Stop the imitation

Questioner: They say Krishna was happy and mischievous and did so many things. People praise him for those things. But if I go and dance joyfully like that, they say I am irresponsible. Is it irresponsible to be joyful?

Sadhguru: To be joyful is not irresponsible. Nobody is stopping you from being joyful. Trying to be joyful at somebody else’s cost is irresponsible. Trying to extract your happiness and expecting somebody else to pay the price for you is irresponsible. If you simply danced out of joy, nobody would bother you. They are bothered because you are getting drunk and dancing. You take their money, drink, and dance, so they are definitely bothered. If you simply danced joyfully, who is bothered? And if somebody is bothered, why should you worry if you are joyful? It would not matter. So you are not joyful; you are trying to be joyful.

Krishna was not trying to be joyful. He was just joyful and bursting with ecstasy. So don’t compare yourself with Krishna and try to do what he did. Can you do everything else that he did? He played with the girls, and that is all you want to do. But he did all this only till he was sixteen. After that, once he realized the purpose of his life, not once did he go back to anything like that.

He just lived with intense purpose. When he was a child, he danced around and robbed butter, so you want to do that.

But then he dedicated his whole life for other people’s wellbeing. He risked and staked his life, not caring about his own existence. Will you do that? No. You only want to do what is convenient.

This happened in Adi Shankaracharya’s life. Shankaracharya and a few disciples were walking through a village, when they passed somebody selling liquor. Shankaracharya just went and drank a whole pot full of liquor and walked on. The disciples behind him started discussing, “Our guru himself is drinking. Why are we missing out?” So when the next village came, all of them got drunk and started wobbling behind him. Shankaracharya noticed that these guys were wobbling, drunk. He knew why they had done this. So when the next village came, he went to a blacksmith’s shop, picked up some molten iron, drank it and walked on. Now the disciples were terrified.

You don’t understand where that man is coming from. You are just trying to imitate his actions and that is the biggest problem. People are trying to imitate somebody else all the time.

(Ranked amongst the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic visionary and a New York Times bestselling author Sadhguru has been conferred the Padma Vibhushan by the Government of India in 2017, the highest annual civilian award, accorded for exceptional and distinguished service.)