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Sri Jagadish Vasudev:
Sri Jagadish Vasudev @ Jaggi Vasudev born in Mysore-Karnataka, India, in 1957, Sadhguru was a precocious child reared in a traditional home. Even at an early age, he possessed a unique passion and purpose that defined his life. Preferring the wonder of nature and the eloquence of poetry to attending school, 10-year old Jaggi would often venture out alone on long treks through the surrounding mountain forests for days at a time. It was also in these mountain woods that, years later, Sadhguru found his deepest connection to himself.
Around the age 13, Sadhguru came across an elderly yogi by name Shri Raghavendra Rao, popularly known as Malladihalli Swami, who was being hosted by his grandparents. Admiring the physical agility and self-mastery of Malladihalli Swami, Sadhguru began studying yoga under him. At that time, his yoga practices were a means of attaining peak physical and mental health. “I never thought of yoga as a spiritual possibility, nor did the word ‘spiritual’ mean anything to me at that time,” he says.
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Continuing his education reluctantly and attending classes intermittently, Sadhguru graduated in English Literature from the Mysore University. Subsequently, in partnership with a close friend, he built his own successful construction business. Despite his new hectic and even wild working schedule, Sadhguru continued to be an active and adventurous outdoorsman – hang gliding, racing motorcycles, and arranging hiking expeditions into the mountains for him and his friends. It was during one of these trips that Sadhguru had a deep ‘experience of the self’ that changed everything in his life.
"From the age of 5 years, I had not shed a drop of tear. Now so much tears flowed from my eyes that my shirt was drenched. I thought this experience was there for only about 3 to 5 minutes. But when I came back to my normal state, it was 7:30 in the evening - about four to four and a half hours had passed. The whole experience made me very ecstatic and blissful”.
At that time Sadhguru was not somebody whom you would describe as a spiritual person or a person with such inclinations. He never went to temples or had any interest in meeting spiritual people. Belonging to the sixties, he grew up with ‘blue jeans and Beatles’. But now, in a month’s time, after the experience he just wound up all his business.
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“That’s when I knew there was something fantastic in me, but I did not know how to share it.” He happened to meet some spiritual people who confirmed the mention of such experiences in spiritual literature but refused to believe that it was happening to him. “I found all these people on the spiritual path were talking of something fantastic but they did not have the experience. I had a big experience but I did not know how to express myself”.
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Today, full two decades after the experience, Sadhguru remains deeply engaged in creating an elaborate mechanism and a movement to bring to fruition the large scale manifestation of the fullest realization of the human potential.
Sadhguru has often mentioned that it is his dream that just as walking down a street in India one runs into a handful of vegetable vendors, one day walking down the streets he would like run into a handful of enlightened people.
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