The human mind is a dazzling labyrinth of thought, creativity, and curiosity—a true marvel of nature’s design. It dreams up entire worlds while staring at the ceiling, solves complex equations over morning coffee, and somehow remembers song lyrics from a decade ago. From painting masterpieces to building rockets, the mind is our ultimate superpower, constantly buzzing with ideas, emotions, and epiphanies. It’s not just brilliant—it’s brilliantly unpredictable, and that’s what makes it so endlessly fascinating.
Sadhguru: “The nature of human mind is such – let’s look at it this way: it’s a building of million rooms, most people who live a normal life may explore 5-10 of those rooms, that’s all. The million rooms are just there, unused. So once in a way if you forcefully enter those rooms by using a chemical or something else, sometimes it can happen because of injury, sometimes it can happen because of shock that people enter other spaces of their minds, which they can’t believe it is their mind because it looks like a whole new world. It is just like let’s say if you did not have eyes to see, if you open your eyes suddenly it’s a whole new world. So just like that if you open your eyes to certain things it looks like a whole new world. No, it’s the same good old world, but it has so many dimensions, and human mind, in its evolutionary process, has gathered so many rooms to it that most of the rooms are not explored.”
“So what is the purpose of this? The purpose of this is this: if our focus is only on our survival process, if we are constantly activating our survival instinct, then the number of rooms that you explore in your mind will become very limited. If our focus and our attitude is not about survival – because survival essentially means we want to build a wall of protection around ourselves. Well, you see all the creatures are always trying to create boundaries, that comes from our evolutionary memory that we want to survive and surviving is a very important process. If we don’t survive, then what next? There’s nothing else. So we must survive, but is it necessary that your survival instinct is always on? If you are a wild creature yes it must be always on, but we evolved to this point where our cerebral cortex opened up, blossomed into this possibility where once you have become a human being your survival doesn’t fulfill you anymore.”
“In the sense, for example, for all the other creatures if their stomach becomes full their life is settled – but for a human being if stomach is empty there’s only one problem, if stomach becomes full there are 100 problems. This is the nature of a human being because for a human being life does not end with fulfillment of survival requirements. In fact, life begins only after survival is taken care of. This is the nature of a human being, and no matter where you are, in what position you are in your life, you want to be something more than who you are right now. If that something more happens tomorrow morning, once again you want to be something more. So something more, something more, something more goes on. If I make you the CEO of one galaxy, you will say what about the other galaxies.”
“So this is how human nature is, it wants to expand in a limitless way. When we say expand in a limitless way, we want to expand into our infinite nature. So can anybody count 1 2 3 4 5 and get to infinite nature? No, that’s never going to happen. So the important thing is to be able to distinguish between our survival instinct and longing to expand. Our longing to expand infinitely is finding a constipated expression which we call as ambition, or you know desires and things like that. Essentially, it is a very small expression of this longing to expand. This longing to expand, if you make it a conscious process within you, then you will see your survival instinct will come down to its minimum levels. When that happens, your mind opens up to various possibilities.”
“In many ways this is what these chemicals are doing, it puts down your survival instinct to such a level – there have been cases people have left off mountain peaks, tall buildings, and things like that because their survival instinct is gone. They cannot even understand that if I fall off this, you know this is going to end my life. So because survival instinct has come down forcefully, not consciously. So consciously producing these experiences from within and forcefully doing it from outside – these are two different things. Here and there somebody might have felt that because something opened up they benefited from that, but you look at the larger consequence of such experiences most of the time it’s left people either frustrated or disturbed or imbalanced. Very, very few people can really claim they have benefited from that.”
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