According to Osho, to transcend sex is not to suppress or begin some new practice, but to recognize—through alert awareness—the very life-energy that moves as sex. When you bring total consciousness to your actions, relationships, and even breathing, unconscious compulsion dissolves. Then the same energy shifts from tension and misery to trust and delight, and sex loses its grip as identity, becoming just a natural flow.
Pay steady, gentle attention to your life-energy (like you watch your breath) so sex stops running you and becomes just simple, natural energy.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
How to start the journey? What does it exactly mean to transcend sex?
So there are two types of people: very egoistic people are always against sex; humble people are never against sex. But who listens to humble people? In fact, humble people don't go preaching, only egoists. Why is there a conflict between sex and ego? -- because sex is something in your life where you cannot be egoistic, where the other becomes more important than you. Your woman, your man, becomes more important than you. In every other case, you remain the most important. In a love relationship the other becomes very, very important, tremendously important. You become a satellite and the other becomes the nucleus; and the same is happening for the other: you become the nucleus and he becomes a satellite. It is a reciprocal surrender. Both are surrendering to the God of love, and both become humble. Sex is the only energy that gives you hints that there…
Can't sex be transcended without going into it?
Then what is the need to transcend it? The need of transcendence arises only because you are in it. You are born in it, you are born out of it. You are a sexual phenomenon. Except for Jesus, nobody has been born of a virgin. And Christians insist too much on the theory that Mary was a virgin so that they can condemn sex. If Jesus is also born of sex, then it will be difficult to condemn sex. In fact, Jesus was born out of sex as much as anybody else. The body has to be constituted from male and female energy, otherwise the body cannot be constituted. To say that Mary was virgin is to say that you have electricity in your house with only one pole: positive or negative. That will be just as nonsensical. Electricity needs to have both poles, positive and negative. Without those two…
Question: BELOVED OSHO, DO WE HAVE TO TRANSCEND SEX BEFORE GETTING ENLIGHTENED? You don't have to transcend anything. You have to live everything that is natural to you, and live it fully, without any inhibition -- joyously, aesthetically. Just by living it deeply, a transcendence will come. You are not to transcend anything. Remember my words. A transcendence will come by itself, and when it comes by itself it is such a release and such a freedom. If you try to transcend, you are going to repress, and repression is the sole reason why people cannot transcend; so you are getting into a vicious circle. You want to transcend, so you repress, and because you repress you cannot transcend, so you repress more. As you repress more, you become more incapable of transcendence. Live it out fully, without any condemnation, without any religion interfering with your life.
Please describe to us the spiritual significance of sex energy. How can we sublimate and spiritualize sex? Is it possible to have sex, to make love, as a meditation, as a jumping board toward higher levels of consciousness?
There is no such thing as sex energy. Energy is one and the same. Sex is one outlet for it, one direction for it; it is one of the applications of the energy. Life energy is one, but it can manifest in many directions. Sex is one of them. When life energy becomes biological, it becomes sex energy. Sex is just an application of the life energy. So there is no question of sublimation. If life energy flows in another direction, there is no sex. But it is not a sublimation; it is a transformation. Sex is the natural, biological flow of life energy, and the lowest application of it. It is natural because life cannot exist without it, and the lowest because it is the foundation not the peak. When sex becomes the totality, the whole life is just a waste. It is like laying a foundation and going…
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…