Meditation or therapy ― sex, love, and death?

 
 
 
Working with people, three fears continuously come up in them. It is the fear of going crazy, the fear of letting go in sexual orgasm, and the fear of dying. Can you please comment on this?

 

It is really very significant an existential question. In these three fears humanity has lived for thousands of years. They are not personal, they are collective. They come from the collective unconscious.

 

The fear of going crazy is in everyone, for the simple reason, because their intelligence has not been allowed to develop. Intelligence is dangerous to the vested interest. So for thousands of years they have been cutting the very roots of intelligence.

 

In Japan they have a certain tree, which is thought to be a great art, but it is simply murder. The trees are four hundred, five hundred years old and six inches high. Generations of gardeners have taken care of them. The technique is the trees are put in a pot without any bottom. So they go on cutting their roots. They don't allow their roots to go into the earth. And when you don't allow the roots to go deeper, the tree simply grows old, it never grows up. It is a strange phenomenon to see that tree. It looks ancient, but it has only grown old, old, old, but it has never grown up. It has never blossomed, it has never given any fruits.

 

And that is exactly the situation of man. His roots are cut. Man lives almost uprooted. He has to be made uprooted, so that he can become dependent on the society, on the culture, on the religion, on the state, on the parents, on everybody. He has to depend. He himself has no roots. The moment he becomes aware that he has no roots, he feels he is going crazy, he is going insane. He is losing every support, he is falling into a dark ditch... because the knowledge is borrowed, it is not his own. The respectability is borrowed. He himself has no respect for his own being. His whole personality is borrowed from some source ― the university, the church, the state. He himself has nothing of his own.

 

Just think of a man who lives in a grand palace with everything conceivable for his luxuries. And one day suddenly you make him aware that the palace does not belong to him, neither this luxuries belong to him. They belong to somebody else who is coming and you will be thrown out. He will go crazy.

 

So in deep therapy you will come across this point and the person has to face it and allow it. Go crazy. Allow in the therapy the situation that the person can go crazy. Ones he goes crazy, he will drop the fear. Now he knows what craziness is. The fear is always of the unknown. Let him go crazy and he will soon calm down, because there is no real base to his fear. It is a fear projected by the society.

 

The parents say if you don't follow us, if you disobey, you will be condemned. The Jewish God says in Talmud "I am a very jealous God, very angry God. Remember that I am not nice, I am not your uncle." And all the religions have been doing it.

 

So just go off the way, which is followed by, the mob and they will declare you crazy. So everybody goes on clinging to the crowd, remaining part of a religion, a church, a party, a nation, a race. He's afraid to be alone, and that's what you are doing when you bring him to his own depths. All that crowd, all those connections, disappear. He's left alone and there is nobody else on whom he has always depended.

 

He has not of his own intelligence ― that is the problem. Unless he starts growing his own intelligence, he will always remain afraid of being crazy. Not only that, the society can make him crazy any moment. If the society wants to make him crazy, if that is in their favor, they will make him crazy.

 

In Soviet Union it happens almost everyday. I am taking the example of Soviet Union because they do it more scientifically, methodologically. It happens everywhere all over the world, but their methods are very primitive. For example, in India if a person behaves in a way, which is not approved, he is made an outcast. He cannot get any support from anyone in the town. People will not even speak to him. His own family will close the doors upon his face. The man is bound to go crazy. You are driving him crazy.

 

But in Soviet Russia they do it more methodologically and they have done it to such people who were Nobel prize winners, who had intelligence, but an intelligence, which was always under control, under the obedience of the state. And just a single disobedience... because they got the Nobel prize, and Russian government did not want them to have it, because it comes from a capitalist world, and to the government of Russia it seems like a bribery. This is how they purchase people, and these are the people who have all the secrets of science. They don't want to be world known, they don't want to be in contact with other scientists, they don't allow them to accept Nobel prize. But if the person insists, then the result is he is put into a hospital.

 

He goes on saying that, "I am perfectly healthy; why I am being put in the hospital?" They say, "Because the doctors feel you are going to be sick. The early symptoms are there, you may not be aware." And they go on injecting the person, he knows nothing of, and within fifteen days he is mad. They have made him through their chemicals mad. And when he is perfectly mad, then they produce him in the court that this man is insane, that he should be removed from his job, and that he should be sent into a mental asylum. And then nobody ever hears what happened to those people.

 

This is doing it scientifically. But every society has been doing it, and the fear has entered into to very deep realms of unconsciousness. And the work of therapy is to make the person free of that fear. If he is free of that fear, he is free of society, free of culture, free of religion, free of God, heaven, hell, and all nonsense. All that nonsense is significant because of this fear, and to make that nonsense significant the fear has been created. It is the ugliest crime one can think of. It is being done to every child around the world every moment, and the people who are doing have no bad intentions. They think they are doing something for the best of the child. They have been conditioned by their parents. They are transferring the same conditioning to their children.

