Introduction
It is only love that makes a person creative. It is only in love that one starts overflowing into existence, because it is only in love that one has something to give and share. The person who has not known love can’t be creative; he can only be destructive. It is the same energy—joined together with love it becomes creative; disconnected from love it becomes destructive.
The world can be a totally different kind of place if people are allowed and not hindered from loving. If people are given a climate of love, a milieu of love in which they can easily grow into loving beings, the world can become the very paradise. World wars won’t stop unless and until we have released love energy. Now, only love energy can be the survival for humanity’s future. Only a love explosion can be the antidote to the atomic explosion; otherwise man is already coming closer and closer every day to a universal suicide.
We have forgotten how to love, and we have created so many destructive weapons that it is almost impossible to survive unless the miracle of love happens on the earth. The situation is like this: in a room there are all kinds of ammunition, and you have given a child a matchbox to play with there. You are just hoping that nothing wrong will happen, but there is every possibility—because the matchbox is there, the child is there, the child’s curiosity is there. He will open the matchbox; he cannot resist. He will try to do something with the matchbox; he cannot resist. And explosive ammunition is all around the room. It is almost impossible to avoid the accident.
This is the situation: man is almost retarded as far as the heart is concerned, and he has great powers released by science. Unless, in the same proportion, we can release man’s love—his poetry, his capacity to enjoy, live, celebrate—it is impossible to survive.
But this is one of the fundamentals: whenever you find a destructive person, don’t be angry with him. Feel pity for him. Even people like Adolf Hitler need to be pitied; they need compassion. Their energies have turned sour and bitter and poisonous because somehow they missed what love is. And the society is such that it creates hate and prevents love. It creates competitiveness and prevents camaraderie. It teaches you how to fight; it never teaches you how to befriend.
My whole effort here is to release your love sources, to ignite your love flame. And once that is there, then it takes care; then your life will become creative of its own accord.
1
First Sight of Love, Last Sight of Wisdom
Love should be unaddressed. Love need not be oriented toward the other. Love oriented toward the other is not true love; love as a relationship is not true love. Love as a state of being is true love. One can love a woman, one can love a man, one can love one’s children, one can love one’s parents, one can love roses and one can love other flowers, one can love a thousand and one things—but these are all relationships.
Learn how to be love. So it is not a question of to whom your love is addressed, it is simply a question of your being loving. Sitting alone, still love goes on flowing. Absolutely alone, still, what can you do? Just as you breathe … you don’t breathe for your wife; it is not a relationship. You don’t breathe for your children; it is not a relationship. You simply breathe—it is life. Just as breathing is life for the body, love is the life of the soul—one is simply love. And then only does one know that love is “God.”
Jesus says, “God is love.” I say to you, “Love is God.” The words are the same, but the significance is very different. Jesus says, “God is love.” Then love becomes only one of the qualities of God; he is wise also, powerful also, a judge also, and many things more. Amid all those qualities, he is love too. Jesus’s statement was very revolutionary in those days, but not anymore.
I say, “Love is God.” Then it is not a question of God having many other qualities. In fact, God disappears—love itself becomes God. Love is the real thing. God is the name given by the theologians to something they know nothing about. There is no God; the whole existence is made of the stuff called love.
Everyone wants to love and to be loved. Why? “First sight of love, last sight of wisdom.” Is it true?
Love is prayerfulness groping toward godliness. Love is poetry born out of the sheer joy of being. Love is song, dance, celebration: a song of gratitude, a dance of thankfulness, celebration for no reason at all, for this tremendous gift that goes on showering on us, for this whole universe, from the dust to the divine. Love is not what you understand it to be, hence the question.
You ask, “Everyone wants to love and to be loved. Why?”—because love is religion at its highest; love is the supreme-most religion. Love is the search for godliness—of course, an unconscious search in the beginning, stumbling, groping in the dark. The direction may not be right, but the intention is absolutely right.
