People look at each other, but they don't look at each other at all. They are just looking for the sex object. A woman passes. Have you ever seen a woman as a being? Sometimes you become interested in a woman, but not as a being. You feel a certain attraction, but not as a being, but as a sex object. Or sometimes you are repelled, that too is sexual. Or sometimes you are not interested -- bored, neither repelled nor attracted, just indifferent -- but that too is sexual.
And unless you can come across a person who can look at you in your eyes as a being, not just as a sexual object; who can love you as a being... then you have found your friend, not before it.
We go on looking for only that which we have a desire for. Men looking at women, women looking at men, are not looking at each other. They are looking for something. They are looking for their own food. They have an appetite, a hunger -- that hunger is sexual. Hence whenever somebody looks at you as a sex object you feel offended, because he is reducing your identity to a very muddy state. He is reducing you to the lowest denominator, to the lowest rung of your being.
A person can love you without reducing you. In fact, love never reduces you. Love helps you to rise above the ordinariness, love helps you to soar high. It makes you meditative, ecstatic. Love becomes the first proof that god exists, that life is not just matter, and man is not just body, that soul exists, that there is the world of the beyond.
That woman must have been missing it. She may have loved many people, but whenever she looked into their souls there was nothing but a desire for sex.
Many women have told me that they weep and cry when their man makes love to them -- because men make love and then they fall into sleep. It is a ritual. It helps to fall asleep, it is like a tranquilliser. And the woman goes on crying and weeping. She has been used and thrown away. Like a plastic thing -- you use it and throw it away. There is no need to be bothered at all now. Your need is fulfilled.
We look at the other person only through our need; then that look is offensive. When you look at the other person as a beauty in its own right, a grandeur, a divinity, a god or a goddess.... Yes, that's what I would like to tell you -- that each man is a god and each woman is a goddess. When you look at the other as a god and a goddess then the other is fulfilled; that very look enhances grace, that very look helps the other to soar high.
In all the languages of the world we have such expressions as 'falling in love'. That is ridiculous. Why 'falling in love'? Why not 'rising in love'? 'Falling in love' indicates the very idea that love is just a trick -- really you want to fall into sex, you want to go low; you pretend.
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When a person looks at you with sexuality and passion in his eyes, he is looking at your genital organs, not at you. He is insulting you, he is reducing you to your genital organs. He is simply saying you are just an appendage. He is saying, 'I am interested in your sexuality, in your genital organs. I am not interested in you. You are just a situation, nothing more, but my interest is in your sexuality -- in you as a man, in you as a woman.' That is offensive, insulting, degrading, humiliating.
That woman must have been a woman of deep love. And if you have deep love you will feel always tears on your cheeks, because it will be very difficult to fulfill it.
Only lower needs can be fulfilled in this world, because people have fallen very low. If you have any higher need, you will suffer, if you have any higher need you will not find a right partner; if you have a higher need you will remain alone. That was the problem with the woman. And this I see as the problem of all human beings who are intelligent, who have some understanding.
People have reduced everything to money or to sex. These two things seem to be the real gods -- either money or sex. And people are after money also only for sex, because money can help.
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The whole thing seems to be either money or sex. And everybody seems to be reducing life to be just a whorehouse. All sacredness of life is damaged. And then it is natural that if you have a heart which is waiting for love you will remain unfulfilled. Never look at another human being as if he or she is only sexuality. Look at human beings as really they are. Sexuality is part of them, but they are not just sexuality. A very small part, a beautiful part in itself, nothing wrong about it, but if that part becomes the whole then everything goes ugly. Whenever any part claims to be the whole then things go ugly.
If it is your head which claims your whole personality, you are ugly. Then you have lost your roots into wholeness. If it is sex that claims your whole personality and you start living for it, then again you are reduced — reduced to the earth, your sky is lost. Then you are reduced only to the roots and you don’t have any branches which can spread into the sky and greet the sun and the rains and meet with the clouds and communicate with the sky.
Sex is good, healthy, beautiful, in its own place. Try to understand me: if sex follows as a shadow of love it is tremendously holy. But if love is nothing but a seductive measure, if love is nothing but a salesmanship, if love is nothing but a seduction and only sex is the goal, then sex is ugly, love is ugly; then your whole being, by and by, will become ugly. You will exist like a wound, not like a flower.
Never reduce anybody to being just a sexual object, and never allow anybody to reduce you to being just a sexual object. If sex follows love, if it becomes a harmony in love, it has a totally different quality to it. Then it is no more sexual.
When it comes as a part of love… you love a person, you want to share everything with the person. When you love the person you want to share your mind, you want to share your body, you want to share your soul, you want to share your meditation, you want to share your… whatsoever you have. If you have an aesthetic sense, you want the person you love to share your poetry, to share your painting, to share your vision, to share your dreams.
Of course, when you love a person you also want to share your sexuality; then it is beautiful, then it has nothing like sex in it, then it is not the libido of Sigmund Freud. Then the energy has a totally different quality to it, and then it helps you to go higher and higher.
Nothing helps you to go higher than love. Nothing can help you as much as love can help you to go higher — because it becomes such a tranquillity, such a calmness, such content, one feels as if one has arrived. One feels grateful, one feels at home in existence. One is no more a stranger.
Remember: while you are relating with a person never relate only for sexuality, otherwise your whole being will become absurd. And treat sexuality as prayer. It is one of the doors towards the divine. Don’t do any sacrilegious act about it.
I have heard: A pregnant jewish girl asked her doctor what position she would have to lie in to give birth to her baby.
‘The same position you were in when you started it,’ the doctor told her.
‘My god!’ she exclaimed. ‘Do you mean I will have to drive around Berlin in a taxi for two hours with my feet hanging out the window?’
But this is happening. Your aquaintance with love happens in such odd and ugly places. Now the back seat of a taxi! It should happen in a church, in a temple. The very association is ugly.
One should make love only when one is feeling tremendously beautiful, happy, celebrating. One should dance before one makes love, one should sing and pray before one makes love, one should read a few sayings of Buddha, or a few sayings of Jesus, or one should recite the Koran — it is beautiful before one makes love. Love should be entered as a shrine of god. Then love will give you such fulfillment as nothing else can give.
- Osho, “The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 1, #4”