As soon as we are born on this earth, count­less needs arise in us: food, pro­tec­tion, warmth, secur­ity, later upbring­ing, love, care, then money, shel­ter, friends, and at last a hos­pit­al, a doc­tor and a gravedig­ger.

We come into the world with oblig­a­tions. We are bound not only to our fore­bears, fam­ily and par­ents, and not only to the des­cend­ants yet to come, but also to beings unknown and invis­ible to us, and even to the plan­et and the uni­verse. Man must work off his debt. Of old, this was done by under­tak­ing sac­ri­fice, how­ever much we have grown unused to it.

The sac­red tra­di­tion of yoga teaches that man can settle his cos­mic debts with five kinds of daily sac­ri­fice. We can serve God by study­ing the Vedas, the fore­fath­ers by the ances­tral sac­ri­fice, the deit­ies who gov­ern nature by the noble but­ter-offer­ings made in fire sac­ri­fice, liv­ing beings in gen­er­al by feed­ing the anim­als, and men by serving guests – this too is a need. For only he is happy who has no debt, that is, who has paid off his cos­mic dues.

Human needs, how­ever, find expres­sion not only on this elev­ated plane. Our bio­lo­gic­al exist­ence lays a mul­ti­tude of needs upon us, just as it does upon any other liv­ing being. Eat­ing, sleep­ing, repro­du­cing and defend­ing are uni­ver­sal tasks of earthly exist­ence, whatever spe­cies the indi­vidu­al may belong to. The cater­pil­lar also eats, the dog also sleeps, the dove also raises its young, and even a meek sheep defends itself. How, then, is man any dif­fer­ent?

The com­pul­sion of the emo­tions drives us towards the sur­viv­al of self and spe­cies, but it mat­ters at what level, and with what qual­ity, man sat­is­fies his needs. He may eat bru­tally or as a veget­ari­an, sleep dully or med­it­at­ively, defend him­self non-viol­ently or aggress­ively, and repro­duce sexu­ally or on a spir­itu­al level.

Eat­ing is a com­pul­sion, a need for sur­viv­al, and although man gen­er­ally con­sumes far more food than he would need to sus­tain his exist­ence – a fast is an excel­lent way to come to exper­i­ence this – yet there are few who can get by on air or sun­light.

Sleep, too, is a com­pul­sion, a sleep dis­order is coun­ted an ill­ness, and although we may regard sleep as a dull state of con­scious­ness, man may yet sleep in obli­vi­on, or while receiv­ing proph­ecies, or even while med­it­at­ing. There exists a kind of dream-jour­ney in which mas­ter and dis­ciple roam the same spheres togeth­er as they dream.

Every being has the right to defend itself, to pro­tect its life, and yet defens­ive avoid­ance is a finer solu­tion than aggress­ive con­front­a­tion.

Finally, repro­duc­tion… Schopen­hauer says that love is noth­ing but the spe­cies' demand for sur­viv­al, and that pleas­ure and mutu­al attrac­tion are in truth a trap set by nature. Oth­ers see man's desire to repro­duce as a reflec­tion, an octave lower, of God's desire to cre­ate. An ascet­ic does not repro­duce genet­ic­ally, but through teach­ing, ini­ti­ation, spir­itu­al guid­ance he takes part, we might say, in a kind of spir­itu­al repro­duc­tion. Ceph­alo­gen­es­is, for its part, is prac­tised only by the great, such as Zeus, from whose head Athena sprang, or Brahma, whose thought-born sons peopled the world.

Man is also known to have two other import­ant needs: the desire for self-expres­sion and the desire for free­dom. The former is in most cases a desire for the lime­light and only very rarely a pos­it­ive ambi­tion, while the lat­ter is mostly a mirage, for what man gains is not free­dom but only its illu­sion. Every human need is only a lim­it­a­tion, a chain that binds the soul to the world. Even a pious need is a chain, a golden chain. Deny­ing our needs does not mean true free­dom. There­fore one must wisely dis­cern what part needs play, and also how they can be tran­scen­ded. The man who awakens to spir­itu­al aware­ness will have more and more spir­itu­al needs, not mater­i­al ones.