Question :

Osho,

There is a great deal of hypocrisy in india about sex. people are not even willing to discuss it openly, yet there is a growing proliferation of, and obsession with, nude pictures. will this flood of pornography help? can it finally bring sex out into the open in india?

 

 

D. M. Silvera, man’s past has been very stupid, and the whole stupidity has arisen out of a life-negative approach, attitude. And all the religions in the past have supported the life-negative approach. Not the Buddhas, not the Christs, not the Zarathustras, but the priests. It is the professional religious man who has been exploiting the names of the Buddhas, the Christs, the Zarathustras, who has been exploiting the masses.

 

The priest has found it very helpful to keep people life-negative, because the moment a person is life-negative he becomes weak. And it is easy to exploit the weak, to enslave the weak. It is easy to dominate the weak, to destroy the weak.

 

Hence the priest has found that two things are very essential for man’s strength, freedom, consciousness — and both have to be destroyed. One is food, the other is sex — both are basic instincts. Food is needed for the individual to survive and sex is needed for the race to survive. Without food and sex humanity will disappear. Knowing this, that these are the essential requirements of a really alive man, priests have been against both, and they have supported fasting and they have supported celibacy. Because they have supported fasting they have made people food-obsessed. Any religion that has fasting as its orientation — for example, Jainism — is bound to create food-obsession in its followers. Any religion that is rooted in its opposition to sex is bound to create sex-obsession.

 

Pornography is a by-product of your so-called religions. It is a religious phenomenon — excuse me! It is because of your priests that pornography exists. And it is not a new thing, it is as ancient as man. Khajuraho, Konarak, Puri, what are they? Pornography in sculpture. And you can go to the ancientmost caves and you will always find pornography of some kind or other. You can look into folk literature, folk songs, folk stories, and you will always find them pornographic.

 

Pornography is as old as the priest. Once the priest comes in, pornography comes as a shadow; it is bound to happen. And when you are taught to be life-negative you become afraid of talking about things frankly, authentically. You do not like to talk about sex, because what will people think about you? You want to hide it. You try to create a facade — as if sex is nonexistent in your life. But deep down you are boiling. Deep down, you are thinking of sex twenty-four hours a day.

 

Modern psychological surveys say that each man thinks about sex at least once every three minutes. And this is about the irreligious, remember, so what to say about the religious? They must think about sex every three seconds! Women think about sex once every seven minutes — that is a gap between man and woman. That’s why women can pretend more that they are far higher, that they are not concerned, that this whole ugliness of sex is man’s creation. They are superior beings. But the difference is only of four minutes. The man has to go on persuading them “Four minutes more,” that’s all.

 

Hence the man has to go into a kind of foreplay. Before he can persuade a woman to be normal, to be healthy, at least four minutes’ foreplay is needed. And because man is the aggressive sex, because man’s energies are aggressive energies and the woman is the receptive sex, that too makes a great difference. Man has to take the initiative. The woman can pretend: “I am not running after you.”

 

Mulla Nasruddin and his wife were arguing, and Mulla said, “It must have been the most unfortunate moment in my life when I married you.”

 

The woman said, “But I was not running after you.”

 

Mulla said, “That is true. No mousetrap ever runs after the mouse. The mousetrap simply waits; the mouse comes itself.”

 

That is true: mouse or Mulla Nasruddin — it makes no difference. Because women are receptive, they are a little cold. Man is hot. And because women are the receptive sex they are not much interested in pornography — because the most aggressive part in man’s or woman’s body is the eye. There is a difference between man’s and woman’s eye — not a physiological difference of course but something very deep and psychological. Man’s eye is aggressive, woman’s eye is receptive. Hence the woman is not very interested in pornography.

 

Moreover, man’s sex has something of extroversion in it and woman’s sex has something of introversion. Whenever you are making love to a woman she will close her eyes, because when you are making love to a woman she is not so interested in you; she is much more interested in what is happening inside her. She closes her eyes. She enjoys the feeling that you trigger in her innermost being. But man is more interested in looking at what is happening to the woman. He wants to keep the lights on. Not only that: there are a few really religious people who keep automatic cameras in their bedrooms to take pictures so that later on also they can enjoy what was happening. Man is more interested in seeing what is happening to the woman and less interested in his own inner feelings.

