Only the energy of sex can flower into love.
Religion and culture pour poison against sex into the mind of man. They create conflict, war; they engage man in battle against his own primary energy – and so man has become weak, gross, coarse, devoid of love and full of nothingness.
If passion is transformed, the wife can become the mother; if lust is transcended, sex can become love. Only sex energy can flower into the force of love. But we have filled man with antagonism towards sex and the result is that love has not flowered.
Man’s consciousness is becoming more and more sexual. Our songs, poems, paintings, and virtually all the figures in our temples are centered around sex – because our minds also revolve around the axis of sex. No animal in the world is as sexual as man. Man is sexual everywhere – awake or asleep, in his manners as well as in his etiquette. Every moment man is haunted by sex.
What I want to say is this: sex is divine. The primal energy of sex has the reflection of God in it. It is obvious: it is the energy that creates new life. And that is the greatest, most mysterious force of all.
End this enmity with sex. If you want a shower of love in your life, renounce this conflict with sex. Accept sex with joy. Acknowledge its sacredness. Receive it gratefully and embrace it more and more deeply. You will be surprised that sex can reveal such sacredness.
When a man approaches his wife he should have a sacred feeling, as if he were going to a temple. And when a wife goes to her husband she should be full of the reverence one has nearing God.
Only in the moments of coitus did man realize that it was possible to feel such profound
love, to experience such illuminating bliss. And those who meditated on this truth in the right frame of mind, those who meditated on the phenomenon of sex, of intercourse, came to the conclusion that in the moments of climax the mind becomes empty of thoughts. All thoughts drain out at that moment. And this emptiness of mind, this void, this vacuum, this freezing of the mind, is the cause of the shower of divine joy.
Love is the experience of unity. The demolition of walls, the fusion of two energies is what the experience of love is. Love is the ecstasy when the walls between two people crumble down, when two lives meet, when two lives unite.
You are able to forget the name, face or nationality of someone – if I had met you, I might forget your name, your face, your caste, your age, your status, everything about you – but you never forget the sex of a person, you never forget whether someone was male or female. Have you ever had any doubt that the person you had a conversation with, let’s say, on the train to Delhi last year, was a man? Why? When you forget everything else about a person, why can’t you erase that aspect from your memory? It is because the awareness of sex is so firmly rooted in man’s mind, in his thought processes. Sex is ever-present, ever-active.
My point is that those who forbid talk about sex are the same people who have pushed humanity into an abyss of sex. Those who are frightened of sex, and have therefore convinced themselves they are innocent of sex, are lunatics. They have conspired to make the whole world a gigantic asylum.
But to reach somewhere, one has to know the starting point. We have to start from where we are; it is imperative we know this place first. And this is more important at the moment than the place we want to reach. In this context, sex is the fact, the reality; sex is the starting point. But God? God is far from here. We can reach the truth of God only by understanding the starting point of the journey; otherwise we cannot move an inch. We will be lost. We will be on a merry-go-round, going nowhere.
And first of all, one fact must be comprehended fully: man is born out of sex. The whole of his being exists because of the practice of sex. Man is filled with the energy of sex. The energy of life itself is the energy of sex.
In the sexual act the ego fades away. Orgasm is a state of self-effacement.
In orgasm, the sense of time is non-existent. There is no past, no future; there is only the present moment. The present is not a part of time; the present is eternity.
This is the second reason man is so eager for sex. The craving is not for the body of a woman by a man or vice versa, the passion is for something else: for egolessness, for timelessness.
And it does not last for more than a moment; after a momentary climax, we return again to our original position. For a second, we reach towards a different plane of existence; for a second, we climb towards a peak of immense satisfaction. The momentum is towards the pinnacle, but we have hardly taken a step when we fall back to first base.
Sex is man’s most vibrant energy, but it should not be an end unto itself: sex should lead man to his soul. The goal is from lust to light.
