Ojas

▵ Self-Preservation
If you go by the laws of physical nature, then naturally, self-preservation is the main instinct and the main process. All these three things – respiration, ingestion, excretion – are also connected with self-preservation. If self-preservation is happening well, then the next immediate thing that the physical existence demands is procreation. But that is also self-preservation – preservation of the race. So, even procreation can be termed a secondary level of self-preservation. So, the physical knows only self-preservation – and that’s good. If the physical did not have any sense of self-preservation, you wouldn’t exist.

▵ Beyond Boundaries
Now you want to cater to a higher dimension within you. There is another part of nature in you which wants to expand, which wants to become something else, which is not willing to settle for the limited. It wants to become boundless. The boundary is always of the physical. Physical means always between two boundaries, isn’t it? Nonphysical means no boundaries. So moving from the physical to the nonphysical also means moving from the bound to the boundless. To move from bound to boundless, you don’t have a vehicle. Right now all that you have is physical. So you are trying to create a vehicle for yourself which is non-physical, but can still retain a certain form.

Ojas is that dimension where you generate a nonphysical energy, but still it has its own individual form. So that is used as a vehicle.If you create sufficient ojas around you, your passage in this existence will be well lubricated. You will see life happens effortlessly for you.

Wherever you go, you move smoothly. So much turmoil may be happening around you, everybody is going through turmoil, but somehow your passage is always clear. You keep going. Once you are like this, you can take violent risks in your life, you know? Recklessly, you can live. At least other people think you are reckless, but you know where you are going so there is no hassle about it. You can live in such a way that other people think you are superhuman, simply because you have well-rounded ojas hanging around you. Your passage is well lubricated in the existence.

In the Far Eastern cultures, an enlightened being is referred to as an “enso.” An enso means a circle. Why they are referring to him as a circle is, a circle is the shape of least resistance. Why are your car wheels or motorcycle wheels circular, not a rectangle or a triangle? Can you imagine how you would ride on square wheels? Why they are circular is because a circle is the shape of least resistance. Any moving part anywhere is a circle because it’s of least resistance. So if you create sufficient ojas around you, you become circular in your existence, you become circular, so that your passage is with least resistance through the existence. Ojas creates this possibility.

▵ A meditator is someone who has set up an industry of Ojas
Sadhguru: When we eat food, generally for a human being, most of the food is converted into the physical body. A small part of it is becoming ojas. When you do your kriya, we are trying to change this ratio – we want to convert a large part of our food into ojas. A meditator is someone who has set up an industry of ojas. The whole process of kriya yoga is to turn this “factory” which makes food into flesh and shit, into a factory to transform the same food into a much subtler possibility, which makes you accessible to the divine.

When a person has a very huge ojas about him or her, everything that is celestial and considered divine becomes just like normal communication. You simply see and perceive things because your energies have become so subtle. The quality, the intensity, and the volume of ojas makes the difference between one human being and another. Why one human being’s presence seems to be so strong and transforming, and another’s weak, is simply because of the ojas they carry with them.

Right now, it is quite limiting and frustrating not to allow people to go into higher states of energy and ojas simply because people don’t have the necessary balance, preparedness, and discipline; or they are still unable to understand the priorities they need to allocate to different dimensions of their life. Quite a few people are experientially open and definitely capable of generating higher possibilities of energy, but modern life has made people absolutely fickle. People are simply shifting all the time, from this to that, whether it comes to jobs, priorities, education or relationships. In this shifting, a person’s energy also becomes unstable.

There are so many things that you can do to dissipate and destroy the growth of ojas in you. Improper attitudes, negative thoughts and emotions, and various types of mental activity can do that. Certain types of physical activity, excessive sexuality, excessive indulgence in food, too much of stimulants, and being in contaminated atmospheres can also do that. With kriyas and practices you fill the tank, but then you go on leaking the tank. It is because of this that it takes so long for a person.  If one knows how to plug all the holes, suddenly you will see the kind of energy that you gather around yourself is enormous.

Spirituality means going into processes that can enhance one’s ojas and change the very fundamentals of your life – to take you to a completely different experience and joy within yourself, a blissfulness which is not only yours, but which will be everyone’s around you. Your meditation is not only about yourself. If twenty-five people become truly meditative, the whole town will become peaceful without knowing why. Without having any idea about what is happening to them, there will be a certain sense of settling. The deeper one goes into it, the more of a device you become for everyone’s wellbeing.

It is not by blabbering good things that true peace and wellbeing will come. Only when people carry the right kind of energy around them, only when their ojas is such that a hundred people can sit under their shadow and experience it, only then wellbeing will truly happen.

▵ Ojas – A Passage to Effortless Living (Isha)
▵ Ojas – A Passage to Effortless Living 2 (Isha)