According to Osho, using the word 'orgasm' does not make him a sex guru; he speaks about sex to expose repression’s damage and to redirect sexual energy into meditation and spiritual consciousness. Sex’s real center is in the mind; denying it breeds perversions and pornography. Honest acceptance plus awareness dissolves obsession, transforming biology into clarity, love, and freedom.
He uses frank words to clear confusion, not to sell sex—accept sex naturally and meditate so it turns into peace instead of problems.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, doesn't your recurrent reference to the word "orgasm" continue to propagate the image of the "sex guru"?
For example, we know that no impotent person has ever been enlightened. No impotent person has ever been a prophet or a messiah. No impotent person has ever been a genius in any field -- science, music, art, dance. In the whole history of man, not a single impotent person has been able to contribute anything. It seems that all creativity consists of your sexual energy. And if a person doesn't have sexual energy, perhaps he will become absolutely dull, lusterless; his eyes will lose shine. He will lose interest in everything; he may not live long. And there is no need... because sex is the energy that has to be used as a ladder for your higher growth. I am not the sex guru. I am the anti-sex guru, if anything. The sex guru you can find in the Vatican. His perversion is not to touch women but to…
Osho, why are you called "the sex guru" in the west?
Why so much emphasis? People are obsessed particularly the religious people are obsessed. This label of "sex guru" comes from religious people. "Were you shocked by the porno film we saw?" a friend asked the Polack Pope. The Pope said, "I was even more shocked the second time I saw it!" The way people have been brought up for centuries is life-negative. I affirm life with all that it contains. That does not mean that I don't want you to change -- in fact, that is the only way to change. First you have to accept where you are, what you are. First you have to explore your reality, and then only you can find ways to go beyond it. You have to explore into all the possibilities of your existence. And sex is one of the most important phenomena, in fact the most important phenomenon of your life. But…
Beloved Osho, what is orgasm in reference to meditation and higher levels of consciousness? Isn't feeling orgasmic in a deep state of meditation totally nonsexual?
The experience of orgasm itself is always nonsexual. Even though you have achieved it through sex, it itself has no sexuality in it. You can reach to orgasm through sex. It is a merger of the negative and the positive polarities -- such a deep merger that the man is no longer man, the woman is no longer woman. They are not two; there is only one energy surrounding them both. They have melted into that energy. It may be for a moment -- that does not matter -- but the experience itself has nothing to do with sex. The first orgasm is bound to be attained through sex. And my own understanding is that meditation has grown out of the experience of orgasm, because the original founders -- particularly Shiva who, in his VIGYAN BHAIRVA TANTRA, has written, just like a scientific formula, about one hundred and twelve meditations;…
You are also known as the sex guru. What do you presently think of love?
The definition which calls me a sex guru is not only false, it is absurd. To put it right: I am the only person in the whole world who is antisex. But that needs tremendous understanding. You cannot hope for that understanding from journalists. I have been talking about sex so that it can be transformed. All the religious teachers can be called sex gurus except me, because they are teaching repression of sex, which keeps a man continuously sexual; he will never be transformed. He will never go beyond sex. Repression is the way to keep you attached to whatever you have repressed. I have been teaching expression, so that you are getting rid of it by expressing it. You are not holding it back inside your unconscious. And the more you express your sexuality, with no guilt, with no sin -- because it is not a sin; it…
You are known throughout the world as the tantra master or the sex guru, yet in the three years I have been in your ashram, not only have I had less sex than ever before in my life, but thought and heard less about it as well. Will you explain this discrepancy?
Just the other day in a magazine, CINE BLITZ, I came across a headline, and they say I am the Hugh Heffner of the spiritual world. And what are they talking about? Yes, I teach you how to go deep in love. I teach you how to go deep in sex too, because that is the only way to go beyond. To go through it is the only way to go beyond it -- but my goal is to take you beyond. Now this is a problem, and I am going to be misunderstood again and again, all over the world. People have become accustomed: they think religious people have to be against sex; and those who are not against sex, how can they be religious? These have become DEADLY settled categories. I am unsettling all those categories, and I don't expect the world to immediately change so much from…