Osho talks about sex

Question:
What are your views on sexual ethics?

My views on sexual ethics are against all the views that have been held up to now. They were all repressive of sex; they were condemnatory and created a split in the human mind. The whole schizophrenia and all the perversions of man are rooted in those wrong sexual ethics.

I conceive of sex as a natural phenomenon. There is nothing profane in it and there is nothing sacred in it. It is purely natural life energy of tremendous importance. If you cannot sublimate it, it can destroy you; and it has destroyed humanity.

It is the energy man is born out of; everything is born out of it. Naturally there is no higher energy than sexual energy, but biological reproduction is not its only function. The same energy can have different creative dimensions. The same energy, joined with meditative practices, can be sublimated to the highest peak of consciousness — what I call enlightenment.

My sexual ethics is not a law, it is love.

Two persons can be sexually related only if love allows. When there is no love, and only law remains as a binding force, it is sheer prostitution. And I am against prostitution.

It is strange that all the religions are the cause of prostitution in the world, but nobody stands up and says that prostitution exists because you have replaced love with law.

Law is not love. Marriage is valid only if there is love. The moment love disappears, the marriage is invalid. It means millions of people are living unlovingly, unethically, unnaturally, because of the religions that have forced the arbitrary bondage of marriage and have tried to make it permanent.

Life is continuously changing; nothing is permanent. Love also is not permanent. Only plastic flowers are permanent, real flowers cannot be permanent. If you are too addicted to permanence then you will end up with plastic flowers; that’s how people have ended up with plastic marriages, plastic relationships — phony, hypocritical. And it gives no pleasure to anybody.

There is a vast prostitution all over the world. Ordinarily when you go to a prostitute, you purchase her for one night. At least it is straightforward. But when you marry a woman, promising her that you will love her always, even beyond death — and even before the honeymoon ends, the love disappears — then you live in deception. Now you are using a human being as a thing, as a sexual object. I condemn it.

According to me love should be the only law, the only deciding factor.

And the energy of sex should not remain confined to reproduction only. It is simple to see the fact that animals are not sexual all the year round, they just have their seasons. In those few months or few weeks they are sexual; otherwise sex disappears. Why has man the capacity to be sexual all the year round? There must be a purpose behind it. Existence never does anything meaninglessly.

My understanding is that reproduction could have been managed within a few weeks, just as it is being managed in all the animals. But man has been given so much sexual energy… it is a clear indication that existence wants you to transform this energy into higher levels of consciousness — and it can be transformed. Just as it can give birth to children, it can give birth to you. It can make you reborn, with a new vision, new bliss, new light, and a totally new being. All that is needed is that the sexual energy should be joined with meditation. And that has been my whole work.

That is my sexual ethics: sex energy plus meditation.

And it is the easiest thing to join them, because while making love, the moment you come to an orgasmic explosion your thoughts disappear, time stops. Suddenly you have melted into the other, you are no longer an ego. And these are the qualities of meditation: no ego, no time, no thinking. Just pure awareness and a melting into the whole.

Where sexual orgasm ends, meditation begins. They can be joined very easily. The easiest thing to do is to join them, they are so close.

My own insight is that people came to discover meditation through sexual orgasm because of these qualities. They could see that when thoughts stop, time stops, ego disappears and you are in a tremendously beautiful space. Although it lasts only for seconds, it has given you the taste of something that is not of this world, something of the beyond.

We don’t know who discovered meditation, perhaps thousands of years ago. In the East we have books at least ten thousand years old describing methods of meditation. But any method brings the same qualities.

This is my feeling, that without sexual orgasm nobody could have been able to discover these three qualities. Once they discovered these three qualities, people of intelligence must have tried to experience them without going into sexual orgasm. Is it possible to attain to such a consciousness? Somebody must have succeeded, and since then millions of people have succeeded.

The whole of humanity lives in misery for the simple reason that they have the wrong kind of sexual ethics, a kind which teaches them to repress it. And the more you repress your sexuality, the farther away you are from meditation. The more you repress it, the closer you are to madness, not to meditation.

And now it is a fact established by psychoanalysis — by the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud — that repressed sex is the basic cause of human misery, of all kinds of perversions, of all kinds of mind sicknesses. But the religions still go on preaching the same thing.

Sigmund Freud should be remembered as one of the milestones in the history of man. But his work is only half. He simply fought against repression; his work is negative. In itself it takes you nowhere; it is fighting against darkness.

My sexual ethics are a completion. Repression has to be dropped. And a deep acceptance, a deep friendliness towards your own energies, a loving intimacy with your own energies so those energies can reveal all their secrets to you… And joining them with meditation, orgasm becomes the door to the temple of the divine.

To me, if sex is the creative force in the world, it must be nearest to the creative center of the world — whatever name you give to it. Creative energy must be closest to creation, to the creative source of it all.

People should be taught the art of converting sexual energy into spiritual enlightenment.

Osho – ‘The Path of the Mystic’, chapter 21, Question 1
14 May 1986 pm in Punta Del Este, Uruguay