At age 25, as the story goes, Jagadish Vasudev rode his motorcycle up into the Chamundi Hills near Mysore, India, sat on a stone and dropped into his first mystical experience. Tears of “indescribable ecstasy” streamed down his face, and when he emerged from meditation, many hours later, he had begun a new life as a spiritual leader. His mission was to teach all people how to achieve the blissful liberation he first came to know in those hills.
This is the origin story of Sadhguru, the chosen name of Vasudev, now 67. He has become one of the most prominent spiritual figures of the internet era. His Isha Foundation, started in 1992, is now an empire of yoga instruction and environmental activism, with tens of millions of followers across YouTube, social media, a podcast and a proprietary app. The foundation’s physical center in Coimbatore, India, is the size of a small town, with a school, ashram and temple. Isha has also expanded into the United States with the Institute of Inner Sciences in McMinnville, Tenn., a rural location chosen for its proximity to several major American cities. Sadhguru intends to develop the 17,000 acres of the institute into a community of 20,000 to 30,000 people.
In the spring of 2023, I visited the institute for one of Sadhguru’s talks specifically designed for celebrities, influencers and writers who could spread the word of Isha. About 150 people waited for hours for the doors to open and then sprinted to be close to the stage. On Sadhguru’s entrance, the room lifted in adoration. I remember a child beside me clutching her drawing of the guru. Nearby, a TV actress beamed at his presence.
In person, Sadhguru was impressive and funny, with the slick charisma of a politician, but when we shook hands later I felt no otherworldly aura. Despite his mystical experiences, he seems more like an approachable celebrity than a hermetic cult leader. He has done interviews with Joe Rogan, Logan Paul and Matthew McConaughey and has counseled Will Smith and SZA. His online persona balances wisdom with a sarcasm that undercuts the image of the overserious guru.
Sadhguru’s media trajectory echoes the rise of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who founded Transcendental Meditation and befriended the Beatles in the 1960s. Such yogic fame was a path first laid in the early 20th century by people such as Swami Vivekananda and Paramahansa Yogananda, who are in part responsible for bringing yoga to the West. Considering the omnipresence of yoga today, these missionaries were undeniably successful. But it is the scandals of yoga that usually characterize the American skepticism toward the guru, from acts of political bioterrorism by Osho’s followers to allegations of sexual abuse against Bikram Choudhury.
Sadhguru seems to be aware of the uneven history of past yogic communities and has a few of his own scandals, including questions about his wife’s process of yogic death and his purported encroachment upon Indian forests. So he actively distances himself from the history of yoga controversies, joking that “guru is a four-letter word” and explaining that his name is a description for a self-made guru without formal lineage. He scoffs at the idea of learning yoga from books, though he has written many best sellers, which, he specifies, are meant as inspiration, not instruction. “I do not give any teaching to anyone,” he tells me. “All I am doing is trying to confuse the hell out of you.”
Sadhguru is a trickster figure, and despite what he says, he is a powerful orator who cannily employs scientific metaphor to appeal to Western audiences. The Isha philosophy is especially well tuned for American self-improvement culture. Videos like “How to Live Joyfully No Matter What” and “What Is Karma?” are often short (five to 10 minutes) nuggets of musings, clipped from Sadhguru’s longer talks and accompanied by the wandering tones of a bamboo flute. It’s uplifting to listen to such talks on the subway, but what happens to ancient knowledge when it is extracted from sacred spaces and dropped into the algorithm of entertainment?
Sadhguru began offering Isha’s foundational program, Shambhavi Mahamudra Kriya, online during the pandemic, a time when people were hungry for structures of meaning. Like many spiritual systems, Isha Yoga provides a total regulation of schedule, diet, thought and community. Shambhavi puts this all together, assembling a variety of yogic techniques into a fairly simple and convenient package for the neophyte.
I learned the practice over four days, at home, seated before a 15-inch laptop in my painting studio, where I would be undisturbed. Despite the casual environs, the program demanded constant rigor and participation. I began at dawn, turning on my camera so volunteers could ping me if I began to doze during my sixth hour of sitting erect without back support. As the volunteers instructed, I noticed abstract energies arise within me.
I was dubious whether the same space where I work, shop and dodge advertisements could hold such power, but I dedicated myself to the practice anyway. At the end of the program, the other remote attendees and I experienced a kind of spiritual transmission en masse and over Wi-Fi.
The internet can be a treadmill of spiritual seeking, just as it is for medical diagnosis, but this process felt unexpected, like arriving at something real. Nevertheless, when the ritual ended, the reverie began to dissolve. I closed the Isha window and there was my desktop, speckled with bills and other icons of anxiety. Is the spiritual threshold just an open tab, hiding an inbox of spam? Or was I just a sucker? Sadhguru had me right where he wanted me: confused.
I continued the practice daily with careful precision and after months, felt a little better, as I often have with meditation. I kept on for a year, adding more advanced Isha practices, but felt none of the bliss described in so many Reddit testimonials. Furthermore, problems arose in relation to this work: neurological, muscular and psychological, and I began to feel that the training had not prepared me for these possibilities. Sadhguru warns of the dangers of yoga gone wrong, and yet he offers these practices to anyone able to pay.
While I had initially asked whether spiritual transmission could occur online, I now wondered whether it should. Sadhguru describes many of the Isha practices as “occult,” a controversial word associated with esoteric traditions like tantra in the East and Theosophy in the West. Sadhguru told me the occult is “a slightly more advanced technology” that you can use to develop seemingly supernatural skills. These methods go far beyond the postures of a yoga class and reprogram the mental, spiritual and energetic systems of the body, a transformation for which Westerners can be unprepared.
Online, spirituality and meditation are often proclaimed as tools for success. But intensive spiritual practice is mysterious and unpredictable and may not always lead to society’s ideas of self-improvement. By definition, the immaterial realm obeys different laws from the material world, and our new technology is not equipped to contain it. In fact, spirituality’s great value to humanity may actually lie in its immortal resistance to the trends of culture. The internet puts social media and therapy apps on the same plane. It anticipates our desires and convinces us that all knowledge is just a click away. But as any guru will tell you, mystical truths are not information, and inner work is always inconvenient.
Source photographs for illustration above: Sujit Jaiswal/A.F.P., via Getty Images
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