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Question: Why do we worship five elements?
Sadhguru: Everything that we know as physical existence, including ourselves, is just the mischief of five elements: earth, water, fire, air, and space. It is so magnificently put together that it could be an eternal trap. Even a magnificent trap is still a trap. Yogis enjoy the trap when they are in it, but they constantly work to transcend the trap.
The wise of the past devised many methods to go beyond the trap. We developed a system called bhuta shuddhi, as a scientific way of becoming free from the five elements. Bhuta shuddhi is the most fundamental aspect of Yoga. If you become free from the five elements, you become free from the physical. To support this kind of sadhana, they built devices called bhuta lingas.
There are five temples for the five elements, four in Tamil Nadu and one in Andhra Pradesh: water in Thiruvanaikaval, space in Chidambaram, fire in Thiruvannamalai, air in Kalahasti, and earth in Kanchipuram. People moved from temple to temple to do sadhana on each of the five elements, get mastery over them and enhance them, which could do miracles for one’s health and wellbeing.
This understanding and mastery is mostly lost today, but the temples still exist; some vibrant, some weak. These five temples were built to function in tandem for the five elements in this region to have a certain vibrance so that human beings can live with stability and purpose, becoming a possibility, rather than generating poison within themselves.
Question: You always say Namaskaram and not hello. Why so?
Sadhguru: The nature of human intellect is such that the moment it sees a person, it will make all kinds of judgments – “This is okay in that person, this is not okay. He is good, not good. He is beautiful, he is ugly.” Your judgments may be completely wrong because they are all coming from your past experiences of life. They will not allow you to experience something or someone the way they are right now. The intention behind doing namaskaram is to make your likes and dislikes mild because you recognize the source of creation within them. And, it is a constant reminder that the source of creation is within you too. If you recognize this, you are paving the way towards your ultimate nature every time you do namaskaram.
Another aspect is that your palms have a lot of nerve endings – something that medical science has also discovered today. Actually, your hands speak more than your tongue and your voice. There is a whole science of mudras in Yoga. Just by holding your hand in certain ways, you can make your whole system function in different ways. The moment you place your hands together, your dualities, your likes and dislikes, your cravings and aversions, all these things are leveled out. There is a certain oneness to the expression of who you are. The energies are functioning as one. So namaskaram is not just a cultural aspect. There is a science behind it.
Question: Why is Isha Yoga different from other yoga institutes?
Sadhguru: There is a difference between objective technology and subjective technology. Let us say you go into a chemistry laboratory and you want to do an experiment. You put this chemical into that one, watch what happens and write down your observations. This is a kind of understanding. But with a subjective technology, you are the chemical and you are the chemist. You have to put yourself into it and make it happen. For this it needs a different kind of atmosphere. You need to establish a certain level of commitment and a certain level of focus. Otherwise, subjective aspects of life will be completely missed.
The greatest disaster that has happened now is that in so many places, only the objective aspect of yoga has come up without the subjectivity. People are telling you, “You twist your body like this, you breathe like this, this will happen, that will happen.” No. Without the subjectivity, it is like a stillbirth. Not having a child is better than having a stillborn child, isn’t it? So right now, just the body of yoga has arrived without the subjectivity. The subjective aspects of life are being handled like some kind of an objective thing. That is the reason why it does not work. Subjectivity will not come through books, it has to come with a certain involvement of a human being. It will not happen otherwise.
(Sadhguru is a Yogi, mystic, visionary and a New York Times bestselling author. He is also the founder of Conscious Planet – Save Soil)