 

Kiss a woman and she closes her eyes, because she wants to taste the kiss in her interiority, she wants to absorb it. And man wants to see what is happening to the woman; his interest is other-directed. Hence man has always remained interested in pornography.

 

But pornography is not a natural phenomenon — you have to be reminded of that again and again — it is a religious phenomenon. Because priests have been so much against sex, man has been repressing it. And when you repress anything too much it is bound to assert itself in subtle ways, in hidden ways, in such ways that you will not even be consciously aware of what you are doing. It will start moving in your unconscious mind.

 

Hence the tremendous interest in the woman’s body. Pictures, statues, movies — basically, they are all either directly or indirectly pornographic. Unless there is something of sex in it you are not interested. Sex and murder are essential for a film to succeed, for a story to be read, for a fiction to be enjoyed. Strange! Sex and murder — why are they connected? They are connected: if you repress too much you become murderous. In fact, murdering somebody is a perverted act of sex.

 

Man wants to enter the body of the woman. If he is not allowed to, he will start finding any possible way to enter the other’s body. He will become homosexual; if he cannot find a woman then he will find a man. If he cannot find a man, he will find animals. If that too becomes difficult then he will start creating rubber women, plastic women which you can keep in your bag so that whenever you need the woman, you just pump her up a little. And if there is no possibility at all, he becomes enraged. Sex energy repressed becomes anger, it becomes murderous.

 

In fact, psychologists say that all our weapons are nothing but symbols, metaphors, for the genital male organ — they are a thrust into the other’s body. Our bayonets, our bullets, our swords — they are nothing but another offshoot of life-negative religions. Now, politicians were also interested in repressing sex for this reason, for this very purpose: if people’s sex is repressed they can easily be made to kill others and be killed by others.

 

And man’s whole past has been a history of wars and wars. In the past three thousand years we have fought five thousand wars. It seems absolutely insane — five thousand wars in three thousand years — as if we are living here only to kill each other! What has gone wrong with man? No animal kills any other member of its own species. No lion kills another lion; never. No dog kills another dog; never. It is only man. Why has it happened to man? — because no other animal has the priesthood, the pope, the shankaracharya, etcetera. No other animal has people like Ayatollah Khomeini.

 

Hearing the news that the shah is suffering from cancer, this so-called religious man, the head of the Iranian religious people, said, “Insh’allah, God willing, the news is true and the cancer kills him.” And he has issued a statement to the American Iranians: “Kill this man! Cut him into pieces and send those pieces to Iran!”

 

But this has always been the attitude of the so-called religious — murderous. It is repressed sex. Repressed sex is bound to create troubles for you.

 

The husband and wife were having difficulty in deciding what to give up for Lent, but finally, in a fervent spirit of atonement, they agreed on sex.

 

As the weeks slowly passed, they began to regret their choice but still stuck to it, sleeping in separate bedrooms and also locking the doors to control temptation.

 

Finally, the glorious Easter sun rose, and the wife was awakened by a series of thunderous knocks on her door.

 

“Oh, George,” she called out, “I know what you are knocking for!”

 

“You’re damned right!” he yelled back. “But do you know what I’m knocking WITH?”

 

This is natural! Man is the only perverted animal on the earth. All kinds of perversions…. And for centuries you have been conditioned to be very cold about sex. And because you are cold about sex, you are cold about everything else. Your very source of warmth disappears.

 

Sex is the source of life; it is how God creates existence. It should be respected, worshipped. It is sacred. Sex is the most sacred phenomenon in existence, because it is the base of all life. If life is not sacred, then sex is not sacred. If life is sacred, then sex is sacred.

 

But the politicians and the priests conspired against man. The politician wanted soldiers; the priests wanted stupid slaves, obedient people. Destroy the dignity of man and he easily becomes an obedient slave. And the best way to destroy his dignity is to make him fight against himself: he starts feeling guilty because he cannot conquer.

