Osho on Sex

Osho, I always dream of sex and sex and sex -- why?

ARE YOU A FOLLOWER of Morarji Desai? Something is basically wrong with you. Your dreams simply show that you are living a repressed life. Your dreams reflect how you are living your life. Your dreams are not just dreams -- they are reflections. In the waking time you must be repressing sex; then, naturally, it is bound to assert itself in your dreams. Dreams only indicate that you are doing something wrong with your life. When your life is really harmonious, lived consciously, dreams disappear -- all kinds of dreams disappear. Your whole sleep becomes dreamless. That is the indication that the transformation is happening -- that happens to every meditator. As meditation goes deeper, dreams start disappearing. But dreams show something about you. And you have to rethink, you have to rearrange your life. If you are dreaming only of sex, that simply shows you are sex-obsessed. And who…

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.

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…

Is it really possible to drop sex by going through it? It seems my mind and body will never stop asking for it?

I have heard about Jerome, a very famous Christian saint. He was so much against the body that he used to whip his body every day. Blood would flow from his body, and thousands of people would come to see this great austerity. Now both are ill: Jerome is a masochist, and the people who gather together to see this great phenomenon are sadists. They want to torture people, they have a great desire to torture. They cannot, and this man is doing it on his own -- they are very happy watching it. Both are pathological. Jerome condemned the body as the 'vile body', the 'sack of excrement'. He was tormented in his cave by visions of bevies of girls. He grudgingly permitted marriage, very grudgingly -- because it was the only way of producing virgins. The reason is: virgins -- the most perfect beings on the earth. So…

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…

Question: BELOVED OSHO, WHAT ARE YOUR VIEWS ON SEXUAL ETHICS? ... My own insight is that people came to discover meditation through sexual orgasm because of these qualities. They could see that when thoughts stop, time stops, ego disappears and you are in a tremendously beautiful space. Although it lasts only for seconds, it has given you the taste of something that is not of this world, something of the beyond. We don't know who discovered meditation, perhaps thousands of years ago. In the East we have books at least ten thousand years old describing methods of meditation. But any method brings the same qualities. This is my feeling, that without sexual orgasm nobody could have been able to discover these three qualities. Once they discovered these three qualities, people of intelligence must have tried to experience them without going into sexual orgasm.

One of the controversial issues about the rajneesh ashram concerns indulgence in sex and what are being condemned as sexual perversions or orgies. We would like bhagwan rajneesh to give us his views on sex and its role in transcendence. -- r.k. Karanjia, editor, blitz

He's an atheist, a confirmed atheist who had never prayed. But with the situation -- the fear of the night and the wild animals -- for the first time in his life he thought of God. He forgot all his arguments that he used to give against God. He knelt down on the ground and he said, "Dear Lord...." although he looked around, a little embarrassed, knowing perfectly well that there was nobody, but still embarrassed -- the whole life's philosophy of atheism! But when fear knocks on the doors and when death is so close by, who bothers about logic, philosophies, isms? Who bothers about reason, argument? "Dear Lord," he said, "please help me get out of these woods, and I will always worship you. I will even start going to the mosque. I will follow all the rituals of Islam. I promise you! Just save me. Forgive me.…

Beloved Osho, would you talk to us about using our sexual energy for growth, as it seems to be one of our main preoccupations in the west.

In a sexual orgasm you ARE. Being is there without any thinking. In this moment, if you can become alert, conscious, then sex can become the door towards the divine. And if in this moment you can become alert, that alertness can be carried in other moments also, in other experiences also. It can become a part of you. Then eating, walking, doing some work, you can carry that alertness. Through sex, the alertness has touched your deepest core. It has penetrated you. Now you can carry it. And, if you become meditative, you will come to realize a new fact. That fact is that it is not sex that gives you bliss, it is not sex that gives you the ecstasy. Rather, it is a thoughtless state of the mind and total involvement in the act that gives you a blissful feeling. Once you understand this then sex will…