According to Osho, the boundary between joy and sorrow is the sex center—the threshold of pleasure. Ordinary sexual joy is merely the relief of released, accumulated energy. If that energy is refined upward, it becomes higher, nonsexual bliss; if it is blocked and falls below sex, it turns into pain, perversion, and cruelty. Direction of energy decides joy or suffering.
Sex is the doorway between feeling good and feeling bad: lift your energy above it for deeper happiness, let it drop below and it becomes pain.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
What is that—where our joys are transformed into sorrows? That boundary line where below there is suffering and above there is joy. That is why a suffering man becomes sexual. A very happy man becomes nonsexual. Because for him there is only one pleasure. Only one pleasure. Just as a poor, destitute, unhappy society will at once start producing children: the poor have many children; the rich do not. Often the rich even have to adopt!
You will be surprised to know, the word “sadism” comes from a man: de Sade, a very great writer. His way of making love was precisely this—from him the term “sadism,” “pain-ism,” arose—that whenever he loved a woman he kept with him a whip, a knife, thorns! He had a bag for this. When he loved, after closing the doors, the first thing was to whip her! He would strip her naked and begin to whip her! And she would run, scream, cry; the more she screamed and cried, the more bliss he felt! He would prick with thorns; he had made all kinds of instruments for just this—how to torment a woman! Ordinarily it doesn’t occur to us. Ordinarily it doesn’t occur to us that if in love someone is pinching a woman, it is sadism in a small measure. It is a tiny act of torture. In love…
Question: BELOVED OSHO, THEN A WOMAN SAID, SPEAK TO US OF JOY AND SORROW. AND HE ANSWERED: YOUR JOY IS YOUR SORROW UNMASKED. AND THE SELFSAME WELL FROM WHICH YOUR LAUGHTER RISES WAS OFTENTIMES FILLED WITH YOUR TEARS. AND HOW ELSE CAN IT BE? THE DEEPER THAT SORROW CARVES INTO YOUR BEING, THE MORE JOY YOU CAN CONTAIN. IS NOT THE CUP THAT HOLDS YOUR WINE THE VERY CUP THAT WAS BURNED IN THE POTTER'S OVEN? AND IS NOT THE LUTE THAT SOOTHES YOUR SPIRIT THE VERY WOOD THAT WAS HOLLOWED WITH KNIVES? WHEN YOU ARE JOYOUS, LOOK DEEP INTO YOUR HEART AND YOU SHALL FIND IT IS ONLY THAT WHICH HAS GIVEN YOU SORROW THAT IS GIVING YOU JOY. WHEN YOU ARE SORROWFUL, LOOK AGAIN IN YOUR HEART, AND YOU SHALL SEE THAT IN TRUTH YOU ARE WEEPING FOR THAT WHICH HAS BEEN YOUR DELIGHT.
Question: The first question: Osho! Ah, what joy! Ah, what pain! Vinod Bharati, at first one is startled when it feels like this: such joy, such pain—together! They arise together; they can only arise together—in equal proportion. But the glory of bliss, its magic wand, is that it fills even pain with a new sweetness. Pain is no longer pain. A sannyasin, Bhavani Dayal—well known—returned to India after years of traveling in the West. In his autobiography he writes: I went on a pilgrimage to the Himalayas. A steep ascent, blazing noon, the sun like fire, the slope sheer—a struggle to take each step—drenched in sweat. Just ahead of me a mountain girl, no more than eleven or twelve, was climbing with her younger brother on her shoulder. The boy, though small—three or four at most—was pretty heavy, a sturdy hill child. The girl was dripping with sweat.
Osho, in your satsang I am experiencing great joy and life appears to be a celebration. But isn’t the joy of this fleeting life also fleeting?
Naked in each other’s arms! At first they were delighted and rushed to embrace. But when ropes tied them to the post, how long does pleasure remain pleasure? Within a few minutes they began to panic: How to separate now? How to be apart? How to get free? But they remained bound. A few hours passed, and then another disturbance began. Evacuation of excreta and urine happened; filth spread. Each other’s mouths began to stink; sweat; such distress. And they had to remain bound for twenty-four hours. As soon as they were released, the story says, they ran away from each other so fast they never saw each other again. The young man even left the village. This proved a wondrous—yet very psychological—way to end love. You see in the West love is being uprooted, breaking. Why? There is no longer any obstacle between man and woman; therefore love is…
Osho, I am so familiar with sorrow that I can’t bring myself to trust happiness. One sorrow leaves and another arrives; it just goes on like that. Will I ever have a glimpse of happiness? Show me the path—what should I do to attain happiness? I am ready to do anything.
One sorrow follows another. The son finishes and the father arrives. But the beginning—why did you go to the poet’s house at all? And when he laughed, why didn’t you run away then? When he ordered tea, why didn’t you take the hint? Once you drink the tea, leaving becomes difficult. If you eat someone’s salt, you must play along—otherwise they’ll call you ungrateful! Be careful in advance. Where is the root of sorrow? It is in the ego, in the sense “I am.” This is the root of all diseases; all the ailments are its leaves. And you do not let go of it; you cling to it. Yet it is a sheer, downright untruth. You are not; the divine is. I am not; the divine is. A wave imagines, “I am,” whereas only the ocean is—where is the wave? And once you start living a lie, you must…