Osho Talks on Tantra

 

 

 

Beloved Osho, 
Please explain whether the techniques you have discussed so far from Vigyan Bhairav Tantra belong to the science of yoga instead of to the actual and central subject matter of Tantra. What is the central subject matter of Tantra?

 

 

"This question arises to many. The techniques that we have discussed also belong to yoga. They are the same techniques, but with a difference: you can use the same techniques with a very different philosophy behind them. The framework, the pattern differs, not the technique. You may have a different attitude toward life, just the contrary to Tantra.” [....]

 

-Osho, The Book of Secrets, #32, Q1, “No Fight’ Is the Central Teaching”

 

 

 

“First, the world of Vigyan Bhairav Tantra is not intellectual, it is not philosophical…. Tantra means technique. So this treatise is a scientific one. Science is not concerned with why, science is concerned with how. That is the basic difference between philosophy and science…. Tantra is science, Tantra is not philosophy…. As you are, you can understand philosophy – but not Tantra.”

 

-Osho, The Book of Secrets, #1, “The World of Tantra”

 

 

 

Osho, 
What is the difference between traditional yoga and tantra? Are they the same?

 

“Tantra and yoga are basically different. They reach to the same goal; however, their paths are not only different, but contrary also. So this has to be understood very clearly.

 

“The yoga process is also methodology; yoga is also technique. Yoga is not philosophy, just like Tantra – yoga depends on action, method, technique. Doing leads to being in yoga also, but the process is different. In yoga one has to fight; it is the path of the warrior. On the path of Tantra one does not have to fight at all. Rather, on the contrary, one has to indulge – but with awareness.” [....]

 

-Osho, The Book of Secrets, #2, Q1, “The Path of Yoga and the Path of Tantra”

 

 

 

“Tantra teaches the inner journey. Morality will happen, but that will be a consequence, not a prerequisite. Be clear about this distinction. Tantra says don’t be entangled with moral and immoral concepts. They are outer. Rather, move within. So the techniques are there for how to move within.”

 

-Osho, The Book of Secrets, #42, “Alertness through Tantra”

 

 

 

“The Tantra vision is a direct approach towards God, towards reality, towards that which is. It has no mediators, no middlemen, it has no priests. And Tantra says the moment the priest enters, religion is corrupted. It is not the devil who corrupts religion, it is the priest. The priest is in the service of the devil.”

 

-Osho, Tantric Transformation, #7, “Intelligence Is Meditation”

 

 

 

Osho, 
What does Tantra mean by purity?

 

“One of the things being asked about is: What does tantra mean by purification of the mind, purity of the mind, as a basic condition to further progress?

 

“Whatsoever is ordinarily meant by purity is not what is meant by Tantra…. For Tantra this division of good and bad is meaningless. Tantra does not look at life through any dichotomy, any duality, any division. Then “What is meant by purity in Tantra?” is a very relevant question.” [....]

 

-Osho, The Book of Secrets, #8, “Total Acceptance and Non-Division: The Meaning of Tantric Purity”

 

 

 

“Tantra believes, not in gradual development of the soul, but in sudden enlightenment. Yoga believes in gradual development: inch-by-inch, step-by-step, you progress toward the final.

 

Yoga is very arithmetical: for each sin that you have committed you have to balance it by a virtuous act; your account has to be closed completely…. Tantra says just the opposite. Tantra is a very, very poetic approach, not arithmetical. And Tantra believes in love, not in mathematics; it believes in sudden enlightenment.”

 

-Osho, Tantra: The Supreme Understanding, #6, “The Great Teaching”

 

 

 

“The Tantra attitude is the very being of Tilopa. You must understand first what the Tantra attitude is; only then it will be possible for you to comprehend what Tilopa is trying to say. So, something about the Tantra attitude: the first thing, it is not an attitude, because Tantra looks at life with a total vision…. Tantra avoids mind and encounters life face to face, neither thinking, “This is good” nor thinking, “This is bad,” but simply facing that which is. So it is difficult to say that this is an attitude; in fact it is a no-attitude.

 

“The second thing to remember: that Tantra is a great yea-sayer; it says yes to everything….

 

“Tantra loves, and loves unconditionally.”

 

-Osho, Tantra: The Supreme Understanding, #5, “The Innate Truth”

 

 

 

“Before I take your questions some other points have to be clarified, because those points will help you understand more what Tantra means. Tantra is not a moral concept. It is neither moral nor immoral. It is amoral. It is a science, and science is neither. Your moralities and concepts concerning moral behavior are irrelevant for Tantra. Tantra is not concerned with how one should behave; it is not concerned with ideals. It is concerned basically with what is, with what you are. This distinction has to be understood deeply.”

