Empowering your thought

Q: Can a thought be empowered with one’s energy, to make it manifest into reality?

Sadhguru: Whatever people aspire for in their life – whether it is to grow a business, build a house or whatever else, the thought: ‘I want this’ arises. Once this thought happens, for most people, they focus their energy towards that something through action and start working towards it. If their action is incisive enough, their thought becomes a reality. That is the usual way people function in the world. But they do not know how to infuse or empower that thought with a certain dimension of energy.

However, if you have some mobility in your energy beyond the physical body, if the mobility becomes a conscious process, you can sit in one place and make your energies go somewhere else. However, if you do this without gaining sufficient mastery over your own life energies, you may not know how to pull the energies back into you. You can lose your life like this. You will see, if someone’s desire is beyond a certain pitch, they always die young. Most people’s desires are fickle. They desire something today, something else tomorrow—it keeps changing. But if someone desires something very powerfully, they die young whether that something happens or not. Especially if that something happens, they die young because they know how to throw their life energies out, but do not have enough mastery to do the work and come back.

A Single-Pointed Mind is Powerful

Thought itself is a reverberation and an energy. You cannot generate a thought without energy. It is just that because it is happening in such a haphazard way, maybe it does not have the necessary energy to manifest itself. You can generate so much energy with your thought process that you could kill someone. When your mind is single-pointed, it is a powerful instrument. Unfortunately, most of the time this single-pointedness happens to people in a negative way, not in a positive way. An angry mind and also a lustful mind are very single-pointed minds. That is why in Indian culture, children are always warned, “When you are angry, do not say anything negative about somebody,” because if your mind has become single-pointed with anger, it can easily manifest itself.

Let us look at the process of generating a thought. Is your thought conscious or is it just an outcome of a million things that have already gotten into you? When your thought process is unconscious, most of the time it is like mental diarrhea. There is no control over it. It simply rambles because there is old stuff inside. This is just like the more bad food you have in your stomach, the more your diarrhea goes on. When you have mental diarrhea, you cannot call it a thought.

A woman once invited a few friends for dinner. She served dinner and then told her six-year-old daughter, “Why don’t you say the blessing?” She wanted to show off her daughter a little bit. The daughter said, “I don’t know how to say a blessing.” The mother said, “Just repeat what mummy says.” So the girl very religiously bent her head, held her hands together and said, “Why on earth did I invite all these people for dinner.” These things are happening to you, isn’t it? You want to meditate, isn’t your mind talking so many things?

Clearing Your Slate

If you want to write on a blackboard, first you have to wipe it clean. Only then will you be able to write clearly. If a million things have already been written on it and you write something else on that, no one can figure out what you have written. And after sometime neither will you. You have to first clear the space and then generate a thought consciously.

If people have cleared their space and then have a thought, this thought really matters because this has come out of a conscious process. Once this thought is on like this and it is held in that clarity, infusing energy to it can be done.

If you just generate a thought in your mind consciously and if it is single-pointed, it will find its way in the world. It will manifest itself naturally. And if you have little more control over your life energies, you can tweak it further.

Ranked amongst the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and a New York Times bestselling author. Sadhguru was conferred the Padma Vibhushan, the highest annual civilian award accorded for exceptional and distinguished service, by the Government of India in 2017.