A Guru Mixes the Right Cocktail
Sadhguru: There is a wonderful story in the yogic lore. One day, a gnana yogi, a bhakti yogi, a karma yogi, and a kriya yogi were walking together in a forest. Usually these four people can never be together, because a gnana yogi has total disdain for every other yoga. An intellectual person, a thinking person has complete disdain for everybody else. A bhakti yogi, full of emotion and love, thinks all this gnana, karma and kriya yoga is just a waste of time. Just love God and it will happen. The karma yogi thinks everybody is lazy and that they have all kinds of fancy philosophies. What needs to be done is work. One must work, work and work. The kriya yogi just laughs at everything. The whole existence is energy. If you don’t transform your energy, whether you long for God or anything else, nothing is going to happen.
So, usually they cannot be together, but today they were walking together. Then it started to rain heavily. They started running, looking for shelter, and they found an ancient temple which just had a roof and no walls. In the center of this structure, there was a linga. These four people went inside the temple for shelter. The storm became more and more furious and it started raining in torrents. The fury of the storm was getting into the temple so they went closer and closer to the linga. There was no other way to be because it was just blasting them from all sides. Then it became so furious and there was no other place, so the only way they could get some protection was for all four to hug the linga. Suddenly, they felt something enormous happening. A huge presence, a fifth presence was there. All of them said, “Why now? For so many years we have pursued You and nothing happened. Why now?” Then Shiva said, “At last the four of you got together. I have been waiting for this to happen for a long time.”
Without addressing the four basic ingredients of body, mind, emotion and energy out of which all your present experiences are rooted, one cannot move ahead on the spiritual path. Right now, the only things that are in your experience are your body, your mind, and your emotions. You know them to some extent, and you can infer that if these three things have to happen the way they are happening, there must be an energy that makes them happen. Without energy, all this cannot be happening. For example, a microphone amplifies sound. Even if you don’t know anything about the microphone, you can infer that there is a source that powers it.
So these are the only four realities in your life: body, mind, emotion, and energy. Whatever you wish to do with yourself, it must be on these four levels because you can only start a journey from where you are right now. If you use your emotions and try to reach the ultimate, we call this bhakti yoga, the path of devotion. If you use your intelligence and try to reach the ultimate, we call this gnana yoga, the path of intelligence. If you use your body or physical action to reach the ultimate, we call this karma yoga, the path of action. If you transform your energies and try to reach the ultimate, we call this kriya yoga, that means internal action.
These are the only four ways you can work with yourself.
In one person the heart may be dominant, in another person the head may be dominant, in yet another person the hands may be dominant, but everyone is a combination of these four, so you need a process that is a combination of these four. And only if it is mixed in the right way for you, it works best. What we give for another person, may not work well for you. Only when it is mixed in the right proportion it works for you. That is why on the spiritual path there is so much stress on a live Guru. He mixes the right cocktail for you, otherwise there is no punch.