 

-Osho, The Book of Secrets, # 34, “Cosmic Orgasm through Tantra”

 

 

 

 

“Remember, Tantra does not talk about God. To talk about God is a little anthropomorphic….

 

“Tantra drops that whole anthropomorphism. Tantra brings things to their right proportion, puts man in his right place. Tantra is a great vision, it is not centered on man, it is not centered on any partial attitude. It sees reality as it is, in its suchness, in its tathata, in its thusness. It does not talk about God. Instead of God, Tantra talks about truth.”

 

-Osho, The Tantra Experience, #7, “Don’t Live Lukewarm”

 

 

 

Osho, 
Do you see shortcomings in the teachings of Tantra that incline you to feel Tantric methods are not suitable for us?

 

“Tantra is right that sexual energy is the basic energy, so this energy should be transformed into higher forms. It is a truth. But what happened is that they never went very deep into meditation; meditation remained just secondary. And man’s sexuality shows so powerfully that in the name of Tantra it became simply sexual orgy. Without meditation that was going to happen. Meditation should have been the most primary thing because that is going to transform the energy, but that became secondary…. So although Tantra has a piece of truth, it could not be used rightly.”

 

“Tantra failed for two reasons. One was an inner reason – that meditation was not made the central point. And secondly, Tantra has no special methodology for the perverted and the repressed, so that first their repressions and perversions can be settled and they can become normal. Once they have become normal, then they can be introduced to meditation. And only after deep meditation should they be allowed into Tantra experiments. It was a wrong arrangement, so the whole thing became, in the name of a great system, just an exploitation of sex.” [....]

 

-Osho, The Path of the Mystic, #38, Question 3, “The Authentic Word”

 

 

 

“Accepting the total life means the middle path. If you deny, you move to the opposite extreme. Denial is extreme. If you deny anything, you deny it for something; then you move to one extreme. If one denies sex, he will move to brahmacharya, celibacy – to the other extreme. If you deny brahmacharya, you will move to indulgence – to the other extreme. The moment you deny, you have accepted the extreme path.

 

“Acceptance of totality is to be automatically in the middle. You are neither for something nor against something. You have not chosen, you are just floating in the stream. You are not moving toward a goal – you have no choice. You are in a let-go.

 

“Tantra believes in a deep let-go. When you choose, your ego comes in. When you choose, your will comes in. When you choose, you are moving against the whole universe – you have your own choice. When you choose, you are not choosing the universal flow: you are standing aloof, isolated; you are like an island. You are trying to be yourself against the whole flux of life.”

 

-Osho, The Book of Secrets, #30, “Accept Life in Its Totality”

 

 

 

“Tantra is freedom – freedom from all mind-constructs, from all mind-games; freedom from all structures – freedom from the other. Tantra is a space to be. Tantra is liberation.

 

“Tantra is not a religion in the ordinary sense. Religion again is a mind-game, religion gives you a certain pattern. A Christian has a certain pattern, so has the Hindu, so has the Muslim. Religion gives you a certain style, a discipline. Tantra takes all disciplines away.

 

“When there is no discipline, when there is no enforced order, a totally different kind of order arises in you. What Lao Tzu calls Tao, what Buddha calls dhamma – that arises in you. That is not anything done by you, it happens to you; Tantra simply creates a space for it to happen. It does not even invite, it does not wait; it simply creates a space. And when the space is ready, the whole flows in.”

 

-Osho, Tantric Transformation, #1, “The Tantra Map”

 

 

 

Osho, 
What is tantric sex? After monkey sex and after love-bliss sex, before the highest cosmic and religious sex in which no partner is needed, in which the cosmos is the partner, isn’t there tantric sex in which two partners are involved, a sex act that is a meditation based on certain techniques?

 

“It is good that after meditating on death you will be meditating on Tantra and tantric sex because sex is also a small death. And because of that small death in sex there is so much joy released in you. For a single moment you disappear and that moment is the climax, the orgasm. In that single moment you don’t know who you are. In that single moment you are pure energy vibrating, pulsating, with no center to it, with no ego in it.

 

“In that single moment of orgasmic space you lose all boundaries, separation. You become vast, huge. You are no more separate from the other. That’s why there is so much joy, although the moment is very small and once it is gone you feel very frustrated because it has been so short, it was so fleeting. You start hankering again. And each time that moment comes you reach to a pinnacle and then you fall into a deep darkness, into the abyss.

