Excerpt: A short story where two elderly men describe the most potent moments of their lives—moments when they were, ironically, closest to death…
The following is an excerpt from Inner Engineering by Sadhguru. In it, we follow a conversation between two elderly men as they describe some of the most potent moments of their lives—moments when they were closest to death. As far as the other years of their lives? Well… read on to see what they have to say in comparison…
Enter Sadhguru:
Only when you recognize your mortal nature do you want to know what more there is to life. It is then that the spiritual process opens up.
Once it happened… Two men over eighty years of age met. One recognized the other and said, “Did you fight in World War II?”
The other man said, “Yes.”
The first asked him where, and with which battalion. The other man told him.
The first exclaimed, “Oh, my God! Don’t you recognize me? We were in the same foxhole!”
Oh, they hit it off! They talked and talked. All that they had actually seen was about forty minutes of an intense combat situation. But they talked about every bullet that went by, zing, zing, just missing them by inches. They spoke for over four hours about those forty minutes.
When they had exhausted everything that they could say about that time, one asked the other, “What have you been doing since the war?”
“Oh, for the past sixty years, I’ve just been a salesman.”
Those forty minutes had come to define their lives because their mortality was dangling in front of them at every moment. In battle they had forged a bond that was profound. Beyond that, this man’s life could be summed up in a single sentence: he was just a salesman.
You discover an indescribable profundity within yourself when you realize your mortal nature. If you have not realized your eternal nature you must at least realize your mortal nature.
Death is not the end of life.
Death is simply the end of the body. If you have lived with a very deep identification with the physical, the more you will struggle with death, because death marks the end of the body. Only when you confront your mortality—the potential but inevitable termination of your physical form—does the longing to go beyond become genuine.
The above excerpt can be found on pages 79-80 of Sadhguru’s book. If you enjoyed this piece then you should consider reading Inner Engineering in full. It comes highly recommended.
Book Overview: A yogi lives life in this expansive state, and in this transformative book Sadhguru tells the story of his own awakening, from a boy with an unusual affinity for the natural world to a young daredevil who crossed the Indian continent on his motorcycle. Today, as the founder of Isha, an organization devoted to humanitarian causes, he lights the path for millions. The term guru, he notes, means “dispeller of darkness, someone who opens the door for you. . . . As a guru, I have no doctrine to teach, no philosophy to impart, no belief to propagate. And that is because the only solution for all the ills that plague humanity is self-transformation. Self-transformation means that nothing of the old remains. It is a dimensional shift in the way you perceive and experience life.” The wisdom distilled in this accessible, profound, and engaging book offers readers time-tested tools that are fresh, alive, and radiantly new. Inner Engineering presents a revolutionary way of thinking about our agency and our humanity and the opportunity to achieve nothing less than a life of joy.
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Great on Kindle. Great Experience. Great Value. The Kindle edition of this book comes highly recommended on Amazon.
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