Sex Education

 

 

Sex does not rear its head as soon as a child is born. There is still time for that. The body gathers energy, the cells gain strength, and the day comes when the body is fully ready. The energy will slowly muster itself, and then it will push open a door that has been shut for the first fourteen years – and for the child that is the beginning of the world of sex.

 

Once that door has opened it becomes difficult to open the new door, because it is the nature of energy that once it has found a passage to flow along, it is easier for it to keep that passage. Once the Ganges has set its course it continues to flow along it; it does not seek out a new course every day. Fresh waters may pour in daily, but it continues to flow along the same path. Similarly, man’s life-energy seeks a course for itself and then continues to flow along it.

 

If a person is to be freed of sexuality, it is necessary to create a new door for the sexual energy before the door of sex opens. The new door is that of meditation.

 

There should be a mandatory teaching and lessons in meditation for every child in the early years. Instead we teach the child antagonism to sex which is absolutely foolish. The child is not to be taught antagonism to sex, the child is to be given something positive: how to become available to meditation. And children can attain to meditation faster because the door to their sex energy is not open yet, the door is closed; the energy is safely conserved, it can knock on any new door and open it. Later these same people would have grown old and it would be very difficult for them to attain to meditation.

 

A supple young plant bends easily in any direction, it can be bent easily in any direction. But as it grows older, it hardens. If you try to bend it then, it can break.

 

Older people trying meditation is a wrong approach. All efforts of meditation should be made on children. But humans, as they are, only show interest in meditation toward the end of their life. Only then do they inquire about what meditation is, what spiritual discipline is, how they can become peaceful. When all our energy is spent, when all the possibilities of progress have dried up, when everything has hardened in its tracks, when all suppleness is lost, when transformation is very difficult we want to transform ourselves. A person with one foot in the grave asks if anything can be done to attain to meditation. Is there a way? This is strange. This notion is mad.

 

This planet can never be peaceful and meditative until we connect the notion of meditation with the newly born. It is futile to connect it with people who are in the evening of their lives. It unnecessarily demands enormous effort to try to become peaceful toward the end of one’s life; it could have been very easily accomplished if it had been attempted earlier in life.

 

So the first step toward the transformation of sex is to introduce small children to meditation – to initiate them into peace, and to initiate them into no-thought, to initiate them into silence. Children are anyway silent and peaceful by adult standards. If they were given a little bit of direction and taught to be silent and serene even for a little while each day, a new door would have already opened in them by the time they were fourteen years old, by the time they were sexually mature. The energy would mature and begin to flow through the door that is already open. They would have had the experiences of peace, of bliss, of timelessness and of egolessness long before the experience of sex. This familiarity would prevent their energy from moving into wrong channels; it would divert it onto the right path.

 

Instead of teaching the tranquility of meditation, we teach children to abhor sex. “Sex is sin, sex is dirty,” we say. We tell them it is ugly and bad; we say that it is hell. But name-calling does nothing whatsoever to alter the actual situation. On the contrary, children become more curious; they want to know more about this hell, about this evil, about this dirty thing that makes their parents and teachers so afraid and panic-stricken.

 

And within a very short time, children come to know that their parents themselves are engaged in the very same pursuit about which they were being prevented from knowing. And the day they discover this, all their respect and trust in their parents evaporates. Modern education is not responsible, as is generally believed, for the great decrease in the reverence for parents; the parents themselves are to blame for this. Children soon come to know that the parents are completely submerged in the very thing they teach as dirty, that their day-life is different from their night-life, that there is disparity in what they say and what they do.

 

Children are very acute observers. They attentively notice what goes on in the house. They see that the very thing father calls “dirty” and mother calls “bad” is afoot at home. They soon become aware of it. All feeling of reverence for their parents disappears, because to them the parents are hypocrites, frauds. They do not practice what they preach.

 

And remember, children who have lost faith in their parents will never be able to develop any faith in God. Children have their first glimpse of godliness in their parents, and if this faith is shattered they will surely grow up to be atheists. Children have their first feeling of godliness in the purity of their parents. The parents are closest to them. It is through the parents that a feeling of faith and reverence arises in the child. If this faith is shattered it will be very difficult to bring the child back again to a closeness with God. The very first deities betrayed them – their mother and father proved to be frauds.

 

Today, the modern younger generation denies the existence of God and soul, ridicules the idea of ultimate liberation and calls religion humbug, not because they have searched for themselves and thus arrived at their own conclusions, but because they have found their parents to be hypocrites, deceptive. And this whole deception is based around sex, centered around sex.

 

Do not teach children that sex is sin. Instead, it is necessary to explain to them that sex is part and parcel of life, that we are all born out of sex, that sex is in our very life itself. This will help them to understand their parents’ behavior easily in its proper perspective, and when they grow up and experience life for themselves they will be filled with reverence for the sincerity and honesty of their parents. There can be no greater ingredient in making their lives religious than discovering the sincerity and honesty of their parents. But today all children know that their parents are hypocrites and are deceptive. This becomes a major cause for the conflict between children and parents. The suppression of sex has created a gap between husband and wife and between children and their parents.

