How Osho allied sex and spirituality

Osho on sex and spirituality

Osho advocated a more-open attitude towards sexuality, a stance which earned him the sobriquet of "sex guru" in the Indian and international press. In 1970 he settled for a time in Bombay, initiating disciples (known as neo-sannyasins) and assuming the role of spiritual teacher. In his discourses, he reinterpreted the writings of religious traditions, mystics and philosophers from around the world. Here's a look at some of his preaching about sex…

Sex is the source

"Sex can give you the answer to what the reality of life is because sex is the most alive thing in you. Mind is the most dead thing in you and sex is the most alive thing in you. That is why mind is always against sex, and mind is always for suppressing it. They are enemies. Mind is a dead thing and sex is the life force; they go on fighting. And whenever you move into sex, the mind feels frustrated and the mind says, This is wrong”

"The mind becomes the moralizer, the mind becomes the puritan, the mind becomes the priest. The mind goes on condemning. All that is alive the mind goes on condemning and all that is dead the mind goes on worshipping. And sex is the most alive thing in you because life comes through it: you are born through it, you can give birth through it. Wherever there is life, aliveness, sex is the source."

Love is dangerous, sex is not dangerous

"People who are afraid of love are not afraid of sex. Love is dangerous; sex is not dangerous, it can be manipulated. There are now many manuals on how to do it. You can manipulate it – sex can become a technique. Love can never become a technique. If in sex you try to remain in control, then even sex will not help to reach the ultimate. It will go to a certain point and you will drop back, because somewhere it also needs a let-go.”

"That's why orgasm is becoming more and more difficult. Ejaculation is not orgasm, to give birth to children is not orgasmic. Orgasm is the involvement of the total body: mind, body, soul, all together. You vibrate, your whole being vibrates, from the toes to the head. You are no longer in control; existence has taken possession of you and you don't know who you are. It is like a madness, it is like a sleep, it is like meditation, it is like death."

The more sexual a person is, the more intelligent

"So really it happens that the more sexual a person is, the more inventive he can be. The more sexual a person is, the more intelligent. With less sex energy, less intelligence exists; with more sexual energy, more intelligence, because sex is a deep search to uncover, not only bodies, not only the opposite sex body, but everything that is hidden."

Become meditative in your sex life....

"Holding the hand of your woman or man, why not sit silently? Why not close your eyes and feel? Feel the presence of the other, enter into the presence of the other, let the other's presence enter into you; vibrate together, sway together; if suddenly a great energy possesses you, dance together – and you will reach to such orgasmic peaks of joy as you have never known before. Those orgasmic peaks have nothing to do with sex, in fact they have much to do with silence.”

"And if you can also manage to become meditative in your sex life, if you can be silent while making love, in a kind of dance, you will be surprised. You have a built-in process to take you to the farthest shore."

How can we sublimate and spiritualize sex?

"Ordinarily we use sex' and `love' as if they have an inner association. They have not. Love comes only when sex has gone. Before that, love is just a lure, a foreplay, and nothing else. It is just preparing the ground for the sex act. It is nothing but an introduction to sex, a preface. So the more sex there is between two persons, the less love there will be. When sex becomes a meditation it flowers into love, and this flowering is a movement towards the divine.”

"I am not against sex and I am not for love. You still have to transcend it. Meditate on it; transcend it. By meditation I mean you have to pass through it fully alert, aware. You must not pass through it blindly, unconsciously. Great bliss is there, but you can pass by blindly and miss it. This blindness has to be transformed; you must become open-eyed. With open eyes, sex can take you on the path of oneness."

We are afraid of sex

"We are afraid of sex. The lower part of the body is not only lower physically, it has become lower as a value. It is condemned as "lower." So do not go deep, just remain shallow. It is unfortunate that we can only breathe downwards. If some preachers were allowed, they would change the whole mechanism. They would only allow you to breathe upward into the head. Then you would absolutely not feel sex.

