How to Find Your Calling?

Sadhguru: Is there such a thing as life’s calling? I want you to get this right: There is no life’s calling, but life is calling – both from within and without. Only when you truly respond to the call of life will you know life in its entirety. If life is calling you, you must go towards it with utmost passion and involvement, not with hesitation and calculation. This is not about your ego wanting to do something different. It is about living to your full potential. And if you are truly passionate about every aspect of your life, you will realize very easily what you are good at. It could be that you are good at something completely new that has never been done before. But even if you are not a complete original and are doing the same, age-old things, when you do them with utmost passion and involvement, they will raise you to a new dimension of experience.

Problems come when people are passionate about only one thing, or when they are passionate in an exclusive way. This often leads to isolation. Living an exclusive existence with very limited involvement will only lead to frustration and pain. One must be absolutely and passionately involved with everything that the five senses can perceive in a given moment. This is all-inclusive passion. This is true compassion. Compassion is not an attitude of kindness but an instrument of unprejudiced involvement.

Only when you know unprejudiced and absolute involvement with the universe, with every atom in the universe, will you explore, experience, and know the full scope of who you are. And in being absolutely involved, you need not be limited by your past experience and capabilities. You can imbibe and have access to the great storehouse of knowing that is the very nature of the universe.

The way life happens is first being, then doing, and then having. But right now, people always think first of having. For example, when you were at a certain stage of life, you may have decided that you want to have a certain kind of life that includes a certain kind of partner, a house, a car and whatever else. Then you think, “How can I have all this?” The moment you start thinking how to get it, people around you start advising you. Then you start thinking about becoming a doctor, lawyer, software engineer, or whatever. Once you are in one of these professions for a period of time, you think you have become something, and that is when you start moving against life. You are going the “having-doing-being” way, which leads to an endless pursuit of having. This is the basis of an unfulfilled life.

You must first establish your way of being. Then, whether you get to have what you desire or not, you will still be wonderful. The quality of your life is decided by your way of being. What you get to have is only a question of capability and situations that are conducive. If you make this simple shift to “being-doing-having,” then a large part of your destiny will be by your will.