by Osho:  The first thing is that up till now, all of human culture has been against sex, against passion. This opposition, this negation has shattered and destroyed the possibility of the birth of love in humans.

The simple truth is that sex is the starting point of all journeys to love. The birthplace of the journey to love is sex. And everybody is inimical to it, all cultures, all religions, all gurus, all holy men. “Sex is sin . . . sex is irreligious . . . sex is poison.” And it never enters our minds that it is sexual energy that ultimately transforms and transmutes into love.

But everyone is against it, is inimical to it. Your so-called good people are against it. And this opposition has not allowed the seed even to sprout. It has destroyed the place of love at is foundation, on the very first step.

How can something to which we have become inimical, to which we are opposed, with which we are continuously fighting, be transformed?

Humans have been set up against their own energy. Humans have been set up to fight against sex energy. On the surface, human beings are taught to support the dropping of all conflicts, all fights, all struggles. But deep down they are essentially being taught to fight: “The mind is poison, so fight against it – the the poison has to be fought against. Sex is sin, so fight against it.”

It is very important to understand one thing in this context. Human beings can never be separated from sex. Sex is the very source of one’s life; one is born out of it. Existence has accepted the energy of sex as the starting point of creation, and our holy men call it sinful … something that existence itself does not consider a sin!

My own understanding is that man had his first glimpses of awakening, of meditation, in moments of lovemaking – nowhere else. It was only in moments of lovemaking that human beings realized for the first time that so much bliss is possible. Those who meditated on this truth, those who reflected deeply on the phenomenon of sex, of lovemaking, saw that in moments of lovemaking, at the climax, the mind becomes empty of thoughts. For a moment all thoughts disappear. And this emptiness of the mind, this disappearance of thoughts, brings a showering of blissfulness. They discovered the secret.

They also discovered the secret that if the mind can be freed of thoughts through some other means besides sex, the same blissfulness can be attained. From this grew the systems of yoga and of no-mind that gave birth to meditation. At the root of meditation is the experience of lovemaking. Thus the human beings came to experience that the mind can be stilled, that the mind can be freed of thoughts without going into sex, and that the same bliss that happens in sex can be attained.

So, the first principle I want to give to you is that if you wish to know the phenomenon called love, the first key is that you accept the sacredness, the divinity, the godliness of sex –with a total heart, with your full heart. And you will be amazed to see that the more totally, the more wholeheartedly you accept sex, the freer you will become of it. The less acceptance there is, the more bound to sex you become.

I want to emphasize that this strong and recurring pull toward sex is for the momentary experience of a state of Samadhi, nomind, for the superconsciousness it brings. And you can be free of sex only on the day when you start having the experience of Samadhi or no-mind without sex. From that day you become free of sex.

If we can understand three things rightly – what sex is, what its root attraction is, and why it became perverted – then the mind can go beyond sex. It should, it needs to. But efforts to arise above sex have brought wrong results because we created a fight with it. We created enmity with it, not friendship. We created repression not an understanding of it.

The concepts about sex that have existed so far have not enabled men and women to open any door other than sex. Nature endows humans with one door, sex. But the teachings down the centuries have closed that door without opening a new door. In the absence of such a door, the energy in a person starts going around in circles. If there is no new door for the energy to pass through, this swirling and caged energy drives a person insane. Then this insane person does not just try to force open the natural door of sex, but this energy also tries to shatter the walls and windows and flow from there. Thus the sex energy flows out through unnatural routes. It is one of mankind’s greatest misfortunes—a new door has not been opened, and the old door is already closed.

I have said that the experience that comes in the moment of orgasm consists of two elements, timelessness and egolessness. Time disappears and the ego dissolves. In the absence of the ego and the stoppage of time, one has a glimpse of one’s own self – one’s real self. But that glory is momentary and then we are back in the same old rut. And in the process we have lost energy, we have dissipated a tremendous flow of bioelectric energy.

We forget that nothing can be destroyed by suppression; on the contrary, it only gets strengthened. We also forget that repressing something increases our attraction to it. That which we repress enters the deeper layers of our consciousness. In the very effort to suppress sex, humankind has become bound and trapped by it.

And what did we have to do in order to suppress? We had to condemn sex, we had to develop an insulting attitude toward it, we had to degrade it, we had to abuse it. We had to call it a door to hell; we had to proclaim that sex is sin. We had to say that everything related to sex is to be despised. We have had to invent all these degrading names for sex in order to justify our suppression of it. But we are not at all aware that it is because of these abuses and condemnations that our whole life has become filled with poison.

If a person is to be freed of sexuality, it is necessary to create a new door for the sexual energy before the door of sex opens. That new door is meditation. There should be lessons in meditation for every child in the early years. Instead, we teach the child antagonism to sex, which is absolutely foolish. And children can attain to meditation faster because the door to their sex energy is not open yet. That door is closed; the energy is safely conserved and it can knock on any new door and open it.

