Questioner: Sadhguru, what would you say about youths getting into sex at a very early age? And parents are also giving in, saying ‘ok’, it’s a natural urge.
Sadhguru: The sexual drive is at its maximum between 13 and 20 or 21 years of age. That is the time when it is purely physical, it does not need emotional or any other kind of support.
It is simply there as a physical factor. One way of looking at it is—all animals naturally go for sexuality when they reach puberty. People may be trying to interpret it in that sense and say that it’s natural for us to indulge in sexuality at that stage in our lives.
But a human society is structured in a way which is about more than just living naturally as nature made you—it is not about just eating, sleeping, reproducing and then dying one day.
A human society is longing for something more—whether it is spirituality or intellectual pursuit or economic or social well-being. In so many different dimensions, human beings are aspiring for more.
So if that is the case, you cannot just go by a simple natural law that you do it whenever you feel like it. If it comes to that, then you must be ready for everything that follows because there is something we need to understand—it may be shocking for people when I say this but at that stage in life, let’s say between 13 and 20 years of age when a child is becoming an adult, the sense of discrimination is not so high but the physicality is at its peak.
It is at different levels for different individuals but let us take a person with the strongest sexual drive as an example. In such a person, he cannot even discriminate as to who his sister or mother is.
He desires any female form he sees because it’s not even a mental process; it is a purely physical process. He may not actually go after them physically because there is some sense of discernment in him but his drive cannot discriminate.
So if you are talking in terms of that kind of freedom, you must also be ready for the consequences. But if you have problems with all this then there definitely needs to be a certain order and discipline to the way the younger generation develops.
So a certain sense of discrimination must be brought in, that you do not do whatever you feel like whenever you feel like it.
Otherwise, if you just use that policy for every aspect of your life—whenever you feel like it, you eat or whenever you feel like it, you have sex—your life will become totally enslaved.
If we do this, then gradually human societies will become just like animal societies. There is nothing wrong with animal society but we thought we could evolve a little beyond that and live with a little more discretion than animals. That is why a certain order and sense of discipline were brought in.
At the same time, when there is a physical drive, simply saying “do not do it” will not solve the problem. Human societies have to evolve and bring forth the necessary understanding and different levels of experience for a youth.
This is why in the tradition of this country, a child was initiated into a spiritual process at the age of 12. For such children, sexuality was not a big problem because they were involved in something much deeper and they got married only after they attained a certain level of mastery over what they were doing. That is a very conscious way of moving into sexuality. If this sense of consciousness while moving into the sexual process is not brought into human societies, then you must be ready for a free for all. I am not looking at it moralistically. If you think it is right, it’s up to you. It’s a personal choice.
The author is a prominent spiritual leader.
www.isha.sadhguru.org