Love is not the ordinary thing that you understand by it; it is not just a biological attraction between a man and a woman. It is that, too, but that is only the beginning, just the first step. Even there, if you look deep down, it is not really an attraction between man and woman; it is an attraction between masculine energy and feminine energy. It is not an attraction between A and B; far deeper mysteries are involved, even in ordinary love affairs.
Hence nobody can define love. Thousands of definitions have been tried; all have failed. Love remains indefinable, very elusive, mercurial. The more you want to grasp it, the more difficult it becomes, the further away it goes. You cannot catch hold of it. You cannot manage to know what exactly it is. You cannot control it. Love remains unknowable. Man wants to know, because knowledge gives power. You would like to be powerful over love, but that is impossible; love is far bigger than you. You cannot possess it; you can only be possessed by it. Hence those people who want to possess love never come to know anything of it.
Only those who are courageous enough—only those who are gamblers, who can risk their very lives and be possessed by some unknown energy—are able to know what love is.
Love is the first step toward godliness. Hence it appears mad to those who are hung up in their heads, who don’t understand the whole mystery of love, who try to understand it through the mind.… It can be understood only through the heart. Remember: all that is great is available to the heart. The heart is the door to all great values of life, to all ultimate values, and the head is only a useful mechanism, a gadget—good in the marketplace but utterly useless in a temple. And love is a temple; it is not a marketplace. If you drive love into the marketplace, it is reduced to ugly sexuality.
That’s what people have done: rather than raising love to godliness, they have reduced love into ugly, animalistic sexuality. And the strange thing is, the same people who have reduced love to an ugly phenomenon—the priests, the politicians, the puritans—are against sex, are enemies of sex. And they are the people who have destroyed a power with tremendous potential!
Love is a lotus hidden in the mud. The lotus is born out of mud, but you don’t condemn the lotus because it is born out of mud. You don’t call the lotus “muddy”; you don’t call the lotus “dirty.” Love is born out of sex, and then prayerfulness is born out of love. And then godliness is born out of prayerfulness. Higher and higher and higher, one goes on soaring. But the priests and the puritans have reduced the whole phenomenon into sexuality. And once love becomes sex it becomes ugly; one starts feeling guilty about it. It is because of that guilt that this saying, this proverb, has arisen: “First sight of love, last sight of wisdom.”
If you ask me, I will change it a little bit. I will say, “First sight of love, first sight of wisdom.”
But it depends how you look at it. If you look at the potential of it, at the highest possibility that it can reach, then love becomes a ladder. If you look only at the mud and you are utterly blind to the future of the mud, then certainly love becomes something ugly, and great antagonism arises in you. But to be antagonistic to love is to be antagonistic to godliness.
On returning from his honeymoon, Michael phoned his father at the office.
“Good to hear from you, son. Tell me, how is married life?”
“Dad, I am really upset. I think I married a nun.”
“A nun?” asked the startled father. “What do you mean?”
“Ah, you know, Dad—none in the morning and none at night.”
“Oh, that!” groaned the older man. “Come for dinner Saturday, and I will introduce you to the mother superior.”
Once love is reduced to sexuality only, of course, then the first sight of love is the last sight of wisdom. But it depends on you. Why reduce it to sexuality? Why not change the base metal into gold? Why not learn the alchemy of love? That’s what I am teaching here. And the priests, who don’t know anything about love—because they have never loved, they have renounced the world of love—go on making great systems of thought against it.
The priest stood before a hushed crowd of attentive villagers and spoke to them, “You must not use-a the pill.”
A lovely signorina stepped forward and said, “Look, you no play-a the game, you no make-a the rules!”
These are the people who don’t play the game, but they make the rules. For centuries the priests have been making rules. It is the priesthood all over the world that has condemned a great potential source, in fact the only source, of energy. Once it is condemned, you are condemned; your whole life will become meaningless. Once sex energy is not allowed to grow to its natural heights, you are going to live a miserable life.
