Because of love, we are together

The first question:

Question 1:

Joey Simons, my message is very simple. That's why it is difficult to understand. I teach the obvious; it is not complex at all. Because it is not complex there is nothing much to understand in it. It has to be lived, experienced. My message is not verbal, logical, rational. It is existential, so those who want to understand it intellectually will only misunderstand it.

Still, there are a few fundamentals I would like to tell you. One: up to now man has lived only half- heartedly. In the East, in the West, man has remained lopsided. Neither has the Eastern man been whole nor has the Western man been whole. The West has chosen the body, is body-oriented; the East has chosen the soul, is soul-oriented; and man is both, a great harmony of both. Man is both and a transcendence. Neither in the East nor in the West has man been accepted totally. We have not yet dared to accept man in his totality.

That is one of the most fundamental things I want everybody to understand about my teaching: I teach the whole man. The very idea of East and West is nonsense; that too is because of the ancient division. All divisions have to be dissolved.

I teach one world. East and West have to disappear; both are schizophrenic. The West is right- handed, the East is left-handed; the West is active, the East is passive; the West is extrovert, the East is introvert - but man is both and beyond both.

To be total, one has to be as capable of being extrovert as of being introvert. To be total, one has to be capable of breathing out and breathing in. Inhalation is as much needed as exhalation. In fact, they are not two; exhalation-inhalation IS ONE process.

The West has chosen the outside world, matter, has become very scientific, has created great technology; but man is crushed underneath that technology because man has not grown simultaneously. Man is lagging far behind. Science has gone far ahead, and the science that man has created is now destroying man himself.

Man's inner world has remained poor in the West, man is spiritually starved in the West. And the same has happened in the East from the other extreme: man has completely denied his body, his world. The East has insisted on denying all that is outside you, renouncing the manifested world and just going in, remaining at your center. The East is spiritually rich but materially very poor and starved. The East has suffered, the West has suffered.

My message is: now it is time that we should drop this division of the outer and the inner, of the lower and the higher, of the left-handed and the right-handed. We should drop this division between man and woman, between East and West. We should create a whole man who is capable of both.

That's why I am going to be misunderstood everywhere. The Eastern religious person is angry with me because he thinks I am teaching materialism, and the Western rational thinker is angry with me because he thinks I am teaching spiritual mumbojumbo. EVERYBODY is angry at me, and that is natural; I can understand it.

I am teaching the whole man - from the lowest rung of the ladder to the highest rung, from sex to samadhi, from the body to the soul, from matter to God. My trust is total.

I would like to tell you that up to now man has not trusted. Not even in the East has man trusted.

In the East man has doubted the world; hence in the East the world is called illusory, MAYA. In the West man has doubted God, soul; they are thought to be just hallucinations, pathologies. To the really Western mind Jesus looks like a neurotic, psychologically ill, needs psychiatric treatment. To the East the West looks animalistic. "Eat, drink, and be merry" - that seems to be the understanding of the East about the West, that that is the only Western philosophy: be like animals, gross.

The West has doubted the inner world, the East has doubted the outer world. Both have lived in doubt and their trust has been half-hearted.

My trust is total. I trust the outer, I trust the inner - because outer and inner are both together. They cannot be separated. There is NO God without this world; there is no world without God. God is the innermost core of this world. The juice flowing in the trees is God, the blood circulating in your body is God, the consciousness residing in you is God. God and the world are mixed together just like a dancer and his dance; they cannot be separated, they are inseparable. So I don't say the world is illusion; that is nonsense. The world is as real as consciousness. Neither do I say that the inner world is neurosis, madness, hallucination; it is not. It is the very foundation of reality.

I teach the whole man. I am not a materialist or a spiritualist. My approach is wholistic - and the whole man can only be holy.

Because of this there is going to be great misunderstanding about me, and anybody can pick things, find faults with me, and it is very easy. The spiritualist can call me Epicurean, a follower of Charvaka - and he is not absolutely wrong because half of me is Epicurean. I accept Epicurus and Charvaka because they teach the body and the joys of the body and the exhilaration of the body. And there is exhilaration in the body, and the moment you drop that, you become serious and sad.

That's why the Eastern saint looks so sad, no joy. They talk about bliss but it doesn't show on their faces. They look utterly miserable. They look utterly dead - because they are afraid of the outer, and one who is afraid of the outer will be afraid of love because love is an outgoing process. Love means the other, love means relating, love means communicating with the other. Love means the relationship between I and thou. The East denies the other, hence the East is against love. And if you are against love you will lose dance.

