By Sadhguru – Founder, Isha Foundation
Sadhguru: By the time I was eight years old, I already had a cloud of a billion questions around me. I could never find anyone who answered a single question without quoting someone else. I knew that the authority they invoked invariably quoted some other authority.
When that authority was from another time zone, it was sanctified as ancient scriptural authority! This made no sense to me. So, I brooded endlessly, and wrote poems that always ended with questions. I could never accept authority as truth. Truth was for me the only authority.
Conventionally speaking, my irreverence should have made me the unlikeliest candidate for spirituality. This is why I tell people: outsourcing your responsibility to some external authority will not make you more spiritual; it will only make you submissive.
The spiritual process is about dropping all assumptions. It is an unbridled seeking — a seeking unchained by tradition, caste, creed, religion, parentage, genetics. If you are a true seeker, you are not seeking heaven, or even God. If the Devil rules the world, you want to find out and meet him! The spiritual journey is about seeking truth, nothing else.
When at the age of twenty-five, I exploded into a state of boundless ignorance on Chamundi Hill, it is not that all my questions vanished. I simply realised the folly of trying to capture truth in instalments. I saw that even if you read all the libraries on this planet, your knowledge would be minuscule compared to this utterly incredible cosmos. Enlightenment does not mean you “know” everything in the universe. It means that your faculty of perception is now so uncluttered that you see everything just as it is.
In this culture we always identified with ignorance because our knowledge is minuscule — no matter how much we know – but our ignorance is boundless. So if you identify with your ignorance, you become boundless in some sense, because whatever you identify with will be your quality.
In a way, enlightenment is a celebration of ignorance, a blissful ignorance. You are not cluttered with knowledge, so you see everything just the way it is, that’s all. If you are cluttered with knowledge, you do not see anything the way it is; you are prejudiced about everything.
If you want to grow, it is extremely important you come to the simple understanding: “What I know by experience I know. What I do not know, I do not know.” “I do not know” is a tremendous possibility. When you say, “I do not know,” it simply means your mind and heart is open to know.
A natural seeking and longing to know will happen within you. If you replace “I do not know” with “I believe this, I believe that,” then whatever you do not know, you will try to bridge that chasm with something that you make up in your mind. Knowing brings clarity, believing brings confidence. Confidence without clarity is a great disaster that humanity has suffered for a very long time.
The greatest realisation in your life is you do not know. Mysticism means that you are stepping into a new sphere of life every day. Something new, that you did not know, has come into your experience today. Mysticism does not mean an accumulated amount of knowledge. Mysticism means an exploration. If you believe, you will not explore anything. You can genuinely explore only when you know that you do not know
[Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and a prominent spiritual leader. An author, poet and internationally-renowned speaker, Sadhguru’s wit and piercing logic provoke and widen our perception of life. www.ishafoundation.org]
This post was published on August 22, 2025 6:05 pm