Mountain Mystic

Sadhguru: Right from my infancy, there were always certain mountains in the background of my eyes. When I was sixteen years old and discussed this with my friends, they said, “You're crazy! Where are mountains?” That was when I realized no one had mountains in their eyes except me. For some time I thought I should find out where they are, but then I ignored that idea. Suppose there is a spot on your spectacles, you get used to it after a while. It was just like that. It was only much later when a whole flood of memory came back to me, and when I was looking for a place to establish the Dhyanalinga, that I started looking for that particular peak in my eyes.

I traveled everywhere. I made at least four trips on my motorcycle from Goa to Kanyakumari and back again. Somehow I believed they must be in the Western Ghats. On every road and mud track from the range of Karwar down to the Kerala border in Karnataka, I have probably ridden thousands of kilometers.

Then just by chance I came to a village outside Coimbatore. As I was driving down a bend, I saw the Seventh Hill on the Velliangiri Mountains. There it was right there, the mountain that I had always been seeing since my childhood. And from that day they disappeared from my eyes.

If you ask me, “Which is the greatest mountain on the planet?” I will reply, “Velliangiri Mountains,” because for me these are not just mountains. I was born with an imprint of these mountains in my eyes and they have haunted me since. They lived within me and have been my very own navigating system, my GPS. These mountains were not a pile of rocks for me. They were a reservoir of what I needed to know to create the Dhyanalinga.

Around the age of thirteen, Sadhguru came across Raghavendra Swami, a yogi popularly known as Malladihalli Swami. He caught Sadhguru's attention because he was faster and more agile than Sadhguru was, despite being over eighty years old!

Sadhguru: When I was very young, he used to come to my grandfather’s place. I was just twelve or thirteen years old and he was about eighty-one. At the time, I was made in such a way that I could climb anything. In the house where my grandfather lived in the village, there were wells in the backyard which were just six or seven feet in diameter and about 120 to 130 feet deep.The water would be sixty feet below the surface. One of the sports among us boys was to jump into this well and climb back up. If you made one mistake, you would hit the rock walls and that would be the end of you. None of the kids could climb as fast as me but then one day, this eighty-one-year-old man came and did it faster than me. When I wanted to know how, he said “Come and do yoga with me.” That is what set me off initially to go to him and learn some simple yogic practices.

Guru Pooja is not just an emotional thing, it is a whole system of creating a certain possibility. This is called Shodashopachara, which means 16 ways of treating a Guru. For this, 16-cornered stones are made which are called Guru Pooja Peetas which are unique to yogic culture. Such a thing exists nowhere else on the planet, but in Baalbek there is a 3700-year old Guru Pooja stone. So obviously, there was a very active commercial and spiritual connection between these two lands.