SEX OUTSIDE OF MARRIAGE

What is your attitude toward Sex, and Sex outside of marriage?

Sex is very important because sex is the root of life. You are born out of sex, your every cell in the body is a sex cell. Sex cannot be denied and any society that denies sex becomes suicidal. Then it is denying life itself.

So sex is very significant, very meaningful. But you can do two wrong thinks with sex. One is, you can be suppressive. Then you create perversions. In the West, Christianity has created a very perverted mind through too much of a ’no’ attitude toward sex, too much fear about sex.

Too much suppression has created a reaction. That suppression will lead to perverted mind. So I am not for suppression. Nor am I for indulgence. Indulgence is again a reaction.

Indulgence is the opposite extreme to suppression. That, too, is not good. I am for healthy sex that is neither indulgence nor suppression. Sex must be accepted in its totality. Then the question of inside or outside of marriage is irrelevant because marriage is just a part of the social system; there is nothing natural about it.

To me, to be really authentic in your sex life you have to go beyond the structure of marriage. You become inauthentic in two ways. If someone is in a sexual relationship with someone that he or she doesn’t love, to me it is immoral.

Even if he or she is one’s husband or one’s wife, if one is not in love then it is immoral. If love is the base, only then can you be honest, sincere and authentic. If love is the base then marriage becomes, by and by, a superficial structure.

OSHO♥

LIMITS OF BIOLOGY

Man and woman are intimate enemies – enemies and yet intimate. If your woman is with you then you start feeling: how to be alone? When you are alone, after a few days you start a great thirst and hunger for your woman – how to be with her? If you are alone, appetite arises for love; if you are with somebody, the appetite disappears and you start thinking,

’Why not go to the Himalayas and sit silently in a cave? Why go on bothering with this nonsense?’ Just a few days ago Ramananda wrote a letter to me. First he used to live alone, then he got tired of aloneness – naturally. Everybody gets tired of aloneness, gets fed up with oneself. Nothing else to do, nowhere to go, nobody to look at, nobody to be with, nobody to hug, nobody to care for you or to care about.

He got tired and started looking for a woman – and when you look for trouble it comes! So then came Vani from faraway Germany, and they were both happy – as stories go. They were both happy. Then things started getting entangled, and there was conflict and fight and nagging – all natural things. Then for two days Vani was ill and Ramananda was alone again.

He enjoyed those two days like anything! He wrote me a letter: ’Osho, to be alone is so incredible, so beautiful, I have never known that aloneness is so beautiful.’ I told him, ’Wait, Ramananda! Just a few more days and you will start hankering.’

And this goes on and on, again and again. One has to understand. One has to understand how one functions, man or woman, and how the other functions. And don’t be too personal about it. It has nothing to do with you. It is just the man’s mind and the woman’s mind, it has nothing to do with Ramananda and Vani. It is basically biological. You have to understand it very impersonally, only then can you go beyond it, only then can you transcend it.

Watch every move that you make and watch every move that the woman makes. Listen to the deepest instinct, to what is happening. Don’t throw the responsibility on the other and don’t start feeling guilty that you are doing something wrong. Nobody is doing wrong. It is simply natural. But one can go beyond nature because there is a super-nature too. I am not saying that you are condemned to be natural, that you will remain always natural, no.

With understanding one becomes wiser, wiser than nature. One becomes more meditative than nature allows. And through that understanding there comes a liberation. But that liberation is so alchemical that it transforms you totally, radically. Then you are no more a man and your woman is no more a woman. Then you both become more like two spirits – man, woman, seem irrelevant.

And when a man is no more a man and a woman is no more a woman that means they are no more confined to their biologies, no more confined to their bodies – because the difference is only in the body. Beyond the body there is no difference. Hidden behind, you are the same. It is just the body, the medium, that makes the difference.

Once you have started learning how to go beyond the medium, how to transcend biology, physiology, then you have become only two spirits. And only two spirits can live in communion forever. Then there arises a new kind of love which I call friendship. Friendship is higher than your so-called love. Your so-called love is full of hate; friendship is pure love. All hate has disappeared. All conflict, nagging, fighting has disappeared.

All desire to dominate, possess, be jealous, has disappeared. Friendship is pure love. All that was not needed is no more there. All that was non-essential has, been left behind. Only the essential fragrance. Friendship is the fragrance of love. And remember that unless you and your wife become friends, you will never be at peace.

