Man has spent too much time trying to think about things to which he has no access. When you try to think about that which you have no access to, towards which you have no perception, all you can do is speculate.

When you do excessive speculation without any fundamentals, it amounts to hallucination. Because of this, a large part of religion and spirituality in the world has become purely hallucinatory.

If you are really interested in knowing life in its depth, you must see how to enhance your perception. This moment, if you fall asleep, suddenly people around you will disappear, the world will disappear and you also disappear. You are still alive, everybody around is alive, the existence is on, but in your experience everything disappeared, because these five sense organs have shut down. Right now your whole perception of life is limited to five sense organs — seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, touching. These sense organs, in the very nature of things, can perceive only that which is physical.

Anything that is not in your awareness does not exist for you; and only what you are aware of, you can handle and do things about. If you carefully examine, you will see a large part of you is not in your awareness. If you bring more into your awareness, an inner perception of life not limited to the five sense organs, you will see suddenly your life begins to happen on all levels the way you want it.

When I say ‘an inner perception,’ I am not referring about some airy things. Let us start from the mundane. If your perception is beyond the senses and food appears in front of you, you can simply know how this food will behave in your system. But this perception is today being lost by human beings.

From something as simple as food to something like the ultimate possibility, the inner perception would bring a completely new dimension into one’s life. All the activity that we are doing in our lives whether you are a doctor, a policeman, an engineer or whatever you are, fundamentally, your perception of what is right now in front of you decides the effectiveness of who you are and how much you do on this planet.

People are always asking me, ‘Sadhguru, you are talking about so many subjects. Where do you get the time to read?’ I say, ‘I don’t read.’ What is there in front of me, I perceive it as it is and that is it.

There is no need to carry the burden of knowledge on your head if your perception is keen enough. So perception can be raised to various levels through certain inner instruments. ‘Is it very difficult? Can I rise beyond my senses? Do I have to withdraw to a Himalayan cave to do this?’

Any human being who is willing to dedicate just a few minutes of his life per day can begin to know this. Because it is not sitting somewhere in the Himalayas, it is within you. What is within you is not inaccessible to you. You are just too busy and enamoured with what is happening outside; you never paid any attention to the inside. It is just lack of attention which has denied people this possibility.