Does being sexually active make us impure?
Sadhguru: People’s idea of purity is very convoluted. Purity is not a certain level of incapability as it is generally made out. If you say the air is pure, does it mean that this air came straight from God, or that it has all the ingredients to nourish life? If you say the land is pure, does it mean it is sterile where nothing can grow, or that if you throw a seed in it, it will immediately pop up? Pure means life-oriented; it has everything needed for life to burst out. Purity does not mean becoming unnatural and digressing from the life process. Purity means you have become the life process.
In the Yogic culture, they said, “If you are sexually oriented, you will not perceive,” not because they thought that something is right or wrong about it. They said it because if you are sexually oriented, you are driven by a little cocktail of chemicals within you. It is a compulsive force so your consciousness will not work. If you are in a certain state of compulsiveness, the sounds of consciousness will be out of your grasp. In that context, any number of people have said that if you are sexually oriented, you will miss the other aspect – not because it is right or wrong. If it is wrong, then your very existence is wrong. Well, that has also become a teaching in some places today. It is just that every word that is said can be misunderstood and taken to a dimension of one’s own limitations.
The body involves the mind, the energy and a substance which makes all this. I am calling it a substance because it is quite substantial. For me, that dimension is far more substantial than the physical reality that I see around. Divine is a substance because it is more present than anything else in the existence. If one has to become receptive to this substance that is so powerfully present, the physical substance that one can see and touch has to be only a small extended particle of that substance. Only then, one becomes receptive.
If Krishna came to establish dharma, why did he offer himself or his army to Duryodhana?
Sadhguru: The situation around the Kurukshetra war was such that no one could remain neutral. You had to choose one side. Being a leader of the Yadavas, though Krishna did not want this war and preferred to remain neutral, he also had to put his lot either with the Pandavas or the Kauravas. With both sides, there was a distant blood relationship. He was not against the Kauravas – many venerable leaders were on their side, and they had huge respect for Krishna.
According to the Kshatriya dharma, when a relative comes and asks for something, you cannot say “no”. So, Krishna gave Duryodhana a choice between himself and his army. Duryodhana believed that taking the army was sensible. The Pandavas instead said to Krishna, “If we live, we want to live with you. If we die, we want to die with you. Without you, what will we do?” And that is what made the difference for them.
Krishna was not a moralistic person who made black-and-white judgments about anyone. He neither believed the Pandavas were absolutely pure beings, nor that the Kauravas were absolute evil. This was not the way he looked at life. He constantly maintained a good relationship with the Kauravas. He had no hatred or anger against them. He just saw that they were causing much evil at that time and he wanted to put an end to that.
Krishna saw that human beings are always a combination of everything. Any human being is capable of becoming adharma any moment of their life. You have to strive to be aware and on the righteous path, or else you will easily slip off. This goes for every human being, until you attain to such a level of consciousness where you cannot fall anymore.
In many ways, Krishna tried to encourage Duryodhana to strive for dharma. Even when he gave him a choice between himself and his army, he still tried to avoid the war. In a way, it was a very intelligent move to give the army to Duryodhana. That way, he felt that Krishna was on his side, and the Pandavas were fools to take one person instead of a 100,000-strong army. It could have been something for Duryodhana to latch on to and bring peace, but it failed.
(Sadhguru is a Yogi, mystic, visionary and a New York Times bestselling author. He is also the founder of Conscious Planet – Save Soil)
