Osho Quotes on Sex

 

 

 

You are obsessed with sex because you don’t know any other sort of celebration. So the problem is not sex really; the problem is that you don’t know any other celebration.

 

Nature allows you only one joy, and that is of sex. Nature allows you only one enjoyment, that is of sex. Nature allows you only one thrill, and that is of sex.

 

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In the sexual act you have a certain thrill, a moment of forgetfulness, a moment of oblivion. You feel good — for a few seconds, only for a few seconds, you drop out of this routine world. Sex gives you a door to escape into some other world — which is non-tense; there is no worry; you are simply relaxed and melting. But have you observed? After each sexual act you feel frustrated.

 

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Sex creates neurosis, it is neurotic, because it can never satisfy you. Now, go to the madhouses of the world and just watch the mad people, and you will always find that somewhere or other there is a sexual problem. That’s what Freud says, that ALL pathology is somehow connected with sex. Too much sex obsession becomes neurotic. If you live in the body, you are bound to become neurotic. You have to go a little deeper and higher than the body.

 

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Whenever a person starts condemning sex, somewhere he must be carrying a jealousy. Buddha is not condemning. He is simply factual. He simply says whatsoever is the case. And he wants you to come out of it because your destiny is bigger, higher is the potentiality.

 

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Animals have sex but no sexuality. Man has sex plus sexuality. Sex is physical, sexuality is mental — and when you talk, your talk can be sexual. Animals have sex; that’s a physiological act. They don’t talk, they don’t have any language; but man has language, and language is one of the most powerful instruments in the hands of man. You communicate through it, you relate through it. You seduce through words, you insult through words; you show your love through words, you show your hate through words. You repel or attract through your words.

 

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In sex there may be relaxation. In sex there may be physiological health and hygiene. But there is no growth. You remain animal. With love you become human. With love you become upright. With love you stand erect on earth. With sex you are again animal, you are horizontal on the earth, just moving like other animals, crawling. With love you are erect, vertical.

 

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Real awareness always leads you beyond sex, and celibacy happens on its own accord. Because to be in sex you have either to be identified with the male or identified with the female. A real celibate is one who has gone beyond, who is neither.

 

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Repression can never bring freedom. Repression makes you a slave. Repress anything, and that will become your master. So the so-called celibates in the monasteries — the BRAHMACHARIS — they are continuously obsessed with sex. Their whole obsession is sex, their mind is completely sexual — it has to be so. Or, if you are mad, and you are REALLY against the body and you start destroying the body, the only thing that you can succeed in will be that you will become a eunuch.

 

♦

 

Love goes beyond polarity, sex remains below polarity. Sex needs the opposite, love does not need the opposite. Hence, in sex there is always a subtle conflict, because with the opposite the harmony can never be total. For moments maybe… again the conflict comes in.

 

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Love is unconditional, sex is conditional. In sex there is a give and take. In love, you simply pour. You don’t ask, there is no demand. Not that you don’t get — you get a thousandfold — but that is not asked for. That simply comes on its own accord: the whole existence showers back, echoes back.

 

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Now, one thing to be remembered always: if you are not very alert you may go on believing that you are moving into tantra, and you may be simply rationalizing your sexuality — it may be nothing but sex, rationalized in the terminology of tantra. If you move into sex with awareness, it can turn into tantra. If you move into tantra with unawareness, it can fall and become ordinary sex. It has happened in India — because only India has tried it.

 

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Sex energy is just at the source of the spine. If a child is taught from the very beginning to be against sex…. Sex is sin, and sex has to be destroyed, or at least controlled — never allowed to go too far, never allowed to be spontaneous; has to be put under many controls, laws, regulations. These laws, regulations, suppressions, they become the buffer: the kundabuffer is created. Then sex energy remains repressed at the source of the spine and does not rise in the spine. That’s what they say in the East: Once the sex energy rises in the spine, you start becoming very very happy. When the sex energy reaches to the seventh — SAHASRAR — you flower into a lotus bloom. Your life then is a deep ecstasy.