 

Now, how can you conquer sex or food? If you fight with your sex you are dividing yourself into two persons: you are becoming split — you are willingly entering into the world of the schizophrenic — you are becoming ill and diseased. Fighting with your own energy you can never be victorious; fighting with your own energy is as if you are making a great fight between your right hand and left hand. Who is going to win? Nobody can win. Just your energies will be dissipated, you will become weaker.

 

And a greater thing will happen, of long-range consequences: if you cannot win against your sex you will start feeling so guilty, so ugly, so condemned, so unworthy, that you will be ready to bow down to any stupid person. Anybody who can be a good pretender, a hypocrite, will become your leader politically, will become your priest religiously. All that he needs is hypocrisy, all that he needs is cunningness, all that he needs is a facade to hide behind. Your politicians live double lives, your priests live double lives — one from the front door, the other from the back door. And the back-door life is their real life. Those front-door smiles are just false, those faces looking so innocent are just cultivated.

 

If you want to see the reality of the politician you will have to see him from his back door. There he is in his nudity, as he is, and so is the priest. These two kinds of cunning people have dominated humanity. And they found out very early on that if you want to dominate humanity, make it weak, make it feel guilty, make it feel unworthy. Destroy its dignity, take all glory away from it, humiliate it. And they have found such subtle ways of humiliation that they don’t come in the picture at all. They leave it to you to humiliate yourself, to destroy yourself. They have taught you a kind of slow suicide.

 

You ask me, Silvera: “There is a great deal of hypocrisy in India about sex.”

 

It is not only a question about sex. Sex is the most fundamental hypocrisy, but then there are many many branches of it. India is the most hypocritical country in the world because it pretends to be the most religious. Religion and hypocrisy are cousin-sisters.

 

To be religious and not to be a hypocrite is a very rare phenomenon. Only once in a while a Buddha, a Bodhidharma, a Kabir, a Jesus… only once in a while will you find a man who is religious and not a hypocrite. But then we never tolerate these people. We poisoned Socrates simply because he was honestly religious. He was so honest that he said, “There is no God. Truth is God.” He was so honest that he could not say that there is heaven and hell. And because he could only say, “Unless I know, how can I make such great statements?” he was poisoned and killed.

 

What was his crime? The crime brought against him in the court was that he was corrupting the youth. Whenever there is a man like Socrates, a lover of truth, a real lover of God, he seems to be corrupting people. In fact, he is trying to make them authentic and true, he is trying to bring them out of their hypocrisies, but to the crowd that looks like corruption.

 

Jesus was crucified for the simple reason that he was a rebel — a rebel against all hypocrisy. Buddha was stoned, many attempts were made on his life, for the simple reason that he was a sincere man saying things as he saw them.

 

Yes, there is a possibility of transcending sex, but that is not done by repression. Sex can be transcended, and it is a great experience to transcend sex, but it cannot be done if you are against it. It can be done only if you befriend the energy, if you absorb the energy, if you find out what is the secret of sexual longing, if you find the key. And the key is not very difficult to find, but the priests have made things so messy that it is almost impossible now to find the key. The key is simple, but thousands of years of wrong conditioning have made it very difficult to know the most simple, obvious thing.

 

Why are people are interested in sex? It is not just a question of biology, it is more a question of spirituality. My own observation is that people are interested in sex because that is the only naturally-given window into God, a natural gift. In deep orgasmic states when lovers meet and merge and melt and disappear into each other for a single moment, time disappears, mind disappears, ego disappears, and one has a taste of meditation, of samadhi, of superconsciousness. That taste will give you the key.

 

If you can attain to no-mind, no-ego, no-time, without sex, sex will disappear from your life; there will be no need for it. But that is a disappearance. It is not that you have denied it, not that you have rejected a part of your being; it is absorbed, it is transformed. Then the same crude energy of sex, the same biological energy, reaches to such heights…. First it becomes love, then it becomes prayer. It is the same energy moving, soaring upwards.

 

Remember: I am not saying that sex cannot be transcended. Sex can be transcended, it should be transcended, but not through repression. Nobody has ever been able to transcend it through repression. If you repress sex you become cold; if you become cold you lose the orgasmic quality.

