When fear is the basic emotion which decides the quality and the content of your life, you will never know life. Every step that you take in your life is only half a step, never a full step. People will be unable to do anything with abandon. They cannot sing or dance with abandon, they cannot work or run with abandon because fear and security rule everything. When you live in fear, can you also claim to be joyful? Maybe there were moments when you forgot your fear, but as long as it is there, there is no question of joy. You will neither laugh all your laughter nor will you cry all your tears. You will live a life of insipidness.
If you are insipid, you will go through life without knowing it. The worst crime you can commit against life is not experiencing it since you never allow life to happen to you. You went away without experiencing life, living a mediocre life. You never hit the pitch — the height of life nor the bottom of life. You just went in between. People think this is safe. They are choosing these philosophies because there is security in the middle. If you stand in the middle of a crowd, there is security. If you stand in the front or at the back you are exposed to things. The weak always choose the middle, isn’t it? People are trying to misinterpret this as the golden mean. It is not the golden mean, it is insecurity and fear which is deciding this.
The message in the Gita is just this. This may be a surprise for everybody because it is very hard for people to understand that Krishna went about saying “Hesitation is the worst of all crimes.” Not murder, hesitation is the worst of all crimes because hesitation is not about just doing this or that. Hesitation will lead to hesitation to live and before you know it, as you go on hesitating, one day, life will be over. So, hesitating is definitely the worst of all crimes because that will make you miss your life completely. So, don’t commit the crime. If something is important to you, go for it. This does not mean you have to be aggressive, that is another crime. What has to be done has to be done only to the extent that it has to be done.
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.