 

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Awareness is the true path. Neither indulge nor renounce, but be aware. Do whatsoever you are doing — do it with full awareness. If you move into passion, move with awareness; and passion becomes prayer, and passion has a totally different quality to it. In the East we have called that quality tantra. The same sex is no longer sex — it is no longer sexual at all. Once you move into your passion with awareness, you have changed the very quality of it. It is no longer just physical, it is no longer just a physical release; it is a very deep experience of life. It is a tremendous experience of no-mind. It is a door towards the greatest space possible.

 

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In deep orgasm, if you are aware, you will know for the first time what ecstasy is. Otherwise you have only heard the word; you have not known its meaning. Only in deep orgasm, if you are aware, if your flame of awareness is burning bright, will you be able to know that sex is not just sex. Sex is the outermost layer; deep inside is love; and even deeper is prayer; and deepest is God himself. Sex can become a cosmic experience; then it is tantra. Sex plus awareness… and something tremendous starts changing.

 

♦

 

When sex becomes an obsession, it takes perverted forms

 

♦

 

What happens with your sex energy depends on how you use it. What it can become does not depend on it alone, but on your understanding and on how you live your life. Have you not observed that it becomes brahmacharya, the state of celibacy when it is transformed? bramhacharya is not hostile to passion; brahmacharya is the purification, the transcendence, the sublimation of passion. In the same way, the energy that manifests itself in violence becomes peace, serenity and tranquility. It is only a question of transformation.

 

♦

 

Love is not sexual passion. Those who mistake sex for love remain empty of love. Sex is only a passing manifestation of love. It is part of nature’s mechanism, a method of procreation. Love exists on a higher plane, and as love grows, sex dissipates. The energy that has been manifested in sex is transformed into love.

 

♦

 

Love is the creative refinement of sex energy. And so, when love reaches perfection, the absence of sex automatically follows. A life of love, an abstinence from physical pleasures is called brahmacharya, and anyone who wishes to be free from sex must develop his capacity to love. Freedom from sex cannot be achieved through supersession. Liberation from sex is only possible through love.

 

♦

 

The first thing: be a witness of sex too. Don’t be the controller of it. Don’t try to forcibly bring it under control, remain a witness of it too. Just as you are a witness of everything else, remain a witness of sex too. It is difficult, because you have been taught for centuries that sex is sin. That concept of sin has been fixed in your mind.

 

♦

 

Both are easy: it is perfectly easy to go unconscious in sex, to completely forget what is going on, to get intoxicated is easy. To control sex, to force it to stop, to prevent yourself is also easy. But in both you miss. The one who indulges misses, the celibate misses too. The real brahmacharya happens when you stand in the middle between these two, then you are only watching. Then you will find that sex arises in the body and reverberates in the body; in the mind a shadow briefly falls and departs. You remain standing far away. How can sexual desire be in you? How can any desire be in you? You are nothing but the observer.

 

♦

 

See life from a positive viewpoint. If you start being happy then the things that you grabbed onto because of your misery will drop by themselves. If meditation comes then wine will drop. If meditation comes, then meat-eating will drop. If meditation comes then slowly slowly sex energy begins to be transformed into brahmacharya. Just let meditation come.

 

♦

 

Just by condemning nothing is destroyed. If you say sex is bad, you condemn it, but you cannot destroy it. Just by condemning it, it is not destroyed. Rather, it may become a more dangerous force, because when repressed, it may struggle to be expressed. And if you go on struggling with it, not allowing it, it will become perverted. Repression will make you more sexual, and the sex energy will struggle and will try to come out in any way, in any form.

 

♦

 

All the perversions, all over the world – homosexuality or sado-masochist perversions are basically byproducts of so-called religions, particularly christianity: because the more they repress, the more the energy has to find paths of its own. Natural sex is beautiful; perverted sex is just ugliness. Natural sex can be made hallowed and holy, but perverted sex cannot be made holy because it is twice removed from the original source.

 

♦

 

Sex is there: do not condemn it. Accept it. Do not create a division in your being, between parts of your being. Anger is there: accept it. Greed is there, or whatsoever: accept it. I do not mean be greedy. Rather on the contrary, the moment you accept you go beyond, because acceptance creates a unity, and when you are united within you have the energy to go beyond.