Without love, there is no dance in life and no song. Without love there is no poetry. Life becomes dull, a drag. Without love you can live, but only at the minimum. It will be almost like vegetating.

And that's what is happening to the Eastern spirituality; go into the monasteries, go into the ashrams.

That's why my ashram looks so utterly different - because people are dancing, singing, holding hands, hugging, loving, joyous; this is not the Eastern concept of an ashram. An ashram has to be absolutely joyless; it has to be more like a cemetery than like a garden. But the moment you stop love, all that is flowing in you stops, becomes stagnant.

You cannot celebrate without love. How can you celebrate without love? And what will you celebrate, and with what?

Mulla Nasruddin was saying to me one day, "I have lived a hundred years. I have celebrated my hundredth birthday, and I have never chased a woman in my life, and I have not ever been drinking.

I have never played cards, gambled. I don't smoke. I eat simple, vegetarian food."

I asked him, "But then how did you celebrate your hundredth birthday? How can you celebrate?

With what? And for what? Just living for a hundred years can't be a celebration."

You have not lived if you have not loved.

The East is against love. That's why Eastern spirituality is sad, dull, dead. No juice flows through the Eastern saint. He is afraid of ANY flow, any vibration, any pulsation, any streaming of his energy.

He is constantly controlling himself, repressing himself. He is sitting upon himself, on guard. He is against himself and against the world. He is simply waiting to die, he is committing a slow suicide.

That's why my ashram is going to be misunderstood. This will look like the Ashram of a Charvaka, this will look like the garden of Epicurus.

The Western man has loved - there is laughter and there is dancing and there is song - but the Western man has lost ALL idea of who he is. He has lost track of consciousness, he is not aware.

He has become more and more mechanical because he denies the inner. So laughter is there but laughter cannot go deep, because there is no depth. The depth is not accepted. So the West lives in a shallow laughter and East lives in a deep sadness. This is the misery, the agony that has happened to man.

My message is: it is time now, man is mature enough to come out of these half-hearted, lopsided patterns. These programs have to be dropped and changed. One should accept the outer and the inner both, and totally, and with no conditions at all. Then there will be consciousness and there will be love, and they will not be contradictory to each other but complementary. Love will give you joy, consciousness will give you crystallization. Consciousness will make you aware of who you are, and love will make you aware of what this world is. And between these two banks, the river of life flows.

I teach the whole man. This is one of the most fundamental things to be understood - then all else will become easy, then things will be simple. This is the base. I teach the world and I teach God, and I teach them in the same breath. I want to bring Epicurus and Buddha as close as possible.

Buddha is sitting under his tree; you cannot conceive of Buddha dancing. Epicurus is dancing in his garden; you cannot conceive of Epicurus sitting silently under a tree, meditating.

I would like Epicurus and Buddha to become one. Life should be a rhythm of dance and silence, of music and sound and silence. Life should be a rhythm of going out as far as possible and going in as far as possible, because God is both.

Close your eyes and you see God, open your eyes and you see God, because God is all there is.

Joey, you ask me, "Can you give me a message to take to the Western world so that people there might understand you and your followers?"

The people who are with me are not my followers. They are my lovers, but not my followers. They are my friends, but not my followers. They are my disciples, but not my followers.

And what is the difference between a disciple and a follower? A follower believes; whatsoever is said, he makes a dogma out of it. The disciple learns, experiments, and unless he finds the truth himself he remains open.

I am not giving any dogma to my friends here, to my sannyasins. All that I am doing here is helping them to understand themselves. All I am doing here is helping them to be themselves.

A follower imitates. A Christian has to imitate Christ and a Buddhist has to imitate Buddha - and all imitators are pseudo. I want my friends to be authentic. How can you follow me? I am so different from you and you are so different from me. You are so unique. There has never been a person like you and there will never be again. God only creates one person once. He is very innovative, He does not repeat, He does not make man on an assembly line. It is not like Fiat cars or Ford cars:

you can see thousands and thousands alike, exactly alike. God always creates the unique.

Go into the garden: you will not find two grass leaves the same. Not even identical twins are the same.

So how can you follow anybody? All following is wrong.

So my second message: man has not to follow anybody. Understand certainly, learn certainly, listen certainly, remain open, but follow your own inner spontaneity. Follow your own being. I help people here to be themselves. Just as in my garden I help the roses to be roses and the lotus to be a lotus.

I don't try so that the lotus be a rose. The world is rich because there is variety. The world would be ugly if only roses grew and no other flower. Thousands of flowers grow, and the world is beautiful.

