We have two kinds of needs, material and spiritual. I can’t deny that I have basic material needs, like eating for example. ‘Well I’m spiritually realised I don’t eat anymore’, um…No, you need eating, sleeping. Can’t really do without it. Mating. Another basic human need. And defending, we need to defend ourselves from time to time. We need to have some security. The animals do these things: they sleep, they mate, they defend. Humans beings do these things, and they’re necessary. But they are not everything.
“What’s your goal in life?”
“Well, to eat, to sleep, to have sex, and, defend myself.”
Oh great that’s really fantastic!
Yeah! Every dog does that! Are we no better than dogs? Two legged dogs. So, fine, They need to do what we need to do.
But that’s not our purpose. Not that ‘Why, am I living to eat? Why, am I living to sleep? Why, am I living to fight? Why, am I living for sex?’
No, those things should be, as much as needed. But we try to pump them up, you know: Eating! Eating! New experiences in Eating! Super ultra fantastic like you never had it before! Eating. And what is it? It’s what the dog does. The dog is as happy eating his little bone as you are in your top of the world restaurant. At the end of the meal he’s eaten you’ve eaten, he goes to sleep you go to sleep, he’s happy you’re happy. It’s the same for all of us.
The fantastic ultra super-nothing-like-it-newest-greatest, never before experienced sex life that the human being has is the same as the sexual experience of the mosquito. They get sexual satisfaction, we get sexual satisfaction. Now you’re looking like ‘uh no, really?’ Yes really! It’s the same. There’s nothing qualitatively different, about what the animal gets out of it, and what we get from it. It’s the same thing. You know it really is. We like to think that there’s something, you know, categorically different. It’s not. It’s not, it’s the same thing. But human society, pumps it up it – tries to make it something that’s going to just turn your life into permanent euphoria, and the result is………..disappointment. Because it can never match the expectation. If the expectation is just, heaven! When the reality sets in we’re going to be disappointed! That’s the, you know, the sorry truth about love in the material world. Well sex in the material world.
It’s built up to be like nothing else under the sun, and really it’s the same old thing. Which again is not to say, you know, stop it, but, to try to, fix our happiness on that, is going to result in a big let down in the end.
(Jayadvaita Swami 10/2007)