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: Nobody is stopping you from being joyful. But 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 16. After that, once he realised 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 to 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.
Once there was a CEO of a certain company. He was a brilliant man who went from rags to riches. From zero, he had become the richest man in the world. He had a particular habit. Always when he was thinking, he would put both his feet on the table, and take his pipe in his hand to smoke. That was how he thought. One day, a situation came where his son-in-law, who was good for nothing, became the boss. The first thing the son-in-law did was to buy himself a pipe and put his feet on the table. Just because you smoke a pipe and put your feet on the table, you will not become like the other man. This man smoked a pipe, put his feet on the table and thought of and did brilliant things. If you do the same thing, you will get a backache and somebody will do something else to you one day. So a particular act of somebody is not the basis of their life. Because there is a certain basis, certain actions might have happened in life.
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.
Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, a bestselling author and poet.
He was conferred the Padma Vibhushan in 2017.
Isha.sadhguru.org