Is it wrong to drink? At parties, my friends drink and they say there is nothing wrong with having a drink once in a while with friends.
S: Any kind of external intoxicant lowers your aliveness or awareness. You do not drink and drive because it lowers your awareness. If you become fully aware, you can exist here not just as a piece of flesh and blood, but as the master of your own destiny. That is the choice you have. For this, your awareness has to spread. Right now, your depressions, unhappiness, confusions, the alcohol, everything is putting your awareness down. So, the question is not about, “Is this wrong or right?” The fundamental question is: Are you for life or against life? If all you are seeking is a little pleasure, I am not against it. But if there was a much bigger pleasure — if you could learn how to be drunk all the time and be fully alert — would you not be interested?
Yogis are not against pleasure. It is just that they are unwilling to settle for small pleasures. They are greedy. They know that if you drink a glass of wine, it just gets you a little buzzy, but tomorrow morning you will end up with a headache. They are not willing to go for that when something far bigger is possible within themselves. Yoga can give you access to a much more profound pleasantness.
Are arranged marriages better than love marriages?
S: The question is not about how you get married. The question is about how you conduct your marriage and how wonderfully you live with someone. That will not be decided by how or where you get married. You may have been told that marriages were made in heaven because most people created a hell out of their marriage. If you are heaven, everything that you do, including your marriage, will be heaven. If you are hell, everything that you do will be hell. Rather than bothering too much about marriage, one should constantly be concerned as to how to evolve oneself into a beautiful human being, so that he or she can make every situation they are placed in beautiful. We are always focusing on little branches and not on the root of life. We are just trying to inject chemicals into the fruit and make it grow fast. That will not last too long. It may produce one fruit today, but tomorrow it will be barren. But if you nurture the root, it will bear fruits throughout its life.
I see that as we grow older, depression takes a toll on most human beings. How do we handle this?
S: Depression means you are unable to maintain the exuberance of life in you. This is happening because you have not done anything to keep your life energies high. A large part of your life energy is happening compulsively, not consciously. It is happening as a reaction to external situations, which are never one hundred percent in your control. Now depression becomes normal, and the more exposed you are to life, the more miserable you will become. People can cause depression to themselves in so many ways. If you take away what they think is precious, they become depressed. Depression means somewhere, a certain hopelessness sets in. If you go to some very poor village in India, they are really impoverished, but you will see joyful faces, because they have hope — it is going to be better tomorrow. In affluent societies that hope is gone because everything external — food, housing, clothing — has been fixed, but still there is something wrong; they just do not know what. As we work on the outside, we must also fix the inside. What we call as a spiritual process is just this — not just fixing the objective aspect of your life but also the subjectivity of who you are. If that is not taken care of, you will have everything but you will have nothing. If you truly want to enhance the quality of your life, you have to take the step and be willing to invest a little bit of time for your inner well-being. If this is done, you will see a remarkable change in the way you function.
(Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and bestselling author)
