If a person begins to study yoga, he will find the warning signs all over the place, “That’s not good, that’s not good, and that’s not good. You will never achieve it, you will never find it in this way.” When I was growing up, if something was lost and it was very difficult to find it, or there was a small probability, they would say, “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.” Has anyone ever heard that? In those days they had haystacks; they still have them in Romania, I was just there; very nice. If you go up in the hills of Romania they’ve got the old haystacks with the pole in the middle, and the animals come up and they eat off the haystack. That’s where the saying came from. If you put a needle in that whole haystack, it might be quite difficult to find it, but at least it’s in there so if you look long enough, there’s a good chance you’ll find it. But if there’s no needle in the haystack, it’s guaranteed you’ll never find it, right? So if you know there’s no needle in that haystack, you’re not going to bother to look. The yoga system says in this haystack of material enjoyment, there’s no needle – no happiness, no satisfaction for the soul.
There are tremendous amounts of sensual pleasures — tremendous. And we’ve increased that, there’s no question about it. You can stimulate the senses like never before, but remember, we are not the body. If we were the body, it would work. Yes, it would work: when you make the body happy, you would be happy. But we’re not the body; we’re the person in the body. The soul needs spiritual food, the soul needs spiritual pleasure; the soul needs spiritual satisfaction.
Is it not a fact that if a man is hungry, no matter how many material facilities for pleasure you give him, if you do not give him food, he won’t be happy? Is that not correct? You give him a tremendous house and the most beautiful lady or the most money or whatever, but if he doesn’t have any food, he cannot be happy because the hunger is his number one need. So the hunger of the soul for spiritual food is our number one need, you see? But we don’t recognize what that need is, so again, we identify with some material need.
This is a material example but it’s a fact that when the body is dehydrated to a certain degree, which most bodies are because of the way we live our life today. Most people are very dehydrated and that is causing many, many physical problems. When the body is completely dehydrated, the thirst that the body emanates to tell us, ‘bring me water’, is so misunderstood that we think it’s hunger and we eat food. Instead of drinking what we need to hydrate the body, we simply eat something else and usually some salty or sweet food, which dehydrates the body even more. In other words, we can’t even interpret the message because we’re so polluted, we’re so contaminated; we’re so far away from reality.