Don’t Polish Your Ignorance ...It May Shine

Book excerpt: The persistent questions of seekers fill this book. It’s all here – the pain, the confusion, the raging gut-level thirst, all that it means to be human and alive and wanting. And through it all are the clear, strong, unwavering tones of a master who reminds us that the only thing that lies between the human and the divine, the finite and the boundless, the seeking and the finding, is choice. What does that choice entail? Not the acquisition of any path-breaking wisdom, but a determined refusal to strengthen one’s ignorance, to reinforce one’s deceptions, to ‘gold-plate one’s limitations’. The danger, Sadhguru tells us, does not lie in being in the dark – that can be dispelled for anyone who genuinely desires it – but in settling for an easy brilliance, a spurious radiance. The danger does not lie in seeking urgently, but in arriving cheaply. “Don’t polish your ignorance,” he warns aphoristically, unforgettably, recurrently in the course of this book. “It may shine.”