15 Great Lessons from 'Body - The Greatest Gadget' by Sadhguru

"Body - The greatest gadget" by Sadhguru is a simple book with profound messages and insights, that are not common.

Jaggi Vasudev, commonly known as Sadhguru by isha yoga volunteers, is a yogi, mystic and author. He founded the Isha Foundation, a non-profit organisation which offers yoga programs around the world.

I, hereby, list down my Top 15 learnings from this awesome book. These learnings are worded and appended in a way that makes it easier for most of us to understand and absorb.

If you are interested in reading about such learnings from other all time best selling books, you may click here.

So, here we go with our 15 greatest lessons from this book that influenced me immensely.

1/ A human is not a being; he is a becoming. He is an ongoing process – a possibility.
If there is any limit to what we can achieve and become, to the possibilities in life - that limit is created by us and no one else. Our mind is as powerful as we think it is.
[ Recommended Book --> Dream On ]

2/ Right now, your idea of who you are – your sense and experience of who you are – is very strong. You are here as an individual, but what the trees exhale, you inhale, and what you exhale, they inhale. Or in other words, one half of your lung is hanging up there. Without it, your lungs within would be dysfunctional. Yet, in your experience, you think this individual is everything.
As an individual, we cannot achieve much- rather it is difficult to survive beyond a few seconds. If we are so dependent on the world around us, then there is no place for ego and self centeraism in case 'you' achieved anything.

3/ Reading a book to know about yourself is silly. You are here, alive and kicking! It is alright if you are reading a book to get inspired to take a step inward, but if you want to know something, you must look inward.
The entire knowledge of the universe is zipped inside you. You may look out for some specific information,but this informationis useful only if you have visualised it inside, connected it inside to some thoughts, beliefs qand actions in life. The power will come from experience the outside information inside.

4/ What about your system? This is the gadget. Every damn gadget has come out of this. What percentage of this gadget do you think you are employing? It is well below one percent, because for your survival process, to conduct your life in the material world, you do not even need one percent of your system’s potential. Your body is capable of perceiving the whole cosmos.
We are much more powerful than anything outside us. Survival is not what we are here for. That is extreme underutilisation of our capabilities.

5/ Any animal in nature – whether a worm, insect, bird or animal – is made far more capable than you. The human body has come with a different capability altogether.

6/ Most human beings instead of looking beyond the needs of survival, have just raised their standards of survival. We are raising the bar, but it is still only survival. This is an unintelligent way of using the human mechanism which has come with a different possibility altogether.

7/ The quality of your life is decided not by what kind of clothes you wear, what kind of car you drive or what kind of home you live in, but by how peaceful and joyful you are within yourself. This is essentially the quality of your life. Everything else is done to get there. If this does not happen, everything else goes waste.
Happy and Peaceful life for our own self is the end purpose (the root cause) of everything that we do - be it helping others, taking care of our families, charity, social work, building a great career. In the end, we are only looking for experiencing and sharing happiness.

8/ Where the receptivity is in your hand and where the giving nature of the feet is – if these two things are connected – you may achieve in a moment what you cannot achieve in years of sadhana. It is with that hope that everybody is diving for the feet all the time, hoping that somewhere they may connect.
Hands are for reception and feet are for giving. That is how these sense organs have been designed. This is also where the age old Indian tradition of touching your elder's feet find its unique relevance. You are trying to recieve something extraordinary from someone.

9/ Temples were never built as places of worship or prayer. In a temple, nobody leads you in prayer as it is done in a church; you are just left alone. You are supposed to sit there, that is all. These were energy centers which handle that dimension of the impact on your life which comes from the outside.

10/ Health is not the goal of life. There are more people on this planet healthy and miserable than unhealthy and miserable. At least if you are unhealthy, you have a good excuse for your misery. Health and misery, you have no excuse
Health is important, very important - but it can never be the goal or the purpose of your life. Just like money, it acts a means to achieve your end objectives. At the end of your life, you will leave both your health and your money but your mission could be carried on by the next generation.
Recommended Read --> 3 Corners of a fulfilling life

11/ The air that you breathe, the water that you drink, the food that you eat, the land that you walk upon, and the fire of life in the form of the life force –if you keep these controlled and focused, then health, wellbeing and success in the world are assured.

12/ As a little blade of grass has shot out of the earth, you are also like that – a little mobile, that’s all.

13/ Smear the earth upon the body. By just being in touch with the earth, the system will start reorganizing itself. The body is reminded of its own nature in a very fundamental way, and that reminder must be on all the time. Get off your high cot, just sleep on the floor. You can clearly notice that there will be a great sense of health in your body. in the first one-and-a-half feet from the Earth, the thickness of the pranic vibration is a lot more than it is above. As it goes up, it becomes thinner and thinner.
Stay grounded and down to the earth - literally :)

14/ In today’s water supply system, water is pumped forcefully through a pipe, and it may take fifty bends before coming to your tap. By the time the water lands in your house, they are saying that sixty percent of it will be poisonous –not chemically, but because its molecular structure will have changed. It may not be contaminated the way you normally look at it in terms of bacteria, but just the force of travel is making the molecular structure change in such a way that it is no longer beneficial, perhaps even poisonous. If you hold this water in a copper vessel and keep it there for ten or twelve hours, the damage will undo itself.
Step by step, we must keep improving. Atleast in our house, we have taken a step to drink overnight stored water from an earthen pot. We do not keep water in our refrigerator and never drink it directly from the tap. When you come to our house as a guest, this is what we will offer you as well.

15/ If with just a thought or a look, you can turn the water in a vessel sweet, then with the right kind of attitude, focus, and attention towards it, can’t you turn sweet the water in this vessel of the body? If you turn that water sweet, you are seventy-two percent sweet.
Positive vibrations, thoughts and our subconcious mind can act wonders. We can charge the water we drink, and if we are 75% water - then a lot of positive energy is likely to go inside us. As it is said, our thoughts create our destiny.

Dont have time to read the entire book? Then, you can read the crux of some of the best selling books ever written.
If you are interested in reading about such learnings from other 'all time best selling books', you may click here.

Cheers

Manoj Arora

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