Question 3

What is sexual perversion? why do strange sexual habits evolve, and from where? for example, sado-masochism.

 

 

Man is not what he appears to be, he is far bigger. We know about man only in a very partial way.

 

You will have to understand these five categories: the first is the conscious mind. The conscious mind is a very tiny mind, just a little bit of you which can reason, think, rationalize, go through logical processes and is a little bit alert. It is a very tiny part of you, and we know man only from that tiny part.

 

We have looked into the great palace of human consciousness from a very tiny hole, maybe the keyhole. And whatsoever we have seen through the keyhole is not the whole reality.

 

Man is vast. Just hidden behind the conscious mind there is the unconscious mind. Its discovery is the great contribution of Sigmund Freud to humanity. The unconscious mind is nine times bigger than the conscious mind. It contains all your instincts, it contains all your inner functionings, body mechanisms, emotions and feelings. Except for logic, it contains all of you.

 

But that is deep in darkness. Freud has defined psychoanalysis as an effort to make the unconscious conscious, so that your consciousness becomes a little bigger. More light has to penetrate into the darkness of the unconscious, because the unconscious is nine times more powerful. Whatsoever you decide through the conscious will not be able to materialize unless it reaches to the unconscious.

 

That's why hypnosis goes far deeper than any other methodology. Hypnosis works directly on the unconscious. You may try for years to drop a certain habit, and you will not be able to, because you will try only from the conscious mind. And the conscious is very small; it has no power before the unconscious. And the unconscious has no way to know what the conscious is thinking.

 

But the hypnotist can help you to drop the habit within seconds, or at the most in a few sessions, because he will put the conscious to sleep and will start communicating directly with the unconscious. And if the unconscious agrees to drop the habit, then the habit is dropped. Then there is no way for the conscious to carry it any longer.

 

All realities change from the unconscious. But the unconscious itself is only a part. There is, still hidden behind, a collective unconscious which contains your whole past. And that is not a small thing. Because you have once been a lion and you have once been a snake and you have once been a tree.

 

The Eastern idea of passing through eighty-four million births is significant. It may not be exactly accurate but it is significant, it is meaningful. Eighty-four million births before you became a man, and all those births and their experiences are contained in the collective unconscious. It is almost the whole of history, from the very beginning -- if there had ever been a beginning.

 

It goes to Karl Gustav Jung's credit that he brought the idea of the collective unconscious and introduced it to the world of psychology.

 

But these are only parts, even the collective unconscious is only a part. And Western psychology still has not started moving upwards. This is going downwards; the conscious, below it the unconscious, below that the collective unconscious.

 

Above the conscious there is the superconscious, nine times bigger than the conscious. Above the conscious, parallel to the unconscious, there is the superconscious. And still above the superconscious there is the cosmic mind -- you can call it the divine mind or the God mind or Tao. That means the ultimate in consciousness: all has become conscious and you are as big as the cosmos.

 

If you go deeper than the conscious you will be entering into darkness. If you go above the conscious you will be entering into light.

 

So there are five minds in you. And you are aware only of the small tiny part, the conscious mind.

 

Now, from the unconscious and from the collective unconscious many thing go on arising. Many things happen in your dreams, and sometimes you feel very puzzled about what kind of dream it was. You cannot make any head or tail of it, you cannot figure out what it was, the whole thing seems to be so absurd. It was from the collective unconscious that something arose and surfaced into the unconscious, and you had the dream.

 

But sometimes things start filtering from the collective unconscious into the conscious too. Then they are very bizarre, they are perversions. They only look like perversions -- they are not really perversions, they are as natural as anything else, but they are very abnormal.

 

For example, you ask, sado-masochisme

 

There are people who enjoy torturing others, and there are people who enjoy torturing themselves, and particularly in relation to lovemaking. There are people who would like to torture the beloved person, or people who would like to be tortured by the beloved.

 

Sadism comes from the name of de Sade. He was incapable of getting into sexual arousal unless he beat the woman. So he used to carry a box with him, just like a doctor's box, with all the instruments of torture in it. And he was a very rich man, he was a duke, so all the women of his territory were available to him. Wherever he would see some beautiful woman he would simply give her a gesture and she had to come to his torture-chambers -- they cannot be called love-chambers. And he had all kinds of instruments there in his chamber. The woman would immediately be made naked and he would beat her and do things to her which were very perverted. Unless blood started flowing from her body he would not get sexually aroused.

 

Now, this is perversion. From where is it coming? It is coming from the deep deep collective unconscious, from those eighty-four million lives. Because there are animals....

 

For example, there is a certain African spider who is eaten by the woman while he is making love. He is just on top of the woman, the lady spider, and he is in great ecstasy, total orgasm, and abandoned, he has completely forgotten everything, and the lady starts eating him. And he has not yet even finished his... By the time orgasm is finished, the spider is also finished! So he can make love only once. It is not perversion there, it is natural.

