Vibhuti is a constant reminder of the mortal nature of life – it is like you are always wearing mortality on your body. Normally, yogis always use the ash they pick up from cremation grounds. The next alternative, when they cannot get it from the cremation ground is to use cow dung. You must translate it into the masculine gender, then you know what it is indicative of!
Those who are trying to dodge their mortal nature are obviously full of bullshit. That is why we made vibhuti with cow dung. The next level of vibhuti is made of the chaff that comes from rice husk. If you burn rice, it will not give out the kind of ash that you can use. It is only the husk which does that. This is indicative that the body is not the core substance, it is just the husk.
Profoundness will enter you if you realise the mortal nature of who you are. One who has not realised the eternal nature, he must at least realise the mortal nature. All spiritual process is just bad entertainment unless one realises one’s mortal nature and confronts it. Only then the longing to go beyond becomes a genuine force.
Because a large part of human societies have refused to address this one aspect, they have become so profane, so superficial, so much on the surface. If you are on the surface because of survival reasons, it works in one way. But if you are on the surface after survival has been taken care of, you are heading towards mental degeneration.
If you want to make the whole world go mad, just remove anything that can be considered profound. Feed them well, give them drink, comfort – everything. In a century’s time, almost the whole world will be insane. If you provide all the necessary things for everyone in the world and remove all those things that they could pursue with any sense of profoundness, a whole generation of people will go insane. You can see this in affluent societies around the world. Even in India, you will see insanity mainly in the cities, not in the village, because there is no time to go crazy in villages.
Madness is a luxury only the rich can afford. Because certain things have been taken care of, you can drive yourself nuts. If we have to ensure that this should not happen to human populations, not all of them may take to spiritual sadhana, so it is important that we set up everything we do in the world, whether it is art, music, dance or whatever else, in a certain level of profoundness. If that demand for profoundness is not there in the activity that human beings involve themselves in, for sure they are heading for insanity. It may not be an individual phenomenon after some time, it may become very common.
There is a beautiful temple in southern India, in Karnataka, called Annapoorneshwari temple. This is built according to a certain science with seven layers. It is a powerful place. Behind the temple, in the local language it is written that during the ancient times, they realised they could make a tube-well and get pure water to drink rather than drinking from ponds, which could cause various infections as the water may not be clean.
They could do it, but they did not, because they realised that if each one of us put a tube or a hole into the earth, after some time Mother Earth’s integrity will go. The way the whole planet is communicating, every atom is communicating with the other, making a lot of things happen. The amount of neurological activity happening in your brain cannot be compared to the amount of activity happening in the planet on the atomic and subatomic level. The earth has a brain a zillion times bigger than yours. So you must consult her. Someone who has the brain the size of a planet, is it not better to consult them than to use your petty little brain? Those people did consult, and Mother Earth said, “No.” So they said, “No, we should not do it.”
I think this is wisdom – doing what is really good for us long-term, not doing whatever we are capable of today and then regretting it tomorrow, which has become the way of our science and technology today.
(Sadhguru is a Yogi, mystic, visionary and a New York Times bestselling author. He is also the founder of Conscious Planet – Save Soil)
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