Category: on Sex

Transcending the Basic Duality of Sex – Osho

At whose desire and by whom impelled does the mind alight on its objects? By whom impelled does the chief prana – vital force – proceed to its function? By whom impelled do men utter this speech? What deva or god directs the eyes and the ears?

It – the atman – is the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of the speech, the prana of the prana, and the eye of the eye. Wise men separating the atman from these – sense functions – rise out of sense life and attain to immortality.

-Kenopanishad

Life is not there at its maximum when you are born; it is at its minimum. If you do stick at that, you will have a life which is just near death – just a borderline life. By birth, only an opportunity is given, only an opening is made.

Life has to be achieved. Birth is just a beginning, not the end. But normally we stay at the point of birth. That is why death happens. If you stay at the point of birth, you will die. If you can grow beyond birth, you can grow beyond death. Remember this very deeply: death is not against life; death is against birth. Life is something else. In death only birth ends and in birth only death begins. Life is something totally different. You have to attain it, achieve it, actualize it. It is given to you as a seed, just as a potentiality – something which can be, but which is not already there.

You have every chance of missing it. You can be alive because you are born, but that is not synonymous with really being in life. Life is your effort to actualize the potentiality. Hence, the meaning of religion, otherwise, there is no meaning in religion. If life begins with birth and ends in death, then there is no meaning for religion. Then religion is futile, nonsense. If life does not begin with birth, then religion has some meaning. Then it becomes the science of how to evolve life out of birth. And the more you move away from birth in life, the more you move away from death also because death and birth are parallel, similar, the same – two ends of one process. If you move away from the one, you are simultaneously moving away from the other.

Religion is a science to achieve life. Life is beyond death. Birth dies, life, never. To achieve this life, you have to do something. Birth is given to you. Your parents have done something: they have loved each other, they have been melting into each other, and out of their life force, melting into each other, a new phenomenon, a new seed – you – is born. But you have not done anything for it: it is a gift. Remember, birth is a gift. That is why all the cultures pay so much respect to parents – it is a gift, and you cannot repay it. The debt cannot be repaid. What can you do to repay it? Life has been given to you, but you have not done anything for it.

Religion can give you a new birth, a rebirth. You can be reborn. But this birth will happen through some alchemical change within you. Just as the first birth happened through two life forces meeting without you – they created an opportunity for you to enter, to be born; that is a deep alchemy – so a similar thing has to be done now within you. Your parents met – your mother and your father. Two forces, feminine and masculine, were meeting to create an opportunity for some new thing to be born. Two opposite forces were meeting, two polarities were meeting. And whenever two polarities meet, something new is born, a new synthesis is achieved. A similar thing has to happen within you.

You also have two polarities within you, the feminine and the masculine. Let me explain it a little more in detail . . . Because your body is born out of two polarities: cells from your mother and cells from your father, they create your body. You have both types of cells – those which came from your mother and those which came from your father. Your body consists of two polarities, feminine and masculine. You are both, everyone is both. Whether you are man or woman it makes no difference. If you are a man, you have a woman within you: your mother is there. If you are a woman, you have a man within you: your father is there. They can again meet within you. And the whole yoga, the whole tantra, the alchemy, the whole process of religion, is how to create an orgasm, a deep intercourse between the polarities within you. And when they meet within you a new type of being is born, a new life becomes alive.

If you are a man, then your conscious is masculine, and your unconscious is feminine. If you are a woman your conscious is feminine, and your unconscious is masculine. Your conscious and unconscious must meet so that a new birth becomes possible. What to do for their meeting to happen? Bring them nearer. You have created a separation; you have created all types of barriers. You do not allow them to meet. You try to exist with the conscious and you go on suppressing the unconscious. You do not allow it.

If a man starts weeping and crying, someone is bound to say immediately, “What are you doing? You are doing something womanish, feminine.” The man stops immediately. The masculine is not expected to weep and cry. But you have the possibility; the unconscious is there. You have moments of feminineness; you have moments of masculineness; everyone does.

A woman can become ferocious, a male, in some moods, in some moments. But then she will suppress. She will say, “This is not womanlike.” We go on creating a separation, a distance. That distance has to be thrown away; your conscious and unconscious must come nearer. Only then can they meet, only then can they have a deep intercourse. An orgasm can happen within you. That orgasm is known as spiritual bliss.

One type of orgasm is possible between your body and the body of the polar opposite sex; it can happen only for a single moment because you meet only on the periphery. The peripheries meet and then they separate. Another type, a deeper type of orgasm, can happen within. But then you meet at the center and there is no need to separate again. Sexual ecstasy can only be momentary; spiritual ecstasy can be eternal. Once attained you need not lose it. Really, once attained it is difficult to lose it – impossible to lose it. It becomes such an integration that the fragments disappear completely.

That is why when someone asked Buddha, “Who are you? A deva, a heavenly being?” he said, “No!” And the questioner went on asking. Then the questioner became desperate because whenever he asked Buddha who he is, if he is this or that, Buddha went on saying, “No!” Then finally he asked, “At least you must say that you are male. You must say yes.” Buddha said, “No!” “Then are you a female?” the man asked desperately. Buddha said, “No!” – because a new unity has come into being which is neither male nor female.

When your inner man and inner woman meet, you are neither: you transcend sex. That is the meaning of the oldest Indian image of Shiva as Ardhanarishwar – half man, half woman. That is the symbol of the inner meeting. Shiva is neither now: he is half man, half woman – both and neither. He transcends sex.

Remember, unless you transcend sex, you cannot transcend duality. This is a deep psychological problem – not only psychological but ontological also. If you remain a man or a woman, how can you conceive of the oneness of existence? You cannot. Being a man, you cannot conceive of yourself being one with a woman. Being a woman, you cannot conceive of yourself being one with a man. A duality persists.

Sex is the basic duality. We have been arguing about and discussing for centuries how to attain the nondual. But we go on discussing it as if it is some intellectual matter: “How to attain the nondual?” It is not an intellectual matter; it is ontological, existential. You can attain the nondual only when the duality within you disappears. It is not a question of meditating on the nondual and thinking, “I am the Brahman.” Nothing will come out of it; you are simply deluding yourself.

You cannot attain nonduality unless the basic duality of sex disappears within you, unless you come to a moment when you cannot say who you are – man or woman. And this happens only when your inner man and woman melt so much that they dissolve into each other – and all the boundaries are lost, and all the distinctions are lost, and they are one. When the inner orgasm, the spiritual ecstasy happens, you are neither. And only when you are neither is life born.

In a single moment of meeting between your parents, your mother and father, you were born – in a single moment of meeting! Remember, life is always out of meeting, never out of separation. Life comes only in a deep meeting, in a deep communion. For a single moment your father and mother were one, they were not two. They were functioning as one being. In that oneness you were born.

Life always comes out of oneness. And the life that I am talking about, or Jesus talks about, and Buddha talks about, is the life which will happen inside you, within you. Again, a communion, a melting, happens, and the two sexualities within you dissolve.

Remember, I say again and again that sex is the basic duality, and unless you transcend sex the Brahman cannot be achieved. All other dualities are just reflections and reflections of this basic duality. Birth and death – again a duality. They will disappear when you are neither male nor female. When you have a consciousness which goes beyond both, birth and death disappear, matter and mind disappear, this world and that world disappear, heaven and hell disappear. All dualities disappear when the basic duality within you disappears, because all dualities are simply echoing and re-echoing the basic division within you.

That is why the old, ancient Indian seers have put the Brahman in the third category. He is neither male nor female. They call him napunsak – impotent. They call him the third sex, the ultimate reality of the third sex. The word brahman belongs to napunsak ling: it is neither or it is both. But one thing is certain: it transcends the duality. That is why other conceptions of God look immature, childish. Christians call him father. This is childish, because then where is the mother? And how is this son Jesus born? And they say Jesus is the only son but where is the mother? The father alone giving birth? If the father alone gives birth to Jesus, then he is both – mother and father. Then do not call him father. Then the duality comes in.

Or some religions have called the ultimate being the mother. Then where is the father? These are just anthropomorphic feelings. Man cannot even think about the ultimate in any other terms than human, so he calls it father or mother. But those who have known and those who have transcended the anthropocentric attitude, the man-oriented attitude – they know that he is neither. He transcends both; he is a meeting of both.

In the ultimate, mother and father both are merged. Or, if you will allow me the expression, I would like to say: the Brahman is mother and father in eternal orgasm – one in an eternal ecstasy of meeting. And out of that meeting comes the whole creation, out of that meeting comes the whole play, out of that meeting all that exists is born.

Here, in this meditation camp, we will be trying to bring your unconscious and conscious nearer, your feminine and your masculine nearer. You will have to help me, to cooperate with me. In the meditation techniques you have to destroy all the barriers between your conscious mind and the unconscious. And you have to be free, as totally free as possible because suppression has created the barriers. [. . .]

Here we will try to bring the authentic religion. The secret most core of it is that you must come to it totally – with your mind, your body, your emotions, everything. Nothing is denied. You cry and you weep, and you laugh and you dance, and you sit in silence. You do all the things that your inner being happens to do; you do not force it to do anything. You do not say, “This is not good; I should not do it.” You allow a spontaneous flow. Then the unconscious will come nearer and nearer to the conscious.

We have created the gap through suppression: “Don’t do this, don’t do that,” and we go on suppressing. Then the unconscious is suppressed. It becomes dark. It becomes a part where we never move in our own house. Then we are divided. And remember, then there are perversions.

If you allow your unconscious to come nearer to your conscious, too much sex-obsession will disappear. If you are a man and you deny your unconscious, you are denying your inner woman; then you will be attracted to outer women too much. It will become a perversion because then it is a substitute. The inner femininity has been denied; now the outer femininity becomes obsessive to you. You will think and think about it; now your whole mind will become sexual. If you are a woman and you have denied the man, then ‘man’ will take possession of you. Then whatsoever you do or think, the basic color will remain sexual.

So much fantasy about sex is because you have denied your inner other. So now this is a compensation. Now you are compensating for something which you have denied to yourself. And look at the absurdity: the more you get obsessed with the other sex the more you feel afraid; the more you deny the inner the more you suppress it; and the more you suppress it the more you become obsessed.

Your so-called brahmacharis are totally obsessed with sex for twenty-four hours a day; they are bound to be. It is natural: nature takes revenge. To me, brahmacharya – celibacy – means you have come so near to your own feminine or your own masculine, so near that there is no substitution for it. You are not obsessed with it; you do not think about it. It disappears.

When your own unconscious is nearer to you, you need not substitute it with someone else outside. And then a miracle happens. If your unconscious is so near, then whenever you love someone, a woman or a man, that love is not pathological. If your unconscious is so near, that love is not pathological. It is not possessive; it is not mad. It is very silent, tranquil, calm, cool. Then the other is not a substitute, and you are not dependent on the other. Rather, the other becomes just a mirror.

Remember the difference: the other is not now a substitute, something which you have denied. The other becomes a mirror of your inner part, of your unconscious. Your wife, your beloved, becomes just a mirror. In that mirror you see your unconscious. Your lover, your husband, your friend, becomes a mirror. And in that mirror, you can see your unconscious clearly mirrored, projected outside. Then wife and husband can help each other to bring their unconscious more and more near.

And a moment comes, and it must come if life has been a really successful effort, when wife and husband are no more wife and husband: they have become companions on the eternal journey. They help each other; they have become mirrors to each other. They reveal the unconscious of the other and each helps the other to know himself or herself. Now there is no pathology, no dependence.

Remember one thing more: if you deny your unconscious, if you hate your unconscious, if you suppress your woman or man within, then you can go on saying that you love the outer woman but deep down you will hate her also. If you deny your own woman, you will hate the woman you love. If you deny your own man, you will hate the man you love. Your love will just be on the surface. Deep down it will be a hatred. It is bound to be so, it has to be so, because you will not allow the other to become the mirror of your unconscious. And you will be afraid also. Man is afraid of woman. Go and ask your so-called saints. They are so afraid of women. Why? They are afraid of the unconscious, and the woman becomes a mirror. Whatsoever they have hidden, she reveals.

If you have suppressed something, then the other polar opposite can reveal it immediately. If you have been suppressing sex and you are sitting in meditation in a lonely place and a beautiful woman passes by, suddenly your unconscious will assert itself. That which has been hidden will be revealed in the woman passing and you will be against that woman. You are foolish – because that woman is not doing anything at all, she is just passing there. She may not even know that you are there; she is not doing anything to you. She is a mirror, but the mirror is passing, and in that mirror, your unconscious is reflected.

The whole so-called spirituality is based on fear. What is the fear? The fear is that the other can reveal the unconscious and you do not want to know anything about it. But not knowing will not help, suppression will not help. It will remain there. It will become a cancer and by and by it will assert itself more and more, and ultimately you will come to feel that you have been a failure and that whatsoever you have suppressed has become victorious and you are defeated.

My whole effort is to bring your unconscious nearer to your conscious. You become so much acquainted with it so that it is not unknown. You become friendly to it, then the fear disappears – the fear of the polar opposite. And then the hatred also disappears because then the other is just a mirror, helpful. You feel gratitude. Lovers will be grateful to each other if the unconscious is not suppressed, and they will be hateful to each other if the unconscious is suppressed.

Allow your whole being to come into function. Your emotions are imprisoned, encapsulated. Your body movements are imprisoned. Your body, your heart, have become just as if they are not part of you. You simply carry them along like a burden. Allow your emotions full play. In the meditations we will be doing, allow your emotions full play and enjoy the play, because many new things will be revealed to you.

You have not been screaming. You have not screamed; you cannot remember when you last screamed. When the scream comes to you and takes possession of you, you will become afraid of what is happening because then you are losing control. But lose control: your control is the poison. Lose control completely. Allow your emotions to erupt like a volcano. You will be surprised at what is hidden in you. You may not even be able to recognize that it is your face.

Allow your body to have full play also, so that every cell of the body becomes vibrant, alive. Just as a bird alights on a branch and the branch starts wavering – becomes vibrant, alive – let your being alight on your body and allow your body to be vibrant, alive, alive with the inner force. And suddenly you will enter a new door unknown before. You will open a new dimension of your own existence and that dimension will lead you to the ultimate, to the divine.

Now the sutra:

At whose desire and by whom impelled does the mind alight on its objects? By whom impelled does the chief prana – vital force – proceed to its function? By whom impelled do men utter this speech? What deva or god directs the eyes and the ears?

The master is asking what is the original source in you – of your entire life, of all your movements, of all your expressions. What force creates desire? What force impels you to be alive? What force gives you the lust for life? There must be a hidden force, in a way inexhaustible: it goes on and on; it never tires.

At whose desire by whom impelled does the mind alight on its objects?

When you look at a beautiful woman or a beautiful flower or a beautiful sunset, who impels you? Who throws you outward? Who is the inner source of all your activity?

The Upanishads say that whatsoever you do, the doer is always the Brahman – whatsoever you do, you are not the doer. The doer is always the Brahman. If you run after a woman filled with lust the Upanishads say it is also the Brahman. Because of this, Christian missionaries could never understand what type of religion Hinduism is. Even lust is spiritual because the original source is always the Brahman. Whatsoever you do with your energy, he is moving in it.

