Sadhguru, you spoke about making the right priorities so that we are available to truth in life situations. Our societies across the world are pursuing artificial intelligence at a swift rate, from labs at IIT and Stanford, to companies like IBM and Google. Do you think AI is a good priority for humanity to pursue, given its power to bring about new discoveries and productivity? Does it have the potential to enhance human life and make truth mainstream?
Sadhguru: Any intelligence is good. If you do not have natural intelligence, then artificial; if you do not have organic intelligence, then synthetic. Only someone who wants to be the smartest person around will feel insecure if all the things around him become smarter than him. Otherwise, it is such a blessing. If you had a pen which could write what you want without you touching it, if there was a phone that would say what you want to say without you having to say it, would it not be nice?
Without intelligence, there is no truth. Lies have not always happened because of deceit. Lies have also happened because of ignorance. Intelligence is the only solution to make truth mainstream.
Technology is moving in a direction where artificially, a computer will be able to think a million times better than human beings, because thought is fundamentally computing. Data is assimilated and then it comes out with something sensible from that. As computers evolve, a computer will be able to do this far better than a human being. Then there will be no value for human thought.
But that is only intelligence. That is not consciousness. Our thought, our emotion, these have nothing to do with consciousness. Once everything is well, what are human beings supposed to do? Human beings are supposed to be joyful, blissful and do something that no mechanical thing can do. A robot can do everything that you can do – except it cannot meditate because there is no consciousness.
Sadhguru, what is the science behind mudras?
Sadhguru: The word mudra literally means “a seal.” It is a certain position of the hand. Mudras are a subtle science of arranging your body in a certain way. The way your systems functions can be altered just by changing the positions of your palm. This is a whole science by itself which essentially involves the geometry and circuitry of the body. By holding a certain mudra, the energies tend to move in a particular way. In yoga, there are systems where you can regulate your breath in a certain way, with certain counts and proportions. By doing this, you can pinpoint your energy to any cell in the body if you want.
Hands are capable of many things apart from eating and doing physical work. You can make these hands in such a way that if you move it here, you can make something happen somewhere else and pinpoint it wherever you want it, because these hands are the instrument to everything. This is like the control panel to everything.
Either you can keep this human system as a small little human being or you can enlarge this into a tremendous possibility. Whichever way it is, the control panel is still here. If you do the right things with this system, you can do miraculous things with life. That will take a lot of exploration, and a lot of sadhana is involved.
There are hundreds of mudras, some for health, some for well-being, some for creating certain other kinds of processes. For different aspects of life there are different mudras. In Indian culture, for everything they identified a particular asana, a mudra, and a particular kind of breathing, so that a human being brings out the best within himself. This still lives everywhere across the culture, but it is being practiced without the necessary understanding and awareness.
(Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and bestselling author)