Each person has to be authentically himself, utterly himself So the sannyasins who are here with me are not my followers. They love me. Through their love they have come close to me. Their love has brought me here, their love has brought them here; because of love we are together. But I am not the leader and they are not the followers. And I am not creating a cult, I am not creating a church. The sannyasins are just a commune of friends, not a church. We don't have any dogma that everybody has to believe in. There is nothing to be believed in, but millions of things to be experimented with. My ashram is a lab; we experiment here.

That too is creating great trouble, because man has forgotten to experiment. We are experimenting in a multi-dimensional way. We are experimenting with Tao, we are experimenting with Sufism, we are experimenting with Jainism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity; we are experimenting with Tantra, Yoga, alchemy. We are experimenting with all the possibilities that can make the human consciousness rich and a human being whole. That is creating trouble, because when the follower of Yoga comes he cannot understand why Tantra should be experimented with; he is against Tantra.

When the follower of Tantra comes he cannot see why Yoga should be experimented with; he is against Yoga.

I am not against anything. I am for all. I am UTTERLY for all. I claim the whole human heritage, and whatsoever is good in any tradition is mine, and whatsoever can make man richer is mine. I don't belong to any tradition, all traditions belong to me.

So this is a new experiment; it has never been done before in such a way. This is the synthesis of all the paths. So I am teaching a synthesis. And my feeling is that the man who has only been experimenting with Yoga will remain partial, will grow only in part - as if a man's hand has become too big and the whole body remains small; he will be a monster... unless he can experiment with Tantra also, because Tantra is complementary to Yoga.

Remember, this is one of my basic insights: that in life there are no contradictions. All contradictions are complementaries. Night is complementary to the day, so is summer to winter, so is death to life. They are not against each other. There is nothing against, because there is only one energy, it is one God. My left hand and my right hand are not against each other, they are complementary.

Opposites are just like wings of a bird, two wings - they look opposite to each other but they support each other. The bird cannot fly with one wing.

Tantra and Tao have to be experimented with together.

Now Yoga has a great insight into discipline, and Tao has a great insight into spontaneity. They are opposite on the surface, but unless your discipline makes you more spontaneous and unless your spontaneity makes you more disciplined, you will not be whole. Yoga is control, Tantra is uncontrol; and both are needed. A man has to be so capable of order that if the need arises he can function in utter order. But order should not become a fixation, otherwise he will become a robot.

He should be able to come out of his system, his discipline, whenever the need arises. And he can be spontaneous, floating, in a let-go. That he can get only through Tantra, from nowhere else.

I am bringing all the opposites into my sannyasins' lives as complementaries. Yogis will be against me because they cannot see how sex and love can be a part of a seeker's life. They are afraid.

They are afraid of sex because sex is the most spontaneous thing in your life. It has to be controlled.

They know that once sex is controlled, everything else is controlled, so their basic attack is on sex.

Tantra says if your sex is not spontaneous your whole life will become robot-like. It has to be in freedom. And both are right, and both are right together! - this is my approach. I will look absurd because my approach is very illogical. Logic will always insist: either be a Yogi or be a Tantrika. I believe in life, I don't believe in logic; and life is both together.

A great discipline is needed in life, because you have to live in a world with so many people. You have to live in discipline; otherwise life would become a chaos. Life would become impossible if you couldn't live in a discipline. But if you only live in discipline and you forget spontaneity and you become the discipline and you are not capable of getting out of it, then again life is lost. You have become a machine. Now, these are the two alternatives that have been available to man up to now:

either become a chaos - which is not good - or become a machine - which is not good either.

I want you to be alert, conscious, aware, disciplined, and yet capable of spontaneity. When you are working, be disciplined. But work is not all. When you are playing, forget all discipline.

I used to stay in a Calcutta house with a High Court judge. His wife told me, "My husband only listens to you. You are the only person who can bring something into his life. Our whole family is tired with his attitude. He remains the magistrate even in the house." She said, "Even in bed he remains the judge of the High Court. He expects me to call him, 'My Lord'. He is never spontaneous, and in everything he makes rules and laws. The children are tired. When he enters into the house the whole house falls silent, all joy disappears. We all wait for him to go to the court."

Now I know that man: he is a good judge, a very conscientious magistrate, very sincere, honest - and these are good qualities - but he has become a machine. If he comes home and remains the magistrate, that is not good. One has to relax too. One has to play with children, but he cannot play with children; that would be coming down too much. Even with his wife he remains on the high pedestal, far away; he still remains the magistrate.

This is what has happened to the followers of Yoga: they cannot be playful, they cannot rejoice in anything, they cannot participate in celebration - because they cannot relax.

