How to Live a Life of Adventure

What Does Adventure Really Mean?

Sadhguru: In your life, you can have ventures or you can have adventure. Adventure means that you do not know where your next foot is going to be. That means there is danger. If there is no danger and everything is safe, there is no adventure, Adventure means you want to step into something that you do not know. If you step into the predictable, that is not an adventure; that is just an activity.

The Greatest Adventure

Adventure need not necessarily mean you have to go out and conquer the world. In fact, adventure means you have surrendered what you like and dislike, what is “mine” and “not mine”. Adventure means to surrender oneself to things which are beyond us. Climbing Mount Everest may look like a great adventure but straddling the peak of your consciousness is a much bigger adventure. You can do the greatest adventure with your eyes closed. Some freaky ambition of proving who you are is not adventure.

The greatest adventure in life is not about climbing a mountain, riding a motorcycle or jumping off a mountain. The greatest adventure in life is that you break at least one box in your head every day. Even if you are riding, flying or doing something else, the adventure is only in stretching beyond your limitations. And no one can deny you this. Whether you are working from nine-to-five in an office or doing something else, no one can deny you this. If you break one bondage every day, depending upon how many heaps of limitations you have, some day you must get liberated. It is bound to happen.

How to Live a Life of Adventure?

Question: Namaskaram Sadhguru, my name is Abhimanyu and I am studying in second standard. I saw your bike ride video in America. You are really cool and you ride so fast, I love it. I really want to ride with you. My question is, are you okay with the idea of a kid being your pillion rider?

Sadhguru: Well Abhimanyu, you know that you are the namesake of the very famous Abhimanyu who was Arjuna’s son. He was a brilliant young boy, very adventurous and brave as they come. Unfortunately, his life ended too soon because he was in a bit of a rush. He grasped how to penetrate a formation in the battlefield but he was not patient enough to understand how to get out. So he got killed as a young boy – a brave young boy, still celebrated – but unfortunately, the adventure did not turn out well.

I want you to understand what is exciting you. I am riding a motorcycle and that is exciting for you, but adventure is not just upon a motorcycle. When you start stretching to break limitations – physical, mental, emotional, and perceptional limitations that you have – then you are in adventure mode. There is no specific activity that you can call as adventure. It is the way you conduct the activity.

A lot of people are very excited when they get a new job. But after some time, they suffer their job. People are very excited when they go to a new place, but over a period of time, with a little bit of repetitiveness, it gets boring. Do not ever look for exciting activity. There is a way to make any activity exciting; that is what you should look at. You can make the littlest things in your life very exciting. All that it takes is that you are seeing how to go beyond certain limits that your body, mind, emotions and your very perception sets upon you in every simple activity.

When I was your age, what intrigued me was that if I see a tree, “Why am I unable to see what is behind it?” Or if I looked at my finger, “Why am I not able to see the other side of it? ” I did not know all these theories of light, of how it reflects so that is how you see. But I wanted to somehow bend my eyes and see. My eyeballs would not go out and do that but then I saw that in the process of seeing something, more than fifty percent of what you see is in your mind. It is your mind which sees, not your eyes. Your eyes take an image inside but the process happens there. If you refine that process, you can see at least fifty percent of what your eyes cannot see. I paid attention and this became a very big adventure for me, that simply sitting and staring at something became a big adventure. Someone who looked at me from outside may have thought that I am doing something very dull, but it was the greatest adventure because I was stretching myself.

In a way, this is what Yoga means. People are stretching every morning. If you get to stretch a little more, it is a big adventure because something exciting and tremendous happens in that process.

Start Your Adventure Right Now with This Simple Process

I want you to start this adventure right now. Just try this today. Look at everyone who is walking on the street with the same fondness with which you look upon your mother. Once you are constantly in a mode of seeing how to go beyond where you are, you will cross rivers beyond bridges, you will cross oceans beyond ships. Above all, you will have friendships beyond relationships. Unfortunately, most human beings are able to form a friendship only with those that they can relate to. They are not looking at why they are not able to relate to something. What is it that makes you relate to one thing and not relate to another thing? If you constantly see how to stretch your physical, mental, emotional, and perceptional limitations, your life becomes one big adventure.

The Adventurous Spirit of Jane Goodall

I met Jane Goodall some time ago. When she was a little girl, her sense of adventure made her go and sleep in a chicken coop because she wanted to see how the chickens lay their eggs and how the eggs hatch. Sleeping in a chicken coop might have looked like crazy nonsense, but the willingness to go through whatever it takes to stretch your perception and touch something beyond the limitations of what you are right now is the basis of adventure.

When you develop a very profound sense of love for something, you will naturally stretch yourself beyond all limits. Jane Goodall went on to become one of the foremost authorities on anything concerned with primates. Our understanding of what the primates are, what they are capable of, various aspects of how they live, what they eat, how they relate and respond to each other, has come to us mainly because of her work.

Sadhguru on Adventure Sports – Is it Worth the Risk?

There is room for adventure in every sphere of life. Adventure means you must trust your capability and competence and take one step more than that. There is a risk, of course. Without risk there is no adventure. Unfortunately, sometimes young people get killed. Before I became thirty-five years of age, at least twelve-thirteen of my friends died – some in motorcycle accidents, some in hang gliding, and some in other things we were doing together. Well, these things did not kill me, but I could not live without having done all those things. Even if one of those situations had ended me, I would still have done it. It is not simply out of egoistic jingoism to do something others cannot do, but about stretching yourself beyond your limits.

Is it one hundred percent safe? No. Nothing is one hundred percent safe because all of us are mortal, isn’t it? There is no such thing as a risk-free adventure, but youth without any sense of adventure are not youth. You can already bury them as old men. They have to do something. This does not mean they have to do wild things on the street. We can create situations and spaces where they can do this with a reasonable amount of safety, but there is no absolute safety. Some of the parents will not approve of this, but otherwise they will do it somewhere where you cannot see.

This is one thing I noticed in the United States. I went to a motorcycle shop, and there I saw that they actually make motorcycles for three year olds. Three-year-olds are riding on dirt bikes, fully helmeted, jacketed and their parents are standing there watching. This is great. Otherwise they will do something wild when they are sixteen, without any training, preparation or safety equipment. Then we do not know how it will end. 

Sadhguru’s Poem on Adventure

Some people say, “Sadhguru, you are an adventure addict!” I am not an addict of anything. Addiction means repetition. Where there is repetitiveness, where is adventure?

This is a poem called “Adventure”:

 

There is no return on investment for life because what return do you want for life? Of all the many phenomena that are happening in the universe, life is the most intricate, sophisticated and fantastic phenomenon. When that has come to you as a gift, what return on investment do you want?