself to activity. Simply serve whatever you see as
meaningful. Or, the next possibility is you crank up your energy to such
a pitch that your mind says something, your emotions say something
else, but your energies are so cranked up it doesn’t matter. Your mind
can be wrong, you know that. It has been wrong any number of times and
it continues to be wrong, but your life energies cannot be wrong. Your
life energies do not know any right and wrong. They know only life and
life alone – whether it is low pitch or high pitch is the only question.
(source : isha.sadhguru.org)
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