Love is the greatest gift of existence. Learn the art of it. Learn the song of it, the celebration of it. It is an absolute need: just as the body cannot survive without food, the soul cannot survive without love. Love is the nourishment of the soul. It is the beginning of all that is great. It is the door of the divine.
Help! I am falling apart! My head wants something, my heart something else, my being yet something different, and my body something else. While taking decisions in worldly matters, they are not in tune with each other. My head, mind, heart, being, and body never agree on one thing. So, when I cannot be in harmony with myself, how can I be in harmony with existence?
I can understand that your body, your mind, and your heart are not in harmony. But your being … you have only heard the word; you don’t know anything about it. If you had known your being, everything would have been harmonized immediately.
Being is such a great power that neither the heart can go against it nor the head nor the body. So leave the being apart—because that is the solution. You have to find your being, and the finding of the being will harmonize your existence.
Right now, when you find body, mind, and heart in disharmony, first listen to the body. None of the so-called saints will say this to you: first listen to the body. The body has a wisdom of its own, and the body is uncorrupted by the priests. The body is unpolluted by your teachers, by your education, by your parents. Begin with the body, because right now the body is the purest thing in you. So if the heart and the mind go against it, let them go. You follow the body. The body is the first harmony, and the being is the last.
The fight is always between the heart and the head. The body and being are never in conflict—they are both natural. The body is visible nature, and the being is invisible nature, but they are part of one phenomenon. Mind and heart are in conflict because the mind can be polluted, corrupted—and that’s what all the religions and all the cultures have been doing: corrupting your mind. They cannot corrupt your heart. But they have managed a different technique for the heart: they have bypassed it; they have ignored it. They have not nourished it; they have tried in every way to weaken it, condemn it.
So what you have, in fact, is your head, which goes against your body—because all the cultures are against the body—and the body is your home. Your heart is part of the body, and your head is also part of the body—but the head is capable of being influenced, conditioned. The heart is beyond the reach of other people; only you can reach it.
So begin with the body—first follow the body. The body will never misguide you: you can trust it, and you can trust it absolutely. Anything that goes against the body is forced upon you by others. That is a good criterion to find out what has been forced on you. Whatever goes against the body is forced on you; it is foreign. You should throw it out. Your mind is full of foreign elements; your mind is not in its natural state. It can also come into a natural state, and then it will not be against the body; it will be in tune with it. So begin with the body and use it as a criterion.
It is a very simple process; follow the body. Slowly, slowly the mind starts dropping anything that is anti-body. It has to drop it. It is not its nature; it is carrying it in spite of itself. It is the load that dead humanity has left for you as a heritage. Following the body, you will be surprised that for the first time you see two things happening. First, the head starts dropping the conditioning. Second, as the head starts dropping the conditioning you hear for the first time the still, small voice of the heart, which was drowned by the noisy head. Because the head is becoming a little calmer, a little more silent, you can hear the heart.
First listen to the body so all that is gross in your mind will be dropped, and you will start listening to the heart. It is not against the body, because nobody can condition your heart; there is no approach from the outside to the heart. You will be amazed to see that your heart and your body are in harmony. And when this harmony happens, the head is completely finished; it has no power over you. Now you know a new power, purer, more natural, more authentic, and the head drops even its subtle conditioning.
The day the head also becomes silent and comes in tune with the heart and the body, that day you will discover your being—not before it. And once you have discovered your being, you need not try to harmonize anything. The very presence of the being harmonizes everything. The very experience is so vast that your body, your heart, your mind all lose their identities in the vastness of your being. But begin with the body.
All the religions are saying just the opposite. They say, “Oppose the body; don’t follow the body. The body is the enemy.” That is their strategy to destroy you, because they have taken away the basic element from where you could have grown toward harmony. You will remain always in discord, without harmony. You will never come to know your being, and your whole life will be just anguish, anxiety, tensions of thousands of kinds. The religions have already given you the clue as to how they have destroyed you. Making your mind work against the body has been their strategy.
