Communism is a way of thinking. Socialism is wimpy communism. When you don't have the courage to become a communist, you become a socialist.
— Jaggi Vasudev
I have not worked with farmers. I have not worked with prisoners. I have only worked with human beings. I didn't see anybody as anything other than that.
There are no problems in the world. There are just situations. Some situations you know how to handle. Some you do not know how to handle.
The most fundamental strength of India is that we are a land of seekers. Seekers of truth and liberation. Not a land of believers. We are a godless nation.
Being mentally ill is not a joke. It is a most painful thing.
Yoga is not Indian; it does not belong to India.
When there is a choice, it is best to eat live vegetarian food. 'Live' means in its uncooked condition, because a live cell has everything in itself to sustain life. The idea is to take life into you. When we cook food, it destroys the life in it.
At times, it appears easy to sermonise on morality and ethics. But morality and ethics appear good only when applied to others, never on oneself.
A sense of morality makes a person repetitive in thought and action. Such a person will obviously not get anywhere.
Trees are our closest relatives. What trees exhale, we inhale; what we exhale, they inhale. They are half our respiratory system.
In terms of the quality of food entering you, vegetarian food is definitely far better for the system than non vegetarian.
Work has become like prison because of the way we treat it. If you are trapped with people who you do not care for, it feels like a concentration camp.
Leadership is neither about you or me; it is about something that needs to be done. Leaders figure out how it can be made to happen and get ten or a million people to see that this is the way to do it.
I'm comfortable with anything that fits me well. Bad tailoring is what I am uncomfortable with.
Integrity is about pursuing bigger goals that are beyond your personal success. If people see you only for yourself, they will not trust you. And, without trust, no growth and success are possible.
Children never seek happiness: they are happy.
For me, health, education, and spirituality should never be commercialised.
I speak passionately. I drive passionately. If I hit a ball, I will do it passionately, too. Because I don't understand how you go through life without involvement. Whatever I am doing in my life, whether big or small, I am 100 per cent involved.
If you don't take yourself seriously, you will die joyfully. If you take yourself seriously, you will go through a lot of misery.
'Belief' means something that you do not know. You want to assume and bring a certainty to something that you do not know. That means you are concretising your ignorance. There is no need to believe anything.
Golf is basically about geometry and your ability to gauge how things are, the terrain, the distances, and exerting the right amount of swing and force.
Most of the depressions are self-created. A few people are pathologically ill: they cannot help it. It just comes from within because of genetic and other factors. But almost everybody else can be driven to madness, because the line between sanity and insanity is quite thin.
Yoga is not a belief system - it is not a new religion, philosophy or a teaching but a technology. I call it a technology because you don't have to believe it; you just have to learn to use it. It does not matter what your religion is, what your colour is, what your race is, or where you come from. If you learn to use yoga, it works for you.
Yoga is not a practice - the word 'yoga' means union. It does not mean standing on your head, twisting your body, or holding your breath. Yoga means to know the union of life. When you experience everything as a part of yourself, you are in yoga.
When you stop people from doing certain things, there is a good chance that they will do exactly what they have been told to abjure. That is how human nature is.
In India, nothing is accomplished by policy changes alone. Unless people can relate emotionally to something, nothing happens on the ground.
Spirituality is not about looking up or down - it's about looking inward.
If you listen to your body, your body will clearly tell you what kind of food it is happy with.
If you don't have the necessary inner balance, leadership can demolish you. Today, if you are a CEO by the time you are 35, you must have ulcers. By 45, you must have diabetes. By 55, you must have had a bypass. People say they have had three bypasses, as if it is a qualification.
What people think is their individual nature is just a bundle of thoughts, emotions, ideas, opinions, and prejudices. The world can do without this individuality.
I'm not modern or ancient: I'm just contemporary. I'm sure every guru of his time was contemporary.
Insight essentially means being able to see things other people are not able to see. This is the hallmark of leadership.
Most creatures in nature die consciously. Cobras, for instance, choose a particular place on a particular branch of the tree. Many a times, I would try to force-feed them out of my misplaced compassion, but they would just puke and go back to sit on the same branch.
If your idea of a guru is from a calendar, who has candy-floss beard and a constipated look on the face, then definitely I am not that.
My engagement with mountains, rivers, and forests has been right from my childhood. I have lived in the jungles by myself; I have floated down rivers. So, I didn't experience these rivers, mountains, forests as some mythological figures but as thriving, living entities.
There is no good leader. First of all, if you think you are a leader, you are just messed up in your head. People should think you are a leader. If you think you are a big success, again, you are messed up. Other people should think you are a success.
A beard doesn't grow only on gurus; it grows on all men.
If you have physical ailments, you will get everyone's compassion, but when you have a mental ailment, you will get laughter, unfortunately. This is because it is very difficult to make out when somebody is sick and when somebody is being stupid.
If you don't have very strong emotions or very intense thoughts about something, you cannot get depressed.
A guru is like a live road map. If you want to walk uncharted terrain, I think it is sensible to walk with a road map.
India's rivers are undergoing a drastic change. Our perennial rivers are becoming seasonal. Many of the smaller rivers have already vanished.
If you impose morality on people, they will find ways to circumvent their guilt. They will make offerings to temples - or other places of worship - but also continue doing things that make them feel guilty.
Yoga means union. Union means the boundaries of the individual self-dissolve, and you experience existence as yourself.
Essentially, all life on the planet is coming from the earth. Whether it is a human being or an earthworm, it is the same soil.
Many philosophies have evolved based on the choice of food. But one must remember there is nothing religious, philosophical, spiritual, or moral about the food we eat. It is only a question of whether the food is compatible with the kind of body we have.
At my ashram, people work long hours joyfully because they are inspired. When people are involved and joyfully doing something, they usually turn out ten times more and do more than what they would normally do as a duty.
To be spiritual means you have cosmic ambitions. You want to know not just the whole creation but the Creator and the source of creation as well. To be material means you have petty ambitions of owning a house - or 10 houses - or a whole apartment building.
For most human beings, if what they want happens, it is a success. If what they could not have imagined happens, it is luck. If what nobody could foresee happens, it is a miraculous existence.
To make any endeavor truly successful, integrity, inspiration, and insight are integral.
The reason for fasting is to understand the relationship between what's you and what's the accumulative body.
