Needs

What do needs mean for the body?

The body knows what it needs. If moving the hand will help, it moves the hand. It knows where its tensions and complexes are; it does its own work. You don’t know—you’re doing a headstand. A person whose body has no need for a headstand may do one—and it can cause harm. The body has its own wisdom; man has lost the body’s wisdom. Animals haven’t. Leave a buffalo in a field where twenty-five kinds of grasses grow. It will pick what it needs and leave the rest. It isn’t “choosing” the way you think; it doesn’t know botany. It hasn’t read any book about which species to eat and which not. It lives by the body; the body itself knows. It selects what it needs and leaves the rest. A dog—if there’s heaviness in its stomach—will vomit at once. It doesn’t know yogic mudras, it doesn’t take an emetic.…

A collection of sheaths composed of nourishing food, in the form of the physical body is called the annamaya kosh, or the food body. The fourteen kinds of winds, like the vital energy, et cetera, circulating through the food body, are called the pranayama kosh, or the vital body.

This physical layer is the first, is the primary layer -- the outermost. If you can be aware that you are unnecessarily the slave and need not be, then change your body habits consciously. By and by, change. Change the seat of power; be more in control. And give to the body all that is needed by it, but never fulfill any addictions. It will be painful in the beginning, but it is a bliss when you have reached beyond the body and have become the master. And when you are on the throne, it is one of the deepest blisses possible. Matter and energy are not two things. Matter is just energy, energy is just matter -- Two states of one thing. The second body is the vital. The vital body is the energy body, the electricity body, or whatsoever name we like to use for it -- the…

You said that needs are to do with the body and desires are to do with the mind. Which of these two brought us to you?

Before I answer this, one thing more has to be understood; then it will be possible for you to understand the answer to this question. You are not only body and mind: you are something else also -- the soul, the self -- the atman. Body has needs, the atman also has needs; just between the two is the mind which has desires. Body has needs -- hunger to be satisfied, thirst. A shelter is needed, food is needed, water is needed. Body has needs; the mind has desires. Nothing is needed, but mind creates false needs. A desire is a false need. If you don't attend to it, you feel frustrated, a failure. If you attend to it, nothing is attained because in the first place, it was never a need: it never existed as a need. You can fulfill a need; you cannot fulfill a desire. Desire is…

Right now I can say something to you about how to distinguish but that won't be right because whatsoever I say will become an intellectual understanding to you. And there is every danger that your intellectual understanding will make you repressive. The intellect is very repressive, dominating, dictatorial. That's how it has disconnected you from your own body. So first put that intellect aside -- that's what I am trying to say. Just put it aside. If it is saying it is lazy, it is lazy -- okay. But if the body is saying something, you are going to listen to the body and not to the intellect. There is one way to make the distinction -- through the intellect; that will always be repressive. There is another way to make the distinction -- through the body; that will never be repressive. The body is more wise.