I am saying to you: start with the body. It is your home. Love it, accept it, and in that very love, in that very acceptance, you are growing toward harmony. This harmony will lead you to being. And once the being is discovered, then you are relieved of all effort. Harmony becomes just your nature—one voice, one organic unity.
Why has sex been a taboo in all the societies down the ages?
It is a very complicated question, but very important too—worth going into. Sex is the most powerful instinct in man. The politician and the priest have understood from the very beginning that sex is the most driving energy in man. It has to be curtailed; it has to be cut. If man is allowed total freedom in sex, then there will be no possibility to dominate him; to make a slave out of him will be impossible.
Have you not seen it being done? When you want a bull to be yoked to a bullock cart, what do you do? You castrate him; you destroy his sex energy. And have you seen the difference between a bull and an ox? What a difference! An ox is a poor phenomenon, a slave. A bull is a beauty; a bull is a glorious phenomenon, a great splendor. See a bull walking, how he walks like an emperor! And see an ox pulling a bullock cart … The same has been done to man: the sex instinct has been curtailed, cut, crippled. Man does not exist as the bull now; he exists like the ox. And each man is pulling a thousand and one bullock carts.
Look, and you will find behind you a thousand and one bullock carts, and you are yoked to them. Why can’t you yoke a bull? The bull is too powerful. If he sees a cow passing by, he will throw both you and the bullock cart, and he will move to the cow. He will not bother a bit about who you are, and he will not listen. It will be impossible to control the bull.
Sex energy is life energy; it is uncontrollable. And the politician and the priest are not interested in you, they are interested in channelizing your energy into certain other directions. So there is a certain mechanism behind it; it has to be understood.
Sex repression, tabooing sex, is the very foundation of human slavery. And man cannot be free unless sex is free. Man cannot be really free unless his sex energy is allowed natural growth.
These are the five tricks through which man has been turned into a slave, into an ugly phenomenon, a cripple. The first: keep man as weak as possible if you want to dominate him. If the priest wants to dominate you or the politician wants to dominate you, you have to be kept as weak as possible. Yes, in certain cases exceptions are allowed—that is, when the services of fighting our enemy are needed; only then, otherwise not. The army is allowed many things that other people are not allowed. The army is in the service of death; it is allowed to be powerful. It is allowed to remain as powerful as possible; it is needed to kill the enemy.
Other people are destroyed; they are forced to remain weak in a thousand and one ways. And the best way to keep a man weak is not to give love total freedom. Love is nourishment. Now the psychologists have discovered that if a child is not given love, he shrivels up into himself and becomes weak. You can give him milk, you can give him medicine, you can give him everything … just don’t give love. Don’t hug him, don’t kiss him, don’t hold him close to the warmth of your body, and the child will start becoming weaker and weaker and weaker, and there are more chances of dying than surviving. What happens? Why? Just hugging, kissing, giving warmth, somehow the child feels nourished, accepted, loved, needed. The child starts feeling worthy; the child starts feeling a certain meaning in his life.
Now from the very childhood we starve them. We don’t give love as much as is needed. Then we force the young men and young women not to fall in love unless they get married. By the age of fourteen they become sexually mature. But their education may take more time—ten years more, until they are twenty-four, twenty-five, or more, then they will be getting their M.A.s, or Ph.D.s, or M.D.s, so we have to force them not to love.
Sexual energy comes to its climax near about the age of eighteen. Never again will a man be so potent, and never again will a woman be able to have a greater orgasm than she will be able to near the age of eighteen. But we force them not to make love. We force boys to have their separate dormitories—girls and boys are kept separate, and just between the two stands the whole mechanism of police, magistrates, vice chancellors, principals, headmasters. They are all standing there, just in between, just holding the boys back from moving to the girls, holding the girls back from moving to the boys. Why? Why is so much care taken? They are trying to kill the bull and create an ox.
