The balance of order and chaos

• Jurmoloya
• 18 October, 2017

By: JurmoloyaRava

INDIA MUST FIND A WAY TO BE ORGANISED AND YET CREATIVE

INDIA as a country and Indians as peo­ple, are living far below their potential. Wherever I travel, whatever kinds of people I meet – I have spoken to top-level scientists, academics and stu­dents at very prestigious universities and various types of people – I always find that the groups I meet in India are far sharper and smarter than most people anywhere in the world.

But though the level of intelligence is high, their ability to use it seems to be very low because of a disorganised attitude and a disorganised situation.

India as a culture, with all its appar­ent disorganisation, used to be very organised deep down. It functioned very systematically. Even today the na­tion has not broken down completely simply because of that deep in-built cultural organisation. With all the sur­face disharmony, there is something deep that is holding things together.

I don’t believe it is the government, the law or the infrastructure that is holding society together in India. Somewhere there is something in peo­ple that keeps things rolling.

If the level of poverty in India was present in any other country, the peo­ple would kill each other. But with this level of poverty in India, for people to still maintain some sanity, go on with their activities, celebrate their festivals, and do all their things takes a different kind of in-built mechanisms that were put in by the culture.

So the beauty of our culture is that it is disorganised, but if you do not find harmony in the disorganisation of what it is, then a disharmonious mind, a disharmonious body and a dishar­monious social situation takes away all possibilities from a human being.

Let’s say you woke up in the house this morning and when you came to your kitchen, everything was mixed up – you did not know where anything was. For one day it might be fun trying to find everything, but if it happened every day and if you had to do it in a certain time-bound way, it would take away a lot of possibilities in you.

Just trying to fix your morning coffee becomes a full-time job for you after some time. That is the kind of situation we have created in the nation, that do­ing simple things is becoming a full-time job for intelligent people who could have done a lot more things around them.

In small communities, in certain corporations, industries and business­es, people are getting organised in small ways and in small units. But this organisation is coming in a very west­ernised way, which is extremely stress­ful for the human being.

Western organisation means every­thing is so organised. Then everything will happen like a machine – every­thing will be happening, but no life will be happening. It is very easy to give a hard and fast rule, “Just do this.” Every­thing looks organised but then when life does not happen, people have a huge longing to break the rule. This is what is happening in the west. For no reason, a whole segment of the popu­lation is striving to somehow break the rules that are working well, simply be­cause somewhere, life feels restricted in the whole process of organisation.

The spiritual paths in India lived to­tally disorganised because they did not want anything to be suppressed. Right now, we do not have enough space in the country to be too disorganised. If you want to be totally disorganised, if it was just one person per square kilo­metre, you could act crazy. But when there are this many people, how you keep every step matters.

With the kind of population and spaces available around us, I think a little more organisation would make life much saner than it is now because if you allow too much life to happen, things will collapse.

Maintaining that balance – allowing enough freedom for life to happen freely, but still being organised enough so that you do not waste the funda­mental human potential within your­self has always been my focus when it comes to people and activity.

Yoga as a science and a practice is such that if people bring this into their lives, they can maintain an inner or­ganisation even if the outside situa­tions are going totally crazy.

Ranked amongst the fifty most influen­tial people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and bestselling author. Sadhguru has been conferred the “Pad­ma Vibhushan” by the government of India in 2017. http://isha.sadhguru.org