How should a teenager approach love and friendship with the opposite sex?

Please talk about love and friendship with the other sex. How should a teenager go about it?

You go totally... and the teenager can go more totally than anybody else. He is becoming sexually ripe, or has become ripe, and he has more sexual potential than anybody else, more than he will ever have again in his life. These are the most precious moments. Do not waste them in reading geography, in reading histories about all kinds of idiots -- Tamerlane, Nadirshah, Alexander the Great, Ivan the Terrible -- all of no use. Make love to a girl. Ask any older boy, ask your teachers, ask your father, ask your mother how to make love. There are manuals available; go to the library and find out. It is not a difficult job, just a little gymnastics... In the beginning you will feel a little awkward about what you are doing. But soon you will become accustomed that this is the way the whole of humanity has been…

This feeling of betrayal has come about because sex has been wrongly represented by their elders. It should be openly explained to them that sex is part and parcel of life, that we are all born out of sex, and that sex is also part of their lives. This will help them to understand their parents' behavior in its proper perspective, and when they grow and experience life for themselves they will be filled with reverence for the honesty of their parents. The beginning, in a child, of this faith and reverence will lay the foundation for a religious life. Children today suspect that their parents are hypocrites; hence the present ideological clash between the younger and the older generations. The suppression of sex has separated husband from wife and has set children against their parents.

So a great reverence has to be developed. That is the tantra vision: reverence for life, reverence for everything that life implies, particularly sex because it is sex that life comes out of. Each cell of the body is a sexual cell. The whole celebration around us is a sexual celebration. Flowers are sexual, the song of the bird is sexual and all that is beautiful is sexual. But the word 'sex' has become very very condemned. The moment you use the word something inside you becomes antagonistic; the very word has become loaded. I am not saying to force sex on yourself, but whenever it happens have a very very holy, full-of-reverence attitude towards it. The woman that you love, think of her as a goddess; think of her as a medium between you and god.

Beloved Osho, what is the right way to help a child grow without interfering in his natural potentiality?

The right way is not to help the child at all. If you have real courage then please don't help the child. Love him, nourish him. Let him do what he wants to do. Let him go where he wants to go. Your mind will be tempted again and again to interfere, and with good excuses. The mind is very clever in rationalizing: "If you don't interfere there may be danger; the child may fall into the well if you don't stop him." But I say to you, it is better to let him fall into the well than to help him and destroy him. It is a very rare possibility that the child falls into the well -- and then too, it does not mean death; he can be taken out of the well. And if you are really so concerned, the well can be covered; but don't help…

No—no opposition, no condemnation of sex; rather sex education should be given. As soon as children are ready to ask, tell them whatever seems necessary, whatever they can understand—so that they are not excessively curious, so that they do not become obsessed, so that they do not run after wrong sources for information. Today children pick up all information from here and there—from wrong routes, from wrong people—knowledge that torments them throughout life. And a silent wall stands between parents and children, as if parents know nothing and children know nothing! They must be given right education about sex. And secondly, they must be initiated into meditation—how to be silent, how to be peaceful, how to be thoughtless. Children can instantly be thoughtless, silent, still.