 

♦

 

You are born of sex. Your every body cell is a sex cell, all your energy is sex energy. So if religions teach that sex is bad, sex is sin, they have condemned you completely. And not only have they condemned you, now you will condemn yourself. Now you cannot go beyond it and you cannot leave it, and now it is a sin. You are divided; you start fighting with yourself. And the more this guilt can be created in you – over the concept that sex is something unholy – the more neurotic you will become.

 

♦

 

I take sex as the basic problem. And if your sex problem is solved, you are a different man or a different woman, because then all the perversions simply are no more. You have resolved the base. And when sex is solved and it is not a problem for you, not a fight, when you have deeply accepted it and said a deep yes to it, then you can transform it – because that is the energy which is alive in you. When you are dead, that energy will go on and on, more and more. You are just a wave in a sex ocean: the ocean continues, and the waves go on, die and disappear. The ocean continues. Sex is the BRAHMAN. If you go deep into sex, then it is the very life. If you forget it, then you remain on the surface. Then it is ugly. If you do not fight with it or sink into it, but drop into it, dissolve into it, melt into it, when you allow sex to become life, then suddenly it is transformed into love. That is how the mechanism automatically works. If you fight it, sex becomes hate. So those who are filled with hatred are those who are fighting with their sex.

 

♦

 

If you do not fight it, if you accept it and melt into it, it becomes love. So love and hate are two faces of sex. If it is perverted, it becomes hate. If accepted deeply, it will become love. And you can create love out of your sex energies. If those energies transform into love, then you are at ease in the world, at home with the earth. That at-homeness is basic.

 

♦

 

This is the beauty: if you accept sex, you will not reject anything else. That is why there is so much emphasis on it. If you reject sex, you will have to reject many things. Sex is the root rejection. If you reject sex, you will reject many things. Food will be rejected, then clothes will be rejected, then everything will be rejected. It is a long sequence, and in that sequence you will have to reject and reject, because the whole life is sexual. If you reject sex you will go on and on rejecting, and ultimately you will reject life. Then suicide is the only thing worth doing because even to take a breath is sexual. It goes to your sex cells and gives them life. To be alive is to be sexual. If you are against sex, then you will be against everything. And a person who is against everything is bound to be neurotic, mad, and you cannot help him.

 

♦

 

When you are with a woman, if you are of the opposite sex, you begin to feel more alive than with a man. With a man you feel less alive because nothing is pulling you out. You are enclosed, the opposite energy pulls you out; the flame flickers, you can be more alive. And whenever you begin to feel more alive, you begin to feel happy.

 

♦

 

The mechanism of sex is so much a momentary phenomenon that it only functions momentarily; if you do not cooperate at the right moment, it stops. At the right moment your cooperation is needed, otherwise it cannot work. It is only a momentary mechanism, and if you do not cooperate with it, it will stop by itself.

 

♦

 

First the energy will try its best to be released sexually, because that is its usual outlet, its usual center. So one must first be aware of one’s downward “doors.” Only awareness will close them; only noncooperation will close them. Sex is not so forceful as we feel it to be. It is forceful only momentarily: it is not a twenty-four-hour affair, it is a momentary challenge.

 

♦

 

One more point, thinking about sex is harmful than sex itself. Sex can be easy and natural but thinking about it too often is unnatural, is a perversion. After examining the experience of thousands of people, the psychoanalysts tell us that man is taking too much interest in mental sex and he does not derive any pleasure from the actual sex activity. The sex that is going on in the mind seems more interesting and colourful. If sex is thus perverted in the mind, confusion will be created within us. To think about sex is not the function of the mind. The intelligence of the person who uses his mind to do the work of sex centre becomes depraved — is spoilt. Gurdjieff used to say so. The intelligence is bound to get spoilt, because the functions of these two are different. It is like this: If a person tries to take food with his ear, his ear will certainly be spoilt, and food will not reach the stomach. Both will be harassed.

