Is There a Solution to Religious Extremism?
Yalda Hakim Interacts with Sadhguru
Yalda Hakim: What goes through your mind when you see religious extremism, the level of evil inflicted on man by man?
Sadhguru: Evil has always been inflicted by one man upon another man, never by some other forces. No hand has ever jumped out of the sky and done any evil to anyone in the history of humanity. It is always one person doing something horrible to another person. This could be done for economic reasons, egoistic reasons, wealth, property, so many things. If we have a fight over material things, at some point, some wisdom will arise in you or me to stop this nonsense. But when people believe they are fighting for their God, there is no compromise.
Yalda Hakim: How do we deal with this?
Sadhguru: All this talk about creating a little bit of peace here and there is not a solution. The days of the sword are over. Now are the days of a deadly button, which can do things that you cannot ever imagine. When this kind of capability is there, and we are really concerned about the future of the world, one fundamental thing that we should establish in the next 25 years in the world is: Your religion is your personal pursuit; do whatever the hell you want, but it cannot be a national or global agenda.
Let us understand the word “belief,” first of all. To believe something means that you are not sincere enough to admit, “What I do not know, I do not know.” Only when you see “I do not know,” the longing to know, the seeking to know, and the possibility of knowing become a living reality. What is the point in assuming what you do not know?
Youth and Technology: Danger and Possibility
Yalda Hakim: But to get out of this mindset in the next twenty-five years is easier said than done.
Sadhguru: Well, never before was this possible. Today you can sit here and speak to the entire world. When you have this capability, how come you say you cannot transform the world? We can. The question is, are we committed to making it happen? Thirty percent of data transferred on the internet is pornography. And every year, some 1.2 million children are being trafficked, often through the internet. What is wrong with us? When such a tremendous tool of technology comes to us, we want to sell our children? We want to change this. That is why I have been loud in the last fifteen years, out on the internet.
Yalda Hakim: Do you think that technology is a good thing or a bad thing?
Sadhguru: Technology is neither. The beautiful thing about technology is if you learn to use it, it works for you. But who you are will decide how you use it. What we need to fix right now in the world is who we are. We all have become many things that we are not. Essentially, we are born as life on this planet. The rest of the things are taught to us. Stop teaching all this stuff that makes us something other than human beings.
Yalda Hakim: You can say this as Sadhguru, but how do you deal with a fifteen-year-old who spends six, seven hours of their day on a phone, which then impacts their mental health and their state of mind?
Sadhguru: Being on the phone need not necessarily impact mental health. But what is on the phone? That is the question. Right now, at least in India, whatever they may be looking for, they may be looking for pornography, but Sadhguru pops up instead. I found that in every school I go to, at least twenty to thirty percent of the children are watching our videos. This is a new, fantastic development.
The phone is not the problem. What is the content you are putting up, and who is putting it up? Not children; adults do that – everything has become commerce. Children are playing video games, like PUBG – for hours every day; they are practicing how to kill people. As they get older, do you think their instinct of wanting to shoot people at sight will be satisfied just on the phone? This is the kind of content we are giving them. Can we not change the content to whatever extent possible?
The Only Cure for Compulsiveness
Yalda Hakim: But there are a lot of studies that the internet is causing a lot of angst for young people.
Sadhguru: These studies go on about everything – what is not causing angst? And they keep changing all the time. Yes, screen time has some kind of impact because of the type of light it emits. People lose their ability to sleep properly because they are going on until late at night. They cannot sleep properly, and because of that, the next morning, there are many troubles.
In the United States, they have technology de-addiction centers that people go to, and it is a huge achievement for them to keep their phone away for a certain number of days. Technology is not the problem – compulsiveness is the problem. If you are compulsive, even if you eat compulsively, you will get sick. For compulsiveness, there is only one cure – consciousness. There is simply no other cure.
Yalda Hakim: Then how do we get to a point of consciousness?
Sadhguru: Consciousness is not just mental alertness. You exist right now only because you are conscious. Consciousness is always there.
Everyone is conscious; the question is, how conscious? So to increase or to raise consciousness, what have we done in societies? Our entire education system is just about survival, about one being better than the other. How can you be conscious when you are competitive? When other people’s failure is your only joy, how can you be conscious? From kindergarten, you are spreading this sickness to our children, and you ‘expect them to be fantastic. It will not work like that.
Memory versus Intelligence
Yalda Hakim: So do we need to change our systems?
Sadhguru: Definitely! It is anyway going to change in the next five to ten years, not because people are going to become conscious but simply because of artificial intelligence. I always wondered, even when I went to school, why some idiotic person who has read a book a few years ahead of me acts like they are something superior. If you are a scholar, you read a few books. If you are a religious person, you read just one book and somehow think you are superior. All this is going to be demolished in the next five to ten years’ time. My phone will be able to do ten PhDs a day. It has enough memory to do that. All scholars, religious people, people who just keep on vomiting stuff that they have read elsewhere – this will be of no value.
All the best for the children of the future because they do not have to go through the torture of trying to retain something in their memory and believe that memory is intelligence. Your memory is not intelligence. Your memory is a certain capability, but intelligence is a different dimension of life. Consciousness means pure intelligence, unsullied by memory.
If I look at you and think, “I know Yalda.” “She’s good.” Or “She’s bad.” “She’s my friend.” Or “She’s my enemy.” If all this nonsense is there in my head, I do not see you the way you are right now. If your intelligence is sullied by your memory, you cannot see and experience anything the way it is right now. In traditional terms in India, when we see people living out of their memory, we say, “Aiyo karma.” That means past memory is ruling them. They will never experience life. They will just recycle the same stuff.
Yalda Hakim: Is it possible to shed or leave behind your memory?
Sadhguru: If you shed your memory, you will again walk into the same pits that you have walked into in the past. Memory is not to be shed; it needs to be carried loosely, so that it is not sticking to you all the time.
Your entire body is memory. There is evolutionary memory, genetic memory, karmic memory, conscious and unconscious memory, articulate and inarticulate memory. In Yoga, we identify your existence as eight dimensions of memory. You may not remember how your great-grandmother looked ten generations ago, but her nose is sitting on your face. The body remembers, one hundred percent. No matter where you go and what you do in your life – the body retains every bit of memory.
This existence is memory. Do you want to use this body and this bank of memory that you have in your mind as a platform upon which you sit? Or do you want to carry it on your head? This is the difference. Being unconscious means you carry the burden of it on your head. Being conscious means you sit on this platform.
Photo by Nick Rancher
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