 

But basically the whole humanity stands on the verge of madness. In deep therapy the fear grips suddenly, because the person is losing all the props, supports; the crowd is disappearing farther and farther away; he is being left alone. And suddenly there is darkness and there is fear. He has never been trained, disciplined for being alone and that is the function of meditation. No therapy is complete without meditation, because only meditation can give him his lost roots, his strength of being an individual. There is nothing to fear. But the conditioning is that you have to be afraid on each moment, each step.

 

The whole humanity lives in a paranoia. This humanity could have lived in paradise; it is living in hell. So help the person to understand that this is nothing to be worried, there is nothing to be afraid. It is a created fear. Every child is born fearless. He can play with the snakes with no fear. He has no idea of fear or death or anything. Meditation brings the person back to his childhood. He is reborn.

So help the person to understand why the fear is. Make it clear that it is a phony phenomenon, imposed upon him. So there is no need to be worried: in this situation you can go crazy. Don't be afraid. Enjoy for the first time you have got a situation in which you can be crazy and yet not condemned, loved, respected. And the group has to respect the person, love the person ― he needs it, and he will cool down. And he will come out of the fear with a great freedom, with great stamina, strength, integrity.

 

The second fear is of sexual orgasm. That too is created by religions. All religions are existing because they have turned man against his own energies. Sex is man's whole energy, his life energy, and religious prophets and messiahs, messengers of God, they all are doing the same work in different words, different languages, but their work is the same... to make man an enemy of himself.

 

And the basic strategy is ― because sex is the most powerful energy in you ― sex should be condemned, a guilt should be created. Then arises a problem for the individual. His nature is sensuous, sexual, and his mind is full of garbage against it. He is in a split. Neither he can drop the mind, because dropping the mind means dropping the society, the religion, the prophet, Jesus Christ, and God, everything. He's not capable to do that unless he has become an individual and is able to be alone without any fear.

 

So man is afraid of sex as far as his mind is concerned, but his biology has nothing to do with the mind. The biology has not received any information from the mind. There is no communication. The biology has its own way of functioning, so the biology will draw him towards sex and his mind will be standing there continuously condemning him. So he makes love, but in a hurry. That hurry has a very psychological reason. The hurry is he is doing something wrong. He is doing something against God, against religion. He is feeling guilty and he cannot manage not to do it, so the only compromise is: do it, but be quick. That avoids the orgasm.

 

Now there are implications upon implications. A man who has not known orgasm feels unfulfilled, frustrated, angry, because he had never been in a state which nature provides freely, where he could have relaxed totally and become one with the existence, at least for few moments.

 

Because of his hurry he cannot manage the orgasm. Sex has become equivalent to ejaculation. That is not true as far as nature is concerned. Ejaculation is only a part, which you can manage without orgasm. You can reproduce children, so biology is not worried about your orgasm. Your biology is satisfied if you reproduce children, and they can be reproduced only by ejaculation, there is no need for orgasm.

 

Orgasm is a tremendous gift of nature. Man is deprived and because he is so quick in making love that the woman is deprived. The woman needs time to warm up. Her whole body is erotic, and unless her whole body is throbbing with joy, she will not be able to experience orgasm. For that there is no time.

 

So for millions of years women have been completely denied their birthright. That's why they have become so bitchy, so continuously nagging, always ready to fight. There is no possibility of having a conversation with a woman. You are living with a woman for years, but there is not a single conversation that you can recall when you both were sitting together talking about great things of life. No. All that you will remember will be fighting, throwing things, being nasty, but the woman is not responsible for it. She's being deprived of her whole possibility of blissfulness. Then she becomes negative. And this has given chance to the priests. All the churches and the temples are filled up with women because they are the losers, more than men. Because the more man's orgasm is local; his whole body is not erotic. So his whole body does not suffer any damage if there is no orgasmic experience, but the woman's whole body suffers.

 

But it is good business for religions. Unless people are psychologically suffering, they will not come to the churches. They will not listen to all kinds of idiotic theologies. And because they are suffering, they want some consolation, they want some hope, at least after death. In life they know there is no hope; it is finished. And this gives a chance to religions to show to men and women both that sex is absolutely futile. It has no meaning, no significance. You are unnecessarily losing your energy, wasting your energy, and their argument seems to be correct because you have never experienced anything.

 

So by preventing the orgasmic experience religions have made men and women slaves. Now the same slavery functions for other vested interests. The latest priest is the psychoanalyst. Now he's exploiting the same thing. And I was amazed to know that almost all new priests, particularly Christians, study psychology in their theological colleges. Psychology, psychoanalysis have become their necessary part of education. Now what psychology has to do with Bible? What psychoanalysis has to do with Jesus Christ? They are being trained in psychology and psychoanalysis, because it is clear that the old priest is disappearing, losing his grip over people. The priest has to be made up-to-date, so he can function not only as a religious priest, but also as a psychoanalyst, psychologist. Naturally the psychologist cannot compete with him. He has something more: religion.