 

Just like de Sade, there was Masoch, from whose name comes the word 'masochism'. He was just the reverse of de Sade. He would force the woman to hit him, to beat him, to whip him. And unless he was whipped and beaten he would not have any sexual arousal.

 

Now, these people are suffering from the collective unconscious. Something is coming from the collecting unconscious. Something goes on surfacing into their conscious; they can't understand from where it comes. These are not criminals, they need treatment.

 

De Sade was forced to live in jail his whole life. That is ugly, that is unjust. He needed some deep hypnotic treatment. We should start feeling compassion for these people; they are sufferers from their past.

 

These things happen to everybody, but they come only to the unconscious in dreams. These other people are freaks; there is some passage between their unconscious and conscious open so easily that things start floating into their conscious and then they are possessed by them. They cannot avoid it.

 

And if you look into the habits of millions of animals you will be surprised. Do you know elephants make love in a certain way? The courtship continues for years. Now, if somebody has been an elephant in a past life, and the memory is there, somewhere in the collective unconscious, then the courtship can continue for years, on and on.

 

The woman elephant makes love only twice in a decade. Now, you will find many women who have that idea: twice in a decade. But it is natural as far as elephants are concerned, because the woman elephant will have to carry the pregnancy for twenty-two months. And it is some pregnancy! Twenty-two months carrying an elephant in your womb... She becomes so afraid of the whole nonsense of lovemaking that for two or three years no playboy can persuade her to go into that trip again. Only after three, four, or five years, when the memory fades, can she be persuaded. So the courtship has to be very long.

 

And all these things are there inside the collective unconscious. And one thing may not be unnatural in a certain animal but will become unnatural in man. That's how perversions arise.

 

Do you know? There are such strange practices among animals that if you read about them you will be thrilled! You will not be able to believe what is going on in nature.

 

You know the common bedbug? The lady bedbug has no genitalia -- NO genitalia. Each time the male bedbug has to make love to the woman he has to drill a hole. She has no entry. Now this is dangerous! But nature had given indications: there is a line on the belly of the lady bedbug, because if you drill anywhere else you will kill her! She can be drilled only on a particular line. You can turn over any lady bedbug and know whether she is a virgin or not, or how many times she has been made love to, because those holes will be there, scars will be there.

 

But if this type of thing surfaces in somebody's mind, if he starts drilling a hole into a woman, it will be a perversion. But this is how it is. There is a great collective unconscious of millions and millions of lives, and all kinds of experiences are stored there. Buddhists call it alaya vigyan:: the storehouse of consciousness. It is infinite.

 

You ask me: What is sexual perversion?

 

It is something surfacing from the collective unconscious.

 

And why do strange sexual habits evolve, and from where?

 

They evolve from the collective unconscious. And a few people have openings; those openings are freak openings. It is as if a child is born with six fingers, or a child is born blind -- these are exceptions, so are perverted people.

 

Just the other night, I was reading a book on Satya Sai Baba, the name of the book is Lord of the Air. It is written by people who have lived with Satya Sai Baba for many years; it is based on their personal experience. They say that he is not only a homosexual, he is also a hermaphrodite. A hermaphrodite is a person who has the genitalia of both male and female.

 

Now, there are animals in which it is not a perversion, it is natural. There are earthworms which have both genitalia; you cannot decide wither one is male or female because each has both genitalia. So when earthworms make love it is a double-way affair. One functions as a male to the other, and also as a female; each makes love to the other in both the ways. The meeting has two points, so it is difficult to decide who is male. Both are male and both are female. So A makes love as a male to B's female parts, and B makes love as a male to A's female parts. It is a circular love affair, and both will become pregnant.

 

Nothing is wrong with earthworms, but if it is so with Satya Sai Baba then there is difficulty. And the way he walks, it seems these people must be right. Rarely it happens, but there is nothing to condemn -- what can Satya Sai Baba do about it? There are a few children born with both genitalia, very rarely. But they live a very fearful life, afraid, hiding themselves; nobody should know about it.

 

Man is not yet so enlightened, otherwise there is nothing wrong in it. In fact Satya Sai Baba is far richer than anybody else, because he can enjoy love both the ways, as a man and as a woman.

 

Perversions can be in the body, perversions can be in the mind, but they both arise from the deep collective unconscious. And they both can be settled, but for that a tremendously deep hypnosis will be needed. No ordinary hypnosis will do; ordinary hypnosis can lead you only to the unconscious. To go to the collective unconscious a very deep hypnosis will be needed.

 

In the new commune I am going to give you methods to go to the deep collective unconscious. But it is a very dangerous trip and great arrangements are needed before somebody can enter the collective unconscious, because so much is there, millions of experiences and they will suddenly explode.

 

A commune is needed. A closed commune is needed, the closed Garden is needed -- because it is not a question for the ordinary masses to know about; they will not be able to understand. And that's why if something reaches to the masses, some naked photographs reach to the masses, they are immediately against me. They cannot understand what is happening here.