There is a story . . . The god Brahma created the world and he fell in love with it. Christian theologians cannot understand it. Naturally, it is difficult to understand. Brahma goes on creating other beings and he goes on falling in love with them! He creates a cow, and he falls in love and becomes the bull – and on and on, until the whole creation is created. He creates the cow, and he becomes the bull. He goes on dividing himself into two polar opposites. The story is just beautiful, if you can understand it. He goes on dividing himself into two polar opposites. And remember, the reverse is the process to reach him again. Go on nondividing; go on meeting with the polar opposite. He creates the world through polar opposites. He creates the cow, but he is the cow because he creates the cow out of himself. Then he creates the bull, but he is the bull. He is both the feminine and the masculine.

Then he follows the cow, and the cow tries to escape the bull. The cow tries to hide and through her hiding she invites the bull. This is a hide-and-seek. That is why Hindus say the whole creation is just a play – a play of the same energy dividing itself into polar opposites and then playing hide-and-seek.

You are the Brahman. Your husband is the Brahman; your wife is the Brahman. And the Brahman is playing hide-and-seek. The whole idea is simply superb. The reverse is the process to reach the ultimate again: do not play hide-and-seek. Allow the divided parts to mingle into each other. Let them merge, and the Brahman arises again – the one.

This master asks:

At whose desire and by whom impelled does the mind alight on its objects? By whom impelled does the chief prana – vital force – proceed to its function? – who breathes in you? By whom impelled do men utter this speech? – who speaks in you? What deva or god directs the eyes and ears? – who is directing your senses?

The Upanishads are not against the senses. They are spiritually sensuous; they do not deny. Denial is not their slogan at all, denial is not their attitude. They accept and they say that even in the senses the divine is moving because there is nothing else to move. They make everything sacred; they make everything holy. They do not condemn; they do not say this is sin. Sin is unknown to the Upanishads, absolutely unknown. They say there is no sin – that everything is a play. Even in sin, even in the sinner, the same energy is moving.

Everything becomes holy. And if you can say with your full heart that everything is holy, holy, holy, you will become holy immediately because the very feeling that everything is holy and sacred makes the sin disappear. Sin is created by condemnation and the more you condemn, the more sinners you create.

The whole world has become a great crowd of sinners because everything has been condemned – everything! There is not a single thing which you can do which has not been condemned by someone or other. With everything condemned, you become a sinner. Then guilt arises – and when there is guilt you can pray but the prayer is poisonous; it comes out of your guilt. When you are guilty you can pray but that prayer is based on fear. That prayer is not love; it cannot be. Through guilt love is impossible. Feeling yourself condemned, a sinner, how can you love?

The Upanishads say that everything is holy because he is the source of all. Whether or not the river looks dirty to you is irrelevant. He is the source of all – the dirty river and the sacred Ganges, to both he gives the energy. To the sinner to the saint, he gives the energy. Really, there is no story like this, but I would like a story like this: he created the sinner, then he became the saint, just like the cow and the bull, and then the hide-and-seek. He created the saint and then he became the sinner and then the hide-and-seek . . . .

Have total acceptance of whatsoever exists. Just by being in existence, it is holy.

It – the atman, or the Brahman – is the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of the speech, the prana of the prana, and the eye of the eye. Wise men separating the atman from these – sense functions – rise out of sense life and attain to immortality.

Whatsoever you do it is him – it is the functioning of him, of the total. The total functions in you. When you breathe, what do you do? You do nothing. The breathing comes in and goes out. Rather, he breathes in you; you cannot do anything. If the breath leaves you, what will you do? If it doesn’t come back, what will you do? If it has left then it has left and if it does not come back, you cannot do anything. Really, when it is not coming you are no more. Who is there to do anything? He breathes, not you. The emphasis is on the total, not on the individual.

This has to be constantly remembered, because we go on forgetting this. Our emphasis is on the individual, the I: “I am breathing, I am alive, I am seeing you.” No! The master says he – the Brahman – is seeing through the eyes, he is the eye of the eye. When I speak, I am not speaking: he speaks. And when you listen, you are not listening: he listens. He becomes the cow, he becomes the bull; he becomes the speaker, he becomes the listener. It is a mysterious hide-and-seek, a great play, a great drama, beautiful, if you can understand. He is everywhere – in the listener, in the speaker, he is everywhere! And when you are silent, he is silent within you. When you speak, he is speaking in you.

This emphasis is not only metaphysical, not only a doctrine. As a doctrine also it is superb. But it is to help you toward a new realization. While speaking, if you can feel he is speaking, all the fever in it will be lost. While fighting, if you can remember that he is fighting through you, the fight will become a drama. While being silent, feel he is silent within you. And if the silence is disturbed and thoughts start moving, you know that he is disturbed, not you. He has become the thoughts and now he is moving like clouds in your inner sky. He is both, so why be worried? He is both!

When you are healthy, he is healthy in you and when you are ill he is ill in you. You are totally unworried; you need not come in. Your whole burden has been thrown upon him. That is why I say this is not only metaphysical. It is one of the deepest techniques to transform your total being.

If he is doing everything, then why do you go on carrying yourself unnecessarily? He breathes and he is born, and he dies. When you die, he will die – not you. Then why be afraid of death? You become unconcerned. This unconcern relieves you of all burden. And this is the actual fact; this is not a make-believe. This is the actual fact: whatsoever is happening is happening to the total. The individual is just an illusion.

I have never been as an ego and I am not as an ego, and I cannot be; only he is. And when I say he, I mean the total. Do not try to conceive of him as a person. He is not a person; he is the total – the whole. That which breathes in you breathes in the trees and that which sings in you sings in the birds and that which dances in you dances in the rivers, in the brooks, in the springs, and that which speaks in you speaks in the breeze passing through the trees. The total!

Just change the gestalt, just change the pattern. Do not emphasize the individual; move to the total. Then what is the problem? Then there is no problem. With you enters every type of problem; with you enters anguish and anxiety. Without any burden on you, you are liberated. You can become a mukta, a liberated one, you can become a siddha, this very moment. Just by realizing, feeling that “I am not, and he is,” the past disappears, and the future is no more because the future is created out of your worries, imagination, projections. Then he will take care. Then whatsoever happens will happen and whatsoever happens will be good because it is out of him.

This is what trust is. It is not that you believe in a God sitting upon some throne in heaven and guiding everyone from there, a great controller, an engineer or something like that – no! He is not the managing director. He is not! There is neither any throne nor someone sitting on it. And faith doesn’t mean that you believe in a concept, in a philosophy. Faith means trust – trusting the whole. Then everything is blissful. How can anything else be? How can anything other than bliss be? You create misery because you come in. Go out just as if a lamp has been put out. Go out . . . and then he is.

It is the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of the speech, the prana of the prana, and the eye of the eye.

Whatsoever appears on the surface, whatsoever it is, makes no difference. Always, hidden, he is there. Look at me with full remembrance, with mindfulness that he is looking through you, and immediately the quality of consciousness changes. Just now look at me: he is looking, he is the eye of the eye, and immediately you are not there, and a tremendous silence happens. The very quality of your being is different when you look at me as if he is looking and not you.

You are listening to me: forget that I am here; he is here – the total. The total has taken possession of me, the total has become active in me, the total has changed me into his instrument. Look at me as if he is speaking, listen to me as if he is speaking, and then everything is different. You are no more there . . . a sudden flash and everything changes. It is not a question of time. You are not to practice it; you can see it this very moment.

Look at me! You are not there; the total, the whole, has become the eyes; the whole has become the eyes in you. You are just an expression of the will of the whole, of the desire of the whole. The whole has become words through me, he is manipulating me, he is using me. And then, in this room, only he is. Then the totality becomes one. Then the parts are lost, and the fragments are no more and there is a deep orgasm between the speaker and listener. Then you will feel the presence, but the presence can come only if you forget yourself.

Remembering God is not really a remembering of his name. Remembering God is not to go on chanting “Rama, Rama, Krishna, Krishna”; that is useless, futile. Remembering him means forgetfulness of yourself. If you are not, if you are forgotten, completely forgetful of yourself, abandoned, he is. When you are not, suddenly he is – and this can happen in a single moment.

I am reminded that after the second world war it happened in a small village in England that there was a statue of Jesus just on the crossroads – a beautiful statue with raised hands. And on the statue, there was a plate, and on that plate, it was written: Come unto me.

In the second world war the statue was destroyed; a bomb fell upon it. And when there was restoration work and the village was again coming to be alive after the war, they remembered the statue, so they tried to find fragments of it. In the ruins the fragments were found, and the statue was restored again. But the hands could not be found. They were missing.

So the village council decided to ask the artist to make new hands. But one old man in the village who was always seen sitting near the statue – both when it was there and when it was not – said, “No! Let Jesus be without hands.”

The council said, “Then what will we do about the plate underneath? It is written, ‘Come unto me!’ and it had raised hands.”

The old man said, “Change the plate and write there, ‘Come unto me. I have no other hands than your own.’”

And now the statue stands there without the hands, and written underneath is: Come unto me. I have no other hands than yours.

In your hands he is moving, in your eyes he is moving, and in your heart, he is beating – the total. And he has no other hands, remember. He has no other eyes; he has no other heart to beat. He is beating all over, he is alive all over. This is the message.

It is the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of the speech, the prana of the prana, and the eye of the eye. Wise men separating the atman from these – sense functions – rise out of sense life and attain to immortality.

All these senses are the functions, and he is the functionary within. Knowing this, you are not against the senses. Knowing this, you simply change the emphasis. Then you are not obsessed with the senses; you are always looking for the inner core. And the rishis say that by knowing this transcendence they attain immortality. Remember, only you can die; life never dies. Because you are born, you will die; that is the natural end to every birth. Life goes on . . . eternally moving; life never dies. Waves in it are born and they die, and the riverlike life moves and moves and moves.

Once you come to feel the river within your wave, you are immortal. If you can realize him seeing through you, breathing through you, you are immortal. Only this shell, this vehicle of the body, will disappear. You will never disappear. You cannot disappear – you have always been.

Sometimes you were a tree because the tree was the vehicle – because he willed to be a tree through you. Sometimes you were a cow because he willed himself to be a cow through you. Sometimes you were a butterfly, sometimes a flower, sometimes a rock . . . but you have always been here. You have always been here! You are not a new visitor. No one is a new visitor; no one is a stranger. You have always been here and now but with different vehicles. Sometimes a rock was the vehicle; now you are a man or a woman: now this is a vehicle.

If you can understand and know that the vehicle is just the vehicle, the vehicle can be changed. It will have to be changed. But the inner one who goes on changing faces remains the same. That one is immortal, life is immortal. You are mortal. And why are you mortal? – because you become identified with the vehicle. Moving in a cart you become the cart. Riding on the train you become the train. Flying in an aircraft you become the aircraft. You go on forgetting that the aircraft, the cart, the train, the car, they are vehicles.

You are not the vehicles; you are the total, and the total goes on changing its vehicles. Then you are immortal. Remember, you cannot be immortal if you are identified with the body. You are immortal knowing, transcending the body. The consciousness is immortal, the very aliveness is immortal.

The sutra says:

Wise men, transcending these – sense functions – rise out of sense life and attain immortality.

And the more you feel the inner, the essential, the eternal, the immortal, the less and less you are obsessed with the sense life. You can play it, but you are not obsessed. Krishna playing on his flute is not obsessed with the flute; Krishna dancing with his girlfriends, the gopis, is not obsessed. It is just a play. Life becomes a play, not an obsession, when you know the immortal.

-Osho

From The Supreme Doctrine, Discourse #2

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

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Consciousness is the Bridge – Osho

Would you talk to us about using sexual energy for growth, as it seems to be one of our main preoccupations in the West.

Sex is the energy. So I will not say sexual energy – because there is no other energy. Sex is the only energy you have got. The energy can be transformed – it can become a higher energy. The higher it moves, the less and less sexuality remains in it. And there is an end peak where it becomes simply love and compassion. The ultimate flowering we can call divine energy, but the base, the seat, remains sex. So sex is the first, bottom layer of energy – and God is the top layer. But the same energy moves.

The first thing to be understood is that I don’t divide energies. Once you divide, then a dualism is created. Once you divide, then conflict and struggle are created. Once you divide energies, you are divided – then you will be for or against sex. I am neither for nor against, because I don’t divide. I say sex is the energy, the name of the energy; call that energy X. Sex is the name of that X energy, the unknown energy, when you are using it only as a biological reproduction force. It becomes divine once it is freed from biological bondage, once it becomes non-physical – then it is the love of Jesus or the compassion of Buddha.

The West is much obsessed today because of Christianity. Two thousand years of Christian suppression of sex energy has made the Western mind too much obsessed with it. First, for two thousand years the obsession was how to kill it. You cannot kill it. No energy can be killed – energy can only be transformed. There is no way to destroy energy. Nothing can be destroyed in this world, it can only be transformed, changed, moved into a new realm and dimension. Destruction is impossible. You cannot create a new energy, and you cannot destroy an old energy. Creation and destruction are both beyond you. They cannot be done. Now, scientists agree to this – not even a single atom can be destroyed.

For two thousand years, Christianity was trying to destroy sex energy. Religion consisted of becoming absolutely without sex. That created a madness. The more you fight, the more you suppress, the more sexual you become. And then sex moves deeper into the unconscious. It poisons your whole being. So if you read the lives of Christian saints, you will see they are obsessed with sex. They cannot pray, they cannot meditate. Whatsoever they do, sex comes in. And they think that the devil is playing tricks. Nobody is playing tricks. If you suppress, you are the devil.

After two thousand years of continuous sex-repression, the West became fed up with it. It was too much. The whole wheel turned. Now, instead of repression, indulgence, to indulge in it became the new obsession. From one pole the mind moved to the other pole. The disease remained the same. Once it was repression. Now it is how to indulge more and more in it. Both are sick attitudes.

Sex has to be transformed – neither repressed nor madly indulged. And the only possible way to transform sex is to be sexual with deep meditative awareness. It is just the same as I was saying about anger. Move into sex, but with an alert, conscious, mindful being. Don’t allow it to become an unconscious force. Don’t be pulled and pushed by it. Move knowingly, understandingly, lovingly. But make sexual experience a meditative experience. Meditate in it. This is what the East has done through Tantra.

And once you are meditative in sexual experience, the quality of it starts changing. The same energy which is moving into sexual experience starts moving towards consciousness. You can become so alert in a peak sexual orgasm, as you can otherwise never become – because no other experience is so deep, no other experience is so absorbing, no other experience is so total. In a sexual orgasm, you are totally absorbed, root and all – your whole being vibrating, your whole being in it. Body, mind – both are in it. And thinking stops completely. Even for a single second, when the orgasm reaches its peak, thinking stops completely, because you are so total you cannot think.

In a sexual orgasm you are. Being is there without any thinking. In this moment, if you can become alert, conscious, then sex can become the door towards the divine. And if in this moment you can become alert, that alertness can be carried in other moments also, in other experiences also. It can become a part of you. Then eating, walking, doing some work, you can carry that alertness. Through sex, the alertness has touched your deepest core. It has penetrated you. Now you can carry it. And, if you become meditative, you will come to realize a new fact. That fact is that it is not sex that gives you bliss, it is not sex that gives you the ecstasy. Rather, it is a thoughtless state of the mind and total involvement in the act that gives you a blissful feeling.