Children are anyway silent and peaceful by adult standards. If they are given a little bit of direction and taught to be silent and serene even for a little while each day, a new door will have already opened in them by the time they are fourteen years old, by the time they are sexually mature. The energy will mature and begin to flow through the door that is already open. They will have had the experiences of peace, blissfulness, timelessness, and egolessness, long before they experience sex.

Instead of teaching the tranquility of meditation, we teach children to condemn sex. “Sex is sin, sex is dirty,” we say. We tell them is it ugly and bad; we say that it leads to hell. But name-calling does nothing to change the actual situation. On the contrary, children become curious; they want to know more about this hell, about this evil, about this dirty thing that makes their parents and teachers so afraid and panicky.

This I call the first step. Meditation is the first step in the discipline of celibacy, in the discipline of transcending sex, in the discipline of transforming sex energy.

The possibility of sex in a person’s life lessens as love increases within. Love and meditation together open the door to godliness. Where love and meditation join, godliness is attained. And the outcome of this attainment is celibacy. Then the entire life energy ascends upward through a new passage. Then it does not leak out gradually; then it does not flow out to be wasted. The energy rises, starts moving upward on inner routes. It goes on an upward voyage.

But you should not conclude that since you are not a child anymore, nothing remains for you to do. Don’t draw that conclusion and quit; in that case my effort will have gone to waste.

This is exactly what I would like to say about sex: we know nothing about it.

Even at the end of a lifetime, all that we know about sex is no more than knowing how to turn the switch on and off-nothing more. But because we carry the false idea that we know all about it, there is no possibility for any research, any discovery, any thinking, any reflection about sex.

We learned about the atom only recently, and the world has undergone a tremendous revolution. The day we succeed in knowing about the atom of sex, the human race will enter a new era of wisdom. It is impossible to predict the impact, the greatness of the heights we can reach when we understand the process and technique of creating consciousness. But one thing can be said for certain: sex energy and its process is the most mysterious, most profound, most precious thing in the world-and we are quiet about it. Something that is the most precious of all is taboo.

Your so-called celibate, who has forcibly imposed celibacy upon himself, is as imprisoned inside the house of sex as any other common person. The only difference between such a person and you is that this person is sitting with closed eyes, whereas your eyes are open. What you do openly, this person does secretly. What you do physically, this person does mentally. There is no other difference. That is why I encourage you to drop antagonism to sex and to try sympathetically to understand it, experiment with it, and give it a sacred place in your life.

You should approach sex as if approaching a shrine, because at the time of sex you are closest to existence. It is through sex that existence can create and give birth to new life. In the experience of sex we are closest to the creator. We become a passage for a new life to come through us. We become a giver of birth. Why is it so? Because the state of intercourse is the closest to creation itself. If we approach sex with sacredness, with prayerfulness, we can easily have a glimpse of godliness.

What actually happens is just the contrary. The more we are full of worries and dejection, the more we are in anger, in despair and in anguish, the more we move into sex. A cheerful person does not chase after sex, but a sorrowful person does because such a person sees it as an opportunity to escape from unhappiness. But remember, if you approach sex with sadness, with worry, with bitterness, with irritation and conflict, you will never attain the glimpse of that deep experience for which your soul thirsts.

But there is a bridge, a route, a journey between sex and superconsciousness. Superconsciousness is the final rung, up in the sky, of the same ladder where sex is the first rung. Those who turn against the very first rung of the ladder never progress at all. Those who deny the very first rung of the ladder can never step on the second.

Up until now, sex and God have been thought of as enemies to each other. Up to now, it has been taught that those in search of the transcendental have nothing to do with sex, and that those on a journey into sex have nothing to do with spirituality and God. But these ideas are nonsense. The journey into sex also exists because of the search for the divine. This tremendous attraction for sex is nothing else but a search for the transcendent, and that is why sex never satisfies. One never feels that through sex all has been fulfilled. The feeling never arises except in the attainment of godliness.

And those who search for God while opposing sex are not really on a search for God; it is nothing but escapism in the name of spirituality. They hide themselves behind God, behind the transcendental, to escape from sex. This is because they are afraid of sex, because they are in a trembling state over sex. They seek refuge in repeating mantras and prayers so that they can forget about sex.

Where are you standing now? You say you long to make the journey to superconsciousness – good. You say you desire to reach God – good. But where are you standing now? You are standing in sex; you are standing in lust. This is where you live, and it is from this point you will take steps and begin your journey. So, first of all it is necessary to understand the place you are at now. You have to know the actuality first to realize the possibility. To know what you can be, it is necessary first to know what you are.

Source: AWAKEN