 

We are trying to penetrate into the deepest layers of consciousness. But this is an alchemical lab; the ordinary masses will not be able to understand it. And if they do understand, they will understand it according to themselves.

 

I am waiting for the new commune: much more has to be done. But then things will become much more bizarre and you will need a field, an energy-field, that surrounds you like a soothing energy, that keeps you anchored with me so that you are not lost into the collective unconscious. Only then can the doors of the collective unconscious be opened.

 

They can be opened, and it is tremendously helpful if they can be opened. If you can know your whole past, you will be freed from it. Knowing something is to be free from it: knowing the truth liberates. If you can be allowed to go into your past, to the very end, you will be finished with everything. Because millions of times you have accumulated wealth, and each time you have failed. If you can remember your past lives and you can see that millions of times you have been playing the same stupid game, to no point at all, then how can you go on playing it in this life again? It will be impossible.

 

If you can see all your sexual experiences, it will be so ridiculous to still go on playing the same game.

 

But for that, a totally secluded atmosphere and a great trust, and absolute trust, will be needed. Hence I am trying to create a commune which will be a world apart, and where we can go into the deepest possible experiments that have ever been done.

 

And once you have gone backwards, you become capable of going upwards and forwards, because the process is the same. Backwards, it is easier because it is a known path; you have forgotten about it but it is still a known path, you can go backwards.

 

Going upwards to superconsciousness and the cosmic mind is an unknown path. If you become capable of going backwards you will have learned how to penetrate the dangerous realms of your being. And then the next step higher can be taken: you can move from the conscious the the superconscious.

 

It is the superconscious in which all the experiences of angels and devatas and gods and kundalini and chakras and lotuses opening happen; they are all contained in the superconscious. It is a beautiful world, it is psychedelic. Beyond that is the world of the cosmic mind where all experiences disappear -- neither ugly nor beautiful, where the experiencer is left alone. Total, absolute aloneness. And that is the ultimate goal of consciousness, that is where evolution is moving towards.

 

But before you can take that quantum leap into the world that is above you, you will have to get deeper into the roots, into the dark roots of your unconscious and your past experiences.

 

Buddha and Mahavira both tried; they did great experiments. Those experiments are called jati smaran: remembering the past. And the past is vast -- if you go on remembering it, it goes on revealing secrets.

 

The man who has gone into his whole past will come back absolutely healthy and psychologically whole. He will not have any perversions. His whole life will be transformed just by going there and coming back. Then all that he can ever imagine doing, he had done many times, and it was all futile and it was all in vain.

 

That very understanding, and all starts changing. And when you are free from the past you are capable of moving into the present: you can dive deep into the now and the here.

 

After some months of marriage, a girl wrote the following letter to her doctor.

 

Dear Doctor,

 

Since I got married, my husband seems to have gone mad. He is after me at breakfast, coffee break, lunch time, even tea time -- and then all night, every few hours. Is there anything I can do or give to help him? I await your kind reply.

 

P.S. Please excuse my shaky handwriting.

 

So the husband is still after her. "There are many animals which make love that way. Now, something surfacing from those animal worlds...

 

A woman went to her doctor to complain that her husband's sexual feelings for her seemed to have declined.

 

The doctor, being an old friend of the family, gave the woman some pills to slip into her husband's tea so that at least the man wouldn't get a complex about being a bit underpowered.

 

Two days later, the woman was back in the doctor's surgery.

 

"What happened?" asked the doctor. "Did the pills work?"

"Fantastic!" replied the woman. "I was so eager to see their effects on my husband that I tipped three of them into a cup of coffee, and within seconds of drinking it he got up, kicked the table and pulled me down on the floor and ravished me."

"Oh!" said the doctor. "I hope you weren't too surprised."

"Surprised?" said the woman. "I'll never be able to set foot in that restaurant again!"

That's how animals make love. You can lose your consciousness and you can behave like an animal.

 

Perversion means you are losing your consciousness and behaving like something below human beings. That capacity is man's: he can fall below the animals and he can rise above the gods. That is the glory of man and his misery too. That is the agony of man and his ecstasy too.

 

Man is the only animal in the world, the only being, who is capable of reaching to the deepest hell and rising to the highest heaven.

 

Perversion simply means you are falling backwards. Conversion means you are moving upwards, falling upwards. And if one is not converted towards the upward journey one remains perverted. Maybe your perversion is not very strange and you can adjust to it. Maybe it is a normal perversion, everybody has it; then it is okay, it can be tolerated. But a few people have exceptional perversions, private perversions, their own, and they cannot adjust to the society.

 

But remember, there are only two kinds of people: the perverted and the converted. There are only two categories: the perverted and the converted.

 

Be the converted: start rising above humanity. But the only way to rise above humanity is to accept all the animality that still exists in you and lurks in you.

 

One who is capable of accepting all that he is, becomes capable of receiving that which he can become.

 

- Osho, "Unio Mystica, Vol 1, #8"