 

But this whole thing has happened through a simple device of condemning sex. So when in your groups you find people fearing of orgasm, help them to understand that orgasm is going to make you more sane, more intelligent, less angry, less violent, more loving. Orgasm is going to give you your roots, which have been taken away from you. So don't be worried. And mixed will be the fear in orgasm that one may go crazy. If in orgasm one goes crazy, help him to go crazy. Only then he will be able to have it in its totality. But the orgasm relaxes every fiber of your mind, your heart, your body.

 

It is immensely important for meditation that a person has the experience of orgasm. Then you can make him understand what meditation is. It is an orgasmic experience with the whole existence. If the orgasm can be so beautiful and so beneficial, so healthy with a single human being, meditation is getting into oneness with the whole that surrounds you, from the smallest blade of grass to the biggest star, millions of years away.

 

This... once he experiences.... The question is always the first experience. Once he knows it, that that craziness was not craziness, but a kind of explosion of joy, and that cools down and leaves him behind, healthier, more whole, more intelligent, then the fear of orgasm is disappeared. And with it he is finished with the religion, with the psychoanalysis and all kinds of nonsense for which he is paying so tremendously. And the third fear you say is of death. The first is of being alone. Much of the fear of death will be destroyed by the first experience of being alone and having no fear. The remaining much of the fear of death will be immediately destroyed by the experience of orgasm, because in the orgasm the person disappears. The ego is no more. There is an experiencing, but the experiencer is no more.

 

These first two steps will help to solve the third step very easily. And with each step you have to go on deepening his meditativeness. Any therapy without meditation cannot help much. It is just super fear, touching here and there, and soon the man will be same again. A real transformation has never happened without meditation, and these are beautiful situations as far as meditation is concerned.

So use the first to make him alone. Use the second to give him courage and tell him to drop all thoughts, just go crazily orgasmic. Don't bother what happens. We are here to take care of you. With these two steps the third will be very easy. That is the easiest. It looks the biggest fear of man. It is not true. You don't know death; how can you be afraid of it? You have always seen other people dying. You have never seen yourself dying. Who knows, you are maybe the exception, because there is no proof that you are going to die. Those who have died have given proof that they were mortals.

 

When I was in the university and learning logic from my professor, in every logic book, in every university around the world, the same Aristotelian syllogism is being taught. Man is mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal. And when I was taught that syllogism for the first time, I stood up and I said, "Wait. I may be the exception. Up to now I have been the exception. Why not tomorrow? About Socrates I accept the syllogism is true because he is dead, but what about me? What about you? What about all these people who are living? They have not died yet."

 

Experiencing death ― people dying in disgust, in misery, in suffering, in all kinds of pain, old age ― that gives you the fear of death. Because nobody has known the death of an enlightened man, how beautifully he dies, how joyously he dies. The moment of his death is of tremendous luminosity, silence, as if joy is radiating from every pore of his being. Those who are near him, those who have been fortunate to be near him, will be simply surprised that death is far more glorious than life has ever been.

 

But this kind of death happens only to people who have lived totally, without fear, who have lived orgasmically, without bothering about idiots what they are saying. They know nothing about it, and they go on saying about it.

 

The fear of death will be the simplest out of the three. You have to solve the first two, and then you tell the person that death is not the end of life. If you meditate deeply and reach to your innermost center you will suddenly find an eternal life current. The bodies... there have been many. There have been many forms to your being, but you are just the same. But it has to be not just a belief ― it has to be made their experience.

 

So remember one thing: your therapy groups should not be ordinary therapy ― just somehow whitewashing and giving a man a feeling that he has learned something, he has experienced something and after a week or two he is the same. There is not a single person in the whole world who is totally psychoanalyzed. And there are thousands of psychoanalysts doing psychoanalysis, and not a single case they have been able to complete yet, for the simple reason because they have nothing to do with meditation. And without meditation you can go on painting on the surface, but the inner reality remains the same.

 

My therapists have to introduce meditation as the very center of therapy, and everything else should revolve around it. Then we have made therapy something really valuable. Then it is not only the need those who are sick or of those who are somehow mentally unbalanced, or of those who feel fears, jealousies, violence. This is a negative part of therapy.

 

Our therapies should be that we give the person his individuality back. We give him his childhood and innocence back. That we give him integrity, crystallization, so that he never fears death. And once the fear of death disappears all other fears are very small, they will follow it, they will simply disappear.

 

And we have to teach people how to live totally and wholly, against the teachings of all the religions. They teach renounce. I teach rejoice.

 

-Osho, "The Last Testament, Vol. 2, #16"