OSHO♥

What are your views on sexual ethics?

My views on sexual ethics are against all the views that have been held up to now. They were all repressive of sex; they were condemnatory and created a split in the human mind. The whole schizophrenia and all the perversions of man are rooted in those wrong sexual ethics.

I conceive of sex as a natural phenomenon. There is nothing profane in it and there is nothing sacred in it. It is purely natural life energy of tremendous importance. If you cannot sublimate it, it can destroy you; and it has destroyed humanity.

It is the energy man is born out of; everything is born out of it. Naturally there is no higher energy than sexual energy, but biological reproduction is not its only function. The same energy can have different creative dimensions. The same energy, joined with meditative practices, can be sublimated to the highest peak of consciousness -- what I call enlightenment.

My sexual ethics is not a law, it is love.

Two persons can be sexually related only if love allows. When there is no love, and only law remains as a binding force, it is sheer prostitution. And I am against prostitution.

It is strange that all the religions are the cause of prostitution in the world, but nobody stands up and says that prostitution exists because you have replaced love with law.

Law is not love. Marriage is valid only if there is love. The moment love disappears, the marriage is invalid. It means millions of people are living unlovingly, unethically, unnaturally, because of the religions that have forced the arbitrary bondage of marriage and have tried to make it permanent.

Life is continuously changing; nothing is permanent. Love also is not permanent. Only plastic flowers are permanent, real flowers cannot be permanent. If you are too addicted to permanence then you will end up with plastic flowers; that’s how people have ended up with plastic marriages, plastic relationships -- phony, hypocritical. And it gives no pleasure to anybody.

There is a vast prostitution all over the world. Ordinarily when you go to a prostitute, you purchase her for one night. At least it is straightforward. But when you marry a woman, promising her that you will love her always, even beyond death -- and even before the honeymoon ends, the love disappears -- then you live in deception. Now you are using a human being as a thing, as a sexual object. I condemn it.

According to me love should be the only law, the only deciding factor.

And the energy of sex should not remain confined to reproduction only. It is simple to see the fact that animals are not sexual all the year round, they just have their seasons. In those few months or few weeks they are sexual; otherwise sex disappears. Why has man the capacity to be sexual all the year round? There must be a purpose behind it. Existence never does anything meaninglessly.

My understanding is that reproduction could have been managed within a few weeks, just as it is being managed in all the animals. But man has been given so much sexual energy... it is a clear indication that existence wants you to transform this energy into higher levels of consciousness -- and it can be transformed. Just as it can give birth to children, it can give birth to you. It can make you reborn, with a new vision, new bliss, new light, and a totally new being. All that is needed is that the sexual energy should be joined with meditation. And that has been my whole work.

That is my sexual ethics: sex energy plus meditation.

And it is the easiest thing to join them, because while making love, the moment you come to an orgasmic explosion your thoughts disappear, time stops. Suddenly you have melted into the other, you are no longer an ego. And these are the qualities of meditation: no ego, no time, no thinking. Just pure awareness and a melting into the whole.

Where sexual orgasm ends, meditation begins. They can be joined very easily. The easiest thing to do is to join them, they are so close.

My own insight is that people came to discover meditation through sexual orgasm because of these qualities. They could see that when thoughts stop, time stops, ego disappears and you are in a tremendously beautiful space. Although it lasts only for seconds, it has given you the taste of something that is not of this world, something of the beyond.


We don’t know who discovered meditation, perhaps thousands of years ago. In the East we have books at least ten thousand years old describing methods of meditation. But any method brings the same qualities.

This is my feeling, that without sexual orgasm nobody could have been able to discover these three qualities. Once they discovered these three qualities, people of intelligence must have tried to experience them without going into sexual orgasm. Is it possible to attain to such a consciousness? Somebody must have succeeded, and since then millions of people have succeeded.

The whole of humanity lives in misery for the simple reason that they have the wrong kind of sexual ethics, a kind which teaches them to repress it. And the more you repress your sexuality, the farther away you are from meditation. The more you repress it, the closer you are to madness, not to meditation.

And now it is a fact established by psychoanalysis -- by the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud -- that repressed sex is the basic cause of human misery, of all kinds of perversions, of all kinds of mind sicknesses. But the religions still go on preaching the same thing.

