According to Osho, it is essential to understand your inner movements—mind, heart, and feelings—because understanding creates a witnessing distance. Seen in awareness, sex and death are two poles of one energy; recognizing their unity dissolves fear and identification. Intense impressions of both often signal sexual energy peaking, not literal danger. Understanding is the alchemy that transforms turmoil into clarity.
Watch your feelings like a curious friend; sex and death are two ends of the same life-energy, and seeing this calmly makes you less scared and more balanced.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, I have had a strong feeling of sex and death over the last few weeks. Is it necessary that I understand why?
Man's orgasm is so quick that he cannot create the vaginal orgasm in that small period of time -- a few seconds. But if clitoral orgasm is created just as foreplay, it is creating a situation for the vaginal orgasm to happen. It has already started: the clitoral orgasm has triggered the process in the body. But men pay no attention to the clitoral orgasm, because their orgasm can happen easily only with vaginal contact. They are interested only in their own orgasm, and when they are finished they don't think about the woman at all. Lesbianism is spreading in the woman's liberation movement because it is giving them clitoral orgasm; but that is another stupidity because it is simply foreplay. It is as if you had the preface of the book but the book is missing. So you go on reading the preface as long as you want, again…
Question: Osho, A dervish was on a sea voyage. As per custom, all the passengers came to him one by one and asked for wise counsel. The dervish told everyone the same thing: “Keep awareness of death until you come to know death itself.” It was a dervish’s meditation aphorism. But it did not appeal to any of the travelers. A little later a terrible storm arose at sea. Panic swept the whole ship. The sailors and the passengers all fell to their knees and began praying to God to save the ship. Yet amid this terror the dervish sat unperturbed and serene. Then the sea, too, grew calm. A fellow traveler asked the dervish, “Did you not see that during that dreadful storm there was nothing between us and death but a plank?” “Yes, I knew,” the dervish replied, “that at sea it is always so.
One becomes unconscious of one's self: one becomes conscious of the supreme Self. One becomes unconscious as an ego: one becomes conscious as a universal consciousness. One loses boundaries, one starts melting; definitions disappear. One is simply there, unlimited, unbounded, infinite: neither limited by time nor limited by space. Love gives you the first glimpses of eternity, of deathlessness, of timelessness. And once love has stirred the heart, one lives a totally different quality of life. One lives without anguish, one lives without fear. One lives dangerously and one lives creatively. Love releases a thousand and one qualities. It makes you authentic, it makes you sincere, it makes you creative. It makes you a celebrant. It brings unknown songs to you. It introduces you to new planes of being, to new plenitudes.
Osho, why am I so much afraid of two groups here, the tantra and the encounter?
You see the stupidity? You are making conditions for me. You are trying to bribe me -- as if being called "Bhagwan" by Geet Govind is going to give me something, as if I am interested in being called "Bhagwan" by Geet Govind, or as if his sannyas is something immensely valuable for my existence. Reading his letter I was reminded of T.S. Eliot's lines: We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! If you are afraid to face your sexuality -- which is the beginning of your life, which is the source of your life -- and if you are afraid to face your death and the fear that it creates -- which is going to be the end of your life -- you are nothing but a "hollow" man, a "stuffed" man, a "headpiece filled with straw. Alas!" You…
What is the relationship between meditation and the unlearning process?
In the East just the totally different thing has happened. We cannot conceive of Buddha going mad. That would be the most impossible thing in the world: Buddha going mad. Nietzsche goes mad because Nietzsche is a thinker, Buddha CANNOT go mad because he is a NO-thinker; he drops thinking, how can he go mad? One day the whole crowd is gone and he is sitting alone, nobody to even disturb, so much alone that he is not even one, because who is there to say that you are one? If somebody is there to say that you are one, the other is still present. Meditation is unlearning. Peel your onion. It is difficult, because you have become identified with the onion, you think these layers are YOU so to peel them is difficult, it is painful also, because it is not like just throwing your clothes, rather it is…