 

♦

 

What happens with your sex energy depends on how you use it. What it can become does not depend on it alone, but on your understanding and on how you live your life. Have you not observed that it becomes brahmacharya, the state of celibacy when it is transformed? bramhacharya is not hostile to passion; brahmacharya is the purification, the transcendence, the sublimation of passion. In the same way, the energy that manifests itself in violence becomes peace, serenity and tranquility. It is only a question of transformation.

 

♦

 

Love is not sexual passion. Those who mistake sex for love remain empty of love. Sex is only a passing manifestation of love. It is part of nature’s mechanism, a method of procreation. Love exists on a higher plane, and as love grows, sex dissipates. The energy that has been manifested in sex is transformed into love.

 

♦

 

Love is the creative refinement of sex energy. And so, when love reaches perfection, the absence of sex automatically follows. A life of love, an abstinence from physical pleasures is called brahmacharya, and anyone who wishes to be free from sex must develop his capacity to love. Freedom from sex cannot be achieved through supersession. Liberation from sex is only possible through love.

 

♦

 

The first thing: be a witness of sex too. Don’t be the controller of it. Don’t try to forcibly bring it under control, remain a witness of it too. Just as you are a witness of everything else, remain a witness of sex too. It is difficult, because you have been taught for centuries that sex is sin. That concept of sin has been fixed in your mind.

 

♦

 

Both are easy: it is perfectly easy to go unconscious in sex, to completely forget what is going on, to get intoxicated is easy. To control sex, to force it to stop, to prevent yourself is also easy. But in both you miss. The one who indulges misses, the celibate misses too. The real brahmacharya happens when you stand in the middle between these two, then you are only watching. Then you will find that sex arises in the body and reverberates in the body; in the mind a shadow briefly falls and departs. You remain standing far away. How can sexual desire be in you? How can any desire be in you? You are nothing but the observer.

 

♦

 

See life from a positive viewpoint. If you start being happy then the things that you grabbed onto because of your misery will drop by themselves. If meditation comes then wine will drop. If meditation comes, then meat-eating will drop. If meditation comes then slowly slowly sex energy begins to be transformed into brahmacharya. Just let meditation come.

 

♦

 

Just by condemning nothing is destroyed. If you say sex is bad, you condemn it, but you cannot destroy it. Just by condemning it, it is not destroyed. Rather, it may become a more dangerous force, because when repressed, it may struggle to be expressed. And if you go on struggling with it, not allowing it, it will become perverted. Repression will make you more sexual, and the sex energy will struggle and will try to come out in any way, in any form.

 

♦

 

All the perversions, all over the world – homosexuality or sado-masochist perversions are basically byproducts of so-called religions, particularly christianity: because the more they repress, the more the energy has to find paths of its own. Natural sex is beautiful; perverted sex is just ugliness. Natural sex can be made hallowed and holy, but perverted sex cannot be made holy because it is twice removed from the original source.

 

♦

 

Sex is there: do not condemn it. Accept it. Do not create a division in your being, between parts of your being. Anger is there: accept it. Greed is there, or whatsoever: accept it. I do not mean be greedy. Rather on the contrary, the moment you accept you go beyond, because acceptance creates a unity, and when you are united within you have the energy to go beyond.

 

♦

 

You are born of sex. Your every body cell is a sex cell, all your energy is sex energy. So if religions teach that sex is bad, sex is sin, they have condemned you completely. And not only have they condemned you, now you will condemn yourself. Now you cannot go beyond it and you cannot leave it, and now it is a sin. You are divided; you start fighting with yourself. And the more this guilt can be created in you – over the concept that sex is something unholy – the more neurotic you will become.

 

♦

 

I take sex as the basic problem. And if your sex problem is solved, you are a different man or a different woman, because then all the perversions simply are no more. You have resolved the base. And when sex is solved and it is not a problem for you, not a fight, when you have deeply accepted it and said a deep yes to it, then you can transform it – because that is the energy which is alive in you. When you are dead, that energy will go on and on, more and more. You are just a wave in a sex ocean: the ocean continues, and the waves go on, die and disappear. The ocean continues. Sex is the BRAHMAN. If you go deep into sex, then it is the very life. If you forget it, then you remain on the surface. Then it is ugly. If you do not fight with it or sink into it, but drop into it, dissolve into it, melt into it, when you allow sex to become life, then suddenly it is transformed into love. That is how the mechanism automatically works. If you fight it, sex becomes hate. So those who are filled with hatred are those who are fighting with their sex.

