The pitch he wouldn’t make

Patrick Bet David: When I was building my sales team, we licensed 60,000 insurance agents nationally. We had a lot of young guys, and the conversation of sexual desire would come up. Some of them were married and asking: “How do you manage the sexual urge that you naturally have?” What would you say to them?

Sadhguru: Relationships happen because of physical, psychological, emotional, and social needs. Sometimes financial needs also. We’ve overly exaggerated the physicality of what a human being is, particularly in these societies, especially in the United States.

Sexuality should be in the body. It’s gotten into the head, which is a kind of perversion. —Sadhguru

I must tell you this – we have never hired a marketing agency or a PR agency. We can’t afford it. It’s just our volunteers working – I have over 19 million volunteers, everyone’s a PR for me. But one PR guy came and did the program. So I asked him for a free consultation. 

I asked him, “We’ve made this Inner Engineering Online program. A few thousand people are doing it – but why aren’t millions doing it? Whoever comes and does it, they say wow. But millions are not coming.”

He told me one thing: “Sadhguru, you need to understand the United States. If you’re willing to say ‘you will become rich,’ or ‘weight loss will happen,’ or ‘your libido will multiply 10x’ – if you’re willing to say these three things, I will sell millions of your program. If you’re not saying this – I have been through the program, I know how valuable it is – but millions will not happen.” 

Patrick Bet David: So did you try? Did you start saying, “If you come to my course, your libido is gonna 10x”? 

Sadhguru: I’m not willing to say those things. I’m okay the way I am.

Most people are suffering the urge rather than enjoying it. Because it’s not in the right place. —Sadhguru

Money in the pocket, not in the head

Patrick Bet-David: So what would you say for men to control their desires?

Sadhguru: Desire is there in the human body. If this desire was not there, you and I wouldn’t have been born. Unless you believe you dropped from heaven or something.

All this is happening because there is desire. The desire is there because there is a certain amount of pleasure or satisfaction built in that whole system. If you just take it as a physicality, it’s a certain percentage of one’s life. But right now, socially, we’re pushing it into people’s minds.

It’s like this. If you have money in your pocket, it’s a good thing. It makes your life comfortable. If there’s no money in your pocket, you have to see where your next meal is coming from – you can’t do anything creative. But once your bread is assured, your shelter is assured, your activity can rise to a different pitch.

Similarly, money should be in the pocket. If it gets to your head, you’ll get sick.

Sexuality should be in the body. It’s gotten into the head, which is a kind of perversion. People are trying to read sexuality everywhere because everyone’s been following that fraud – Sigmund Freud. Well, he himself was quite sick.

The man who said everything is libido

Patrick Bet David: He was a weird guy.

Sadhguru: He was full of fear of death. He wanted to go to Egypt and couldn’t travel because he was scared. And that guy was giving all the solutions to you. He’s the one who said “everything is libido.” Even today, a lot of principles come from him.

Patrick Bet David: On the sexual side. Wasn’t he the guy who had fantasies about his mother or something?

Sadhguru: “Everything is libido.”

Patrick Bet David: Right.

Sadhguru: It’s cultivated. Right from childhood, we’re cultivating our children this way, and they will suffer for it. They will not enjoy this.

Patrick Bet David: I had a husband and wife who worked with me 20 years ago. If his wife was around other wives, all she wanted to talk about was sex. “Have you read this book? Have you tried this with your husband?”

Sadhguru: It’s become that kind of thing. A senior vice president at one of the top law firms in the country told me: “Sadhguru, you don’t know. In the lunch hour, all these men over 50 and 60 years of age – the only thing they discuss is women’s body parts. Throughout lunch, every day, the same thing.

“I just go sit near a window, facing away. I can’t eat with my own colleagues.” She said if they go offsite somewhere, it just goes crazy. Like schoolboys.

When it rules you from the inside

Patrick Bet David: Nowadays, forget about porn. It’s gotten to a point where you’ve got girls trying to break records. There’s a girl who slept with over a thousand men in twelve hours. It gets hundreds of millions of views. What do you think when you read stories like this?

Sadhguru: My God. It’s unfortunate. Many, many people come and talk to me about how, at an early age, they were exposed to pornography and what happened to their minds after that. Whether they look at their sisters or mothers, they can’t think of anything else. And they feel sick.

These are physical needs which need to be satisfied – not to be pursued as if they are the ultimate goal of life. —Sadhguru

There have been people I know who committed suicide because they just couldn’t bear it. Very early, they saw these things, and it ruled them from the inside.

The sexual instinct is there – without it, we wouldn’t be born. We’re here because of that. So it’s not a question of right and wrong. It’s like food. How much to eat? There is a certain consciousness about it. Because there is food, if you go on eating, you know what will happen. This is also just like that.

These are physical needs which need to be satisfied – not to be pursued as if they are the ultimate goal of life.

Most people are suffering the urge, not enjoying it

Sadhguru: If it’s in your body, it’s a limited sphere of life. Right now, it’s entered your head and it looks like everything is like that. This is something we must cure society of.

Even in America, where there is so much openness to sexuality, most people are suffering the urge rather than enjoying it. Because it’s not in the right place. If it’s in the body, it has its own beauty. But if it enters your head, it’ll become a kind of perversion. It rules you.

Patrick Bet David: Promiscuity?

Sadhguru: No. I’m not even saying promiscuity. It’s an individual choice what people do. But it should not be in your head. It should be in your body.

This conversation has been edited lightly for length and clarity.