Question: Sadhguru, I observe that when I miss my kriyas, I go back to my old compulsions and they take over me. I know there is a transformation in me, but when will it be permanent? How can I make those permanent changes so I never fall back?
Sadhguru: The kriyas are not about permanent change, but about continuous change. There is no such thing as permanent change. There is permanence only about death. Life must be changing continuously. Kriyas will assist a continuous changing process—every day must be new terrain. If you are afraid of new things, that is your problem, but every day you must be stepping into something new. That is a good life.
Even when I was very young, people would ask me, “What will you settle down into?”
I said, “Only once I will settle down—into earth. Till then I am not settling,” because settling means you are looking for some permanence. If you look for permanence in a transient life, all you will create is
a hallucinatory life.
The reason why so many people have lost control over their thought processes and are going crazy in their minds or are in a state of mental diarrhoea all the time is that they are trying to bring permanence. Permanence means stagnation. Stagnation means death. That is not the way of life. Your existence is not permanent, so how can you bring permanent transformation?
What you mean with your question is that you want to be in forward gear, not reverse gear. You must be in movement, but forward, not backwards. If you know how to drive, you understand that it goes backwards if it comes to the letter R. R does not mean roaring forward, R means reverse. Generally, that is the language understood in the automobile industry. Tomorrow, if someone creates a rocket car and they put RR, which means roaring, that will be bad language because everyone has agreed that R means reverse. D does not mean death—D means drive. But at the same time, if you do not drive properly, it means death.
A certain symmetry of language is accepted. For example, we know what each road sign means.
Otherwise, each one of us would do different things. Similarly, if you understand that if you are doing kriya you are rolling forward, and if you are not doing kriya you are rolling backwards, then you just have to do it. You must put it on D, not on R. If you put it on R and stamp down on the throttle, boom. Nothing wrong with the reverse gear, it is just that your neck may break trying to look back. D is easier to drive.
If you had eyes at the back of your head, you could go in reverse gear and the companies would provide six gears on the reverse. It may happen once self-driving cars come. On the railway track, the engines go both ways.
The only problem is, you do not have eyes on the back of your head, so we decided to drive the way we do right now. If you understand that when you put it on kriya mode, you are rolling forward, no kriya mode, rolling backwards, then you have the answer.
Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and a bestselling author.
He was conferred the Padma Vibhushan in 2017. Isha.sadhguru.org