Beyond Sense Perceptions

Is it possible to become enlightened through our own power or is it granted by a power beyond us?

​Sadhguru: Except nature, you have never experienced any power beyond yourself. You are not blowing the wind. This much is very clear to you. The wind blows with tremendous power but you did not start this wind.

And you did not create yourself – you just happen to be here. Without that energy or that something which is beyond you, nothing can happen. Something must have created you.

Now that you do not know what created you, the next immediate thing you will say is that God must have done it. Since you are a human being, you think that God is a big human being. If you were a buffalo, you would think God is a big buffalo.

Whatever your idea of God is, it is simply coming from the limited experience of who you are right now. It is not coming from any true experience. Whatever powers we are thinking of, we have not seen them.

The only thing that you can really experience is that which is within you. But you have never really looked at that which is within you in any real depth.

Whatever you have known till now, your experience is only limited to your five sense organs. Whatever you have known, either of the world or yourself, has come to you only by seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting.

If these five senses go to sleep, you will neither know the world nor yourself. The sense organs are limited perceptions. They feel everything only in comparison to something else. For example, if I touch a steel rod, it feels cool to me simply because my body temperature is in a certain way.

Suppose my body temperature was lowered and I touch it, it will feel warm to me. This is not a genuine experience. This is an experience that is sufficient to survive in the physical reality.

If you are seeking something beyond survival, sense perceptions are not enough. All yogic practices are fundamentally aimed at giving you an experience beyond the five sense perceptions. Whatever you experience beyond the five sense perceptions is not in terms of physical reality.

It is in a different dimension. You can call that dimension whatever you want – God, power or myself. But whatever name you give it, it always gets misunderstood by people.

If you want to transcend, only if you are truly willing it can happen. Otherwise no power on earth or in heaven can move you.

Does that mean there is no other power? Obviously there is so much more than what you call as “myself” in this existence. If you transcend this identity of who you are, then there is no distinction between what is you and what you are referring to as the “power beyond.”