By the time you are eighteen you are at the peak of your sexual energy, your love energy. By the time you get married at twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven … and the age has been going up and up; the more cultured a country, the longer you wait, because more has to be learned, a job has to be found, this and that. By the time you get married you are almost declining in your powers.
Then you love, but the love never becomes really hot. It never comes to the point where people evaporate; it remains lukewarm. And when you have not been able to love totally, you cannot love your children because you don’t know how. When you have not been able to know the peaks of it, how can you teach your children? How can you help your children to have the peaks of it? So down the ages man has been denied love so that he should remain weak.
Second: keep man as ignorant and deluded as possible so that he can easily be deceived. And if you want to create a sort of idiocy—which is a must for the priest and the politician and their conspiracy—then the best thing is not to allow man to move into love freely. Without love, a man’s intelligence falls low. Have you not watched it? When you fall in love, suddenly all your capacities are at their peak, at their crescendo. Just a moment ago you were looking dull, and then you met your woman … and suddenly a great joy has erupted in your being; you are aflame. While people are in love, they perform at their maximum. When love disappears or when love is not there, they perform at their minimum.
The greatest, most intelligent people are the most sexual people. This has to be understood, because love energy is basically intelligence. If you cannot love you are somehow closed, cold; you cannot flow. While in love, one flows. While in love, one feels so confident that one can touch the stars. That’s why a woman becomes a great inspiration, a man becomes a great inspiration. When a woman is loved she becomes more beautiful immediately, instantly! Just a moment ago she was just an ordinary woman … when love has showered upon her she is bathed in a totally new energy, a new aura arises around her. She walks more gracefully; a dance has come to her step. Her eyes have tremendous beauty now, her face glows, she is luminous. And the same happens to the man.
When people are in love they perform at the optimum. Don’t allow love, and they will remain at the minimum. When they remain at the minimum they are stupid, they are ignorant; they don’t bother to know. And when people are ignorant and stupid and deluded, they can be easily deceived. When people are sexually repressed, love-wise repressed, they start hankering for the other life; they think about heaven, paradise, but they don’t think to create the paradise here now.
When you are in love, paradise is here now. Then you don’t bother. Then who goes to the priest? Then who bothers that there should be a paradise? You are already there; you are no longer interested. But when your love energy is repressed, you start thinking, “Here is nothing. Now is empty. Then there must be somewhere, some goal…” You go to the priest and ask about heaven, and he paints beautiful pictures of heaven. Sex has been repressed so that you can become interested in the other life. And when people are interested in the other life, naturally they are not interested in this life.
Tantra says: “This life is the only life.” The other life is hidden in this life. It is not against it; it is not away from it; it is in it. Go into it. This is it! Go into it, and you will find the other too. God is hidden in the world—that is the Tantra message. A great message, superb, incomparable. God is hidden in the world. God is hidden here, now. If you love, you will be able to feel it.
The third secret: keep man as frightened as possible. And the sure way is not to allow him love, because love destroys fear: “Love casteth out fear.” When you are in love, you are not afraid. When you are in love, you can fight against the whole world; when you are in love, you feel infinitely capable of anything. But when you are not in love, you are afraid of small things. When you are not in love, you become more interested in security, in safety. When you are in love, you are more interested in adventure, in exploration.
People have not been allowed to love because that is the only way to make them afraid. And when they are afraid and trembling, they are always on their knees, bowing to the priest and bowing to the politician. It is a great conspiracy against humanity. It is a great conspiracy against you. Your politician and your priest are your enemies, but they pretend that they are public servants. They say, “We are here to serve you, to help you attain a better life. We are here to create a good life for you.” And they are the destroyers of life itself.
The fourth: keep man as miserable as possible—because a miserable man is confused, a miserable man has no self-worth, a miserable man is self-condemnatory; a miserable man feels that he must have done something wrong. A miserable man has no grounding. You can push him from here to there; he can be turned into driftwood very easily. And a miserable man is always ready to be commanded, to be ordered, to be disciplined, because he knows, “On my own I am simply miserable. Maybe somebody else can discipline my life?” He is a ready victim.