 

One day, while making love to his wife, Mulla Nasruddin found something new at one moment. He asked his wife, “Am I hurting you, dear?”

 

She said, “No, why? Why do you ask such a question?”

 

He said, “I must have imagined it. I thought for a moment that you moved.”

 

Now, twenty years they have been married, he is the father of seven children, and the wife has never moved! That is not thought to be right. Good women don’t enjoy lovemaking, it is only bad women who enjoy lovemaking. Good women simply lie down there dead, utterly cold. And when the woman remains cold, the man’s orgasmic experience remains local, genital. It does not reach to his soul, it does not reach to his whole body. All his cells and all the fibers of his being are not thrilled, are not in a dance. It is poor, very poor. It is a release, a relief, but not an orgasmic experience. Yes, he is relieved of a burden. His sexual energy was overflooding, he has relieved the energy, but it is not really orgasmic ecstasy. He has not known any timelessness through it, any egolessness through it, any mindlessness through it. He has not penetrated the ultimate through it. It has been a sheer waste as far as spiritual experience is concerned. Biologically it is okay, he may give birth to children, but he will not be able to give birth to his own being. His soul will remain unborn.

 

Now, women have become so cold because they have been listening to the priests for so long. And the priests have been praising them very highly: they have been telling them that they are the most spiritual people in the world. It is through the woman that the priest has destroyed woman’s orgasmic dimension and man’s orgasmic heights. Man still can have a little bit of an orgasm, but it is just a flicker, nothing much, nothing which can transform you. And the woman has completely forgotten.

 

In the East, particularly in India, I don’t think that any woman ever achieves orgasmic joy. In the West also the case was the same in the past. It is just within these last thirty, forty years, because of the women’s liberation movement, that a few women have become orgasmic — not many, only ten percent. Ninety percent of women in the West are still living in a primitive state, and one hundred percent in India. They don’t know what orgasm is, they have no idea of it — they have never experienced it. Now, nothing can be more cruel. This is really cutting the very roots of humanity. It is destroying humanity at its very foundation. The temple cannot be built.

 

A switchman was accosted by a streetwalker down the railroad yard. She convinced him to visit with her in a nearby shed. The railroad man, not too terribly enthusiastic, decided to use an iron rail spike instead of his pecker.

 

For ten minutes neither of the participants spoke. Then finally he asked, “Like it?”

 

“I’m sure glad you said something,” answered the woman. “Your tool is so cold I was afraid you were dead!”

 

Man has become too cold, and when man becomes too cold in his reality, his fantasies start becoming more and more strong. That’s what pornography is. When the body is repressed sexually, sex moves into the head. Pornography is sex through the head. It is as stupid as fantasizing about food in the head and thinking that it is going to nourish you. It is not going to nourish you — you will be starved to death. Real food is needed to nourish you.

 

Pornography is sex repressed in its natural space which has asserted itself through the head. And there are many dangers in it. One danger is: if you become too interested in pornography — which has happened all over the world — then the real woman does not look so appealing and the real man does not look so appealing. Then a great problem arises: your fantasy needs the woman that you have seen in PLAYBOY magazine. But you cannot find that woman anywhere — whosoever you find will fall short. Now nothing will satisfy you. Slowly slowly reality becomes unreal and the unreal becomes more real.

 

But the whole blame goes to the so-called religious people — and they are the people who want man to be freed from all kinds of bondage. They want people to be freed from the bondage of sex, and they are the people who are keeping man in sexual bondage. They are the culprits, they are the criminals. But they seem to be great moralists, great puritans — against pornography, against kissing in films, against hugging on the streets, against all kinds of warm relationships, against any expression of passionate love. They make everybody cold. Then these cold people start moving towards the head; there is no other way. Where else can you go?

 

Pornography will disappear the day priests disappear, otherwise it is not going to disappear. And remember, prostitutes will also disappear the day the priests disappear. The prostitute is the counterpart of the priest; if the priest remains, the prostitute is going to remain. The prostitute is the creation of the priest.