Sigmund Freud should be remembered as one of the milestones in the history of man. But his work is only half. He simply fought against repression; his work is negative. In itself it takes you nowhere; it is fighting against darkness.

My sexual ethics are a completion. Repression has to be dropped. And a deep acceptance, a deep friendliness towards your own energies, a loving intimacy with your own energies so those energies can reveal all their secrets to you... And joining them with meditation, orgasm becomes the door to the temple of the divine.

To me, if sex is the creative force in the world, it must be nearest to the creative center of the world -- whatever name you give to it. Creative energy must be closest to creation, to the creative source of it all.

People should be taught the art of converting sexual energy into spiritual enlightenment.

OSHO♥

THE PATH OF MYSTIC

SEDUCTION

[A sannyasin said that he had been living under a tree in Goa for five years, until he fell in love with a woman and tried to settle down with her, but has been too much for him. When they are apart he loves her; when they are together it is heavy.]

This is the old story! Love is an old story. Nothing is new in it – it is always the old and the same pattern, and everybody repeats the same thing. Nothing new ever happens in love; it is just a rut… A few things to be understood….

One: love is always beautiful in the beginning, very rarely beautiful in the middle, and almost never beautiful in the end; that’s the whole process of love. So there are two ways: one is to go on changing the partner. Each time you think that the beginning is ending, change immediately. That is one way, and is what the west is doing. The moment you feel that the love is no more the same as it used to be, that the honeymoon is over, you change the partner. Then again you are at the beginning and you can go on changing… but you never grow like that.

The East has another trick: get married to a person with whom you are not in love. Then there will be no bad ending because there is no beginning: it is just finished from the very beginning, it has ended before it begins. That’s what the East has done… but both the eastern and western ways are meaningless. The third possibility – and this is my suggestion – is to be in love but not to start thinking of marriage. That’s what you did – you started thinking of making a home; then you are getting into trouble, the old rut.

Be in love as birds and animals are in love. Be in love but don’t start thinking of settling. Settling is very unsettling, because once you start settling the romance is over. The ordinary life is so heavy that it crushes the flower of romance and kills it. Once you start settling, small things become very important and love becomes secondary.

How to manage for money and where to purchase a house and how to manage for furniture, and these things become more important, and love becomes secondary. These things are infinite – the list is long – and love comes only in the end and so it never comes! By the time you are finished with the house and the money and the furniture, you are falling asleep.

By and by you completely forget that you were trying to make this house to love this woman. So don’t do that again – remember it! Always keep a distance between the person you love and yourself. There is no need to settle: settling means that you start taking the other for granted. That is the meaning of being a wife and a husband: the other is taken for granted.

You are only lovers if you don’t take the other for granted. Being in love means you have to seduce the other person every day: you cannot take him for granted, you don’t have any property right, you will have to persuade the other, so the cooing continues. And that’s what love is. Once things have settled and you know that you possess the woman and the woman knows that she possesses you, then through that possessiveness all sorts of jealousies, anger, hatred, fight and nastiness arise.

Then you will start repeating the pattern that you have learned from your parents and she has learned from her parents. Remember one thing: you don’t know what your mother did when she fell in love, you don’t know what your father did when he fell in love, but you know what they did when they were settled. You know them as wife and husband, you have not known them as lovers. This is something very important to understand.

You cannot repeat anything when you are a lover, but when you become a husband or a wife and a householder, then you know. And you have only one programme, your mind is programmed…. Friendship is always good. It is more civilised than love, mm ? And you are an ancient sannyasin, not a new one, mm?… … So it will be very difficult for you.

[The sannyasin answers: That’s why I was clinging so much. She was the only female that I could come close to in this life time.]

That happens to ascetic people, mm? They get starved and worked up, then one day suddenly they start clinging to a woman. They can cling too much and that can destroy the whole thing. Just continue to be yourself, the way you used to be… and remember one thing: she fell in love with you who was sitting under a tree and meditating.

She never fell in love with a man who was under a roof. Mm? – when you are under a roof you are another man, she is no more in love with you. Always remember that! She had fallen in love with a vagabond and then you start settling. … Start living in Goa under some tree and [she] will be in love again!

Women are always attracted to an ascetic person rather than to householders. So start being in samadhi again … and you can watch out of the corner of the eye whether [she] is coming, mm? Little holidays are good; but basically you are an ascetic person, so remain that way!

OSHO♥

THIS IS IT