And the fifth: keep people as alienated from each other as possible so that they cannot band together for some purpose of which the priest and the politician may not approve. Keep people separate from each other; don’t allow them too much intimacy. When people are separate, lonely, alienated from each other, they cannot band together. And there are a thousand and one tricks to keep them away. For example, if you are holding the hand of a man—you are a man and you are holding the hand of a man, walking down the road singing—you will feel guilty because people will start looking at you: Are you gay, homosexual, or something? Two men are not allowed to be happy together. They are not allowed to hold hands; they are not allowed to hug each other. They are condemned as homosexuals. Fear arises. If your friend comes and takes your hand in his hand, you look around: Is somebody looking or not? And you are just in a hurry to drop the hand. You shake hands in such a hurry. Have you watched it? You just touch each other’s hand and shake and you are finished. You don’t hold hands; you don’t hug each other. You are afraid.
Do you remember, has your father hugged you ever? Do you remember your mother hugging you after you became sexually mature? Why not? Fear has been created. A young man and his mother hugging? Maybe some sex will arise between them, some idea, some fantasy. Fear has been created: the father and the son, the father and the daughter, no; the brother and the sister, no; the brother and the brother, no! People are kept in separate boxes with great walls around them. Everybody is classified, and there are a thousand and one barriers. Yes, one day, after twenty-five years of all this training, you are allowed to make love to your wife. But now the training has gone too deep into you, and suddenly you don’t know what to do. How do you love? You have not learned the language.
It is as if a person has not been allowed to speak for twenty-five years. Just listen: for twenty-five years he has not been allowed to speak a single word and then suddenly you put him on a stage and tell him, “Give us a great lecture.” What will happen? He will fall down then and there! He may faint, he may die … twenty-five years of silence and now suddenly he is expected to deliver a great lecture. It is not possible. This is what is happening: twenty-five years of anti-love, of fear, and then suddenly you are legally allowed—a license is issued, and now you can love this woman. This is your wife, you are her husband, and you are allowed to love. But where are those twenty-five years of wrong training going to go? They will be there.
Yes, you will “love” … you will make an effort, a gesture. It is not going to be explosive, it is not going to be orgasmic; it will be very tiny. That’s why you are frustrated after making love. Ninety-nine percent of people are frustrated after making love, more frustrated than they have ever been before. And they feel, “What?… There is nothing! It is not true!”
Now first, the priest and the politician have managed that you should not be able to love; and then they come and they preach that there is nothing in love. And certainly their preaching looks right. Their preaching looks exactly in tune with your experience. First they create the experience of futility, of frustration, then … their teaching. And it looks logical together, of one piece.
This is a great trick, the greatest that has ever been played upon man. These five things can be managed through a single thing, and that is the love taboo. It is possible to accomplish all these objectives by somehow preventing people from loving each other. And the taboo has been managed in such a scientific way. This taboo is a great piece of art; great skill and great cunningness have gone into it. It is really a masterpiece. This taboo has to be understood.
First, it is indirect. It is hidden. It is not apparent, because whenever a taboo is too obvious, it will not work. The taboo has to be hidden so that you don’t know how it works. The taboo has to be so hidden that you cannot even imagine that anything against it is possible. The taboo has to go into the unconscious, not into the conscious. How is it made so subtle and so indirect? Their trick is to first go on teaching that love is great so people never think that the priests and the politicians are against love. Go on teaching that love is great, that love is the right thing—and then don’t allow any situation where love can happen. Don’t allow the opportunity. Don’t give any opportunity, and go on teaching that food is great, that eating is a great joy—“Eat as well as you can!”—but don’t supply anything to eat. Keep people hungry, and go on talking about love. So all the priests go on talking about love. Love is praised as highly as anything, just next to God, and denied every possibility of its happening. Directly encourage it, and indirectly cut its roots. This is the masterpiece.