Once you understand this then sex will be needed less and less, because that thoughtless state of mind can be created without it – that’s what meditation means. And that totality of being can be created without sex. Once you know that the same phenomenon can happen without sex, sex will be needed less and less. A moment will come when sex will not be needed at all.

Remember, sex is always dependent on the other. So in sex, a bondage, a slavery remains. Once you can create this total orgasmic phenomenon without any dependence on anybody else, when it has become an inner source, you are independent, you are free. That’s what is meant when, in India, we say only a brahmachari, an absolutely celibate person, can be free – because now he is not dependent on anybody else, his ecstasy is his own.

Sex disappears through meditation, but this is not destroying the energy. Energy is never destroyed; only the form of the energy changes. Now it is no longer sexual, and when the form is no longer sexual, then you become loving.

So, really, a person who is sexual cannot love. His love can only be a show. His love is just a means towards sex. A person who is sexual uses love just as a technique towards sex. It is a means. A sexual person cannot really love, he can only exploit the other; and love becomes just a way to approach the other.

A person who has become non-sexual, and the energy is moving within, has become auto-ecstatic. His ecstasy is his own. Such a person will be loving for the first time. His love will be a constant showering, a constant sharing, a constant giving. But to achieve this, you are not required to be anti-sex. To achieve this, you have to accept sex as part of life, of natural life. Move with it – only move with more consciousness. Consciousness is the bridge, the golden bridge, from this world to the other, from hell to heaven, from the ego to the divine.

Enough for today?

-Osho

From My Way: The Way of the White Clouds, Discourse #5, Q2

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

 

The Inner Alchemy – Osho

Paripoorn chandra amrit rasaiki karanam naivedyam.

Accumulation of the nectar of the inner full moon is naivedya, the food offering.

You must have heard about the Taoist concept of yin and yang – the concept of polar opposites into one reality. Reality exists through polar opposites – through the positive and the negative, through the male and the female, through yin and yang.

Reality is a dialectical process. And when I say “dialectical process,” I mean it is not a simple process, it is very complex. A simple process means one element working; a dialectical process means two polar opposites working in one direction. And though they appear as opposites, they create a symphony – they create a musical harmony. And that harmony is reality.

Man and woman, they mean humanity. Man alone is not humanity, nor is woman alone humanity. Humanity – the music, the synthesis we call humanity – is a dialectical phenomenon. Man and woman both work to create humanity, they both help to create humanity. And the way of their creating it is dialectical. They exist as polar opposites, and the inner tension between the two creates the energy for movement, for a process of further growth.

It is the same on every plane. If we go deep down with the physicist to the atom’s inner structure, then again, we find two polar opposites working there: the negative electricity and the positive electricity. Because of these two polar opposites, matter is created. If there were only positive electricity, the world would disappear immediately. If there were only negative electricity, there would be nothing. But negative electricity and positive electricity create an inner tension, and because of that inner tension matter exists.

The same is the case with the inner being of man also. This sutra is concerned with that. We discussed how awareness creates an inner sun. But this sutra talks about the creation of an inner moon. The sun is symbolic of the inner positivity and the moon is symbolic of the inner negativity. The sun is the inner male and the moon is the inner female. These words are symbolic, and for Indian yoga, particularly, they are very meaningful. By “sun” the outer sun is not what is meant, nor by “moon” the outer moon. These two words “sun” and “moon” are used for the inner universe.

Indian yoga divides man into two parts: the sun part and the moon part. Even one breath is known as the sun breath and another breath is known as the moon breath. And, really, this is one of the deepest findings. If you stop the moon breath and just breathe from the sun breath, your body will become hot. And such a great heat can be created, simply by using only one kind of breath, that it seems inconceivable in physiological terms. Among Tibetans there exists a heat yoga in which breathing is done only through this sun breath, not using the moon breath at all.

Ordinarily the breath is continuously changing, but Western medical science has not yet taken note of it. Breathing is not a simple process. It is a dialectical process. You are changing your nostrils within each hour. Between forty and sixty minutes, approximately, your nostrils change, and you begin to take your breath from the other nostril; then again it changes. When you need more heat in the body – for example, if suddenly you become angry – your sun breath starts.

Yoga says that when you are angry, if you use your moon breath and stop the sun breath, you cannot be angry at all, because the moon breath creates a deep coolness inside. The whole body is divided between the sun and the moon, and the mind is also divided between the sun and the moon.

So look at man not as one, because nothing can exist as just one. Everything exists through duality. You are divided into two: you have a negative part and you have a positive part. The positive is known as the sun in Indian symbology and the negative as moon. The negative is cool, silent, still. The positive is hot, vibrant with energy, active. The sun is the active part in you and the moon the inactive part, and if the active and the inactive both come to a deep equilibrium you are suddenly enlightened. If one is more emphatic, you have an imbalance, but if both are of equal force, then they balance each other, negate each other, and the moment both are of equal force, your inner balance is regained, and you reach to a different reality – the reality of the non-dual. That one nondual reality can be felt only when both of these dualities in you are balanced. Then you transcend them.

In the world we exist as duality. Beyond the world we exist as non-duality, as one. Think of yourself as a triangle; two angles exist in the world and the third angle beyond the world. Two angles belong to this world and one angle belongs to that world – the world of the Brahman. But if these two are in an imbalance, you cannot go beyond them. You go beyond them only when they regain balance. This balancing is nirvana, this balancing is moksha, this balancing is the centering. Awareness works to balance this duality. And the moment this duality is balanced, you cannot be reborn again – you disappear from the world.

You can be born again and again only if there is an imbalance. If the balance comes to a totality, if the balance becomes total, it is impossible to be born again. You disappear from the world; the body cannot exist anymore. Then you cannot re-enter a body again. So first we will try to understand what this inner sun is and what this inner moon is, and how they are balanced.

This sutra says, “Accumulation of the nectar of the inner full moon is naivedya, the food offering.” You need a full moon in you to offer to the Divine as a food. That only can be the food for the Divine – a full moon inside.

Awareness works in a double way. It creates a sun, and it also creates a moon. We talked about how it creates a sun inside. When you become aware of whatsoever is happening in you, of the innermost unconscious activities, you become Enlightened. The very cells of your body become conscious; you become light. Your consciousness reaches to the very pores of your body. Just like the rays of the sun reach into the earth, your inner awareness, once awakened, begins to work in every cell of the body and every fiber, every nerve of the body. Your whole body is filled with light. But this is only one part of awareness, this is only one process of awareness. Rays from your center also go to your periphery, to the circumference. The more your rays go to the circumference, the cooler your center becomes.

I do not know whether you have heard of a particular theory about the sun – the outer sun; I do not know whether it is right or not, but it is meaningful in helping to understand the inner reality. They say the sun at its deepest center is the coolest spot in the solar system; it is not hot at all. The heat is only on the periphery, on the circumference, not in the inner center of the sun. Because of helium gas around the sun, heat is created; because of the helium and its chain explosion of atoms, heat is created, and then the heat spreads to the solar family.

The sun has a body, and it is the center. The solar family is the body, and the earth belongs to the body as a cell. The heat goes to the solar family, it spreads. But the sun in itself is a cold thing, absolutely cold, and at its deepest center, it is the coldest spot in existence. It should be so because reality exists in polarities. If the sun is the hottest thing, it must have something inside it which balances the heat. Take a wheel that is just moving on the street: the wheel moves, but in the center the hub on which it moves remains still. The movement must have something non-moving in the center, otherwise movement will not be possible.

In this world of manifestations, everything exists within polar opposites. You are alive because you have death inside. If you had no death inside, you could not be alive. So do not think that one day it suddenly happens that death comes to you. It is an inner growth. It is not something that you meet, that you encounter – no! It is something toward which you are daily growing. One day the growth is complete, and you are dead. It is an inner phenomenon. You are alive with a death center. You cannot be alive without a death center.

Nothing exists without its polar opposite. Life and death are just two positive and negative realities. So it looks logical, dialectical also, but it is not yet proved that the sun has at its center a cold spot, an absolutely cold spot, the polar opposite to the heat on its circumference. It may be true; it may not be true: that is irrelevant. But inside it is absolutely true. When you become aware, the heat begins to travel toward your circumference. Each cell of your body will become heated, warm, because of the awareness penetrating. The second counterpart will be that your center of being will become cooler and cooler and cooler. That is the moon working. The sun is the warmth spreading, the light spreading.

And you must know that light has two qualities – light and warmth. Heat is just concentrated light; light is nothing but dispersed heat. So when light travels to your body, every cell will become warm, enlightened, aware. Sleep is a cold thing; night is a cold thing. That is why we sleep in the night: it is a cold time. And in the morning, with the rising sun, everything becomes warm, alive. Then it is difficult to sleep and easy to be awake.

When your circumference is cold, when each body cell is cold, asleep, your center will be a hot spot. Because of that hot spot in the center, you will be sexual, you will be angry, you will be greedy, you will be everything. Your center will be in a fever. This heat begins to travel. Of course, when heat leaves your center, it spreads; and the more it spreads, the less it is heat and the more it is light.

The sunrays on the earth are life giving. They have travelled much. If you go nearer and nearer to them, they will become death giving, because then they will not be warm: then they will be just pure fire.

As it is, the whole-body structure is just cold. You feel heat only in anger, in sex, in desire, in passion. That is not light, but simply a feverish phenomenon. Because of this, sex is felt as a release – because you lose a certain quantity of heat, and you are relieved; you lose a certain quantity of fever, and you are released. [. . . . ]

In sex you are releasing a particular amount of energy. They say that in one sex act you release 120 calories of heat – 120 calories! It is the same if you run fast for one mile. Then you will release the same amount of calories – 120. That is why there is much talk about whether sex can help heart disease. It can help! It releases energy. For persons who are well fed, it helps to delay heart disease. It releases energy, but it is not a solution. It is just a temporary arrangement. It just creates a leakage in your system from which energy is released.

Any day that you are angry your whole body is heated. It becomes feverish. The center releases anger: energy comes to the periphery. Ordinarily it is cold. The periphery is cold ordinarily, and the center is hot. The reverse will be the case when awareness happens to you. When you meditate and go deep within, when you become aware of every activity, everything will take a turn – an about turn. Your periphery will not go into anger, not go into sex, not go into greed, not go into passion. It will lose its coldness – its sleepy coldness. It will become warm, alive and aware. And because this energy is released to the periphery every twenty-four hours continuously, you will not need any anger or any sex.

A Buddha doesn’t need anger. It is absolutely useless for him because the very energy system has changed. He is using his heat for light and you are using your light for heat. The same fuel can be used to burn your house and the same fuel can be used to light it. The fuel is the same, but the direction changes. The inner fuel, the inner energy, becomes fire – suicidal. It burns you down, and ultimately you are just ashes. In the end, when death comes near you, you are just ashes. Everything is burnt out because you used your energy not as a light, but as a fire.

It becomes fire if it is concentrated in the center and is released only temporarily, whenever it is overflowing. In a sudden shock it comes to the periphery and is released. This is a very chaotic state. You go on accumulating it inside. Then one day it is overflowing, and you have to throw it.

We go on rationalizing our actions. When you get angry you say that someone has made you angry. No, really, it is that you were ready: you were overflowing inside. You do not know this because you were not aware. You were overflowing with a certain amount of energy which was waiting to be released. When someone abuses you, insults you, and you become angry, you think that this person is creating anger in you.

No, this person is simply giving you a situation and opportunity to release the overflowing energy. In a way, he is your friend, a helper. If he is not there you will be in a very difficult situation. If no one is giving you any opportunity to throw your energy, you will project, you will imagine something, and you will get angry with anything at all.

People get angry with their shoes; they will throw them. They can get angry with the door; they become violent with it. They can be angry with everything. When no opportunity is given, they can even become angry with themselves. They will begin to harm themselves or they will create some substitutes. […]

If you have energy in the center which is feverish, not transferred to the periphery, not used as light for the whole body and for your whole being, this is bound to happen. Every day you will accumulate energy, and then you will have to throw it. And this is nonsense! For the whole life you are doing this: accumulating, throwing; accumulating, throwing. What are you doing twenty-four hours a day? Just accumulating energy to throw it. Then when energy is there, the only problem is how to throw it. So we throw it in sex, in anger, in greed. When energy is thrown, then the only problem is how to accumulate it.

What sort of life is this? A vicious circle. With awareness the whole mechanism changes. With awareness, every moment your inner center is sending its energy to every pore of your body. And your body is not a small thing. It is a miniature universe. As above, so below: everybody is a small universe. And when I say “small,” I feel guilty because, really, it is not small. It is as vast as the universe. But because of our language, there are problems. The universe appears vast and your body appears small.

What is the difference between the two? They say that if we can throw out all space from the earth, if we can compress it and throw out the space, if the vacant space in it is thrown out, our earth will be just like a small ball. If we can throw out all the empty space from the Himalayas, they can be put into a match box. The material is not much, the matter is not much. The matter is very small, only the emptiness in it is vast.

So how to judge whether a thing is big or small? A very small thing can be blown up to any bigness if we put space in it. If we put as much space into your body as there is in the earth, you will be like the earth. So all the differences are of spaces – empty spaces. No difference is there really.

But when I say, “a small universe,” I mean only this: that everything that exists in the universe exists in you also. Whatsoever may be the measure, exactly everything exists in you also. So when your solar center, your sun, releases energy, it releases it in two ways. Either you are unconscious: then it releases it into sex, anger, greed and other diseases. Or if you are conscious, through this consciousness, heat is transformed into light: then it is released as light. Then you are under a shower of light continuously. Your every pore, your every cell, is bathed. There is a continuous shower of light. When this happens, your inner center begins to become cooler and cooler and cooler, and ultimately it becomes the coldest spot.

Hindus have a myth that Shankara lives on Kailash. Kailash is the coldest mythological spot– the coldest peak, the highest peak – and it is always covered with snow. This is just a symbolic way of saying that you have the coldest spot – a Kailash – in you. But you can know it only when the heat is transformed into light – never before. And the more you become aware, the more heat is transformed into light, and you begin to feel a moon inside. You begin to feel a cool, silent pool.

This sutra says:

Accumulation of the nectar of the inner full moon . . .

In the beginning, of course, you will feel it and miss it. It is just like the first day’s moon. Then there is the second-day moon, the third-day moon. You feel it and it is gone; then it grows again; then comes the full-moon night. Just like this, this inner spot of coolness grows. As your consciousness grows, your heat is transformed into light. As your periphery becomes enlightened, as your each and every cell is filled with light and becomes aware and awake, this inner moon grows. Sometimes you feel it and sometimes you miss it. Sometimes there is an inner cool breeze, and you know something has happened inside. You feel it, but then you miss it again. Then it goes on growing. Ultimately, when there is no unconsciousness left and your total energy has become light, you come to know the full moon.