And Tantra alone creates chaos. Tantra alone makes you very, very selfish. You don't care about anybody. You forget that you are part of a great whole, that you belong to a society, that you belong to existence and you are committed to this existence; without it you will be nowhere. You have to fulfill some demands from the side of existence, from the side of society. If you become utterly chaotic, then you cannot exist. Then nobody can exist.

So there has to be a great understanding between chaos and mechanicalness. Exactly in the middle there is a point where I would like my sannyasins to be, exactly in the middle; capable of going to both the extremes when needed, and always capable of moving away from there. I teach this fluidity, I teach this liquidity.

I don't teach fixed life patterns, dead gestalts. I teach growing life syntheses, growing patterns, growing gestalts, and always capable of comprehending the other, the opposite. Then life is beautiful.

And one can know truth only when one has been able to transform the opposites into complementaries. Then only is one's life symmetrical. There is balance - positive and negative are both equally balanced. In that balancing is transcendence. In that balancing one knows the beyond, one opens up to the beyond. The Golden Flower blooms.

The second question:

Question 2:

Follow all three. Act with love and awareness. Love with awareness, and let your love be creative.

Bring awareness not against love, but full of the juice of love. And let your awareness participate in existence, let it be creative.

These three are part of your being. This is the real trinity. And if you avoid one then something in you will be denied and will remain stuck. And remember that you can grow only as a total being. If you want to come to me you can come only if your whole being comes here. Your one hand cannot come, your one leg cannot come.

I have heard about a villager. He went to the capital city of his country for the first time and he asked the taxi-driver to take him to a certain place. Now it was a big place. The taxi-driver asked, "Which part?" And the villager said, "Part? I want to go whole."

You cannot go in parts. You can go only when you are whole. Now action is a must; so is awareness, so is love. Why should you choose? - there is no need. All choosing will be committing suicide. Let all the three mix and meet and merge and become one. Be this trinity, be this TRIMURTI. These are the three faces of God.

Mulla Nasruddin's mother-in-law died far away in Brazil. Telegraphically he was asked how the remains should be disposed of He replied, "Embalm, cremate, bury. Take no chances."

The third question:

Question 3:

Joey, I am God because I am not. And the moment you are not, you are also a God. God is not something special; God is our very being, God is our very existence. When I say I am God I am simply saying I exist. Existence and God are synonymous in my language. I say the trees are also God, and so are the rocks, and so are you.

Yes, Joey, even a journalist is a God! He may not know. You may not be aware of your godliness.

I am aware of it! And the moment I became aware of my godliness I became aware of everybody else's godliness. So it will be difficult for me to tell you how many Gods there are. Infinity...

All beings are Gods at different stages of recognition, realization, awareness.

But I can understand your problem. Joey is a Dutch journalist. People coming from the West cannot understand a few things, because their idea of God is the very limited idea that Christianity has given to them. Their idea of God is a very limited idea.

In India we have three words for God; no other language has such richness. And certainly, because we have been working on the inward for centuries, thousands of years have been devoted to it, naturally we have followed all the possibilities of God's existence. It is just like I have heard that Eskimos have nine names for snow because they know different kinds of snow. Now no other language can have nine names for snow; we never come across it so much. Now the West has all the words for science. In the East we have to coin words for scientific terminology; we don't have it. But as far as religion is concerned the whole world will have to follow the East, because we have worked deep down into the interiormost being.

We have three words for God. The first is 'Brahma'. It means the one, the undivided one, when the creator and the creation were asleep in each other. Now Christianity has no word for it. God created the world, Christianity says, so one day - it must have been Monday - God created the world... just that the working week starts on Monday... and He rested on Sunday, just a holiday. Theologians have even been searching for an exact date, and they have found one: four thousand and four years before Jesus, on a certain Monday, God created the world. Before that, where was the world? And before that, who was God? - because He had not created, so He was not a creator. God means 'the creator'. But before creation, how could He be a creator? So creation was latent, potential, unmanifest in the creator. The creator and the creation were together, one. Christianity has no word for it.

We have; we call it Brahma. It is the state when the dancer has not started dancing; the dance and the dancer are one. When the dancer has started dancing, now there is a division. The singer has not sung his song yet, the song is fast asleep in the singer; the moment he sings the division starts.

The painter, once he paints, is separate from the painting.

The second word in India is 'Ishwar'. Ishwar means the creator. The unity has broken in two, the duality has arisen. Now the world is separate and the creator is separate. Now Brahma, the one absolute, has become two.

The third word is 'Bhagwan'. It means anybody who has again seen the unity - of the dancer and the dance, of the painter and the painting, of the poet and the poetry, of the creator and the creation.

