Last week , we read about Akka Mahadevi, one of the many intense women who were absolutely devoted to Shiva. This week, in part 4 of the “Women and Spirituality” series, Sadhguru tells us about Mirabai, who took Krishna as her divine lover.

Read in Hindi: कृष्ण की प्रेम दीवानी मीरा

Sadhguru: Human beings are usually body, mind and in a big way, emotion. Most human beings cannot commit themselves to something without committing their body, mind and emotion. Marriage meant just this, that you commit everything – your physical body, your mind and your emotion to the person. So in that context, even today in many groups, nuns get married to Jesus before they are ordained into the process. This was taken to a completely different level beyond mind, emotion and body and was made into an absolute reality for certain people. One of them was Mirabai who looked at Krishna as her husband.

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She went so mad about Krishna, in her mind she married him when she was just 8 years of age.

She went so mad about Krishna, in her mind she married him when she was just 8 years of age. Her focus and intensity of emotion and thought became so intense that Krishna started becoming a reality for her. It was no longer just a hallucination, it became a reality where he walked with her, he sat with her. Mira’s husband was a king and he had real difficulties because she was constantly with her divine lover with whom she went through the whole process – she even went through the sexual act with her divine lover. Her husband tried everything possible to understand this because he really loved Mira but he just could not figure out what was happening with her. Because what she was doing and going through seemed to be so real, but in his eyes it was not there. He became so desperate that one day he painted himself blue, dressed like Krishna and came, but unfortunately he used the wrong kind of dye and he got a bad allergy; his whole body went into a rash.

People around her were naturally confused and they did not know what to do, till at a certain point of her life when she rose to such pitch that people could see that she was an extraordinary woman. People then recognized her and huge crowds gathered around her seeing that she could do things that nobody else could do. After her husband died, Mira was accused of adultery. At that time, the punishment for adultery was death. So in the royal courts she was given poison to drink. She said “Krishna” and she drank it and walked away. They expected her to die but she flourished and blossomed. Many such situations have happened because devotion is that which is devoid of you.

Devotion is not a love affair. Love itself is a crazy thing but there are shreds of sanity attached to it. You can still recover. In devotion, there is no shred of sanity.

Devotion is not a love affair. Love itself is a crazy thing but there are shreds of sanity attached to it. You can still recover. In devotion, there is no shred of sanity. Devotion does not allow recovery. When I say devotion, I am not talking about belief systems. Belief is just like morality. People who believe some nonsense think they are superior to others. The moment you believe something, you don’t get any better. It is just that your stupidity gets confident. So I am not talking about belief, I am talking about moving into trust.

So the question arises, “How can I trust?” The fact that you are sitting comfortably on this planet, that is trust. Because you know, there have been incidents where the earth has opened up and swallowed people. There have been incidents where pieces of sky have fallen on people and crushed them to death. This round planet is spinning and traveling at a tremendous speed and the whole damn solar system and galaxy are traveling at we don’t know what speed. Suppose Mother Earth decides to suddenly start spinning in the opposite direction, maybe you will fly off from where you are sitting right now – you don’t know.

So for you to sit, smile, listen and talk to somebody, you need trust – enormous trust, isn't it? But you are doing it unconsciously and un-lovingly. Just learn to do this trust consciously and lovingly. That is devotion. Once you learn to sit here, consciously and lovingly, trusting the existence the way it is, that is devotion. Devotion is not a belief system. Devotion is the sweetest way to be in the existence.

Editor's Note: Click here to purchase and download the collector's special edition of “Leela – The Path of the Playful”, a special program where Sadhguru led a group of Isha meditators in an exploration of the multifarious dimensions of Krishna.