Buddha has talked about this full moon in negative terms because it is the negative pole. So Buddha says that when this inner silence is achieved, it is nirvana. The word is very meaningful in reference to this sutra. Nirvana means “cessation of the flame”: a lamp is burning and then the flame disappears.

When your heat is totally transformed into light, there is no flame. That is why the moon symbol is used. The moon has light but no flame. That is why its light is cool. It is without flame, without fire. Light is there without any flame. The flame has disappeared.

When one first becomes acquainted with the sun, the light becomes like a flame, burning, hot. So if you analyze the life, the inner life, of a Buddha or of a Jesus, or of a Mahavir, many things will become apparent which are ordinarily hidden. For example, whenever a person like Buddha is born, the early life will be very revolutionary, because the moment one enters the inside the first experience is a fiery flame. The more Buddha grows older, the more the inner coolness is felt, the more the moon becomes perfect. Revolution is lost: then Buddha’s words are not revolutionary.

Jesus couldn’t get this opportunity. He was killed when he was still a revolutionary. That is why, if you compare Buddha’s sayings with Jesus’ sayings, there is a clear-cut distinction and difference. Jesus’ sayings look like that of a young man – hot! Buddha’s early sayings are also like that, but he lived to be eighty. He was not killed.

There are reasons. And one reason is this: India always knew that this happens: whenever a person goes in, the first expression is fiery, revolutionary, rebellious. That is why India never killed anyone. That is why India could never behave as Greeks behaved with Socrates and Jews behaved with Jesus. India knew much. It has known many, many such persons. India knows it is natural that whenever a Buddha enters into himself the first experience will be revolutionary. He will burst open, explode into a fiery flame. But then the flame will disappear, and ultimately there will be only a moon – silent, cool, with no fire but only light.

Jesus was killed. That is why Christianity has still remained incomplete. Christianity was based on early Jesus – on Jesus when he was just a flame. That is why Christianity has remained incomplete. Buddhism is complete. It has known Buddha in all stages. It has known Buddha’s moon in all stages – from the first day to the full-moon light. This crucifixion has been unfortunate for the West. It has proved one of the greatest misfortunes in history that Jesus was killed when he was only thirty-three, just a flame. The flame would have turned into moonlight, but the opportunity was not given. And the reason was only this: that the Jews were not aware of the inner phenomenon.

India knew many, many Buddhas, and it is always the case that whenever someone enters in, he first sees the fire, the flame, and the revolutionary spirit comes up. But if one goes on in and in, it dissolves, and then there is only silence – a moonlight silence.

This sutra says, “Accumulation of the nectar of the inner full moon . . .” This silence, this cool silence of the moon, Hindus have called nectar, the amrit, the elixir. It is not to be found somewhere else. It is in you. This nectar is in you! Once you are established in this nectar, once you are in this pool of cool moonlight, then you are a full moon inside. Then you have known both the polarities. You have known life; you have known death. You have known the sun; you have known the moon. You have known both the polarities – life and death. And once you have known both you have transcended both. That is why it is called the nectar, amrit.

Now you will not die. Now you are drunk with elixir; you cannot die. But you will not be alive in the old sense either. You have died in the old sense; you are reborn in a new meaning. Now death will not be a death and life will not be a life. Now you will be beyond both. [. . . . ]

This inner phenomenon is beyond birth and death. It is never born and never will it die, because that which is born can die and that which is not born cannot die. Death needs birth as a prerequisite, as a necessary prerequisite. You cannot die if you are not born. With this inner phenomenon – when sun and moon are balanced, when the dialectical process is finished, when the synthesis is complete – you come to feel in yourself something which is eternal.

That is why this sutra says, “Accumulation of the nectar of the inner full moon is naivedya.” Now you have become food yourself. Now you can offer yourself to the Divine. Now you are food. Now you are eternal. And why is it called “food,” naivedya? Because when you are eternal, you can become food for the eternal. And by “food” the ordinary meaning is also implied. When you take food in, it becomes one with you. It becomes your blood, it becomes your bones, it becomes you: you are your food! So when you have come to know this inner reality, the eternal reality, you can offer it as food to the universe, to the existence.

By this is meant that now you can become the bones of the universe, you can become the blood of the universe. Now you can be one with it just like food becomes one with you. The meeting is complete because you have become food for the Divine. Then you are naivedya. Then the offering can be accepted.

But you cannot offer your body as the food. It will be food, but for the vultures, not for the Divine. This cannot be offered as food for the Divine. Your body comes out of the earth and goes back to the earth. It can only be eaten by the earth again: “Dust unto dust.” It can only return to dust, so this body cannot be offered to the Divine.

One young seeker came to Gautam Buddha. He said, “I have come to offer myself to you. Accept me.”

Buddha asked him, “What are you offering – your body? But that is already offered and the earth will claim it, so how can you offer it to me? What are you offering? Tell me exactly!”

The man was confused. He said, “Whatsoever I have, I offer to you.”

Buddha asked him, “What do you have? What is it that belongs to you? Do your thoughts belong to you? They belong to the society; your mind belongs to the society. Your body belongs to your parents, to the earth, to the sky, to water, to fire, to many things – to the five elements. What do you have that you can offer to me?”

The man could not answer because he had nothing else. He could not think of anything else, so Buddha said, “Do not offer now. First find out what you are. And the moment you find it, it is already offered. Then there is no need to offer.”

When you find the inner balance that is known from finding the sun and finding the moon, only when you know both, they balance each other, and in that balance you escape from duality. And then the third angle of the triangle is touched. For the first time you are above yourself: you are the inner self. Now you can look down at yourself – at your sun, your moon, your body, your soul, your positivity, your negativity, your male, your female. Now you can look down at yourself – at the whole world of duality, at multidimensional duality – and now you can become naivedya, the food offering.

But now there is no need even to offer: you have already offered. Now there is no need to ask to be accepted: you are already accepted. You are one. Just as food becomes one with you, you become one with the Divine. And by “Divine” I mean the Whole, the Totality, everything – the very Existence.

So what to do? Transform heat into light: that is the mantra: transform heat into light! Do not use heat as heat: use it as light. When you think anger is coming to you, close your eyes and meditate on what anger is. Dig deep inside and find out the source from where it is coming. What we are doing ordinarily is just the opposite. When we get angry, we begin to think about the object of anger, about who has created it, and not of the source of anger, from where it is coming. When you get angry, close your eyes. This is the right moment to meditate.

Close your eyes, go in, and find out from where this anger is coming. Follow it to the very source. Go deep, and you will come to the source of heat from where the accumulated energy is bursting forth to go out.

Observe it; do not indulge in it – because if you indulge in it, it will be thrown out without being transformed. And do not suppress it – because if you suppress it, it will be thrown back to the original source which is overflowing. It cannot absorb it. It will be thrown back again with a more forceful movement. So do not suppress it and do not indulge in it. Just be conscious. Move inward to the source. This very movement slows down the process; this very observation transforms the quality of anger, because this calm observation is an antidote.

Anger and calm observation are different phenomena. When this calm observation enters into anger, it changes the energy, the very chemical composition of it, and the heat becomes light. That is the change: heat becomes light! Then the anger is neither thrown back to the original source which cannot contain it because it is overflowing, nor is it thrown to the object in a wastage, a foolish wastage. Then this energy neither moves out to the object of anger, nor is it suppressed back to the original source. With observation this energy becomes diffused. It moves to the periphery of your body as light. When diffused, it moves as light, and the very anger becomes ojas, the very anger becomes a light, an inner light.

So do not be disturbed and disappointed if you have much anger. That only shows you have much energy. A person born without anger cannot be transformed. He has no energy. So be happy that you have energy, but do not misuse it. Energy can be misused; it can be transformed. Energy in itself is neutral. It will not tell you what to do with it – you have to decide. This is the secret science of inner alchemy – to change heat into light, to change coal into diamonds, to change baser elements into gold.

These are just symbols. Alchemists were not really concerned with changing baser metals into higher metals, but they had to hide and they had to make an esoteric, secret symbology, because it was very difficult in past ages to talk about the inner science and not be murdered or killed. Jesus was killed: he was an alchemist. And the Christianity that developed, that followed Jesus, went quite against him. The Christian Church began to kill and murder those who were again trying alchemy.

This word “alchemy” is very beautiful. Our “chemistry” is born out of alchemy. The word “chemistry” comes from “alchemy,” but “alchemy” itself is a very deep and significant word. The word “alchemy” comes from Egypt. The old name of Egypt was “Khem” and “Al Khem” means “the secret science of Egypt.” The Egyptians were deep in the alchemy of inner transformation, in how to transform the inner chemistry. [. . . . ]

This process is alchemical. Observe anger, and anger is transformed into light. Observe sex, and sex is transformed into light. Observe any inner phenomenon which creates heat. Observe it, and through observation it becomes light. And if your every heat phenomenon is transformed into light, you will come to feel the inner moon. And when there is no heat left, then you have accumulated the nectar of the full moon.

And through this nectar you become immortal. Not in this body, not with this body: you become immortal because you transcend life and death both.

Then you are naivedya: then you are a food offering to the Divine – to the Total.

-Osho

From The Ultimate Alchemy, V.2, Discourse #5

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

Two Types of Freedom – Osho

You said last night that to have an upward flow of the mind one has to make a constant effort against past animal habits. Please explain what the difference is between effort against habits, and suppression.

Transformation of the mind is a positive effort. Suppression of the mind is negative. The difference is that when you are suppressing your mind, you are positively concerned with being against something. When you are transforming your mind, you are not directly concerned with being against something. You are positively concerned for something: the effort is for something, not against something.

For example, if you are fighting directly with sex, then it will be suppression. But if your positive effort is for transformation of sex energy, your positive effort is for something else, then it will not be suppression. Suppression means you have blocked the natural door for the energy, you have blocked the natural outflow, and you have not opened anything else. It is just a blockage. You are against anger, so you block anger – but where will the energy go? The energy that you have suppressed will create inner complexities. It will even be more perverted. So to be natural is better than to be perverted. Perversion is disease; to be natural is healthy.

Of course, just to be healthy is not the end. One can go even beyond health. So these are three things – suppression, being natural and transcendence. Just being natural is just being healthy. If you suppress and there is no positive outlet, no creative outlet for your suppressed energy, then you will become perverted. You are not healthy: you become diseased, you become a “dis-ease”.

Don’t be concerned negatively. Change the energy, the door, the path, the outlet, positively, and when there is a creative change, the energy that was flowing into sex will not flow. Whenever you can open a higher passage for it, it will flow through it. Whenever you can create something which is better than nature itself, then there is no suppression. This difference must be understood.

Only man can fall below nature; no animal can fall below nature. There are no abnormal animals. Sometimes animals also become abnormal, but only when they are with men – never alone. A dog can go abnormal, a horse can go abnormal, but never alone, never in their natural state. They can go abnormal with man, with man’s society. They can go abnormal in a zoo.

Man can fall down below nature. This may seem unfortunate. This is not, because this capacity comes with another capacity: man can transcend nature. No animal can transcend nature. The higher you can go than nature, the lower you can go also, in the same proportion. Every possibility is a double possibility. Every possibility opens two doors that are diametrically opposite. Unless you can fall below nature, you cannot transcend above it. And if you have the capacity to transcend nature, you will have the capacity to fall below it also.

Animals are just natural; they are neither perverted nor are they transformed. Never do they become sub-animal and never do they become super-animal. They are just animal. Man is a flexible potentiality. He can fall below nature, can be perverted, can become mad. He can transcend nature, can become superhuman, can become a Buddha.

Another thing: animals are born with their nature. In a way they are born perfect. An animal is born developed. Man is born without any nature and is not developed at the time of birth. He develops later. Then many possibilities open, and there is a great range of possibilities. Marl is born undeveloped – not only mentally, but even bodily he is born undeveloped. No animal child is born with an undeveloped body; the body is complete. That’s why, when the animal child is born, he is capable of living even without parents.

But man’s child is born undeveloped, and even in the physiological structure many things develop only after he is born – and it takes years. In the mother’s womb he is not completely developed, and because of that, the phenomenon of mother is born – because mothering continues. If the child is born completely developed, then there will be no mothering. The whole institution of the family developed – and, consequently, the whole society – the whole society was born because the child is born undeveloped. He has to be looked after, taken care of. Only after twenty years will he really be out of the womb. In these twenty years, he will need a family, loving care, a society, in which to develop This will be a greater womb.

Even when he is physically complete, mentally he is not. He will have to develop his mind. And, really, the average mind is never beyond fourteen years of age. The average mind remains below thirteen and a half. The average mental age is thirteen and a half. A person who is physically seventy is mentally thirteen and a half. The mind remains in such a primitive, primary state! Body becomes complete, mind remains incomplete, and spirit is not even touched. Man dies without ever having evolved any spirit.

Whenever someone asked Gurdjieff, “Have we souls?” he would say, “No! Sometimes it happens that a man has a soul. Sometimes only does it happen.” Gurdjieff would say, “only sometimes, rarely does it happen that a man has a soul. You are not even complete minds, so how can you have a soul?”

A body incomplete cannot have a mind, an incomplete mind cannot have a soul, and an incomplete soul cannot realize the Divine. Really, body works as a womb for the mind, and mind works as a womb for the spirit, then spirit works as a womb for God. So man is not born fixed, complete. He is born only as a multi-potentiality, and he can fall down – below nature. He can be more animalistic than any animal and he can be a superhuman being also, he can be just Divine. This range of possibilities is there.

Now you can do two things. If your mind becomes negative, suppressive, you go on fighting things which are not “good”. So you fight sex, you fight anger, you fight greed, you fight jealousy, you fight violence – you go on fighting. But when a person is fighting violence, he will never be non-violent, because to fight violence one needs to be violent.

You cannot fight violence without being violent, so your so-called nonviolent saints are all violent – deeply violent. Of course, their violence is not against others: their violence is against themselves. So no one objects; you can even applaud them. They are against themselves – very violent! You cannot fight violence. How can you fight violence without being violent? How can you fight anger without being angry? The very attitude to fight anger is a subtle anger. The very fight means you are angry. You are not at ease with your anger.

You can take a negative attitude, and you can go on fighting with things which are there. The more you fight them, the more you become like them. A person fighting sex will become sexual. His every gesture will become sexual. His sitting, his standing, his walking, will become sexual. He will be so much obsessed with fighting it that everything will take the tinge and color of sex.

When you fight with something, you have to use the techniques of your enemy. If you want to win, you have to use the same techniques that your enemy is using. So even if you win in the end, you will not win because the techniques will be the same. Really, you will have been defeated. Fight with anger, and if you are defeated then anger will be there. If you win, then also there will be anger. Only anger will have won against anger.

This negative fight will narrow down your consciousness more and more, and you will become afraid of everything. A negative mind is always in fear. Everything becomes a sin, and everything creates guilt, and everything creates fear. You are just in a deep escape from everything. Your consciousness will be narrowed down; it will not expand. You will become so much afraid that you will just hide within yourself, and everywhere around will be all the enemies. You have created them because you became negative.

