Darshan 11 September 1977
[A new sannyasin asks if she can train in tantra yoga, as she is a therapist and can use it in her work.]
You can train. You can be of immense help to people....
Yes, you can. So you do the tantra group here. You can bring very good energy into helping people.
And people's problems are basically concerned with sex energy. Ninety-nine percent of problems can be reduced to sex, and tantra is the only way to go beyond them. Everything else, at the most, settles things for a time being but there is no transformation, even through psychoanalysis. Even through growth groups things only settle for the time being but your root cause remains; it is not even touched. Symptoms disappear, but the root remains.
Sooner or later the root will start creating new symptoms again. Only tantra can destroy the root because it can transform sexuality into superconsciousness.
Tantra is nothing but an alchemical process... and you can bring great energy into it; you are old enough to bring that kind of energy. If a young woman is going to take the group she herself is not yet out of sex; if a young man is going to do, he himself has the same problem somewhere. You can bring a very motherly energy and a motherly atmosphere, and that will be of great help.
In the east tantra was developed by great sages... very ancient, old. When vatasana wrote his 'kamasutras' he was beyond ninety, but only a man of that age and that experience who has known all ups and downs of life, who has known the ecstasy of love and the misery too, who has known the joy that comes through sex and the frustration... And they both come together; they are both there.
Sex is such a vital energy that it brings both the negative and the positive together; it is a meeting ground of the negative and the positive. So it brings the greatest joy and it brings the greatest misery; hell and heaven meet there.
And it is very very rare that the joy comes because people are not ready for the joy. People are ready, more ready, more in tune with misery, so more misery comes. If a person is really natural then fifty percent joy will come and fifty percent misery will come out of sex. But it is difficult to find a normal person. By 'normal' I mean a balanced person who exists in the middle, who is not an extremist, leftist or rightist... who walks just in the middle of the way, who follows the golden mean.
Ordinarily people are abnormal this way or that: either they are too indulgent, licentious, or they are too repressive, religious. In both ways misery will be more and there will be only glimpses of joy, far and few in between, very rare... just enough to keep you hoping, that's all.
If a person is normal then fifty percent joy and fifty percent misery will come. If a person has absolutely fallen below normal - not an extremist, but has fallen below human consciousness - then one hundred percent misery will come out of it. And if a person has gone beyond human consciousness, has become more alert, has brought some meditative energy to focus upon it, then one hundred percent joy.
Freedom is through joy; freedom has no boundaries - misery has boundaries. The bigger the misery, the closer will be the boundaries. When a person is really in misery he is almost suffocating in the boundaries. They are like an armour pressing him down, pressing him inwards, crushing him.
When you are more joyful, you have a little space between you and the boundaries. If there is real joy then boundaries simply evaporate; then the whole existence is yours.
When sexuality can bring one hundred percent joy without even a trace of misery, then tantra has succeeded. This is the fulfillment in tantra. And when this has happened a person is ready to go into god. If he can tolerate, if he can bear the joys of sexuality, one hundred percent, then only is he capable of invoking god... because that is invoking a storm. Tremendous energy will fall on you! If you are not ready for it you will be crushed. God can become a self-murder if you invoke him when you are not ready.
If you are not ready to see him and you open your eyes to see, your eyes will be burned. Truth is too bright for ordinary eyes; eyes have to be trained slowly, slowly. The body has to be trained, the mind has to be trained. And tantra functions on all the three layers - the body, the mind and the soul. It begins on the body, ends on the soul. Where tantra ends, god begins.
Tantra brings you to the real meditative state because it transforms the whole sexuality into joy. You can bring your energy to it.
Shunya means nothingness, emptiness, nobodiness, egolessness, and praveera means excellence - excellence in being nobody. And that is your task: become more and more excellent in becoming nobody, then god is yours. It is a promise!... excellence in being nobody. And that is the greatest spiritual quality which has to be evolved. When you have completely disappeared, then all is possible. The 'I' is the only barrier. Good!
[Osho explains the meaning of prem preeksha: preeksha is the capacity to see, so it means seeing through love, through the heart, through feeling.
So come closer to the heart. Go as far away from the head as possible. Your vision will happen there in the heart. You will not be able to understand it intellectually; you will be able to understand
it lovingly. Love will be your door to knowledge; you will know through love. And when one is capable of knowing through love there is no need to bother about the mind, because that is always secondary. When the heart is not capable of seeing we have to choose the next best, and that is the head. Then one has to follow intelligence, but it is next best.
And the best is possible for you so there is no need to go for the next. Simply start being more feeling, more loving, more sensitive, and as many times as possible, just go there behind the heart and pulsate with it, and it will create a kind of energy in you. Soon you will find that you are streaming with some new energy - which is there. It just needs your attention, then it will start growing. So your name will be: seeing through love, love vision.
[A sannyasin, newly arrived, says: I don't know what I'm doing here!]
Nobody knows! and nobody cares! I myself don't know what I'm doing! But it is fun, whatsoever it is.
[She then says that her family and friends were not accepting of her sannyas... she thought it would be easier.]
No, it is difficult! Nobody likes anybody changing because it creates inconvenience for them.
Everybody wants you to be exactly that which you are. Everybody wants you to remain stereotyped so they know who you are, so they know how to behave with you, so there is no inconvenience.
Everybody wants you to have a fixed character, a dead character, so you remain predictable. If you start changing - and this is a great change - then everybody who has been related to you has to readjust. That creates inconvenience; that's why they become hard and they are very antagonistic.
The reason is that you create work for them; now they have to readjust with you. They have again to learn how to relate with you. You have changed - in fact, it is as if they are being introduced to a new person. And it is better to be introduced to a new person because you can start from abe. But you have known the person for many years and then suddenly the person has changed. Now you will be in confusion. You know so many things about the person and now he has changed.
Now there will always be a confusion. It will take years for them to have a right concept about you and, in fact, my sannyasins won't ever allow anybody to have a right concept about them because they will be continuously changing. Sannyas is not one change: it is the beginning of change. It is not birth but a continuous birth. Now you will be born again and again every day, and those who are related with you will always be in trouble unless they start learning to change, unless they start accepting an unpredictable person... and that is hard.
And I can understand their problem... but don't be worried about that. That is their problem - either they will adjust or they will fall out or they will start learning something new about what this sannyas is. But you have created a turmoil in their mind so they become angry. They want to hush you down, back to your old pattern, but there is no way to go back; one can only go ahead.