By Sadhguru – Founder, Isha Foundation
At one time I knew every street in Mysuru like the back of my hand — every tree, building, everything. I prided myself in knowing Mysuru like very few people.
When I was a young boy, I had “friends” in the Mysuru Zoo. Sunday morning, I had my two rupees with me and would go deep inside the fish market, where they kept the half rotten fish. For two rupees, I sometimes got two or three kilograms of fish. I put them in a plastic bag and took them to the zoo and spent the whole day there feeding all my friends with my fish!
Later, once I passed my pre-university courses, I declared to my parents that I was not going to college. My father was a prominent doctor, so he wanted me to study medicine. I refused, saying that I would not go to college that year and would educate myself.
I spent most of that year in the University of Mysore library. I would be there every morning, before the library doors opened, and I was the last one to get out when it closed at eight in the evening. From geography, history, literature, popular mechanics to philosophy, I simply read just about anything that came my way. I think most of the reading that I have done in my life, I did in that one year.
Though many things have changed in Mysuru in the last 45 years, I can still see so many places where I walked and how deeply I looked at them, and the billion questions that I asked at a billion different places in Mysuru. It forms a bond which is not emotional or sentimental, but of a very different kind which brought me to a certain level of quest within myself. For me, Mysuru means a billion questions and at the same time, an incredible answer too.
I loved the Chamundi Hills in Mysuru. This is a place where I have trekked extensively, camped, meditated and done many things. At a time in my life when I was fully engrossed in a variety of business activity, something fantastic happened to me. It was the 23rd of September 1982.
On that afternoon, I had a little time to spare between two business meetings, so I rode up Chamundi Hills. I parked my vehicle, went to a particular rock — a huge rock which was my usual place — and sat there with my eyes open. After a few minutes, I did not know where I was. What was “me” was just everywhere. The very rock I was sitting on, the air that I was breathing, the atmosphere around me — everything had just become me.
Whatever I say about it, it will sound stupid and insane. I thought I was in that condition for about 10-15 minutes, but when I came back to my so-called normal condition, it was 7.30 pm — four and a half hours had passed. My eyes were open, I was fully conscious, but time just flipped. Every cell in my body was bursting with a new indescribable level of ecstasy.
I had hit upon a nameless goldmine within myself which I did not want to lose even for a moment, and I knew it could happen in every human being. Every human being has the same inner ingredient but it was not happening to them. So I thought the best thing to do was to somehow rub off this experience on them. I started looking for ways to do that.
The first program I ever taught started off as a four-day, two-hour program. Since then, there has been no looking back. Millions of people have gone through our programs and millions of lives have changed because of it. Today, I can proudly say that in homes and marketplaces alike, we have created people whose vision and experience of life is rooted in the harmony and unboundedness of life rather than in any narrow perception of the limited.
[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.]
This post was published on February 16, 2025 6:10 pm