Question: Did Krishna do any sadhana before his enlightenment? What brought him to such a state in this life?

Sadhguru: For a human being to live in joy and love, every day is a tremendous sadhana. Most people smile when someone is around, but if you look at them when they are alone, the depressed face they wear says everything. If you cannot be alone, it obviously means you are in bad company.

Mixing with people is like a festival, but being is always in aloneness. To be loving every moment of your lifenot only if a certain situation occurs, or if you see a certain personif you are simply loving, indiscriminately, your intelligence blossoms in a completely different way.

To be loving is not a gift to someone else. It is the pleasantness of your systemyour emotion, mind, and body naturally become pleasant. And there is substantial scientific evidence to prove today that only when your system is pleasant, your intelligence functions at its best.

You will see, if your heart beats 60 times per minute when you are restful, you are in tune with the planet. If you do some simple yogic practices like Surya Namaskar and Shambhavi Mahamudra for about 18 months, it will be 60you will be in tune. When you are in tune, being joyful is natural because that is how the being is made. It is made to flourish.

This was Krishnas sadhanahe was in perfect tune with life around him. The fact that everyone still loved him though he stole butter and pulled all kinds of pranks means that somehow he got them in tune with himself.

Until the age of 16, Krishnas sadhana was just to be in perfect tune with life around him. Then his Guru, Sandipani, reminded him that there was a bigger purpose to his life. Krishna said, "I just like to be in this village. I like the cows, the cowherds, the gopis. I want to dance and sing with them. But Sandipani said, You have to stand up because this is the purpose for which you were born. This needs to happen."

Krishna went and stood on a small hill that is known as Govardhan Hill. When Krishna came back down, he was not the boy he used to be. He came down with a different gravity about himself. People knew something phenomenal had happened, and they also knew they were going to lose him. When they looked at him, he still smiled back at them, but there was no love in his eyesthere was vision. He saw things that they could not even imagine.

After the reminder, his first exploit was to kill his uncle Kamsa and end his tyranny over the Yadavas. Then he withdrew into the ashram of his Guru Sandipani along with his brother Balarama and lived the life of a brahmachari for the next seven years. Until he was 22, he did intense spiritual sadhana.

Krishnas sadhana was of a different dimension. Sandipani designed it in such a way that it was largely internal. Since Krishna lived and acted like he belonged to Satya Yuga, everything happened on a mental level for him. Sandipani did not need to open his mouth to give an instruction. All was conveyed mentally; all was grasped mentally; all was attained mentally. And he displayed that in a million different ways in his life.

(Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and a bestselling author. He was conferred the Padma Vibhushan in 2017 and can be contacted atIsha.sadhguru.org)

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Dimension of Krishna Sadhana - The New Indian Express