In October 2015, in New York, at the age of 58, Sadhguru said, in front of Deepak Chopra and Ms. Chandrika Tandon, that he is spiritually uneducated. Sadhguru said that he neither read the Gita, nor the Veda, nor the Upanishads, not even the Yoga Sutra.
Even Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862), etc. scholars of the West, did tribute to the greatness of Indic civilization.
Henry David Thoreau wrote, "In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial."
Ralph Waldo Emerson said this about the Bhagavad Gita: "I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad-Gita. It was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us."
These gentlemen with great difficulty procured the Bhagavad Gita. Remember, these times were the times of the sailing boats and the communication was very difficult. The Bhagavad Gita uplifted their emotions to the spiritual heights that they always were entranced with. They modeled their life based on the philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita. These were the times when mankind was looking at each other through suspicion. Credit goes to these great souls who could transcend the limitations of politics and see the beauty via the Gita.
Sadhguru presenting himself in the international world as the spiritual Guru of India and at the age of 58 says, in the convention in New York, that he neither read the Gita, nor the Veda, nor the Upanishads, not even the Yoga Sutra. It is even worse that not only Sadhguru was 58 years old but also that he was awarded the Padma Bhushan award and posed around as the spiritual ambassador representing India. This is the shame and a sham on the part of Sadhguru. This takes him to be remembered as a false representative of the Gurus of India.
In this clip, Sadhguru almost says he has no spiritual education at all. Even as a layperson with the Padma Bhushan award Jaggi Vasudev should have put the effort to read at least a translated copy of the Bhagavad Gita as we know he does not know Sanskrit, or Hindi, or Tamil.
Jaggi Vasudev is only leading his blind devotees. It is like the blind leading the blind. This is a shame. Jaggi Vasudev is just capitalizing on the ignorance of the masses by creating social-political divisions.
The rest of the clips are saying that Jaggi Vasudev has no affiliation with the Indic cultures or philosophy therefore he says don’t read the Vedanta as for Jaggi it is just a mental game. And that he reads newspapers to know what is going on in the world etc. If Jaggi is enlightened, as he claims, why he does not know what is going on in the world without reading the newspapers? These are just claims.
Whatever wise words Sadhguru is presenting in his clips are all from Palani Swami or Bhagavan Shanmukha Anantha Natha. Therefore Sadhguru is giggling and saying that his blind devotees did not realize how he convinced them of his superior knowledge without reading the Bhagavad Gita or the Mahabharata, as well as Vedanta, Upanishads, and Yoga Sutra. This is because Sadhguru just read from the book the “Divine Initiation” which was written in 2001 by Palani Swami or Bhagavan Shanmukha.