Have you ever observed that no animal is sexual all the time, but that man leans toward sex in each and every situation? Sexuality fumes inside man, as if sex were all and everything in life. How has this perversion come about? How has this disaster occurred? Why hasn’t it happened to any animal? There is only one cause: man has done his utmost to suppress sex. And it has erupted throughout his personality in equal measure.And think of what we have done to suppress sex! We have had to develop an insulting attitude toward it; we have had to degrade it; we have had to abuse it. We have had to call it sin; we have had to shout from the rooftops, ”Sex is sin!” We have had to proclaim that those who indulge in sex are contemptible, are to be despised. We have had to invent countless degrading names for sex in order to justify our suppression of it. But we have never worried for a moment that these abuses and objections would eventually poison our entire beings.
A man is able to spread love to those around him in direct proportion to the love that grows within him. Those who are empty of love are filled with sex. And sex-minded they remain. The less a man loves, the more he hates; the less love there is in a man’s life, the more spiteful his life will be.
The next motto: grow to the fullness of love. We should adore love; we should bestow love; we
should live in love. But to love other men alone is not the name of the game; to be devoted to love is to replenish one’s whole personality with love. I am speaking of a total education in loving. We should be able to pick up a stone as if we were lifting a friend; we should be able to shake hands with an enemy as if we were holding the hand of a friend.
People should simply be full of love; it should not depend on ”with whom.” But the lover wants the beloved to love only him, to love no one else. ”Love me alone,” he says, but he does not know that those who cannot love all cannot love one. The wife says her husband should love only her and not show affection to anybody else, but she does not realize that such love is false and that she has caused it to be so. How can a husband who is not always full of love for everybody be loving towards his wife?
Love should well up inside you – love for plants, love for human beings, love for strangers, love for foreigners, love for those on their way toward the moon and the stars.
A man may have driven a car for a thousand miles, but it does not necessarily follow that he knows anything about the engine. He might ridicule my statement, saying he had just driven a thousand miles, but I still venture to make the accusation that he knows nothing about the car. I repeat, driving a car is different from knowing the internal mechanism. You may have gone through sexual experiences, but you know no more about sex than an animal.
The truth of the matter is that sex has not been studied scientifically. No philosophy or science of sex has developed because everyone believed he knew about sex. No one has seen the need for a scripture of sex. This is a very grave mistake by mankind.
We never go deeply into the subject of sex, never reflect upon the practice of sex, never try to get to the bottom of it, never meditate on it – because of the delusion that we know everything there is to know about it. When everybody already knows everything, what need is there to consider the subject? And in the same breath, I wish to tell you that there is no deeper mystery, no deeper secret, no deeper subject than sex – in this world and in life itself.
Man is helpless; man is a slave to sex, and this helplessness is to be despised. We want knowledge, not ignorance. Knowledge on its own is power, and the knowledge of sex is an even greater power. It is dangerous to continue to live in ignorance about sex.
One friend has asked, ”If the transformation of sex is into love, do you then mean that the love of a mother for her child is also because of sex?” Others have also asked similar questions.
It will be helpful to understand this. If you listened attentively, you will remember my telling you that there is a profound depth in the experience of sex, a depth to which a person does not normally reach. There are three levels of sex and I wish to speak about them now.
The first level of sex is the gross level. For example, a man goes to a prostitute. The experience he gets there cannot be any deeper than physical. A prostitute can sell her body but cannot sell her heart, and, of course, there is no way to sell the soul. On this level, bodies meet – as in rape. In rape there is no meeting of hearts or souls; rape happens on the physical level only. There is no way to rape a soul; the experience of rape is purely physical. The primary experience of sex is on the physiological level, but those who halt there never attain
the fullest experience of sex. They can never know the depths about which I have been speaking. These days, most people have stopped at the physical level.
A man and a woman who can meet on the spiritual level, who can unite spiritually – even once – feel they have united for endless lives to come. There is a deep fluidity; timelessness and pure ecstasy are the wedding dowry. The sex I am talking about is spiritual sex, the divine experience. I desire a spiritual orientation of sex.
Osho - From sex to superconsciousness