This is suppression, and you will end in a madhouse. Everything that you have suppressed you will have to suppress continuously. The fight will be so continuous that you will not be able to do anything else. If you are fighting sex, then it will be enough – your whole life will be just a fight. If you are fighting greed, then it will be enough; even greed itself will not take so much energy as the fight with greed. Sex will not take so much energy, it will not dissipate so much energy, as fighting with sex – because sex is just natural, and the fight creates negativity: whenever you are negative, you only dissipate energy. Nothing is gained, nothing creative is achieved. You become self-destructive.

So always remember never to be negative; then there will be no suppression. But I have told you that to go against the current is the way for the mind to flow upward. What do I mean by going against the current? The difference is very subtle, but once felt, you can never lose the track.

For example, you are swimming in a river against the current. Two are the possibilities: one, you are just fighting the river, just fearful of being taken away by the river – taken down, taken in the flow – just afraid, trembling, fighting against the river. Then you will be defeated because this very attitude of fear of being taken away, of this trembling mind, cannot win. The defeat has set in How long will you be able to fight the current? The whole attitude is negative, and the river is very much positive, lifelike. But you are just fear and trembling. How can you win? Sooner or later, you will dissipate energy in the fight, and the current will take you away.

There is a second point, another dimension: you are not fighting the river because you are not fearful of it.

The first thing: fight is created because of fear. Remember, fight means fear. Fear comes first, then you begin to fight Your fear creates fight, your fear creates the foe. So basically, fear is at the root.

The second point: you are not fighting the river because you are not fearful of the river. You are not fearful of the river because you know that this is just natural that the river flows downward. Even if you flow downward, there is no guilt. It is natural. Even if you flow downward, it is not a defeat. It is a defeat only if you fight – then it becomes defeat. It is just natural: the river flows downward, and you flow with it. You can even enjoy it. You can feel the bliss of the flowing river – without any effort, just moving with the current, and the current takes you away. You can even conserve energy by flowing down naturally.

So the first thing: don’t be fearful of a downward flow don’t be fearful! Remember, it is natural, and it is better to flow with the current than to be defeated and taken away – because then the whole thing will lose the bliss that is possible naturally. So the first thing: to be natural is not a sin. Remember, because only then can whole effort become positive; otherwise, it will be negative.

To be natural is not a sin. Of course, it is not enough – mm? – that is another thing. But it is not a sin. If you are flowing naturally, that is okay. As far as it goes, it is okay. It is not a sin, it is not a guilt, it is not immoral – it is just healthy. But I say it is not enough. It is not enough because your possibilities are still more. They are not just to be healthy. You can be holy also.  So don’t be in fear – first thing. Don’t be in condemnation of nature, and then the negative attitude will not be there.

Now: don’t fight the current – play with the current. You are not fighting the river really; you are just training yourself to go upward. Feel the difference: you are not fighting the river – you are just filled with an abundance, you are just filled with energy and training the energy to go upward. Now the river is not an enemy. Rather, it is a friend, because it gives you the opportunity to go up, to play with it. Now the fight is not a fight at all. It is a game; it is a play. And the river is not your enemy, it is a situation. Life is a situation; it is not an enemy. Nature is a situation; it is not an enemy – it is an opportunity.

So try to train your inner energy to flow upward. You are not really concerned with the river going downward. You are concerned with a different river of energy going upward. Your mind is basically concerned with the inner energy which can go upward.

Feel thankful for the river – because it gives you a background, it gives you an opportunity, it helps you, it cooperates with you. You can weigh yourself only through its current. You can feel yourself only because the river is going downward. The feeling that you can go upward even when the river is flowing down gives you a very different quality of confidence – you can go upward. And now, even if you relax and flow with the river, you know very well that you can go upward. Now even this downward flow with the river is not a defeat. You have known something – something different from nature.

If you have glimpsed something different from nature even for a single moment, then you have known your potentiality. You may achieve it, you may not achieve it, but now you are not just part of the downward flow – the upward flow is possible. Now it will depend on you. You will be the decisive factor, not the downward current. Now there is no enmity! If the river flows downward, it is okay. You need not flow, you need not fight, you need not be in fear. You can go up.

Ultimately, there is another possibility in which tantra has gone very deep. Tantra says there is a possibility when you flow downward with the river and still you flow upward. Then only your body is carried away. How can the river carry you away? It can carry only the body. Tantra tried to create many downward rivers. So go into the river, feel the downward flow, flow with it, and remember constantly that you are not flowing.

I was saying that by fighting with sex you may be obsessed with sex totally. There is another possibility: even going deeply in sex, you may not be sexual at all. But that possibility opens only when your effort becomes positive. This is what I mean by positive effort against the current. It is not really against the current; it is for the consciousness. The current is being used just as an opportunity – just to weigh yourself, just to find yourself out – just to feel the upward, the downward is needed. The more forceful the current, the more forceful will be the feeling of the upward. So use nature as an opportunity, not as an enemy. Use instincts as friends, not as enemies They are friends. Only through your ignorance can you make them enemies. They are friends!

When someone reaches the original source, the peak of the river from where the river comes down, one is just thankful – thankful towards the river, grateful towards the river, because it is only through the river that he could achieve the source. So when someone reaches the peak of consciousness, one is thankful to every instinct – because they all helped, they all created the situation, they all created the opportunity. And they were flowing in the opposite direction. So their opposite flow is not really against you; the river is not against you. You can be against the river, and if you are against the river then you will never win. The greater possibility is that you may become perverted.

So use nature to transcend it. When you see there is anger, don’t fight anger directly. Weigh yourself, feel the energy, transcend the anger. Anger is there: remain silent, feel anger and feel yourself and weigh yourself – begin to flow upward. Take it as a play. Don’t be serious! Seriousness is a disease. If you take everything negatively, then you will be serious. Then everything disturbs you: “Why is there anger? Why is there greed? Why this? Why that?” Everything disturbs you and you become serious.

But our so-called saints are very serious. Really, I cannot conceive how a saint can be serious. He can only be playful. The seriousness shows he has been fighting. A soldier, of course, is bound to be serious. A saint need not be, must not be. Really, it disqualifies him from being a saint. A saint must be playful because nothing is against him – everything is for him. He can use everything for himself.

When I say, “effort against the current”, I mean play against the current – play! Try! See what you can do. The current is flowing downward. Can you flow upward? The anger is there. Someone has insulted you; the button has been pushed. Can you remain non-angry? Just play – play with the situation; don’t be serious. The moment you become serious, you become angry, really. Anger is very serious. Be playful, laugh, and see that the anger has been put on, that the conditioned mind has been put on. The anger is boiling there. Now, swim against the current. Take it as a play and see whether it is possible that someone has insulted you. the anger has been created in the metabolism. Can you still swim beyond it? Don’t fight it!

That’s why I say the difference is very subtle. Standing on the bank you cannot feel the difference – unless you have been in the river and experienced both. You are standing on the bank, and someone is fighting the river, and someone is just playing with the river, going upward. What difference can you see from the bank? Only one: one will be serious and the other will be playful – nothing else.

One who is in fear, afraid, fighting, will be serious – dead serious. How can he laugh? How can he play? If the current pushes him, he will feel defeated. The other one who is playing will not be serious at all. He can laugh: he can laugh with the river, he can laugh with the waves. And if the current pushes him down he will not feel defeated – he will try again. He will not be serious. Rather, he will begin to love the river because it pushes. He will begin to love the river! The difference will be inner, qualitative.

Suppression is a serious disease. Transforming oneself is a play – it is not serious at all. It is sincere. but never serious. It is authentic, but never serious. The quality of playfulness always remains there. It is the very spirit. With positivity you are creating something inside. The outward is just an opportunity; the inside creation is the thing. The emphasis is on something else. It is not on fighting the river: the emphasis is on the upward flow.

For example, I am writing something on a blackboard. I use a blackboard, but I write with white chalk, because on a blackboard the white chalk becomes clear in contrast. I can write on a white wall also. The writing will be there, but it will be as if it is not because the contrast will not be there. So the blackboard is not against the white chalk. It is not the enemy: it is the friend. Only when they are against it do the white lines become more white. On a white wall they will just lose themselves, they will be nowhere.

So who is the enemy – the white wall or the blackboard? Who is the enemy? The white wall is the enemy because you lose. The blackboard is not the enemy. Really, it is the friend. On it, the white becomes more white and clear and apparent. But when I am writing on a blackboard my emphasis, my intention is not to destroy the blackboard. Rather, my intention is to make the white lines clear. If you are trying to destroy the blackboard, then the blackboard is the enemy. See the difference: if you are trying to destroy the blackboard by whitewashing it, then you will feel the blackboard as the enemy.

You can whitewash it; then there will be a fight. But when you are writing something on it, your emphasis is not on the blackboard. Really, you never remember it, you need not remember it. It is not even in your awareness; it is only on the fringe. You write: the emphasis is on writing, not on destroying the blackboard. You remember what you are writing, and the blackboard helps. It never obstructs you.

So your emphasis must be on what you are trying to achieve. not on what you are against. If you are trying to achieve love, then be positively concerned with love, not with destroying hate. You can never destroy it! You will not be able to destroy hate. But the moment love is there, the whole energy is transformed. It begins to flow “lovewards”.

Don’t be negative about your energies, instincts, about anything. Be positive. And when you are positively creating something, be playful. It is your nature. Why fight it? you have created it. It is your effort. You wanted to create it, so you have created it. You have chosen it; it is your freedom. If you are angry, it is your choice – so why be against it? It is your choice! For lives and lives you have used anger, so it is there. Why be angry against it? No one has chosen it except you. So whatsoever you are, you are your own creation.

So it is nonsense to think in terms of negativity. Rather, feel that if you can create such a madman inside of you, then, really, you are capable of many things. If you can create such a hell, why not a heaven? But don’t be concerned with the hell. Be concerned with heaven and begin to create it. When the heaven is created you will not find the hell. It will have disappeared completely because it exists only as a negative, it exists only as an absence.

Because there is no heaven, hell has to be. Because there is no love, hate has to be. Because there is no light, darkness is there. Don’t fight with darkness: create the light, be concerned with the creation of light. When the light is there, where will the darkness be then? But you can fight directly. Don’t think about the light at all and begin to fight darkness directly. But no matter what you do, the darkness will never be destroyed. On the contrary, you may be destroyed in the fight. How can you fight darkness directly? It is an absence. Darkness only means that the light is not. So, please, create light.

The river is flowing downward, and you are flowing with it because you don’t know the upward flow. You have not known it: that is the only thing. Once you know it, all the rivers may flow downward, but you cannot flow downward. Then go with the river to the very sea, and you will not go downward.

It is difficult to sense the difference. That’s why so much suppression is in the world. No one has taught it – everyone has understood it. No one has taught it – neither a Buddha nor a Mahavir nor a Jesus nor a Krishna. This is a miracle. No one has taught suppression because no one can. It is absolute nonsense! But everyone has suppressed, and everyone is suppressing – because the difference is so subtle that whenever transformation starts, suppression is understood.

Whenever a teacher is born who begins to talk about transformation, followers gather who begin to understand about suppression – because it is so delicate, so delicate that unless you experience it there is every possibility you will misunderstand it. So try to experience it. The primary requirement: Don’t be against anything – be for! Be for something! Don’t be against something!

Really, when you are against something your future is not open. Only when you are for something does your future open. When you are against something you are clinging to the past. You can never be against the future. How can you be against the future? You can only be against the past. So let it be understood in this dimension also: when you are against, you are against the past. You are fighting with death. The past is no more, so why fight it? Create the future; be for something. Then you become positive.

There are two types of freedom: one is from something and one is for something. A young man is fighting with his parents to be free; he goes hippie. Then for some time the fight continues. The parents cannot do anything, and they forget. Then for the first time the boy begins to feel, “What to do?” because he was only against. The freedom was from the parents. It was not leading anywhere; it was not for something. It was just against something. […]

Life will be a boredom if you are always against and never for. Never be against: be always for. So when I say, “against the current”. I mean for something, for the peak. Sex is not bad, but the peak is better. So never think in terms of bad and good. Always think in terms of good and better. Mm? The bad must be thrown out; it must not be given any status in the mind. Always think in terms of good and better and better. Life is that.

Once you create good and bad, soon the good will drop and bad and worse and worse will follow. So nothing is bad, but better things are possible. Always remember, and struggle for better things. Then you have a positive flow.

-Osho

From The Ultimate Alchemy, V.1, Discourse #8, Q1

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

Inscape – The Ultimate Annihilation – Osho

Apparently sex was used by some Zen masters – for example, Ikkyu – as a way to transform energy. However, in no translation to date does evidence of this appear. It seems disciples excluded from their records about their master any mention of sex, for fear that their master would be misunderstood. Would you like to comment?

It is a long story . . .

Zen has moved from one country to another country, from one climate to another climate. It was born in India.

Hinduism, as such, in its early stages, was very natural, very existential. It had no taboos about sex, its seers and saints had wives. Celibacy was not an imposition; it came on its own accord through the natural experience of sex. Hinduism in its early stages was a very natural, very existential approach – almost like Zen.

But then there was another tradition which is represented by Jainism. It is a very puzzling question, and historians are almost silent, because nobody wants to stir any controversy. It is left to me to create all kinds of controversies.

Jainism is not a part of Hinduism; it is far more ancient than Hinduism. […]

And Jainism has never indicated that it belongs to Hinduism. Its whole approach is different. […]

Jainism has nothing in common with Hinduism. Its language is different, its conception about the world is different, it has no God. It does not have any yoga system, it does not have any Tantra. It is absolutely against sex, it is repressive of sex. But this repressive tradition of Jainism influenced the whole of India.

Of course, their saints looked far more deeply holy than the Hindu saints who were married, who had children. And not only children, but they were allowed to have concubines. These saints were just householders and lived in the forests, they had all the possessions that anybody can have. In fact, they had more possessions than ordinary people, because thousands of disciples brought presents to them. Each seer had become almost a university in himself. Around him thrived hundreds of teachers, disciples, visitors. But compared to the Jaina saint, these Hindu saints looked very ordinary.

Because of this comparison, Hinduism also became contaminated with the idea of repression of sex. Otherwise, you can see beautiful statues of men and women in deep embrace, in different postures even in the temples in Khajuraho, in Konarak, in Puri. Such beautiful sculpture you cannot find anywhere else. These temples were Hindu. Of course, sex was accepted by the Hindus – not only accepted, but a system of transforming the sexual energy, Tantra, was developed by the Hindu saints.

Jainism has remained a very small current, but very influential. It is one of the very important things to understand: the more miserable your saint, the holier he seems. If the saint is happy, joyous, loves life, and enjoys everything that existence allows him, you cannot think of him as very holy. To be holy, one has to be miserable.

In short, pleasure in any direction is condemned. Jaina saints looked more saintly, more holy, and Hindus felt that they had to change – and by and by, they did change, but not consciously. They started respecting the repressed person. Tantra became taboo, and Hindus became completely disoriented from their own sources. It happened again when Christianity came, and Hindus became even more repressed.

Gautam Buddha is the original source of Zen. He was born into a Hindu family, but he lived a very different life than is possible for ordinary people. From his very childhood he was allowed everything that he wanted; he was kept surrounded by beautiful girls; he was married. His whole life up to the age of twenty-nine years was wrapped in pleasure, in dancing, in music, in women, in wine, because the astrologers had predicted that this boy either would become a great saint or would become a great conqueror of the world.

