Lust

 

 

Love is saying yes to life. Love is nothing but saying yes to life. Hate is saying no to life. And in India the person who hates life, renounces it, denounces it, condemns it, is worshipped as a saint. And because of these people and because of this tradition and because of this conditioning, everybody has become repressed. Everybody's love energy is in a perverted state. When love becomes perverted it creates lust. Love is beautiful, lust is ugly.

 

When you see a woman, a beautiful woman, or a beautiful man, you can see her or him through loving eyes or lustful eyes -- and the difference is tremendous but very delicate. When you see a woman through loving eyes you are seeing a roseflower or a lotus or a sunset. And if you say the sunset is beautiful and if you stop for a moment, nobody will say that this is wrong, that this is immoral. If you say that the roseflower is beautiful and if you go close to the roseflower to smell the perfume of it or even to touch it tenderly, softly, to feel its velvetiness, nobody will call you a sinner. People will think you are a poet, a sensitive man, that you have some aesthetic sensibility.

 

But if you go to a beautiful woman just to touch her, to see her skin, to feel it, and to say to her, "You are beautiful!" suddenly great fear arises. This cannot be done; this is immoral -- she is somebody else's woman. Or even if she is your own woman, this has to be done in privacy, as if you cannot enjoy the sunset openly -- you have to hide somewhere, then you can enjoy -- you cannot enjoy the starry night.

 

Love simply means sensitivity to beauty, to life. Lust means a desire to exploit, a desire to use the woman as a means. Lust is sexual, love is sensitive. There may be sex in love, but then it has a totally different connotation, a different meaning, a different flavor. Then it is not the center of it.

 

In a loving relationship sex may happen, may not happen; there is no inevitability about it. If it happens then it is part of love, of sharing energy. If it does not happen, that too is part of love. There is no need to come to the physical level; you are capable of sharing your energies psychologically, spiritually.

 

So love has many dimensions, at least three dimensions: the physical, which can become sex; the psychological, which becomes friendship; and the spiritual, which becomes prayer. And it is possible that in love all three dimensions may be present simultaneously, but they are all part of a loving approach towards life. There is no exploitation; there is no desire to use the other as a means and then throw them away.

 

Lust means sex is the center: you don't have any sensibility for beauty, you don't have any aesthetic sense. Can you think of a man of aesthetic sense going to a prostitute? Impossible. Can you think of a man who has some aesthetic sense raping a woman? Impossible. Or even hitting a woman in the crowd or just touching her body in such a way as if he was not meaning to touch her, as if it happened accidentally? This is not love, this is not sensibility, this is not sensitiveness. It is lust.

 

Lust means you don't respect the other at all. You have a deep, repressed desire, repressed sexuality which comes in many perverted ways. Then your eyes become covered and colored with only sexuality. [....]

 

The Indian mind is so sexually repressed that it cannot love, it can only lust. And once the lust is there you start looking at everybody else in the same way; that is your language.

 

When two Western sannyasins are hugging each other and the Indian -- any Indian -- sees them, the only idea in his mind is that of sex and lust; he cannot understand love. Not a single sannyasin from the West in these six years -- and thousands have come, at least fifty thousand people come every year -- has raped any Indian woman. But hundreds of attempts have been made by the Indians on Western women, and not only by ordinary people but even by police officers. Even to go to the police station is dangerous! Everywhere there are wolves -- and these are very spiritual wolves, very religious! But they know only one language: that of lust. [....]

 

Sex can be raised to higher levels of love and prayer, and sex can also be reduced to lower levels of lust and animality. Sex can become a conversion or a perversion; it has both the possibilities. And because of twentyfive centuries of continuous condemnation, every Indian is full of perverted ideas.

 

-Osho, "Theologia Mystica, #15, Q2“