 

♦

 

If you do not fight it, if you accept it and melt into it, it becomes love. So love and hate are two faces of sex. If it is perverted, it becomes hate. If accepted deeply, it will become love. And you can create love out of your sex energies. If those energies transform into love, then you are at ease in the world, at home with the earth. That at-homeness is basic.

 

♦

 

This is the beauty: if you accept sex, you will not reject anything else. That is why there is so much emphasis on it. If you reject sex, you will have to reject many things. Sex is the root rejection. If you reject sex, you will reject many things. Food will be rejected, then clothes will be rejected, then everything will be rejected. It is a long sequence, and in that sequence you will have to reject and reject, because the whole life is sexual. If you reject sex you will go on and on rejecting, and ultimately you will reject life. Then suicide is the only thing worth doing because even to take a breath is sexual. It goes to your sex cells and gives them life. To be alive is to be sexual. If you are against sex, then you will be against everything. And a person who is against everything is bound to be neurotic, mad, and you cannot help him.

 

♦

 

When you are with a woman, if you are of the opposite sex, you begin to feel more alive than with a man. With a man you feel less alive because nothing is pulling you out. You are enclosed, the opposite energy pulls you out; the flame flickers, you can be more alive. And whenever you begin to feel more alive, you begin to feel happy.

 

♦

 

The mechanism of sex is so much a momentary phenomenon that it only functions momentarily; if you do not cooperate at the right moment, it stops. At the right moment your cooperation is needed, otherwise it cannot work. It is only a momentary mechanism, and if you do not cooperate with it, it will stop by itself.

 

♦

 

First the energy will try its best to be released sexually, because that is its usual outlet, its usual center. So one must first be aware of one’s downward “doors.” Only awareness will close them; only noncooperation will close them. Sex is not so forceful as we feel it to be. It is forceful only momentarily: it is not a twenty-four-hour affair, it is a momentary challenge.

 

♦

 

One more point, thinking about sex is harmful than sex itself. Sex can be easy and natural but thinking about it too often is unnatural, is a perversion. After examining the experience of thousands of people, the psychoanalysts tell us that man is taking too much interest in mental sex and he does not derive any pleasure from the actual sex activity. The sex that is going on in the mind seems more interesting and colourful. If sex is thus perverted in the mind, confusion will be created within us. To think about sex is not the function of the mind. The intelligence of the person who uses his mind to do the work of sex centre becomes depraved — is spoilt. Gurdjieff used to say so. The intelligence is bound to get spoilt, because the functions of these two are different. It is like this: If a person tries to take food with his ear, his ear will certainly be spoilt, and food will not reach the stomach. Both will be harassed.

 

♦

 

You can be intense in sex and you may not be sincere, because sex is not necessarily love. You may be very, very intense in your sexuality -- but once sexuality is fulfilled, it is finished, the intensity gone. Love may not look so intense, but it is sincere -- and because it is sincere, the intensity continues. In fact, if you are really in love it becomes a timelessness. It is always intense. And make a clear distinction: if you are intense without sincerity, you cannot be forever intense. Only momentarily you can be intense; when the desire arises you are intense. It is not really your intensity. It is enforced by the desire.

 

♦

 

Love is the creative refinement of sex energy. And so, when love reaches perfection, the absence of sex automatically follows. A life of love, an abstinence from physical pleasures is called brahmacharya, and anyone who wishes to be free from sex must develop his capacity to love. Freedom from sex cannot be achieved through supersession. Liberation from sex is only possible through love.

 

♦

 

The more mind is filled with chattering, more sex has appeal.