 

“So sex brings you joy and sex brings you great misery too. It takes you to sunlit peaks and then drops you into the darkest valleys. After each sex act one feels frustrated. Something was happening, happening, and it happened…and you could not even catch hold of it and it was gone.

 

“So sex remains the greatest fascination and the greatest frustration.

 

“Because of these two things in the act of sex there are two types of people….”

 

“But look at Tantra. Tantra has a totally different idea. Tantra says: The appeal of sex is because it gives you a moment of egolessness, timelessness, meditation. Because of ego gratification sex has become very, very superficial, it only scratches the skin. It does not go deep, it has no depth. So many people are worried about premature ejaculation. The reason? – they don’t love. If they love, then naturally they can make love for longer periods – the more you are in love, the longer the period will be. For hours you can be in love because there is no hurry, the ego is not controlling.

 

“You can remain for hours in tantric coitus. It is a kind of melting with the woman or with the man; it is a kind of relaxation into each other’s being. And it is meditative because there is no ego, no thought stirs. And time stops. This is a glimpse of God. Tantra is the natural way to God, the normal way to God. The object is to become so completely instinctual, so mindless, that we merge with ultimate nature – that the woman disappears and becomes a door for the ultimate, the man disappears and becomes a door for the ultimate.

 

“This is the tantric definition of our sexuality: the return to absolute innocence, absolute oneness. The greatest sexual thrill of all is not a search for thrills, but a silent waiting – utterly relaxed, utterly mindless. One is conscious, conscious only of being conscious. One is consciousness. One is contented but there is no content to it. And then there is great beauty, great benediction.” [....]

 

-Osho, This Very Body the Buddha, Chapter #8, Question 2, “Off to Hell – Yo ho!”

 

 

 

“Saraha was born about two centuries after Buddha; he was in the direct line of a different branch. One branch moves from Mahakashyapa to Bodhidharma, and Zen is born – and it is still full of flowers, that branch. Another branch moves from Buddha to his son, Rahul Bhadra, and from Rahul Bhadra to Sri Kirti, and from Sri Kirti to Saraha, and from Saraha to Nagarjuna – that is the Tantra branch. It is still bearing fruit in Tibet. Tantra converted Tibet, and Saraha is the founder of Tantra just as Bodhidharma is the founder of Zen. Bodhidharma conquered China, Korea, Japan; Saraha conquered Tibet.

 

“These songs of Saraha are of great beauty. They are the very foundation of Tantra. You will first have to understand the Tantra attitude towards life, the Tantra vision of life. The most basic thing about Tantra is this – and very radical, revolutionary, rebellious – the basic vision is that the world is not divided into the lower and the higher, but that the world is one piece. The higher and the lower are holding hands. The higher includes the lower, and the lower includes the higher. The higher is hidden in the lower – so the lower has not to be denied, has not to be condemned, has not to be destroyed or killed. The lower has to be transformed. The lower has to be allowed to move upwards and then the lower becomes the higher. There is no unbridgeable gap between the Devil and God: the Devil is carrying God deep down in his heart. Once that heart starts functioning, the Devil becomes God.

 

“That is the reason why the very root of the word devil means the same as divine.”

 

-Osho, The Tantra Experience, #1, “Learning through Action”

 

 

 

“Tantra is transcendence. It is neither indulgence nor repression. It is walking on a tightrope, it is one of the greatest of balances. It is not as easy as it appears, it needs very delicate awareness. It is a great harmony.

 

“It is very easy for the mind to indulge. The opposite is also very easy: to renounce. To move to the extreme is very easy for the mind. To remain in the middle, exactly in the middle, is the most difficult thing for the mind, because it is a suicide for the mind. The mind dies in the middle and the no-mind arises. That’s why Buddha has called his path majjhim nikaya – the middle path. Saraha is a disciple of Buddha, in the same lineage, with the same understanding, with the same awareness.

 

“So this very fundamental thing has to be understood, otherwise you will misunderstand Tantra. What is this razor’s edge? What is this being exactly in the middle? To indulge in the world, no awareness is needed. To repress worldly desires, again no awareness is needed. Your so-called worldly people and your so-called otherworldly people are not very different….”

 

-Osho, Tantric Transformation, #3, “Breaking the Four Seals”

 

 

 

"Tantra is basically spiritual sexology because man's mind is perverted throughout the world by religions teaching repression of sex. Tantra is the only science which teaches you expression of sex not as indulgence, but as a spiritual discipline. This is a transformation of a biological phenomenon into spirituality."

 

-Osho, "From Darkness to Light, #27"