And of course, his father was concerned and worried – he did not want him to become a saint. He was his only son, and he wanted him to become a world conqueror. He asked the astrologers how to prevent him from becoming a saint. Those idiots advised that he should be surrounded with pleasure: “Don’t let him know that there is misery. Don’t let him know that there is sickness, old age, death. Don’t let him know at all about these things. Just let him be drowned in music, in dancing, surrounded by beautiful girls. Make three palaces in different places for different seasons: a cooler place when it is summer, and a warmer place when it is winter . . . ”

And the father followed all the instructions of all those so-called wise men; in fact, their advice made him a saint. Twenty-nine years of continuous luxury – he became fed up. And suddenly, when he saw one sick man, it was a shock, because for twenty-nine years he had been kept unaware of sickness, old age, or death. And when he saw these things… how long can you prevent? Even twenty-nine years must have been very difficult for the father to manage him not to see a flower dying, or a pale leaf falling from the tree. In the night, the garden had to be cleaned of all dead flowers, dead leaves. Gautam Buddha should not know that there was something like an ending.

But this created exactly the situation in which he became first, exhausted, bored . . . so many beautiful women. By the age of twenty-nine years, he became as old as a man cannot experience in three hundred years. In twenty-nine years, he saw everything of luxury, of sex, of licentiousness. And when he suddenly came to know old age, and saw the body of a dead man being carried, he was shocked. He would not have been shocked if from the very beginning he had known that people become old – it is natural. These twenty-nine years of protection proved dangerous. When he saw the dead man, he inquired of his charioteer, “What has happened to this man?”

The charioteer said, “I am not allowed . . . in fact, the whole city has been told that you are passing by this road, so no old man, no sick man, no dead man, should be allowed on this path. How he has entered . . . but I cannot be untruthful, he is dead.”

And the second question immediately was, “Is the same going to happen to me?” And the charioteer said, “I don’t want to say it, but the truth is, it happens to all. Nobody is an exception.”

And just then he saw a sannyasin in orange robes. He asked, “What kind of man is this, and what kind of uniform . . . ?”

The charioteer said to him, “This man is in search of the eternal. He has become aware that this life is momentary, made of the same stuff as dreams are made of. Hence, he has started a search to see whether there is something inside him which will survive even death, or if there is nothing. He is an inquirer.”

Gautam Buddha was going to inaugurate the annual festival of youth. He told the charioteer, “Take me back home. I am no longer interested in the festival. I have been cheated. For twenty-nine years I have not been allowed to know the truth.”

That very night he escaped from the house. And because he was bored and fed up, those who followed him after his enlightenment obviously thought that sex was dangerous because it keeps you attached to the world. Naturally those who followed Gautam Buddha became escapists. For Buddha it was right, it was not an escape; it was simply getting out of the prison. But for others, it was not getting out of the prison. They had not even lived in the prison, they did not know the prison, they had not explored the prison. It had not come to their consciousness that it was a bondage. They simply followed Gautam Buddha. For them, sex became repressive, pleasure became contaminated.

But fortunately, Bodhidharma took Gautam Buddha’s message to China. That was a different climate. Tao was the climate in China, and Tao is very life affirmative. So in China, a new development happened: the meeting of Bodhidharma and Tao, a totally new concept. Zen is not just Buddhism; in fact, the orthodox Buddhists don’t accept Zen even as Buddhism, and they are right. Zen is a crossbreed between Gautam Buddha’s insight and Lao Tzu’s realization, the meeting of Buddha’s approach, his meditation, and Tao’s naturalness.

In Tao, sex is not a taboo; Tao has its own Tantra. The energy of sex has not to be destroyed or repressed, it is not your enemy. It can be transformed, it can become a great help in the search of your ultimateness. So in Zen, the idea of celibacy was dropped. There was no insistence on it, it was your choice, because the question is meditation. If you can meditate and live your life in a natural way, it is acceptable to Tao.

And then another transformation happened: Zen reached from China to Japan, where Shinto, the native religion, was very natural. There it became absolutely affirmative; hence it is not even talked about. There is no need, it is not a question.

You are asking, “Apparently sex was used by some Zen masters – for example, Ikkyu – as a way to transform energy. However, in no translation to date does evidence of this appear.” That does not mean that sex was a taboo. It was so natural that there was no need to discuss it. You don’t discuss urination. That does not mean you have stopped urinating. You start discussing things only when you start going against nature. If you are natural, there is nothing to discuss.

Life is to live, not to discuss.

Live as deeply and intensely as possible.

Ikkyu is certainly known to have used Tantra as a way of transformation. The sexual energy is nothing but your very life energy, it is only the name. You can call it sex energy, but by it ‘sex’, it does not become different, it is life energy. And it is better to call it life energy, because that is a wider term, more inclusive, more comprehensive. When you are going deeper into your center, that experience can be explained in many ways. It can be explained the way Hindus have explained it: it is realization of the ultimate, brahmabodh. But Brahma is not a person. The word is dangerous; it gives an idea as if we are talking about a person.

Brahma is simply the whole energy of the existence.

Jainas will call it self-realization, atmabodh, but their self is not synonymous with the ego. It is synonymous with Brahma. You are no more – in your self-realization you are no more. Buddha and Mahavira were contemporaries, and Buddha insisted again and again, that if you are no more, then why do you call it self-realization? That gives a very distorted description. Call it no-self realization. But Mahavira has his own reasons not to call it no-self realization – people are afraid of no-self realization; if you are going to be nothing, then it is better to remain something. And Mahavira knew that it does not matter whether you call it self-realization or not, you are going to disappear. But keep a positive word which is more attractive.

I can see Mahavira’s compassion in it, but I also can see Buddha’s truthfulness. He says, “If it is really no-self realization, then call it what it is. Don’t deceive people.”

Tantra will call it samadhi.

The names are different, but it is exactly life, pure life without any contamination. Once you reach to your center you can think in different categories. You can use the yoga method, then you can say this is the very center of your being: sambodhi. You can use the Tantra method, then you can say this is the center of your sex energy. And sex energy in Tantra is equivalent to life energy. These words have unnecessarily kept people discussing and discussing.

The reality is one. It is better to experience it.

Zen masters don’t talk about it for the simple reason Zen is a very natural phenomenon. It is not anti-life; it is not escapist. But most of the Zen masters have left their household life. Tired, seeing no point in the marketplace, they moved to the mountains. It was not against the marketplace, it was simply that the mountains were more silent, more peaceful. They allowed you to be yourself without any interference.

Sex is not mentioned in the records, for the simple reason that there is no reason to record it, it is accepted. If one has lived it, and there comes a time when you have outgrown it, then there is no point to go on and on, tired and disgusted. While it is beautiful, enjoy, and when it becomes a tiring, disgusting phenomenon, then just leave it for others. But there is no reason to condemn it.

A natural person simply passes beyond stages without condemnation. He has lived life, he has known life, now he wants to know something more. He wants to know something of the eternal. He has reproduced children, now he wants to know who he is in his innermost core. He has lived the world of the outside, he has been a Zorba. Now a moment comes of turning in. The outside reality has been explored without any inhibition, then you will naturally one day turn inwards.

It is the inhibition, the repressive mentality, that goes on forcing you to think of sex, because you have never lived it. Your Christianity, your Jainism, did not allow it, or allowed it and then created guilt in you that you were doing something which should not be done. Then you are living halfheartedly.

And when a thing is lived halfheartedly you never transcend, you never go beyond it. Dance to the moment when you stop automatically.

Live everything in life so you can transcend joyfully without any guilt. That is difficult for people who have been programmed with taboos: sex should not even be mentioned; death should not be mentioned either.

Sex and death are the two points: one is the beginning, the other is the end. People are kept unaware of both. About sex, it is dirty; about death, it is dangerous and gloomy . . . don’t talk about it. It is always somebody else who dies, don’t be worried. But in reality, you are born out of sex, and you are going to die. That which is born out of sex is going to disappear in death. Sex and death are the two points of the same energy. That which appears in sex, disappears in death. And both have to be understood, because both are the most important points in your life, and both have to be accepted and lived.

But religions like Christianity and Jainism are very repressive. Their very repression makes people guilty, sinners. They cannot live their life with totality, intensity, and they cannot meditate, because meditation’s first condition is to be total, to be total in everything. Then everything becomes meditation. Even making love, if you are total, then it becomes a meditation.

My own understanding about meditation is that in the beginning it must have happened to someone while making love, because that seems to be the only thing in which you can come to such a totality that time stops, mind stops, and everything becomes absolutely silent.

But that silence can be created by meditation also. The secret is known through sex, that if there is no time and no mind, you have entered into the ultimate. Through sex you enter for a single moment, and you fall back into the temporary. Through meditation you can remain in the ultimate, twenty-four hours around the clock, in an orgasmic joy. Your every moment becomes a dance. Knowing that you are not, there is nothing to fear.

Knowing that you are the whole, there is nothing to lose.

Sex is not talked about by Zen masters, simply because it is taken for granted.

One of our sannyasins has been working with John Stevens, author of One Robe, One Bowl.

He claims to have found ancient manuscripts never before published, in which Zen masters speak of sex as a tool for transformation. He has compiled a book of this material, which he is calling Lust for Zen. He anticipates that he is going to “upset Buddhists everywhere” by publishing this material.

Do it quickly, because without upsetting, it is very difficult to bring people to come to a settling. First upset, only then can they settle down in a zazen.

But there is nothing upsetting to the real Zen masters; only Buddhists may be upset. The Buddhists of India will be upset, because they have borrowed the sex-repressive idea from Jainism, from Hinduism, and from Buddha’s own experience.

But you cannot afford Buddha’s experience, because he was first a Zorba. Even Zorba was not such a Zorba as Buddha. His father found as many beautiful girls as possible from his whole kingdom . . .  and he became tired.

One night after much drinking and dancing, everybody had fallen asleep. He looked around – those beautiful faces… Foam was falling from their mouths, their makeup was upset, their hairdo was not in the right place . . . and it was disgusting. But that kind of experience is not available to everybody.

It should be available to everybody, then at the age of thirty everybody is going to escape from the world. But this escape will not be out of fear.

This escape needs a new name. It is inscape. One has lived outside, now one wants to live inside. One is bored of repetition, but because of the guilty, life-negative religions predominating over humanity, nobody ever comes to meditation through his love life. Nobody comes to an orgasmic experience where time stops, where mind stops, where suddenly a new sky opens its doors.

Tantra has used the method in India. And in China, Tao has used its own different technique of Tantra to bring people through sexual experience to a meditative state. But it is not a necessity that you should come to a meditative state through sexual experience. You can come by the direct route, by the immediate . . . this very moment, through meditation.

Sex is a long way. Nothing is wrong if somebody chooses the long way; if he enjoys the journey, there is no harm. But if somebody wants a shortcut, then meditation is available as a shortcut. It is really reaching to the same experience, but by a shortcut.

And as far as my sannyasins are concerned, there is no question of renouncing anything unless something renounces you. Many things will renounce you. By and by, you will start seeing – “Why go on playing these games . . . ?” Sooner or later, you will be sitting silently, doing nothing, rejoicing in the ultimate annihilation, disappearing into the ocean, losing all your boundaries.

[…]

The sutra:

Beloved Osho,

A monk asked Daiten, a disciple of Sekito, “How is it when one meets the person-in-there?”

Daiten replied, “The person is not in there anymore.”

When you go in, you don’t meet any person, you simply meet the whole; you simply meet the impersonal existence. You are only on the surface; once you go deeper you disappear. The deeper you go, the less you are. And when you are not, then only have you touched the real depth.

You don’t meet any person, you simply meet the impersonal existence.

Daiten was right when he said, “The person is not in there anymore if you go in.” It is only when you don’t go in . . . it is a conception, an idea. If you remain in the mind, you remain a person. The moment you go beyond the mind, the person starts melting. There comes a point you are no more, everything is – you have become one with the whole.

The monk asked, “What is ‘in there’? If there is no person, then who is there?”

Mind cannot conceive of nothingness; it can only conceive of something limited. If the person is not there, then who is there? God is there?

Buddha is reported to have said, “If you meet me in you, immediately kill, immediately cut my head! Because you have loved me, when you meditate, the image of your master may come to you. It is just an image, don’t let that image prevent you from meeting the whole. Cut the head.”

The monk asked, “What is ‘in there’?”

Daiten said, “Don’t ask that question. That is the only question that cannot be answered. You better go in and see who is there.”

Daiten is a very clear master. Without much philosophy he simply says, “Don’t ask that question. Simply go in and see.”

The monk then asked, “In the ocean of misery, the waves are deep. With what can we make a boat?”

Daiten replied, “Make a boat with wood.”

The monk said, “If we do, can we go across the ocean?”

Daiten replied, “The blind are still blind, the dumb are still dumb.”

He is showing his frustration. This monk cannot understand. You don’t have to go to the other shore of the ocean, you have to melt in the ocean. You don’t need a boat for melting. The other shore will be just like this shore. You can change places, but that is not going to change your inner space.

Hence, he said, “Whatever the masters say, people still remain blind and still are dumb.” They don’t change. They go on listening. If it is a philosophy, they can understand it, but if it is an existential experiment, they simply remain blind, deaf and dumb.

Going in is not a philosophical question. Who is there inside you? What is the point of asking when the inside is yours? Go in and see who is there. You will not find any person. You will find a pure nothingness, an existential grace, a beauty, a song without sounds, a great drunkenness, a tremendous ecstasy. You will not find any person, just experiences, but those experiences are going to transform you. Those experiences are going to change your individuality, because you will now know there is absolute silence inside, no individuality.

Then, if somebody insults you, you will not feel insulted, because you don’t exist. He is throwing stones at nothing. Then even in your ordinary life you will function like a buddha – aware, alert, compassionate.

On another occasion a monk from Korea came to see Daiten. When the monk unrolled the sitting mat to make a bow, Daiten said, “Before you leave your country, get the single phrase!”

The monk had no answer. He could not understand what Daiten was saying to him. He is saying, “Before you leave your country, get the single phrase!” By “country” he does not mean Korea. By country he is meaning, before you go from your personality, the boundary that you have lived in, get one phrase. What is that phrase?

Rather than asking, the monk had no answer. He could not understand Daiten. That single phrase is zazen. Before you leave your personality and your individuality and your mind, remember to sit silently without asking any question, and without creating any hallucination, and without creating any dream.

Just get one thing: sitting silently.

In Japanese it is one word: zazen.

Daiten then came forward and said, “If you ask about the single phrase here,

I will answer with two phrases.”

He is saying that if you don’t go in by yourself, and somebody else has to show you the way, the oneness of inside becomes two, a duality of the mind. Anything said is dual; only the unsaid is non-dual.

You say day and it includes night; you say life and it includes death. You say man and it includes woman.

You say this – and it includes that.

You cannot say anything without implying its opposite. But inside, you can experience oneness without any duality – a pure silence not against sound, a beauty not against ugliness, a truth not against lies.

The function of the master is not to tell you what is in, but to lead you inwards, force you inwards. All that is said is in the service of that which cannot be said.

