Needs and Desires

Questioner: Sadhguru, I am on spiritual path, Shouldn’t I still fulfill my needs and desires like food, sex, sleep?

Sadhguru: You are confusing basic requirements with dispensable desire. Food and sleep are basic requirements. Youdon’t desire them. When you are tired you sleep, when you are hungry you eat. These are required for your survival.

Discounting those two, let’s address the other desire that you mentioned: sexuality. Let’s look at it truthfully. Your desire is not for sex. One part of the fact is that your hormones have hijacked your intelligence. Another part is there is a lot of pleasure attached to sex. Yet another part is you are desperately trying to become one with somebody. But no matter how hard you try, sex does not work this way. You never become one with somebody by fusing your bodies. You will either realize this on your death bed, or you can realize it now and look for other ways that work.

Now, you may ask, “Oh, should I give this up?” There is no need to give up anything. As I said earlier, when you were a child, did you have some kind of a doll of your own? Let us say you had a teddy bear or a Barbie doll, or whatever, something that went all over the world with you. Now you had this teddy bear with you. At one point in your life this teddy bear was more important than your mother, your father, God, or all of them put together, yes? At a certain point in your life, at that time, suppose I had told you, “See, this teddy bear is just a bundle of cotton. What is the big deal? Let us throw this nonsense away.” Would you have listened? No way. But as you grew up and gathered more exposure into the ways of the world other things interested you more than your childhood doll, so much so that you probably don’t even know where it is lying now! So something which was at one stage the most important possession in your life today stands disposed or missing and you don’t even care. Its absence means nothing to you.

This is the fate of desires. You hang on to certain teddy bears today because you don’t know anything better. If you taste something of a bigger dimension than you know right now, these insignificant dolls you have as desires will naturally fall off. And the best part is you don’t have to give them up, they naturally fall off. On the spiritual path, just sitting and breathing is by itself, a million times more amazing and captivating than anything else that you have known. Imagine just sitting here and breathing! Once you have known the pleasure of something higher will you settle for crumbles?

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.