 

You ask me: “There is a great deal of hypocrisy in India about sex. People are not even willing to discuss it openly, yet there is a growing proliferation of, and obsession with, nude pictures.”

 

That is natural. If people don’t talk about it, if they are not courageous enough to talk about it frankly, if they cannot live their lives naturally, they are bound to find some underground ways. Nature is persistent. It is not easy to transcend nature; to transcend nature needs great skill. Buddha says: great upaya — great skill, great art, great understanding.

 

Yes, transcendence is beautiful, it brings you great benediction, but before that you have to be immensely artful, understanding, meditative. This is not the way to go beyond it.

 

In that sense, pornography is a help in two ways. It is a help for the victims of the priests. The victims need it, otherwise they will go crazy, they will go mad. The pornography keeps them sane. It serves a great humanitarian purpose. You may not have thought about it in that way, but pornography serves a great purpose: it keeps people a little bit sane and healthy, because then their sexuality can have an underground outlet. If you close all the outlets, then people will start exploding into insanity.

 

And if pornography is allowed, accepted — in movies, on TV, in films, in magazines, in books — it will help people to come out of their hiding places. It will be beneficial. It will help people to talk about sex more clearly, more truly, more sincerely. Sex will not be a taboo anymore. And whenever something comes in the open, great changes happen.

 

Bring your inner being out into the open, in the wind, in the sun, in the rain, and you will be surprised: you are becoming cleaner, purer, weightless. Your understanding grows, your integrity grows, your self-respect grows, your independence grows, and you become less and less dependent on others — political leaders, religious priests.

 

In my vision of life, the world will be a beautiful world if we can get rid of politicians and priests. These are the people who are not allowing humanity to live its life totally.

 

Yes, Silvera, pornography can help: it can finally bring sex out into the open. And if people start discussing it openly, frankly, without holding anything back, without any prejudices or condemnations…. Because it is a natural phenomenon — as natural as the flowers, as natural as the stars.

 

If people start talking about sex and studying it naturally, without any guilt, two things will happen. The most strange thing will be that pornography will disappear. Who is interested in a nude picture if he can attain orgasmic joy with a woman? Unless he is utterly stupid, why should he be interested? A picture is just a picture. There is nothing, nobody — just a few colors and a few lines arranged in a certain way. You are not deceived by food in a picture; you don’t carry that picture close to your heart, thinking that whenever you are hungry you will look at the picture and it is going to satisfy you. But you go on carrying nude pictures close to your heart. The man who thinks that he can nourish himself and live on this ‘nourishment’ by looking at pictures of delicious food is a fool. And so is the person who thinks that by carrying nude pictures he can have any insight into the ultimate height of sex, into orgasmic experience.

 

Once a man came to Picasso — he was a realist — and he said, “Your pictures are absolutely unrealistic. I am a realist philosopher and I have come to tell you that you are wasting your time. Be realistic!”‘

 

Picasso asked, “What do you mean by being realistic?”

 

He immediately took a picture of his wife from his bag, showed it to Picasso, and said, “This is a photograph of my wife. It depicts how my wife is exactly. This is a realistic picture. And I have seen your pictures of women — it is so difficult to find what you really want to depict.”

 

And that is true. Once a woman had asked Picasso to make a portrait of her, which he did. He took six months and demanded a fabulous price for it. The woman said, “Okay, I will pay you, but there is just one thing: my nose is not right in the portrait, so you make it right.”

 

Picasso looked at the picture and said, “That is impossible.”

 

The woman said, “Why is it impossible? I am ready to pay.”

 

He said, “That is not the point. Now I don’t know where I have painted the nose!”

 

So this man was right to show him a picture of his wife. Picasso looked at the picture and said, “This is a realistic thing?”

 

The man said, “Yes, absolutely representative, absolutely realistic.”

 

Picasso said, “Then you have a very small wife — and very flat, too!”

 

A photograph is a photograph — flat; you cannot find any of your wife’s curves in the photograph. You can go on searching for lives together, but you will not find anything. There is nothing.