Basho wrote:

The wild heron
Sleeping –
Undisturbed nobility.

Have you seen a wild heron sleeping? Basho says, “undisturbed nobility.” That’s what you are when silence happens to you – an undisturbed nobility. Suddenly you become an emperor. The insight gives you the whole universe. It takes away all that is false, and it gives you all that is truth, all that is beauty, all that is grace, all that is sheer joy.

A man like Basho – a man of deep meditation – will start seeing it everywhere. Even in a heron sleeping, he will see an undisturbed nobility. In a wild bird on the wing, he will see immense freedom.

In the sky, he will see his own nothingness.

He will start having a new sight about everything – even a wildflower will become more beautiful.

Jesus says, “Look at the wild lilies in the field. They are more beautiful than even Solomon the emperor was in all his splendor.”

Solomon was an ancient Jewish king of great beauty, and of great understanding. In the whole of the Holy Bible, only his song, Solomon’s Song, has some truth; otherwise, everything is ordinary. But Jesus says, “These wild lilies are more beautiful even than the splendor of the great King Solomon.”

To the man of meditation, everything becomes totally new and fresh, young, alive. He radiates love and compassion and joy.

-Osho

From The Zen Manifesto: Freedom from Oneself, Discourse #8

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com  or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

Neither Licentiousness nor Repression – Osho

Do you profess licentiousness in life?

I don’t profess anything. I simply clarify things to you, I don’t profess. I am not giving you any ideology; I am only giving you insight. Take note of the difference. An ideology has to be professed; an insight has to be imparted. I simply make things clear to you, I simply help you to clarify things. I am not giving you a dogma. I am not giving you a theory that will solve all your problems – there is none. I am simply telling you: Open your eyes, become more aware. And that awareness will help you in every kind of difficulty, in every kind of problem. That awareness will be like a light in the dark night. And wherever you go that light will remain with you, you will be able to see. I don’t give you a theory. You have depended too much on theories. Theories are cheap because they don’t require any transformation on your part. Dogmas are very easy to accept. Then you have an idea which you go on trying to fit everywhere in your life, and you start depending on the idea.

That dependence on the idea makes you more and more blind. If you are a Christian, you are blind, if you are a Hindu you are blind, if you believe in any dogma you are blind. Because only blind people believe.

A blind man believes in light. But a man who has eyes, he does not believe in light, there is no need.

He knows light – why should he believe? You don’t believe in light, you don’t believe in the sun, you don’t believe in these trees, you know. But a blind man, he believes that trees are green, that the rainbow has seven colors, that the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening, that there are colors in the world. A deaf man believes in sounds; you don’t believe. Belief is an ugly word.

I help you to see. That’s what Buddha says: ‘Ihi passika – Come and see.’ You see the difference? Jesus says ‘Come and follow me.’ Buddha says ‘Come and see.’ Both are enlightened – but Jesus must be talking to a very low level of consciousness, he has to say ‘Come and follow me.’ ‘Follow me’ means believe. Buddha must be talking to highly evolved conscious people, he says ‘Come and see.’ There is no question of following anything, there is no question of believing in anything. He just says ‘I have seen – come and see through my eyes. Just come close to me and see through my window. Maybe that will give you an insight and you can open your own window.’

I also say to you: Ihi passika – Come and see. Seeing is a totally different matter. I don’t teach anything; I am not a teacher. In fact I destroy teachings. I don’t help you to learn anything, in fact I help you to unlearn. You have already learned too much.

But the question is relevant. Many people interpret me in that way, they think I am professing licentiousness. I am neither professing licentiousness nor am I professing repression I am simply helping you to see a saner way of life. Licentiousness is insane, as much insane as repressiveness. Christianity created a very repressive atmosphere in the West. That has created licentiousness. For your sinners, your saints are responsible. The world will never be without sinners unless it decides to be without saints. The saint creates the sinner, the saint cannot exist without the sinner. They are partners, they are together.

The Vatican has some deep support for the playboy. If you are repressive, you will create pornography. If you are repressive, people will start finding ways and means to go to the other extreme. Because normality is not allowed. Life has been forced to be either white or black – either be a saint or be a sinner. The priests have not allowed you the possibility that there is something else too. Life really is grey. It is neither black nor white. Black and white are two extremes of grey, but life remains grey.

I am neither teaching licentiousness nor repressiveness. I am simply helping you to become sane.

It is your life; it is nobody else’s life. And you have to be sane about it, otherwise you will miss the great opportunity, the great blessing, the great gift of God. Don’t be repressive, otherwise one day, in this life or in some other life, you will become licentious. And don’t be licentious, otherwise in this life or in some life you will become repressive. The pendulum goes that way. The pendulum has to stop in the middle. And have you watched? If the pendulum stops in the middle, the clock stops. When the mind stops in the middle, time stops. When the mind stops in the middle, the world stops. And in that silence, one knows God.

But listening to me – and you are all carrying a thousand and one repressions – you listen through the screen of your repressions, and you interpret that it is licentiousness. Your unconscious is too full of repressions. I am not teaching anything like that, I am simply saying to be a man is enough. You need not be a saint and then you will not need to be a sinner. Be natural. Don’t interfere with your nature, don’t mold it into pattern. Don’t be ideological and don’t be always hankering to be somebody else. Don’t hanker for betterment, just be natural and relax into your being. And whatsoever is natural is good.

This is the meaning of Tao, this is the meaning of Zen. But you have your repressed unconscious.

And when you hear me, naturally you hear from the repressed unconscious. That repressed unconscious immediately gives colors, changes meanings, interprets.

I have heard:

A Cockney was in great difficulties over which of his two girlfriends he should marry. One was called Margaret and the other Maria. The first was rich but very ugly, and the second was poor but immensely beautiful. So he was divided. The head was saying ‘Marry the rich girl and then you will have no problems. And what is ugliness? You will become accustomed to it. And even beauty is so fragile – today it is there, tomorrow it may not be there. And if you get even the most beautiful woman, after a few days you become accustomed to it and the beauty disappears. It is only a question of a few days. Marry the rich girl.’ But the heart was longing for the beauty. And he was going nuts.

A friend said to him ‘Ere, Bert, why don’t you go to Lourdes?’

‘Lourdes?’ said Bert. ‘Where’s that?’

‘It’s in France’ said his friend. ‘It’s a sort of shrine where people go to get cured. But maybe you could find the answer to your problem there – you know, a sort of miracle from heaven!’ So Bert saved up and went over to Lourdes. A week later he was back, and his friend asked him how he had got on. ‘Great!’ said Bert. ‘I got the answer all right. I went into the big church place – and there, up at the altar, was a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes with a big banner next to it, saying “Ave Maria”.’

So he married Maria, the beautiful girl.

When you hear, it depends on you what color you will give it to it. You are already too full of repressions, you are ready to become licentious – so when you hear me you interpret it as licentiousness. It is nothing of the sort. Be very careful with me.

I have heard:

It was some time since Patrick and Michael had met, so Michael was anxious to hear if there had been any addition to Patrick’s family.

‘Not one’ answered Patrick very sadly. ‘We’ve still got the four.’

‘Still four?’ said Michael. ‘Are you at the birth-control or something?’

‘Not exactly’ replied Patrick. ‘You see, it’s all to do with this new hearing-aid.’

‘What do you mean – this new hearing-aid?’

‘Well, you see, when Bridget and I would get to bed, I’d say to her “Darling, is it sleep or what?” And Bridget would reply “What?” And we would make love. But now, with this new hearing-aid of hers, when I say to her “Well, dear, is it sleep or what?” she just turns on her side and says “Sleep” and off she goes.’

That ‘what’ . . . You already have an idea, and the interpretation follows. Listen to me directly, just put your mind aside.

That’s why so many therapy groups are being run here. Just to help you to put your mind aside. Just to help you to see your unconscious, to help you to cathart your unconscious, to vomit it. So that you can become more and more empty and can listen to me through your emptiness. Otherwise, you are carrying so much rubbish, rubbish of the ages. You have been going through so many ideals, ideologies, you have accumulated so much nonsense. And when you hear me, that nonsense comes in-between.

I am neither for repression nor for licence, they are both aspects of the same coin. The whole coin has to be thrown into the Ganges. You have to become natural, you have to accept all that you are.

In that acceptance is flowering. All is good that God has given to you. How can it be otherwise? – it is a gift from God.

So listen to me, not through your thoughts, your prejudices. Listen to me without your prejudices, just put the mind aside. While listening to me don’t go on interpreting, while listening to me get en rapport with me. Don’t be in a hurry to conclude; that hurry is harmful. You are in such a hurry to conclude, you want to achieve some results so fast, that’s why you go on missing many things. There is no hurry and there is no need to conclude right now. While listening to me, first listen totally.

And then later on you can think about it. If you have listened rightly then your thoughts will not be able to distort the meaning, they will not be able to distract you. Once you have listened rightly, without any interpretation, without any thinking about it, then later on you can bring your whole mind to it. There will be no problem, you will have followed what I have said to you. Otherwise, while listening to me you are continuously thinking by the side. While you are listening to me you are thinking – many thoughts are going, rushing in and out. They are very, very dangerous. Then whatsoever conclusion you arrive at through them will be your conclusion, will not be mine.

But it feels good to throw the responsibility on me. You have become so disrespectful towards yourself that you always throw the responsibility on somebody else. You have forgotten that you are responsible to yourself. Only you. All that happens to you and all that is going to happen to you is going to happen through you. You are wholly and solely responsible for your life. Nobody else is the savior.

And you cannot throw your responsibilities on me. If you want to be licentious be licentious. I am nobody to interfere – who am I? If you want to be repressive, be repressive. But don’t impose meanings on what I say.

-Osho

From This Very Body the Buddha, Discourse #9, Q3

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com  or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

Old Age is the Last Opportunity – Osho

Why is there such an expression as “The dirty old man”? I am getting on and I suspect people are beginning to think about me in exactly those words. 

It is because of a long, long repressive society that the dirty old man exists. It is because of your saints, your priests, your puritans, that the old dirty man exists.

If people are allowed to live their sexual life joyously, by the time they are nearing forty-two—remember, I am saying forty-two, not eighty-four—just when they are nearing forty-two, sex will start losing its grip on them. Just as sex arises and becomes very powerful by the time one is fourteen, in exactly the same way by the time one is forty-two it starts disappearing. It is a natural course. And when sex disappears, the old man has a love, has compassion, of a totally different kind. There is no lust in his love, no desire, he wants to get nothing out of it. His love has a purity, an innocence; his love is a joy.

Sex gives you pleasure. And sex gives you pleasure only when you have gone into sex; then pleasure is the end result. If sex has become irrelevant—not repressed, but because you experienced it so deeply that it is no more of any value…. You have known it, and knowledge always brings freedom. You have known it totally, and because you have known it, the mystery is finished, there is nothing more to explore. In that knowing, the whole energy, the sexual energy, is transmuted into love, compassion. One gives out of joy. Then the old man is the most beautiful man in the world, the cleanest man in the world.

There is no expression in any language as the clean old man. I have never heard it. But this expression, the dirty old man, exists in almost all languages. The reason is that the body becomes old, the body becomes tired, the body wants to get rid of all sexuality, but the mind, because of repressed desires, still hankers. When the body is not capable, and the mind continuously haunts you for something which the body is incapable of doing, really the old man is in a mess. His eyes are sexual, lusty; his body dead and dull. And his mind goes on goading him. He starts having a dirty look, a dirty face; he starts having something ugly in him.

It reminds me of the story of the man who overheard his wife and her sister discussing his frequent out-of-town business trips. The sister kept suggesting that the wife should worry about her husband being unchaperoned at those posh resort convention hotels with so many attractive, unattached career women around.

“Me worry?” said the wife. “Why, he’d never cheat on me. He’s too loyal, too decent… too old.”

The body sooner or later becomes old; it is bound to become old. But if you have not lived your desires they will clamor around you, they are bound to create something ugly in you. Either the old man becomes the most beautiful man in the world, because he attains to an innocence the same as the innocence of a child, or even far deeper than the innocence of a child — he becomes a sage. But if desires are still there, running like an undercurrent, then he is caught in a turmoil.

A very old man was arrested while attempting to sexually molest a young woman. Seeing such an old man, eighty-four, in court, the magistrate reduced the charge from rape to assault with a dead weapon.

If you are becoming old, remember that old age is the climax of life. Remember that old age can be the most beautiful experience, because the child has hopes for the future, he lives in the future, he has great desires to do this, to do that. Every child thinks that he is going to be somebody special — Alexander the Great, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong — he lives in desires and in the future. The young man is too much possessed by the instincts, all instincts, exploding in him. Sex is there. Modern research says that every man thinks once at least about sex every three seconds. Women are a little better, they think of sex every six seconds. It is a great difference, almost double; that may be the cause of many rifts between husbands and wives.

Once every three seconds sex somehow flashes in the mind. The young man is possessed by such great natural forces that he cannot be free. Ambition is there, and time is running fast, and he has to do something and he has to be something. All those hopes and desires and fantasies of childhood have to be fulfilled; he is in a great rush, in a hurry.

The old man knows that those childish desires were really childish. The old man knows that all those days of youth and turmoil are gone. The old man is in the same state as when the storm has gone and silence prevails. That silence can be of tremendous beauty, depth, richness. If the old man is really mature, which is very rarely the case, then he will be beautiful. But people only grow in age, they don’t grow up. Hence the problem.

Grow up, become more mature, become more alert and aware. And old age is the last opportunity given to you: before death comes, prepare. And how does one prepare for death? By becoming more meditative.

If some lurking desires are still there, and the body is getting old and the body is not capable of fulfilling those desires, don’t be worried. Meditate over those desires, watch, be aware. Just by being aware and watchful and alert, those desires and the energy contained in them can be transmuted. But before death comes, be free of all desires.

When I say be free of all desires I simply mean be free of all objects of desires. Then there is a pure longing. That pure longing is divine, that pure longing is God. Then there is pure creativity with no object, with no address, with no direction, with no destination — just pure energy, a pool of energy, going nowhere. That’s what buddhahood is. Atisha calls it bodhichitta, buddha consciousness.

-Osho

From The Book of Wisdom, Discourse #26

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

Also read a related post Don’t Get Stuck in the Outer. 

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com  or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

Don’t Get Stuck in the Outer – Osho

You ask: “Do I rightly understand you that even if you and your beloved can transmute your sexual energy into spirituality, that this relationship will not be satisfying either?”

Yes, it will not be satisfying either. In fact, it will create in you the greatest discontent that you have ever felt, because it will make you aware how much is possible. It will make you aware of the tremendous moment of that orgasmic unity, of that spiritual transmutation. But it will remain only momentary. With the outer, nothing can become permanent. And once the moment is gone, the higher was the peak, the lower will be the valley, and you will fall deep down in darkness. But it will make you aware of one thing, that if male and female energy can have a meeting which is non-temporal, then there will be eternal contentment.

How to manage it? Out of this question the whole science of Tantra was born. How to do it? It can be done. It cannot be done with the beloved outside — it cannot be done without the beloved outside, remember that too, because the first glimpse comes from the beloved outside. It is only a glimpse, but with it comes a new vision that, deep down inside yourself, there are both the energies present — male and female.

