By Sadhguru – Founder, Isha Foundation

Spiritual process means a conscious self-destruction. Very few people are seeking it consciously. Generally, for most people, the spiritual process comes in the pursuit of their well-being. They are only seeking well-being, but slowly, they realise as long as their individual nature exists, there is no such thing as well-being. So then, willingly and unwillingly, they begin to destroy themselves.

Self-destruction is painful unless there is a complete dis-passion about who you are. It is painful, but with every bit of yourself being destroyed, you feel more beautiful. So, the longing to burn is there. The longing to preserve is there. These are two forces within you, always.

One aspect of you just knows preservation. Self-preservation is a fundamental instinct in you — in every life form for that matter. Another half of you is longing to become liberated from this limitation of who you are. Today, it feels like all your material pursuits are stupid. You want to drop it and go away to the Himalayas or wherever you think it is. But three days later, suddenly you feel the whole spiritual nonsense is so stupid. Somebody who was just making money and enjoying their breakfast, lunch,  dinner is smart.

For a few individuals, spiritual process is very effortless. They simply go on it without hesitation. For most others, it is a huge struggle because they are unable to choose which of these forces they should align themselves with. You are constantly weighing which is better. You don’t know where you belong. You are trying to see which is more advantageous. Whichever you choose, you make a mistake. Most people have made themselves like this. Whatever they choose, they feel they have made a mistake in their life. There is endless conflict within themselves because this is the nature of the creation. Without the instinct to preserve, there would be no survival process. But if you identify yourself with those forces, you feel trapped and suffocated.

To be rooted in the dimension which is longing for liberation and still effectively handle your survival needs a certain amount of skill and juggling with life, which destroys many people. It need not destroy them but because people have this idea that they have to be aligned or they must be identified with something strongly, that is why they struggle. If you don’t identify with both, and if you just look at life, depending upon how much priority you accord to something that functions and happens in a certain way, the other things can be handled to the best of our ability. That is all that can be done in life. But people always believe that unless they are identified with something, things cannot happen. They are afraid to just be here without being identified with any particular dimension of life, just looking at everything.

Even externally, everybody wants to belong to some party because there is safety in belonging to some party. In identification there is security. Or at least, there is a feeling of security. So, people always identified themselves with this and struggle with that or identify themselves with that and struggle with this. If you just begin to understand life as various forces working upon you, above all, learn to understand the nature of the fundamental life force which is you, which decides the quality of everything that you do and are, and learn to see how to make it happen without identifications, then you see whatever kind of situations you are placed in, there is no struggle. As the external situations demand, you function; that’s all.

[Ranked amongst the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and best-selling author. Sadhguru has been conferred the “Padma Vibhushan,” India’s highest annual civilian award, by the Government of India in 2017, for exceptional and distinguished service.]