One who has seen the unity again, one who has comprehended the unity again in his being, he is called Bhagwan. Literally, the word means 'the blessed one'. It does not mean God, but because of the poverty of Western languages there is a problem. You have to translate 'Brahma' also as 'God'; you have to translate 'Ishwar' also as 'God'; you have to translate 'Bhagwan' also as 'God'. This is simply a poor language, nothing else. Bhagwan literally means 'the blessed one'.

Who is the blessed one? - one who has known the unity again, one who has reached to the original source again; he is called Bhagwan. That's why we call Krishna 'Bhagwan', and Buddha 'Bhagwan'.

And you will be surprised to know: Buddha never believed in any God; certainly Bhagwan cannot mean God. Buddha never believed in any God, he never believed in any creation or any creator.

Still, Buddhists call him Bhagwan, the blessed one, because he understood whatsoever the truth is.

You call it God, creator, truth, NIRVANA, enlightenment; that is not the point. He understood, and in that understanding blessings showered on him. He became Bhagwan, the blessed one.

Now this is going to be a constant problem. I declare myself to be the blessed one. I have seen.

Those flowers have showered on me. By declaring myself Bhagwan I am not saying that I have created the world. I don't take that responsibility!

By declaring myself Bhagwan I am simply saying that I have been blessed by existence. The grace has descended into me. I have seen. And the moment seeing happens you disappear, you are no more. The blessed one is one who is no more. I am not, God is: this is the EXPERIENCE that makes one blessed.

Now the paradox has to be understood. Man never meets God. Man can only dissolve, disappear; then God is. In your absence God's presence descends. The whole work of religion is nothing but helping you to disappear as an ego. The moment you look into yourself and there is no 1, no ego to be found, but utter silence, utter emptiness, therewith the matter is settled... you are God.

You are God not against others - not that others are not God and you are God. You are God because then only God is! So I am not saying I am God and you are not God. In declaring myself, I am also declaring you divine; and not only you - the animals, the birds, the trees, the rocks, the whole existence consists of God and nothing else.

I am not saying I am holier than you. I am not saying I am more special than you. All that I am saying is that I have disappeared, and in that disappearance grace has showered, ecstasy has arisen.

I am utterly gone, and gone forever.

And in this space that is left behind there is nothing else but God.

In fact, when you say "I am" you are uttering a falsehood, because you are not. The moment you say "I am" you are separating yourself from existence, and this is absolutely false, a lie. You are not separate from existence. You are not capable of being yourself apart from existence; not even for a single moment can you exist. No man is an island. The moment you see it, separation disappears.

Suddenly you are one with the trees and with the stars, and that moment is the moment of blessings.

You have come home.

That's all that is meant by 'Bhagwan': the word simply means 'the blessed one'.

The fourth question:

Question 4:

All men are afraid of women, and all women are afraid of men. They have good reasons to mistrust each other, since they have been trained from early years to be enemies of each other. They are not born to be enemies, but they achieve enmity. And after about twenty years of such training in being afraid of each other they are supposed to marry one day and find complete trust in each other.

All this for a five rupee marriage license? Twenty years training of being afraid of each other... In a sixty, seventy-year life, one third of your life, and the most delicate and sensitive part of your life...

Psychologists say a man learns fifty percent of his whole life's learning by the time he is seven. In the remaining sixty-three years he will learn only fifty percent more. Fifty percent is learned by the time you are seven. By the time you are twenty almost eighty percent is learned. You have become fixed, hard. Distrust has been taught to you. The boys have been told, "Avoid girls, they are dangerous."

The girls have been told, "Avoid boys, they are nasty, they will do something evil to you." And then after this complete conditioning of twenty years - just think, twenty years of constantly being taught by the parents, by the school, by the college, by the university, by the church, by the priest - one day suddenly how can you drop this twenty years of conditioning?

This question arises again and again. So many people come and tell me that they are afraid of women. Women tell me they are afraid of men. You were not born afraid. Otherwise no man would enter into a woman's womb. If he was really afraid then no woman would be conceived, because she can be conceived only through a man.

You were not afraid in your beginnings. A child is born simply unafraid. Then we teach him fear and we condition his mind.

This has to be dropped. This has driven people almost neurotic. Then people fight, then they are constantly fighting - husbands and wives constantly fighting. And they are worried about why they go on fighting. And all relationships turn sour. Why does it happen? You have been poisoned, and you have to consciously drop that conditioning. Otherwise you will remain afraid.