 

♦

 

Why is so much sex needed? Because you are tense, sex becomes a release. Your tensions are released through it -- you feel relaxed, you can go to sleep; if you repress it, you remain tense. And if you repress sex -- the only release, the only possibility of release -- what will happen? You will go mad. Where will you release your tensions then?

 

♦

 

Only in sex the noise sometimes stops. I say "sometimes". If you have become habitual in sex also, as husbands and wives become, then it never stops. The whole act becomes automatic and the mind goes on its own. Then sex also is a boredom.

 

♦

 

If you fight sex, sex becomes the center. Then, continuously, you are engaged in it, occupied with it. It becomes like a wound. And wherever you look, that wound immediately projects, and whatsoever you see becomes sexual.

 

♦

 

Brahmacharya is not against sex. If it is against sex then sex can never disappear. Brahmacharya is a transmutation of the energy: it is not being against sex, rather it is changing the whole energy from the sex center to the higher centers. When it reaches to the seventh center of man, the sahasrar, then brahmacharya happens. If it remains in the first center, muladhar, then sex; when it reaches to the seventh center, then samadhi. The same energy moves. It is not being against it; rather, it is an art how to use it.

 

♦

 

If you go on loving a person deeply, by and by sex disappears. Intimacy becomes so fulfilling, then there is no need for sex; love is enough unto itself. When that moment comes then there is the possibility of prayer dawning upon you.

 

♦

 

When you make sex to a person, woman or man, you think it unites you. For a moment it gives you the illusion of unity, and then a vast division suddenly comes in. That's why after every sex act, a frustration, a depression sets in. One feels that one is so far away from the beloved. Sex divides, and when love goes deeper and deeper and unites more and more, there is no need for sex. Your inner energies can meet without sex, and you live in such a unity.

 

♦

 

When you are feeling very passionate, lust, sex takes over. Just try to be tranquil in the breathing, and you feel sex has disappeared.

 

♦

 

When sex desire arises, one simply pays total attention to it, not judging, not saying this is good or bad not saying this is evil, not saying that this is a provocation from the devil. No -- no evaluation at all because all valuation belongs to the mind and witnessing is not of the mind. Good, bad -- distinctions all belong to the mind, and the witnessing is undivided, one. It is neither good nor bad, it simply is. One pays attention to hunger or to the sex desire, total attention -- and total attention is such an energy, it is fire-the hunger simply is burned, the sex desire is simply burned.

 

♦

 

A great poet, a great singer, a dancer who is moving totally in his commitment, automatically becomes celibate. He has no discipline for it. Sex is superfluous energy; sex is a safety valve. When you have too much in you and you cannot do anything with it, the nature has made a safety valve; you can throw it out. You can release it, otherwise you will go mad or burst -- explode. And if you try to suppress it, then too you will go mad, because suppressing it won't help. It needs a transformation, and that transformation comes from total commitment. A warrior, if he is really a warrior -- an impeccable warrior, will be beyond sex. His whole energy is moving.

 

♦

 

If you are involved totally, sex disappears because sex is a safety valve. When you have energy unused, then sex becomes a haunting thing around you. When total energy is used, sex disappears. And that is the state of brahmacharya, of virya, of all your potential energy flowering.

 

♦

 

If you can come to this nowness without sex, sex, by and by will become useless, it will disappear. It will not be a desire then. If you want to move in it you can move into it as a fun, but not as a desire. Then there is no obsession in it because you are not dependent on it.

 

♦

 

What happens with your sex energy depends on how you use it. What it can become does not depend on it alone, but on your understanding and on how you live your life. Have you not observed that it becomes brahmacharya, the state of celibacy when it is transformed? bramhacharya is not hostile to passion; brahmacharya is the purification, the transcendence, the sublimation of passion. In the same way, the energy that manifests itself in violence becomes peace, serenity and tranquility. It is only a question of transformation.

 

♦

 

Be a witness of sex too. Don't be the controller of it. Don't try to forcibly bring it under control, remain a witness of it too. Just as you are a witness of everything else, remain a witness of sex too.

 

♦

 

Transcendence of sex is a totally different phenomenon from the suppression of it. But suppression can give you the feeling that you have transcended.