Devotion is Devoid of You

Devotion is a crazy thing. Devotion is that which is devoid of you. It is not a love affair. Love itself is a crazy thing but there are shreds of sanity attached to it; you can still recover. In devotion, there is no shred of sanity. Devotion does not allow recovery.

When I say devotion, I am not talking about belief systems. Belief is just like morality. People who believe some nonsense think they are superior to others. The moment you believe something, you don’t get any better; it is just that your stupidity gets confident. Confidence and stupidity are a very dangerous combination. You should never have them together, but very often you find them together because that is their nature. Intelligence and hesitation are natural. The more intelligent you are, the more hesitant you become in many ways because if you start looking at all the dimensions around you, you clearly understand that what you know is so miniscule; there is no way to act in confidence. A belief system takes away this problem. It gives you enormous confidence but it does not cure your stupidity.

I am not talking about belief, I am talking about moving into trust. So the question arises, “How can I trust?” The fact that you are sitting comfortably, that is trust. Because you know, there have been incidents where the earth has opened up and swallowed people. There have been incidents where pieces of sky have fallen on people and crushed them to death. There have been situations where the very air that people breathed turned against them. This round planet is spinning and traveling at a tremendous speed and the whole damn solar system and galaxy are traveling at we don’t know what speed. Suppose Mother Earth decides to suddenly start spinning in the opposite direction, maybe you will fly off from where you are sitting right now – you don’t know.

So for you to sit, smile, listen and talk to somebody, you need trust – enormous trust, isn’t it? But you are doing it unconsciously and un-lovingly. Just learn to do this trust consciously and lovingly. That is devotion. Once you learn to sit here, consciously and lovingly trusting the existence the way it is, that is devotion. Devotion is not a belief system. Devotion is the sweetest way to be in the existence.

(Ranked among India’s 50 most influential people, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, and New York Times bestselling author. He received the Padma Vibhushan in 2017 for his exceptional service.)