‘If you have mastery over your life energies, your life and destiny will be in your hands.’
All creatures on the planet adapt to the situations in which they exist, but humans can adapt the situations to their requirements. Today, most people in the world are moulded by the situations in which they exist because they exist in reaction to them. Predictably, their questions would be, ‘Why was I placed in such a situation? Is it my bad luck? Is it my destiny?’
Whenever things do not happen the way you want them to, there is a temptation to label this as ‘destiny’. You try to console yourself, reconcile yourself to your present condition. This is a way of dealing with failure, illness or other misfortunes. Or it may even be about success beyond one’s competence. All the things that we are unable to logically comprehend, we conveniently call ‘destiny’.
People keep asking me, ‘Sadhguru, how much of my destiny can I control?’ Your destiny is your creation. Even now you are creating it – unconsciously. Every thought, emotion, impulse and reaction that you generate within yourself is creating the course of your destiny. Life within you does not ignore anything; it takes everything that you do seriously.
Life is not recording selectively; it is recording everything in wakefulness and sleep. Because everything is recorded, this huge heap of information within you, without any particular direction or awareness, is creating a whole lot of confusion, and hence, many unexplained situations and consequences of life pass off as destiny.
So if the question is, ‘What will happen to me?’ the answer is, whatever you create will happen to you. But don’t wait for it to happen to you. Make it happen the way you want it. Inner Engineering [a basic Isha programme of self-empowerment and growth] is a set of tools subtler than your physical body, intellect and emotion, designed to create your inner and outer worlds the way you want.
Many of those things that people considered to be destiny a hundred years ago, you have taken into your hands today. We have managed the disastrous destinies of diseases, infections, epidemics and famines that people experienced just a century ago. Many who were affected defi nitely thought it was a matter of fate, but have we not taken charge of many of these seemingly inevitable calamities? Today, what we call ‘technology’ is just this: within the laws of nature, everything external that can be taken charge of, we take charge of.
I was once at an international conference on how to alleviate
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poverty on the planet. Lots of ‘responsible’ people were participating, including several Nobel laureates. At one point, a participant said, ‘Why are we trying to solve these problems?
Isn’t all this divine will?’
I said, ‘Yes, if somebody else is hungry or dying, it must be the divine plan. But if your stomach is hungry, if your child is dying, you’ll have your own plan, isn’t it?’
Wherever we have to do something about our lives, we have taken it into our hands. Wherever we do not want to take it into our hands, we talk about divine will or destiny. Yoga is a science that allows you take the very process of life and death into your hands. Right now you are making the choices in your life unconsciously. That is what karma means: you are creating your destiny in total chaos, in total unawareness. Whatever you are doing unconsciously, if you start doing it consciously, that makes a world of difference. It is the difference between ignorance and enlightenment.
Taking destiny into your hands does not mean everything will happen your way. The outside world will never happen 100 per cent your way because there are too many other variables involved. Wanting the outside world to happen your way is about conquest, tyranny, dictatorship. Creating destiny does not mean you have to control every situation in this world.
It simply means making yourself in such a way that whatever the nature of events and situations around you, you learn to ride those situations, not get crushed by them. Essentially, it is about steadily moving towards fulfi lling your ultimate nature, no matter what the content of life is around you.
‘What about the stars, the planets? Don’t they decide our
destinies?’ If your destiny is decided by the planets and stars, it means you cannot even commit suicide! You can neither live nor die the way you want. (It is true that no one has the right to commit suicide. This is not because of moral
reasons, but because you have no right to destroy that which you cannot recreate.) You cannot decide anything about your life either positively or negatively because you are looking at everything through your horoscope – which is for sure, a horror-scope!
Should inanimate objects decide the course and the destiny of human nature or should it be the other way round? If you are well established in yourself, every planet can go wherever it wants, but you will still go in the direction you want. If people were less concerned about other planets and a little more concerned about the well being of this one – Mother Earth – at least we would live a little better!
So what you call ‘destiny’ is just something that you created unconsciously for yourself. Karma is the process; destiny is the result. ‘Karma’ literally means ‘action’. Action is of many kinds:
physical, mental/emotional and energy action. If these actions fi nd outward expression, that is karma. The most signifi cant aspect of yoga is always to perform action on the level of energy, because energy is the most unconscious part of your karma.
Beyond body, mind/emotion and energy, if action turns inward,