There is nothing to be afraid of in a man or a woman. They are just like you - just as much in need of love as you are, hankering just as much to join hands with you as you are hankering. They want to participate in your life. They want others to participate in their lives - because the more people participate in each other's lives, the more joy arises. People are looking very sad. They have become very lonely. Even in crowds people are lonely because everybody is afraid of everybody else. Even if people are sitting close to each other, they are holding themselves, holding so much so that their whole being becomes hard. A hard crust surrounds them, an armor arises around their being. So even when they meet there is no real meeting. People hold hands but those hands are cold, no love is flowing. They hug each other, yes, bones clash with each other, but the heart remains far away.

People have to love. Love is a great need, just as food is a need. Food is a lower need, love is a higher need, a much higher-order value.

Now psychologists have been doing much research work on children who were brought up without any love. Almost fifty percent of children die if they are brought up without love; within two years they die. They are given good food, nourishment, every scientific care, but mechanically. The nurse comes, gives them a bath, feeds them; every care is taken, but no human love. The nurse will not hug them close to her heart. The nurse will not give her warm body to the child; warmth is not given.

Within two years fifty percent of those children die. And this is strange, because there is no visible reason why they die. They were perfectly healthy, the body was going perfectly well, they were not ill or anything, but suddenly, for no reason at all, they start dying.

And the remaining fifty percent are in more trouble than those who die. Those who die are more intelligent. Those who survive become neurotic, schizophrenic, psychotic, because no love has showered on them. Love makes you one piece. It is like glue - it glues you together. They start falling into fragments. There is nothing to hold them together, no vision of life, no experience of love - nothing to hold them together. Their lives seem meaningless, so many of them turn neurotic, many of them become criminals. Because love makes a person creative, if love is missing then a person becomes destructive.

Had Adolf Hitler's mother loved him more, the world would have been totally different.

If there is no love the person forgets the language of creativity, becomes destructive; so criminals, politicians are born - they are the same types of people. There is no difference in them, no qualitative difference. Their faces differ, their masks are different, but deep down they are all criminals. In fact, you have been reading the history of human crimes and nothing else. You have not yet been taught the real history of humanity, because the real history consists of Buddhas, Christs, Lao Tzus.

That's what I am trying to do here! Now talking about Lu-tsu - you may not even have heard his name - now talking on this tremendously beautiful book, THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER, I am trying to make you aware that a totally different human history exists which has been kept out of the schools. History takes note only of crimes, history takes note only of destruction. If you kill somebody on the streets you will be in the newspapers, and if you give a roseflower to somebody you will never be heard of again. Nobody will know about it.

If love is missing in childhood the person will become either a politician or a criminal, or will go mad, or will find some destructive way because he will not know how to create. His life will be meaningless.

He will not feel any significance. He will feel very very condemned, because unless you have been loved you cannot feel your worth. The moment somebody loves you, you become worthy. You start feeling you are needed, existence would be a little less without you. When a woman loves you, you know that if you are gone somebody is going to be sad. When a man loves you, you know that you are making somebody's life happy, and because you are making somebody's life happy, great joy arises in you. Joy arises only in creating joy for others; there is no other way. The more people you can make happy, the more you will feel happy.

This is the real meaning of service. This is the real meaning of religion: help people become happy, help people become warm, help people become loving; create a little beauty in the world, create a little joy, create a little comer where people can celebrate and sing and dance and be. And you will be happy. Immense will be your reward. But the man who has never been loved does not know it.

So the fifty percent that survive prove to be very dangerous people.

Love is such a basic need; it is exactly the food for the soul. The body needs food, the soul also needs food. The body lives on material food, the soul lives on spiritual food. Love is spiritual food, spiritual nourishment.

In my vision of a better world children will be taught to love each other. Boys and girls will not be put apart. No division, no disgust with each other should be created. But why has this disgust been created? - because there has been a great fear of sex. Sex is not accepted; that is the problem - because sex is not accepted children have to be kept apart. And humanity is going to suffer unless it accepts sex as a natural phenomenon. This whole problem of man/woman arises because sex is condemned.

This condemnation has to go - and now it can go. In the past I can understand there were reasons for it. For example, if a girl became pregnant, then there would have been problems. Parents were very much afraid, the society was very much afraid, people lived in fear. The boys and girls had to be kept apart, great walls had to be raised between them. And then one day, after twenty years, suddenly you open the door and you say, "She is not your enemy, she is your wife. Love her!" and, "He is not your enemy, he is your husband. Love him!" And what about those twenty years when he was the enemy? And what about those twenty years' experiences? Can you suddenly drop them so easily? You cannot drop them. They linger on, they hang around you your whole life.