 

If pornography becomes an accepted thing, one thing will be…. And there is nothing wrong in it. If somebody enjoys seeing a nude picture, it is nobody else’s business to interfere. Neither the law nor the government nor the police have any right to interfere. If he enjoys it, he is simply enjoying a picture; he is not interfering with anybody’s life. But he seems to be doing something wrong. In fact, enjoyment has become wrong.

 

For thousands of years we have been told that to enjoy oneself is something sinful. To be miserable is okay, to be joyous is wrong. So we destroy people’s joy in every possible way. We interfere in their private lives. Now, this is absolutely personal — a person enjoying a nude picture; it is nobody’s business to come into it. But the police are there, the magistrate is there, the law is there, the government is there, the priest is there, and the whole crowd, just because he is enjoying a picture. And he is enjoying the picture because of these same people! These are the people who have created the whole problem. First they create the problem and then they are there to advise you how to get rid of it.

 

Two men used to do a business — they were partners. The first would come into a town and in the night throw coal tar on people’s windows and doors. And after three, four days the second would come to clean it off. If anybody wanted him to, he was ready to clean off the coal tar, he would clean it off. By that time the other partner would be destroying some other town. This way they earned much money. A beautiful job, no investment! One goes on destroying people’s windowpanes, and the other comes to clean them.

 

This is what your priests, your police, your politicians, have been doing down the ages: they destroy you and then they are ready to help you. They throw you in the mud and then they are there, great saviors, to save you. Who has thrown you into the mud in the first place? But then, if you are not thrown in the mud, they can’t be saviors. To be saviors they have to throw you into the mud first, then they will save you — and their names will remain in history and they will be talked about for centuries as great men.

 

I love the ordinary, the natural, the simple man. I have no respect for your great men, the so-called great men. I have tremendous respect for the ordinary, natural human being.

 

Pornography can be of great help — it will help you to get rid of your priests — but pornography alone won’t be much of an inner growth. You will have to seek, inquire, into your sexual energy far more deeply. You will have to travel to the deepest core of your being and find out what it is that attracts you.

 

Have you ever watched animals making love? If you have not watched, watch, and you will be surprised. One great revelation will be there waiting for you: that animals don’t enjoy making love. Now that is an established fact: no animal enjoys making love; it is almost a compulsion, a natural compulsion that he has to go into. The moment the love act is finished, the female and the male go their ways — and you can see their faces, in their eyes: sad they are, frustrated, maybe wondering deep down why they go into this nonsense again and again. It is only man who has the capacity to attain orgasmic joy.

 

Sex is animal, but sex with joy is human. It is something absolutely human; with great joy, with warmth, it is a prerogative of human beings. Animals making love look almost as if they are fighting, as if there is a quarrel, as if the male is attacking the female and the female is simply accepting it. If she does not accept, the male can become even more aggressive and it may prove fatal. So she simply accepts and yields, but feels humiliated. And the male also seems to be at a loss as to why he is doing it.

 

But in human beings it is a totally different phenomenon. It is a very soft and delicate affair. It is poetry, it is music. It is the source of all poetry, all music, all great art.

 

Pornography will help a little bit of course, but not much. You will have to go into deeper explorations of sexual energies. You will have to learn something of Tantra again.

 

That’s my whole effort here: to introduce a neo-Tantra to the world, a new vision of love and the possibilities of love, and an insight into the reality of orgasm — because orgasm is your greatest source of finding God, harmony, truth, the universal unity of all life. If you can be one with one woman, one man, you have the secret key in your hands. You can be one with the whole universe, with the whole cosmos.

 

I am trying to give you a totally new religion: a religion which loves life, a religion which affirms life, a religion which is a deep love affair with the universe. The old religions are finished; their days are gone. Humanity needs a new perspective. Humanity needs a totally new mind — a new man who loves life, who is drunk with the joy of life, who knows how to dance with trees and how to sing with birds and who is not against anything but always ready to transform things onto higher planes.

 

Yes, sex can be transformed into love and love can be transformed into prayer. When sex becomes prayer you have arrived home.

 

- Osho, "The White Lotus, #10"