 

No. We do not need antagonism to sex, condemnation of sex; what is needed is education of sex. As soon as children become mature enough to ask, all that seems essential, all that they can grasp should be told to them so that they don’t become excessively curious about sex, so that they don’t become attracted to a point of mania where they try to find out through wrong sources. Otherwise, as is the case today, children find out what they want to know, but they find it out from the wrong people, they find it out through wrong channels, and this causes them pain and torture for the rest of their lives. And all the while a wall of silence and secrecy exists between the parents and them as if the parents know nothing about sex nor do their children.

 

Children must be given the right education about sex.

 

Secondly, children should be taught to meditate – how to remain calm, serene, silent; how to reach the state of no-mind. Children can learn to accomplish this very, very quickly if there are facilities at home for them to move into silence even for an hour every day. And certainly that will only be possible, when you, as parents, also sit for meditation with them. A daily hour of sitting silently should be compulsory in every home. If a home goes without a meal one day due to some necessity, that can be tolerated; but no home should go without an hour of meditation each day. It is wrong to call that place a family’s home where an hour of silence isn’t observed daily. It is a false home.

 

An hour of daily silence by the time one is fourteen will break open the door to meditation, to that state where one experiences timelessness and egolessness, where one gets a glimpse of the soul. This glimpse before any experience of sex is significant. This glimpse puts an end to the excessive rush toward sex; the energy would have found a new path. This I call the first step. Meditation is the first step in the discipline of celibacy, in the discipline of transcending sex, in the discipline of transforming the sex energy.

 

The second step is love. Children should be taught love from infancy. So far the common understanding has been that the teaching of love will lead one into the world of sex. But this fear is groundless. The teaching of sex can lead one to love, but the teaching of love will never drag one into sexuality. The truth is just the opposite. The more love grows in a person, the more sex energy is transformed into love and is shared. The less love-filled a person, the more sex-minded. The less love-filled a person, the more hatred the person has; the less love-filled a person, the more spiteful the person’s life will be. And the less love-filled one is, the more jealousy, competitiveness, worry and unhappiness will be in one’s life. The more one is engulfed by worry, jealousy, hatred, spite, the more one’s energies become stagnant inside and then the only outlet for them is sex.

 

Love becomes an outlet for energies. Love is a flow. It is creative and that is why it flows and brings a contentment. And that contentment is much deeper and much more valuable than the contentment that comes through sex. One who knows that contentment will never look for any substitute, just as a person who acquires jewels will never search for pebbles and stones.

 

But a person full of hate can never find contentment. In hatred, one divides, one destroys things. And destruction never brings contentment; contentment comes through creation. A person with jealousy struggles, but struggle never brings contentment. Contentment comes through giving, sharing, not by snatching away. A person in struggle, in fight snatches. But taking away never brings that contentment which comes through giving and sharing. An ambitious person hops from one position to another but is never able to acquire peace.

 

Peace comes to those who take on the journey of love, who move from one pilgrimage of love to another, not to those who take on the journey of power and position. The more full of love one is, the more contentment, deep satisfaction, feeling of joy, sense of completion flows in every cell of one’s being. A delightful juiciness, that of contentment and bliss, surrounds the person. Such a contented person does not move in the dimension of sex. And one does not have to make an effort in order not to move in that dimension. One simply does not move there because the contentment that one used to get for a few moments through sex is now available around the clock through love.

 

So the next direction is that our beings grow more in the dimension of love. We love, we bestow love, we live in love. And to be initiated into love, it is not necessary to love only human beings. The initiation into love is an initiation into one’s whole being becoming loving. It is an initiation into being loving.

 

One can pick up a stone as if one were lifting a friend. One can also hold someone’s hands in a way as if holding an enemy’s hands. Someone may be able to handle material things with loving care, while another may behave with human beings in a way that one should not even behave with material things. A person full of hatred treats human beings as lifeless objects; a person full of love imparts a living personality even to lifeless objects. [....]

 

To say one should love one’s mother is a misrepresentation. If a mother asks her child to love her just because she is the mother, it is a wrong education. A love due to a reason with “hence” and “therefore” is false. Someone asking to be loved because he is the father is giving a wrong training. It is bringing in a reason for love. Love is without a reason, love is never due to a reason. If a mother tells her child, “I looked after you for so long. I brought you up, therefore love me,” she is giving a reason for love, it is the end of love. Forced, the child may unwillingly pretend to love because she is the mother.

 

The education of love does not mean giving reasons for love, it only means creating an environment, an opportunity in which the child can become loving.

 

-Osho, "From Sex to Superconsciousness, #3"