No priests talk about how they have done the harm. It is as if you go on saying to a tree, “Be green, bloom, enjoy,” and you go on cutting the roots so that the tree cannot be green. And when the tree is not green, you can jump upon the tree and say, “Listen! You don’t listen. You don’t follow us. We all go on saying, ‘Be green, bloom, enjoy, dance,’” and meanwhile, you go on cutting the roots.
Love is denied so much … and love is the rarest thing in the world. It should not be denied. If a man can love five persons, he should love five. If a man can love fifty, he should love fifty. If a man can love five hundred, he should love five hundred. Love is so rare that the more you can spread it, the better.
But there are great tricks. You are forced into a narrow, very narrow corner: you can love only your wife, you can love only your husband, you can love only this, you can love only that; the conditions are too much. It is as if there were a law that you can breathe only when you are with your wife, you can breathe only when you are with your husband. Then breathing will become impossible—then you will die! And you will not even be able to breathe while you are with your wife or with your husband.
You have to breathe twenty-four hours a day. The more you breathe, the more you will be able to breathe while you are with your spouse. Be loving.
Then there is another trick: they talk about “higher” love, and they destroy the lower. And they say that the lower has to be denied: bodily love is bad; spiritual love is good. Have you ever seen any spirit without a body? Have you ever seen a house without a foundation? The lower is the foundation of the higher. The body is your abode: the spirit lives in the body, with the body. You are an embodied spirit and an ensouled body. You are together. The lower and the higher are not separate, they are one; they are rungs of the same ladder.
This is what Tantra wants to make clear: the lower has not to be denied; the lower has to be transformed into the higher. The lower is good! If you are stuck with the lower, the fault is with you, not with the lower. Nothing is wrong with the lower rung of a ladder. If you are stuck with it, you are stuck: it is something in you. Move! Sex is not wrong; you are wrong if you are stuck there. Move higher. The higher is not against the lower. The lower makes it possible for the higher to exist.
And these tricks have created many other problems. Each time you are in love, somehow you feel guilty; a guilt has arisen. When there is guilt, you cannot move totally into love. The guilt prevents you; it keeps you holding on. Even while making love to your wife or your husband, there is guilt: you know this is sin, you know you are doing something wrong. Saints don’t do it. You are a sinner. So you cannot move totally even when you are allowed—superficially—to love your wife. The priest is hidden behind you in your guilty feeling; he is pulling you from there, pulling your strings. When guilt arises, you start feeling that you are wrong. You lose self-worth. You lose self-respect.
Then another problem arises: when there is guilt, you start pretending. Mothers and fathers don’t allow their children to know that they make love—they pretend that sex does not exist. Their pretension will be known by the children sooner or later. When the children come to know about the pretension, they lose all trust, they feel betrayed, they feel cheated. And fathers and mothers say that their children don’t respect them—you are the cause of it. How can they respect you? You have been deceiving them in every way. You have been dishonest. You have been mean. You were telling them not to fall in love—“Beware!”—and you were making love all the time. The day will come, sooner or later, when they will realize that even their fathers, even their mothers were not true with them—so how can they respect you?
First guilt creates pretension, then pretension creates alienation from people. Even the child, your own child, will not feel in tune with you. There is a barrier: your pretension. And when you know that everybody is pretending … One day, you will come to know that you are just pretending, and so are others. When everybody is pretending, how can you relate? When everybody is false, how can you relate? How can you be friendly when everywhere there is deception and deceit? You become very, very sore about reality. You become very bitter. You see it only as a devil’s workshop.
And everybody has a false face; nobody is authentic. Everybody is carrying masks. Nobody shows his original face. You feel guilty, you feel that you are pretending, and you know that everybody is pretending, everybody is feeling guilty, and everybody has become just like an ugly wound. Now it is very easy to make these people slaves—to turn them into clerks, stationmasters, schoolmasters, collectors, deputy collectors, ministers, governors, presidents. Now it is very easy to distract them. You have distracted them from their roots. Sex is the root, hence the name muladhar. Muladhar means the very root energy.