"If we are to create a sexless humanity, then we will have to change the breathing system. The breath must go into the head, to the sahasrar – the seventh center in the head – then come back to the mouth. This should be the passage: from the mouth to the sahasrar. The deeper you go, the nearer you reach to the deeper layers of biology. You reach to the center, and that center is just near the sex center – just near. It has to be, because sex is life."

False phenomena around death and sex

"I have said that man is afraid of both sex and death. That's why they are taboos. No one talks about sex and no one talks about death. We remain silent about those two things. We have remained silent for centuries and centuries. They are taboo subjects, they should not even be mentioned. The moment they are mentioned, something starts trembling within us.

"It seems that there is a deep repression. That's why we have created substitute words. In the western world they do not say 'We are having sex.' They say 'We are making love.' It's a substitute word – and false, because love is a totally different dimension. Having sex is having sex, it is not making love. Love may include sex, but love has an altogether different quality.

"We never talk directly about death. If someone dies, we use substitute words. We say he has gone to the Father, or he has gone to heaven. Death is never faced directly.

"We have created many false phenomena around death and sex. If two people are going to be married, sex is not even mentioned – and they are going to be married for sex! We have created a great illusion around marriage, but the bare, naked fact is sex. We have created a ritual, a great ritual of marriage, just to hide the fact. Why?

"Why is there a taboo about only these two things? They are deeply related. The reason for their relationship is this: first, you are born out of sex, birth is sex. And birth and death are two poles of one thing. In birth, death is hidden. That's why man became aware of the deep relationship between sex and death. Death cannot happen without sex, just as birth cannot happen without sex."

Sex is potentiality

"When love expresses through you it first expresses as the body. It becomes sex. If it expresses through the mind, which is higher, deeper, subtler, then it is called love. If it expresses through the spirit, it becomes prayer....

"If everything goes well and sex is natural and flowing it is a beautiful experience because you can have a glimpse of the second through it. If sex goes really very deep, so that you forget yourself completely in it, you can even have a glimpse of the third through it. And if sex becomes a total orgasmic experience, there are rare moments when you can even have a glimpse of the fourth, the turiya, the beyond, through it.

"But if sex fails, then many perversions happen to the mind. These perversions are expressed in hatred. Hatred is a failure of sex, a failure of love energy. Violence, lust for money, the continuous conflicting attitudes of egos: war, politics – these are all sex perversions.

"All politicians as such need deep sexual therapy, otherwise their whole energy will be. moving to gain more and more power. When sex is natural, you feel power, you are not seeking it. Sex is potentiality, power. You feel it showering on you, you don't seek and search for it. But when you miss it there, then a great urge arises to seek power: politics is born. Then wars, continuous violence, are born; hatred, anger, and a thousand and one types of perversions."

Create meditation out of sex

"The more you go into meditation through sex, the less effect sex will have. Meditation will grow from it, and out of the growing meditation a new door will open and sex will wither away. It will not be a sublimation. It will be just like dry leaves falling from a tree. The tree never even knows the leaves are falling. In the same way, you will never even know that the mechanical urge for sex is going.

"Create meditation out of sex; make sex an object of meditation. Treat it as a temple and you will transcend it and be transformed. Then sex will not be there, but there will not be any suppression, any sublimation. Sex will just become irrelevant, meaningless. You have grown beyond it. It makes no sense to you now.

"It is just like a child growing up. Now toys are meaningless. He has not sublimated anything; he has not suppressed anything. He has just grown up; he has become mature. Toys are meaningless now. They are childish and now the child is no longer a child.

"In the same way, the more you meditate, the less sex will have an appeal to you. And by and by, spontaneously, without a conscious effort to sublimate sex, energy will have a new source to flow to. The same energy that has flowed through sex will now flow through meditation. And when it flows through meditation, the divine door is being opened."

By Pallavi Tyagi