Man is bisexual — every man, every woman. Half of you is male and half of you is female. If you are a woman, then the female part is on top and the male part is hidden behind, and vice versa. Once you have become aware of this, then a new work starts: your inner woman and inner man can have a meeting and that meeting can remain absolute. There is no need to come back from the peak. But the first vision comes from the outer.

Hence Tantra uses the outer woman, the outer man, as part of inner work. Once you have become aware that you have a woman inside you or a man inside you, then the work takes on a totally new quality, it starts moving in a new dimension. Now the meeting has to happen inside; you have to allow your inner woman and man to meet.

In India we have had that concept for at least five thousand years. You may not have seen the statues of Shiva as Ardhanarishwar: half man, half woman. That is the picture of everybody’s being, inner being. You must have seen shivalinga: it symbolizes the male. But shivalinga is placed in the female sexual organ, it is not alone; they are together. That again represents the inner duality, the inner polarity, but the polarity can meet and merge.

With the outer, the merger will be only for the moment. Then great frustration and great misery… and the higher the moment, the deeper will be the darkness that follows it. But the meeting can happen inwardly.

First learn that the peak is possible, and then feel grateful to the woman who has given you the peak, feel grateful to the man. Tantra worships the woman as the goddess and the man as the god. Any woman who helps you to attain to this vision is a goddess, any man that helps you to attain to this vision is a god. Love becomes sacred because it gives you the first glimpses of the divine. Then the inner work starts. You have worked without, now you have to work within.

Tantra has two phases, two stages: the outer, the extrovert Tantra, and the inner, the introvert Tantra. The beginning has to be always from the without; it is because we are there, so we have to start from the place we are and then move inwards. When the inner man and woman have met and melted, and when you are no more divided inside, you have become one — integrated, crystallized, one — you have attained. This is enlightenment.

But right now everything is upside down. You have completely forgotten the inner; the outer has become your whole life. This is as if somebody is standing on his head and has forgotten completely how to stand on his feet again. Now, standing on your head your life will be really difficult. If you want to go somewhere, if you want to do something, everything will become very, very difficult, almost impossible.

And that is what is happening. People are upside down, because the without has become more important than the within. The without has become all-important, and the within is completely ignored, forgotten.

The real treasure is within. From the without, you can get only hints of the inner treasure; from the without, only arrows pointing to the innermost core of your being; from without, only milestones. But don’t cling to a milestone, and don’t think that this is the goal and you have arrived.

Remember that the ordinary man is living a very abnormal life, because his values are upside down. Money is more important than meditation, logic is more important than love, mind is more important than heart. Power over others is more important than power over one’s own being. Mundane things are more important than finding some treasures which death cannot destroy.

Larry went to an Italian restaurant, and just as the waiter was about to serve, he tripped and dumped a whole bowl of minestrone right in Larry’s lap.

Was Larry angry? Was he even slightly ruffled?

He simply looked up with great dignity and disdain and said, “Waiter, I believe there is a soup in my fly.”

Things are completely upside down. The fly is not in the soup, the soup is in the fly. And that’s why there is so much misery. Everybody seems to be simply running after shadows, knowing perfectly well that there is nothing to happen, that nothing is ever going to happen, but what else to do? Standing by the side of the road when everybody is rushing looks silly. It is better to go on rushing with the crowd.

Let this sink deep in your heart: that unless the within becomes more important than the without, you are living a very abnormal life. The normal person is one whose within is the source of everything that he is doing. The without is only a means, the within is the end.

The love affair that you have with a woman or a man is a means to the end. The end is having a love affair with your inner woman or inner man. The outer has to be used as a learning situation; it is a great opportunity.

I am not against the outer love affair, I am all for it, because without it you will never become aware of the inner. But remember don’t get stuck in the outer.

-Osho

From The Book of Wisdom, Discourse #26, Q3

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

You may also like to read a related post, Old Age is the Last Opportunity.

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com  or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

Dry Leaves Falling – Osho

Could dry leaves really be falling at such a young age? I am thirty, and I enjoy sex when it comes, though I don’t come so often. I don’t feel I am holding something down; on the contrary, I find I usually have to hold it up.

Beloved Osho, it now takes me all night to do what I used to do all night. Am I missing, or is it missing?

Nityanando, this is the difference between the Eastern evolution of consciousness and the Western mind.

In the East, to get rid of sex is a blessing; in the West, it is the ultimate calamity, it is dying before death. The day one starts feeling that his sexual energy is getting down, he starts counting days—that death is not far away.

In the East, the day one gets beyond sex, he rejoices—the earlier the better – because now the time has come to grow into a new dimension, into freedom from biology, into freedom from body, into freedom from mind. It is the beginning of the experience of your innermost self.

Sex is continuously taking you away from yourself. Whether you are a man or a woman, it doesn’t matter: sex takes you away from yourself. The moment sex is not there, there is no drive to go away from yourself. You start settling within.

So, Nityanando, old leaves are really falling because new leaves want to grow. And old leaves have to go and give space for new experiences, new spaces. It is a blessing—don’t take it according to the Western, rotten mind.

The West has everything, but it has forgotten itself. And once you are no longer aware of yourself, then sex becomes the ultimate reality. In the West, sex is God. Sex is now the only God worshiped in the West. But sex simply means you are no longer independent: you depend for your happiness, for your joy, on somebody else—and that dependence is the greatest misery.

It is not incidental that men and women, husbands and wives, are continuously quarreling. Even if they are not quarreling, they are in the mood, and the reason is that nobody wants deep down to be dependent on the other. It brings many other diseases by the side: if you are dependent on the woman you love, you will be jealous, you will be continuously watchful… you will start becoming a detective, a CIA, a KGB, an FBI agent, upon your own wife! You will put your children on alert: Be careful, when I am away… what happens in the house.

Why this jealousy…? The fear is that perhaps she may start loving someone else. And the fear is natural, because you are starting to think of other women: why should she not think of other men? This is a natural corollary that goes on in both the minds. So she goes on detecting you, she goes on looking into your letters, she goes on searching into your pockets, any address, any phone number…

One night a phone rang, and as the bell was ringing Mulla Nasruddin went there, said “Okay,” and put it down.

The wife said, “Who was there?”

He said, “It was nobody. I have just been unnecessarily disturbed by someone phoning on the wrong number.”

The wife said, “What is the number from where the phone came?”

These kind of things go on continuously in every house, because the wife has already read the number in his diary. And when he quoted the number, the wife said, “Don’t lie to me that it was a wrong number. This is your diary, and this is the number…. Now tell me, what is her name?” —  now it is no more his, now it is her: “Tell me, what is her name?” Under pressure — and every husband is under pressure — “her name is Kamala… but this is only the name of a horse. And because it is the season of horse racing and I’m thinking to go to the races tomorrow….”

The next morning again the phone rang, and Mulla was standing by it. The wife said, “Wait. This time I will take the call” — and she listened and told Mulla, “Come on, your horse is calling!” It is very difficult… one of the most difficult things is to deceive your wife. But man goes on making his efforts, and is defeated continuously. […]

Nityanando, let the dry leaves fall. You are fortunate that they are falling at thirty. And they are falling at thirty because, as I say, if you live intensely, totally, then the year forty-two… it is only the average, and in existence nothing is average. It all depends on you: there are people who will be at the age of ninety and still thinking of nothing but sex. All other things are finished… the only thing left is sex. That continues to the very end of their life, because they never lived it intensely; they have spread a thin layer of sexuality over all their life. If you live intensely, it is going to disappear sooner.

The thirtieth year is perfectly the right time that sex leaves you — because you are from the West — at least fifty to sixty years to work upon yourself, to find yourself, and to find the innermost mysteries of existence. In fact, now begins the real life; up to now you were a slave. Now, boundaries are dropping and the whole sky is becoming available to you with all its stars.

But in the West it is certainly a very difficult problem. The whole conditioning of centuries has brought man to such a state that sex seems to be everything: it is money, it is power, it is position. Everything is sacrificed for sex, and everything is achieved only for sex.

Nobody bothers that sex is not your reality, sex is not love, and nobody even bothers whether you are getting anything out of it or not. What are you getting out of it? — it is almost like people smoking cigarettes: one wonders why they are smoking, and once in a while they also wonder why. But just a habit… and it is only a mental habit. Sex is a biological habit, very deep-rooted.

You say, “It now takes me all night to do what I used to do all night.” That’s why – you did well. Soon it will take you twenty-four hours to do what you used to do the whole night!

Now, try to understand: you have lost the infatuation and the foolishness and the slavery, and this is the time to start meditating. If you cannot meditate now, then when will you be meditating? I will not prevent you… once in a while you can have your sex, but it will become more and more sparse.

There is a saying in Tibet: If you feel tired, lie down. If you feel energetic, move over.

But first, feel whether you are energetic, otherwise it is better to lie down.

And from me the advice is:

If you do not know what to do, at least laugh.

Grandma was in her eighties. She tired easily, had little appetite, and was sometimes confused mentally. Her son called the gynecologist, who arrived shortly and was shown up to Grandma’s room, where he examined her thoroughly. Half an hour later he came down.

“There is no need to worry,” he explained. “There is nothing really wrong with her except her age. She will be alright.”

The son was very relieved and went upstairs to see her. “Well, mother,” he asked, “how did you like the gynecologist?”

“So that was the gynecologist?” she said. “My god, I thought he acted very familiar for a priest.”

Priests and monks and saints, Nityanando, are in more difficulty than you think you are, because the time when they could have been deeply into sex is gone. Now only the thought goes on and on like a continuous record. And the needle of the record has stuck at sex; it does not move from there.

Ronald Reagan gets into bed with Nancy. Ronnie is feeling very horny, so he turns to

Nancy and says, “Oh, Nancy, I would like to launch my missile into your Gulf.”

Nancy says, “Oh, Ronnie, you are so romantic, but you have not been able to bring your missile up since the Second World War.”

Ronnie pleads, “But Nancy, I think I can do it if you would only have faith in me.”

Nancy replies, “But honestly, Ron, it has been so long since we made war that I would not know where to begin.”

Frustrated, Ronnie says, “God, I hate peace!”

Don’t be an old fool. And if you can become wise while you are young, just thirty, thank God. Be grateful to existence that he is allowing you so much time to explore much that is not available to any other animal, which is only available to man. And the more time you have to explore it, the deeper will be your insight, the greater will be your consciousness and tremendous will be your splendor. You will not die an ugly death; you will die with a grace and with a smile on your face.

A life that cannot reach to enlightenment has been a sheer waste. It is good that your thirty years were passed in the West. Thirty years in the East are bad luck; thirty years in the West are good luck,  but good luck only if after thirty years you can come into contact with the Eastern mysteries. Then you have more chances than the Eastern counterpart, because the Eastern counterpart has been repressing sex, so it will not be possible for him to meditate at the age of thirty. If he can manage to meditate even at the age of sixty, it will be a surprise.

It is a tremendously fortunate moment, at least for my people, because the East is so orthodox, so traditional, so blind, so deaf, that they will not hear me. They can hear Morarji Desai and even can start drinking their own urine. That is possible because for centuries they have been drinking the urine of the cows, so in fact it is better to drink your own—self-sufficiency! Why be dependent on a cow? And who knows what kind of dirty water she has been drinking? As far as I know Morarji Desai has no need of any water. The same water goes on circulating, so naturally he never falls sick, because infections are difficult, pollution is difficult….

But they will not listen to me. They cannot listen to any reasonable, logical, scientific truth.

So it is a very strange situation. I am here in the East, but my people are going to be from the West, because only the Western youth can understand. Sex has become futile, he has lived with too many women; drugs have become useless, he has known too much… now what else? There seems to be nothing around which can keep the youth in the West interested, intrigued, still feeling that life may have some significance.

All the modern, contemporary Western philosophers are talking about one thing only: meaninglessness. And they appeal to the Western youth because he can see himself: it is not a question to be convinced about, to be argued—he has lived everything and he finds everything falls flat sooner or later. He has lived with many women; the woman has lived with many men. They are all alike… you have just to put the light off! The question is only whether the light is on or off; that much difference and the most beautiful woman or the most ugly woman are the same.

Because they have known many women and many men, the hope that still can be helpful in the East is no more for them. In the East everybody is caught up with one woman, and that means monotony. People call it monogamy, but that is not the right word. They are so fed up with the woman, the woman is so fed up with the man, but there is no other way. It is a lifelong contract.

So they go on hoping that, perhaps what my wife does not have, other women have; what my husband is not able for, other people seem to be able…. But in the West, that hope has died. People have tried and found that it is all nonsense; every woman has the same physiology, the difference is just superficial. Every man has the same physiology, and everything comes to the same end.

Then they tried marijuana, they tried hashish, they tried transcendental meditation. Now they are trying yogic flying and making themselves so foolish. But what to do?—they have to do something, otherwise life seems to be empty.

Nityanando, you are fortunate that life need not be empty for you. If sex is going, say goodbye to it. It was good when it was there; it is better when it is gone. Now begins a totally different space of experiencing. Now begins a new adventure, more free, more individual, more unfettered. And the sky is so vast to explore… and on each step there are miracles and miracles.

So sing and dance and meditate. And life is immensely beautiful: it has all that Gautam Buddha experienced and more, because twenty-five centuries have passed; man has become far more mature, and evolution has gone higher. We can produce greater Gautam Buddhas with more dimensions to them.

In the past it was thought that a man can only experience himself or God,  which are only different names,  if he tortures himself. That was a primitive idea.

I give you a sophisticated, cultured version, the latest edition: there is no need to torture yourself—it is absolutely absurd! You can be blissful, you can be ecstatic; you can be meditative, comfortably. I don’t see the connection that you can be meditative sitting in a bullock cart but you cannot be meditative sitting in a Rolls Royce. If you can be meditative sitting on a camel, then why can’t you be meditative flying in a jumbo jet—which is far more comfortable, far more silent, far more peaceful.

Have you ever tried sitting on an animal like a camel? Sex is exactly like that! It is the ugliest vehicle…. I have suffered it; I’m not saying it without experience. And those two, three hours I was on a camel, I said, “My god, whether I’m going to survive or not…” Life has gone on—in spite of all hindrances from politicians, from priests, from traditionalists, from the orthodox. Life has gone on, although it could have gone far faster if all these hindrances were not there. But still, after twenty-five hundred years we are in a position to create better Gautam Buddhas, better Mahaviras. We know much more about human physiology, we know much more about human biology, we know much more about human sexuality.

The ancient most book on sex was written in India; that was Vatsyayana’s Kamasutras, sutras on sex. But looking at it, it looks as if a child is writing about sex. After Sigmund Freud and Masters and Johnson, and after so many discoveries in biology, in genetics, we are in such a position that we can create far greater giants of enlightenment, awareness, illumination. But if you are feeling too much attached to that which is gone, then your life will be a life of misery, continuously thinking of something which you cannot do. It is up to you.

Being my sannyasin, I don’t think you will accept this despair. Less than ultimate ecstasy is not our concern.

-Osho

From The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here, Discourse #11

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com, or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

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