I have heard …
It was her wedding night and the haughty Lady Jane was performing her marital duties for the first time.
“My lord,” she asked her bridegroom, “is this what the common people call lovemaking?”
“Yes, it is, my lady,” replied Lord Reginald, proceeding as before.
After a while, Lady Jane exclaimed indignantly, “It is too good for the common people!”
The common people have not really been allowed lovemaking: it is too good for them. But the problem is that when you poison the whole common world, you are also poisoned. If you poison the air which the common people breathe, the air that the king breathes will also be poisoned. It cannot be separate; it is all one. When the priest poisons the common people, finally he also is poisoned. When the politician poisons the common people’s air, finally he also breathes the same air; there is no other air.
A curate and a bishop were in opposite corners of a railway carriage on a long journey. As the bishop entered, the curate put away his copy of Playboy and started reading The Church Times. The bishop ignored him and went on doing the Times’s crossword. Silence prevailed.
After a while, the curate tried to make conversation. And when the bishop began to do a lot of head scratching and tut-tut-tutting, he tried again. “Can I help you, sir?”
“Perhaps. I am only beaten by one word. What is it that has four letters, the last three are u-n-t, and the clue is ‘essentially feminine’?”
“Why, sir,” said the curate after a slight pause, “that would be ‘aunt.’”
“Of course, of course!” said the bishop. “I say, young man, can you lend me an eraser?”
When you repress on the surface, everything goes deep inside into the unconscious. It is there; sex has not been destroyed. Fortunately, it has not been destroyed; it has only been poisoned. It cannot be destroyed; it is life energy. It has become polluted, and it can be purified. That is the whole process of Tantra: a great process of purification.
Your life problems can basically be reduced to your sex problem. You can go on solving your other problems, but you will never be able to solve them because they are not true problems. And if you solve your sex problem, all problems will disappear because you have solved the base.
But you are so afraid even to look into it. It is simple: if you can put aside your conditioning, it is very simple. It is as simple as this story:
A frustrated spinster was a pest to the police; she kept ringing up saying there was a man under her bed. She was finally sent to a mental hospital, but she still told the doctors there was a man under her bed. They gave her the latest drugs and she suddenly declared that she was cured.
“You mean, Miss Rustifan, you can’t see a man under the bed now?”
“No, I can’t. I can see two.”
One doctor told the other that there was only really one sort of injection that would cure her complaint, which he called “malignant virginity”: Why did they not set her up in her bedroom with Big Dan, the hospital carpenter?
Big Dan was fetched and told what her complaint was and that he would be locked in with her for an hour. He said it would not take that long, and an anxious group gathered on the landing. They heard, “No, stop it, Dan. Mother would never forgive me!”
“Stop yelling. It’s got to be done some time. It should have been done years ago!”
“Have your way by force then, you brute!”
“It’s only what your husband would have done, had you had one.”
Unable to wait, the medics burst in.
“I have cured her!” said the carpenter.
“He has cured me!” said Miss Rustifan.
He had sawn the legs off the bed.
Sometimes the cure is very simple, and you go on doing a thousand and one things.… The carpenter did well, just cutting the legs off the bed, and it was finished! Now where could a man hide?
Sex is the root of almost all your problems. It has to be so, because of thousands of years of poisoning. A great purification is needed. Tantra can purify your sex energy. Listen to the Tantra message. Try to understand it. It is a great revolutionary message. It is against all priests and politicians. It is against all those poisoners who have killed all joy on the earth just so that man can be reduced to a slave.
Reclaim your freedom. Reclaim your freedom to love. Reclaim your freedom to be, and then life is no longer a problem. It is a mystery. It is an ecstasy. It is a benediction.
Copyright © 2016 by OSHO International Foundation