Creativity and Spirituality

In November 2012, nearly 200 entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs aspiring to scale up their business and personal capabilities came together to attend a very special business leadership program called INSIGHT: The DNA of Success. Designed by Sadhguru and facilitated by Dr. Ram Charan, globally renowned CEO Coach, the panel comprised some of the most successful names from the Indian business sphere, including KV Kamath and GM Rao.

The second edition of the program will be underway during 23^rd to 26^th November at the Isha Yoga Center. Leading up to this exciting event, we have been bringing you a video series called The Business of Wellbeing. As a part of the panel discussions at INSIGHT 2012, Sadhguru and Dr. Ram Charan were interviewed by Indrajit Gupta, former editor of Forbes India magazine. In this video, they discuss creativity and spirituality.

Indrajit Gupta: To be creative and innovative, is spirituality really the answer? I’ll set the context. Whenever the issue of spirituality comes up, I notice there are lots of people, even some in this room, who tend to connote religious connotations. At least, spirituality carries religious connotations for them.

Sadhguru: Let me define spirituality, because this is the most corrupted word on the planet. People have used and misused it in so many different ways. One of our by-lines used to be, “Isha – to live and to live totally.” So if I say, “live and live totally,” somebody thinks he must party seven days of the week. No, I’m not talking about partying. You party because you can only live in the evening. You can only live if you put something into you.

No, I am talking about ­– life is not in your work, life is not in your family, life is not in the world around you. Life is here, this is life isn’t it? We do not know whether you will become the richest man in the world or not, or whether you will explore the whole cosmos or not, but before you fall dead, at least you must know this piece of life in its entirety. Whatever you wish to do – whether you want to run an industry or a business, or you simply want to close your eyes and sit, for whatever purpose – the most important thing is you must know this piece of life in its entirety. This is all I did all my life.

The only sadhana I did in my life is to remain uneducated. I am not speaking with any disrespect towards education. To remain uneducated is not easy because from the moment you are born, your parents, all the adults around you, the teachers and just about everybody in the world is always trying to teach you something that has not worked in their life. You can clearly see it's not worked in their life. If you see how they were when they were five years of age and how they are at thirty-five or forty – they’ve become joyless, long-faced, stressed – obviously nothing has worked. Something that’s not worked, they want to preach to everybody.

So to remain uneducated, not to be influenced by your parents, by your family, culture, religion, society, teachers, just to remain absolutely uneducated, the way the Creator intended you to be; if you remain like this, you will naturally know this life in its entirety.

If you want to use any gadget, the more you know about it, the better you can use it, isn’t it? This is spirituality. You are not going to rest till you know this piece of life in its entirety. If you know this absolutely, you do what you can do. When you do what you can do, people think it's miraculous.

The immensity of being human is been completely lost, simply because people are busy wanting to do something. See, if you want a mango tree to yield, you don’t have to do “mango meditation.” If you sit there and dream mangoes, mangoes are not going to come. You just have to think of soil, manure, water, sunlight, simple things that everybody knows but nobody does.

In yoga, we say, “If your one eye is on the goal, you have only one eye to find your way,” which is an inefficient way. If both your eyes are finding the way, you will efficiently find the way. How far you go depends on who you are. So if your work or what you are doing is important for you, who you are needs to be worked at. But you only work on something outside. You are constantly working at your industry, at your business, but you are never working on yourself. Who you are needs to be worked at – not just your knowledge, not your capability, not information, not tricks. Without enhancing the capacity of what this is, the caliber of what you do is not going to rise. You cannot make a Maruti 800 do a Formula One race; you need the right kind of machine.

Editor’s Note: Visit the website www.ishainsight.org, or contact +91 83000 84888, leadership@ishainsight.org for more details.