Developing Personal Power

In a three-part series, read Sadhguru’s insight on creating personal power. In part one below, Sadhguru defines personal power and success:

How far a human being goes in this life–naturally, spiritually, or in whatever dimension–essentially depends on with how much energy he can crackle. Yes? There are a whole lot of people with lots of energy, but there is no wisdom or the necessary systems within themselves to transform this energy into a kind of a personal power.

What is Power?

The biggest mistake is people understand power as over somebody else. Power is not about somebody else. Power is about you. How much of a potential power you are determines the intensity and profoundness of your life, and how effective you will become in your life, in whatever area we choose to operate. Without a sense of personal power, nobody goes very far in anything that they do.  Life will become mediocre.

Modern societies have done little to develop personal power because we have very wrong ideas of equality. Equality does not mean leveling everybody down to one size. Equality means everybody has the opportunity to grow. Not cutting everybody to one size is equality – that is destruction of life and its possibilities.

Personal Power does not Mean Inequality

We’re understanding equality as a kind of sameness of life. If you, even in your thought, decide to make everything same, you will destroy all the uniqueness and possibilities of individual life. There is too much talk about societies, communities, nations — but essentially the quality of the humanity, the quality of what happens on this planet is determined by individual people. And above all, the quality of your life is determined by the quality of who you are, not by what’s happening around you.

It’s absurdly silly that we have come to a place where we think the quality of our life is determined by how many dollars we have in the bank, the size of our car, the size of our home. Does it mean to say, 1000 years ago, when there were no dollars, when there was no cars, and there was no homes of the kind that we are living in right now, does it mean to say people did not live a good quality life? Without any of those things, they lived. Because the quality of life is never determined by what’s around us, the quality of life is essentially determined by the quality of who we are, as an individual human being. Life is a certain amount of time and energy. How you dispense your time and how you dispense your energies will determine most of it.

All opinions are prejudiced. You know, many times I’ve been asked, “What is your opinion on this or that?” I say, “I have no opinion.” I really have no opinion on anybody or anything. When they’re in front of me I make a judgment as to how they are right now, for that particular situation I never form an opinion. That’s why I’m getting along with all of you.

The moment you form an opinion, it takes an enormous energy to carry this opinion. If I have an opinion that this is a good person, this is a bad person, it takes a lot of energy. You will spend enormous amount of energy to keep the opinion going because having an opinion on everything means you are creating a false world of your own. To keep up a false world like this endlessly takes an enormous amount of energy. Just learn to walk around without any opinion on anything. You don’t even think, oh this tree is tall, this is short, this one is like this, that one is like that – no. Simply look at everything. You will see in three days’ time you will have so much energy that you can’t go to sleep. Yes? You’re sitting—you’re falling asleep not just lying down, sitting and standing – simply because of lack of energy.

People are propounding philosophies of how much you must sleep. It’s just that you don’t have the necessary life energy in you so it wants to die by the time it’s 8 o’clock or 9 o’clock in the evening. If you’re bursting with life energy, why would you want to die in the bed?

Personal Power Means Using Energy Wisely

So, other concerns in life of being materially successful, being professionally successful, all these things are there, but my concern is that you are spiritually successful. Even if that needs to happen, you need a certain amount of personal power. If this power has to come, you have to use your energies wisely. Energy can be aggregated into power with the necessary wisdom and necessary tools that we employ. Otherwise energy can be dissipated simply with endless amount of thought, endless amount of reactions and anxieties.

Stay tuned for Part Two in which Sadhguru offers a few simple yogic methods to develop personal power for success in your life.