Essentially, ‘volunteering’ means ‘to become willing’, Or in other words ‘to become an absolute yes to life’. Most human beings are ‘yes’ if it’s convenient, ‘no’ when it’s not convenient; ‘yes’ if it’s yielding something, ‘no’ if it’s not yielding something for them.
Essentially, ‘volunteering’ means ‘to become willing’
A ‘volunteer’ means there’s only one thing that he’s dropped, which is a very significant thing. He’s just dropped this one calculation, ‘What can I get?’ If a human being drops this one calculation, ‘What can I get out of this?’, If he drops that. Suddenly he becomes a phenomenon.
This is something that I am constantly demonstrating to people, what our volunteers can do. If you look at the Project GreenHands or the Rural Rejuvenation programs and just about anything that’s been done here, for example, the Dhyanalinga dome – to just to tell you what it goes into… what goes into it – the dome is made in such a way, there is no cement, there is no steel, there’s no concrete. They’re simple technologies – all the bricks are trying to fall down at the same time, so they cannot.
It’s like everybody is trying to get out of the door and they cannot, unless somebody… one person has the courtesy to move back, then they will go. But the bricks don’t have courtesy. So, they all keep on trying to come down and they cannot come down. So for this to happen, it took 1.8 lakh bricks, to build that. This 180,000 bricks, every one of them was measured to the millimetre, by the volunteers.
If somebody is little lax, somebody puts a brick which is two millimetres less than what it should be, the whole thing may collapse. So I sat down and I spoke to them, ‘See, this is what it means. This is what I’m placing in your hands. You never handled a brick in your life, but you got to measure like this.’ And men, women, children sat down, day and night and they measured, and they measured, and they measured, and they kept these bricks.
And now when they keep… it has to be just kept quickly, so that it doesn’t come down. One circle you have to complete at a time. And today, you see that. I’m just saying just one example. Any number of things like this have been done.
What is it that fires them? See, there is something beyond passion, there is something beyond motivation, there is something beyond profit, which is very significant for a human being, which generally most human beings never explore. Their whole life remains within certain expectations of profit, some passion towards it, some intensity. But volunteers live an intense life.
This hall, you know, normally we operate from there, our audio system is from somewhere else, now suddenly they set up this whole thing, it’s giving us some trouble. It’s technology, you know. We’re not experts. So through the night people are working. But in the day they’re working. When do they sleep? They don’t! This is my experience. I am like this, I am on at least twenty, twenty-two hours a day, seven days of the week.
Because there’s work going on in United States, in every part of the world, which are in different time zones. At two o’clock in the morning, if I just pick up my phone… somebody, one of the swamis or somebody picks up the phone – never once will I hear a groggy voice, ‘What Sadhguru?’ No. ‘Sadhguru.’ It doesn’t matter any time of the day or night.
This is the greatest blessing, that you constantly live among people who are intense, focused and willing to give themselves to what needs to happen. This the greatest pleasure a man can have. This is the greatest fortune a man can have. And fortunately, we have it.
