Q. I have a choice between working in a high-paying job, and another one that I really like, but where the pay is not so great. How do I choose between the two?
Sadhguru: Money is a means for our survival, and to that extent it is necessary. However, you must always assess yourself in terms of whatever you are being asked to do, not just how much you are paid. What is the level of responsibility that is being offered to you? What is the opportunity available to you to create something truly worthwhile, both for yourself and for everyone around you?
Any work that you do in the world is truly worthwhile for you only if you are able to touch people’s lives deeply. For example, would you want to make a film no one would want to watch? Or build a house that no one would want to live in? No. If you look closely, you will see that you want the activity you perform to touch people’s lives. Many people try to divide their life into work and family, where work is something that you do just for money, and family is something you do to touch people’s lives. But this aspect need not restrict itself to family alone. It could extend itself into every area of life. Whatever you do should touch people’s lives.
How deeply you touch people’s lives depends on how involved you are in what you do. If you are deeply involved, naturally the way you work will be very different, and you will be paid according to your capabilities. Sometimes you will have to bargain a little or ask for a raise. But generally, if people realize the value of what you are to that particular business or company, they will pay accordingly.
Q. Why were temples built? What was the purpose behind them?
Sadhguru: The very nature of human perception is such that, right now, whatever a human being is involved with, that will be the only truth for him in his experience. Right now, most people are involved with the five sense organs, and that seems to be the only truth, nothing else. Sense organs can only perceive that which is physical, and because your perception is limited to the five sense organs, everything that you know as life is only physicality: your body, your mind, your emotion and your life energies are physical. If you see the physical existence as a fabric, you are living on the fabric of the physical. You are walking on this cloth, and what you are walking on seems to be all that’s real. But when you look up, there seems to be a vast emptiness above, and even there, you only recognize the physical; you look at a star or a sun or a moon — this is all physical. You don’t perceive what is not physical.
What you call a temple is like putting a hole in the fabric, creating a space where the physical becomes thin, and something beyond becomes visible to you. This science of making the physical less manifest is the science of consecration, so that that dimension beyond the physical becomes apparent or visible to you if you are willing. To take the analogy further, it is like the temple is a hole in the fabric of the physical where you could fall through easily and go beyond.
Q. Is Vastu necessary?
Sadhguru: Vastu is essentially a very basic architectural guidance. If you wanted to build a house a thousand years ago, there would have been no architect in the village. So, what guidelines do you use to build the house? In building any structure, the main challenge is always the span of the roof. How would you have built the roof? You would look for some tree and cut it down. Let’s say you had a stunted tree which was only eight feet tall. Now the roof would have only an eight-foot span. But suppose you had ten children, so you built an eight-feet wide and 120-feet long room to accommodate all of them, you would be living in a tunnel. Your physical and psychological health would definitely be affected. So, they told you, if one dimension of the house is this much, the other dimension has to be this much. If you study vastu, vastu in the hills is very different from that in the plains. Vastu in Karnataka is different from vastu in Tamil Nadu. According to the weather and the temperature, they gave some common guidelines so that you could build your house sensibly.
Today, people are stretching it to such a level and all kinds of nonsense is happening because when fear rules you, you can make a science out of everything. This whole thing has taken over people’s minds in the last ten to 20 years. Before that, no one knew about vastu but everyone was living fine.
