Peak of perception

Most people become intense only when there is danger. Let’s say you are driving your car, pushing it to 120 miles per hour. You are going really fast, when suddenly something comes in your way. Those last few moments before the possible crash, you are trying to do something, either brake, panic, or try to avoid whatever is in front of you. Let’s say you did not crash and get promoted “elsewhere,” you are alive, sitting here today. Still, those few moments you can never forget. Somehow, they were so intense that if you just think about it, it is again all fully alive in you.

Or let’s say you are standing at the edge of a tall building, just about to fall. Do you see how intense you become? If the consequence of the fall is taken away, the fall is a damn great thing, isn’t it? If the consequence of the car crash is taken away, every day you will want to crash. But since your car breaks up, your body breaks up, you want to avoid it. Suppose those consequences are taken away, won’t you like to experience it all the time? All the adventure sports, what do you think it is? Accidents without consequences... You jump off an airplane; at the last moment you pull the parachute. But you want to experience the fall because it makes you so intense.

So generally, only in moments of danger people know intensity. Now what I am talking about is without doing all those fanciful things of jumping off a mountain or crashing your car or doing something else, just sitting here in the peak of your intensity. If you can become that intense, then if you close your eyes, even the need to open your eyes does not arise anymore in your whole life because life is happening at such a tremendous intensity. People closed their eyes and did not open them for a long time not because they are not interested in life, simply because they are experiencing life at its peak. To do anything else did not occur to them, that’s all.

People think somebody is meditating means he is hibernating. Hibernation means lowering life. Meditation is not lowering life. It is about pushing it towards the peak. If you are in such a state of intensity, this is the most exciting thing you can do – just sitting.

Shiva sat like this for millennia because he is at the peak of intensity. It did not occur to him to get up and do something. So, if your “voltage” increases, then naturally you will see everything that is worth seeing. Because he took his voltage up really high, that was how his third eye opened. The “third eye” does not mean a crack in the forehead. It means things that others cannot see became available to him. It will become available to you also, if you raise your voltage.

(Sadhguru is a Yogi, mystic, and Padma Vibhushan awardee, also known for his New York Times bestselling books. He founded Conscious Planet–Save Soil, the world’s largest people’s movement, impacting over 4 billion people)