But now there is no need. In my understanding, the greatest revolution in the world has been that which is created by 'the pill'. Lenin and Mao Zedong are nothing compared to the pill. The pill is the greatest revolutionary. This is going to create a totally different world because fear can be dropped; now there is no need to be afraid. The fear of pregnancy has been the cause of condemning sex.

Now there is no need to condemn it at all, it can be accepted.

Science has prepared the ground for a new culture, and I am heralding that future! That's why all those who are burdened with their pasts are going to be against me. They cannot understand me, because I SEE into the future, what is going to happen in the future, and I am preparing the way for it. Man and woman have to be brought as close as possible. And now there is no fear.

In the past, I understand the fear was there. I can forgive those people in the past, because they were helpless. But now you cannot be forgiven if you teach your children to be separate and antagonize them against each other. There is no need. Now boys and girls can mix and meet and be together, and all fear about sex can be dropped. And the beauty is that because of the fear and because of the condemnation and because of the denial sex has become so important; otherwise it is not so important.

Try to understand a simple psychological law: if you deny something too much it becomes very important. The very denial makes it important. You become OBSESSED with it. Now boys and girls have to be kept apart for twenty years - they become OBSESSED with each other. They only think of the other, they cannot think of anything else.

I have heard of an incident that happened to former Ambassador Ellis while he was an envoy to Greece. Both he and his secretary had been preoccupied by an approaching deadline. He had to fly to Rome to give a report before a European security conference. She, a healthy, buxom lass of twenty-three, was two days away from her wedding to a handsome Marine guard after a six-month engagement. Naturally, her mind was on the state of her trousseau rather than on the state of the Greek government. Ambassador Ellis was trying to finish up his paper on Greece before rushing to the airport. He had entitled his study - a report saying that the political situation was more shaky than the economic - 'Man Shall Not Live by Bread Alone'. Before he had a chance to really go over the copy, he had to race to the Athens airport. He left word that the speech should be teletyped to the Rome Embassy so they could type in for distribution for the next day's conference. When he arrived in Rome he was met by a group of foreign service officers who were to take him to the hotel to deliver the speech. They were a bit puzzled by the printed title of the report; Ambassador Ellis looked at one of the mimeographed copies. The bride-to-be's rendition of the Ambassador's dictated Biblical saying came out not 'Man Shall Not Live by Bread Alone' but 'Man Shall Not Love in Bed Alone'.

The mind can become preoccupied. Twenty years' training in anti-sexual teachings makes the mind preoccupied, and all kinds of perversions arise. Homosexuality arises, lesbianism arises, people start living in fantasies, pornography arises, dirty films, 'blue films' arise - and this whole thing goes on because of the nonsense that you do.

Now you want pornography to stop; it cannot stop. You are creating the situation for it. If boys and girls could be together, who would bother to look at a nude picture?

You go and meet some aboriginal tribe in India who live naked and you show your PLAYBOY magazine to them and they will all laugh. I have lived with them, and I have talked with them, and they all laugh. They cannot believe: "What is there?" They live naked, so they know what a woman looks like and they know what a man looks like.

Pornography is created by your priests; they are the foundation of it - and then all kinds of perversions... because when you cannot actually meet the other pole for which the attraction is natural, you start fantasizing. Then a greater problem arises: twenty years of fantasies and dreams, and then you meet a real woman and she falls very low, very low in your expectations - because all those fantasies! You were completely free to fantasize; no real woman is going to satisfy you.

Because of your fantasies and dreams you have created such ideas about a woman - which no woman can fulfill, and you have created such ideas about men - which no man can fulfill. Hence the frustration. Hence the bitterness that arises between couples. The man feels cheated - "This is not the woman." He was thinking, dreaming, and he was free to create whatsoever he wanted in his dream, and this woman looks very poor compared to his fantasy.

In your fantasy women don't perspire - or do they? - and they don't quarrel with you, and they don't nag you, and they are just golden, just sweet flowers, and they always remain young. They never become old. And they don't get grumpy. Because they are your creations, if you want them laughing, they laugh. Their bodies are made not of this world.

But when you meet a real women she perspires, her breath smells, and sometimes it is natural to be grumpy. And she nags, and she fights, and she throws pillows and breaks things, and she won't allow you a thousand and one things. She starts curbing your freedom. Your fantasy women never curbed your freedom. Now this woman seems to be like a trap. And, she is not as beautiful as you had been thinking; she is not a Cleopatra. She is an ordinary woman, just as you are an ordinary man. Neither you are fulfilling her desire nor she is fulfilling your desire. Nobody has the obligation to fulfill your fantasies! People are REAL people. And because this twenty years' starvation creates fantasy, it creates trouble for your future life.

