Sadhguru: Right from my infancy, there were always certain mountains in the background of my eyes. When I was sixteen years old and discussed this with my friends, they said, “You're crazy! Where are mountains?” That was when I realized no one had mountains in their eyes except me. For some time I thought I should find out where they are, but then I ignored that idea. Suppose there is a spot on your spectacles, you get used to it after a while. It was just like that. It was only much later when a whole flood of memory came back to me, and when I was looking for a place to establish the Dhyanalinga, that I started looking for that particular peak in my eyes.

I traveled everywhere. I made at least four trips on my motorcycle from Goa to Kanyakumari and back again. Somehow I believed they must be in the Western Ghats. On every road and mud track from the range of Karwar down to the Kerala border in Karnataka, I have probably ridden thousands of kilometers.

Then just by chance I came to a village outside Coimbatore. As I was driving down a bend, I saw the Seventh Hill on the Velliangiri Mountains. There it was right there, the mountain that I had always been seeing since my childhood. And from that day they disappeared from my eyes.

If you ask me, “Which is the greatest mountain on the planet?” I will reply, “Velliangiri Mountains,” because for me these are not just mountains. I was born with an imprint of these mountains in my eyes and they have haunted me since. They lived within me and have been my very own navigating system, my GPS. These mountains were not a pile of rocks for me. They were a reservoir of what I needed to know to create the Dhyanalinga.