You ask me, "Why am I afraid of women? And why am I bored with my wife?"

You must have fantasized too much. You will have to drop your fantasies. You will have to learn to live with reality. You will have to learn to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. That needs great art.

A woman is not just her skin, not just her face, not just her body proportion. A woman is a soul! You have to be intimate with her, you have to get involved in her life, in her inner life. You have to merge and meet with her energies. And people don't know how to meet and how to merge; they have never been taught. The art of love has not been taught to you, and everybody thinks that they know what love is. You don't know. You come only with the potential of love but not with the art of it.

Fifty years ago, near Calcutta, in a jungle, two girls were found, Kamala and Vimala. They were brought up by wolves. Maybe they were unwanted children and the mother had left them in the forest. It has happened many times: almost in every part of the world, once in a while, a child has been found who has grown up with the animals.

Those two girls were absolutely inhuman. They walked on all fours, they could not stand on two feet.

They learned from the wolves to walk on all fours. They howled like wolves. They could not speak Bengali. And they were very dangerous - they ran like wolves. No Olympic champion would have defeated them, they were so quick and fast. And if they jumped, if they became angry, they would tear you in parts. They looked human, but their whole training had been that of the wolves.

You are born with a capacity to learn language, but you are not born with a language itself. Exactly like this, you are born with the capacity to love, but you are not born with the art of love. That art of love has to be taught, has to be imbibed.

And just the opposite is happening: you have been taught the art of hate and hatred, not of love.

You have been taught how to hate people. Christians have been taught to hate the Mohammedans, Mohammedans have been taught to hate the Hindus, Indians have been taught to hate the Pakistanis. Hate has been taught in many ways. Man has been taught to hate the woman, the woman has been taught to hate the man, and now suddenly one day you decide to get married...

and you get married... to your ENEMY! And then the whole turmoil starts; then the life becomes just a nightmare.

You are bored with your wife because you don't know how to enter into her soul. You may be able to enter her body, but that is going to become boring very soon because that will be the repetition.

The body is a very superficial thing. You can make love to the body once, twice, thrice, and then you become perfectly acquainted with the body, its contours. Then there is nothing new. Then you start becoming interested in other women: you think they must be having something different from your wife - at least behind the clothes it appears they must be having something different. You can still fantasize about them.

Clothes have been invented to help your sexual desire. A naked woman leaves nothing to your fantasy. That's why naked women are not so attractive; neither are naked men. But when a woman or a man is hidden behind clothes, they leave much to your fantasy. You can fantasize about what is behind it, you can imagine again.

Now you cannot imagine about your wife; that is the trouble. You can imagine about your neighbor's wife, she looks attractive.

I have heard...

A man had a severe coronary and was told that if he wanted to live he had to completely cut out drinking, smoking and all forms of physical exertion. After six months he went into the doctor's office for a check-up. After he was told he was progressing fine, he said to the doctor, "You know, sometimes I want a drink so much - not a lot, just a taste of it. Could I not have - just one drink or two? Maybe once a week on a Friday or Saturday night?"

"No," the doctor said, "but I will tell you what. I will allow you one glass of wine with your evening meal."

Some months later he was back for another physical. This time he told the doctor, "You know, doctor, sometimes I just crave for a cigarette. If I could just puff one when I wake up and another after each meal."

"No," said the doctor. "You would soon be smoking a pack a day. But if you want you can smoke one cigar a week, perhaps after your Sunday dinner."

Months went by, and our friend's health as well as state of mind improved. There was only one thing that gnawed at him. When he went to the doctor again he came out with it very bluntly. "Doctor, it is not normal to go without sexual relations. Surely I am healthy enough to be able to resume that."

"No," said the doctor. "The physical exertion as well as excitement could just be too much. But I will tell you what: I will allow you once a week to have sex - but only with your wife."

People feel bored with their wives and with their husbands. The reason is they have not been able to contact the other's real soul. They have been able to contact the body, but they have missed the contact that happens heart to heart, center to center, soul to soul. Once you know how to contact soul to soul, when you have become soul-mates, then there is no boredom at all. Then there is always something to discover in the other because each being is an infinity, and each being contains God Himself There is no end to exploring.

That's why I say Tantra should become a compulsory phenomenon for all human beings. Each school, each college, each university, should teach Tantra. Tantra is the science of contacting souls, of going to the deepest core of the other. Only in a world which knows the art of Tantra will this boredom disappear; otherwise it cannot disappear. You can tolerate it, you can suffer it, you can be a martyr to it. That's how people have been in the past - martyrs. They say, "What to do? This is fate. This life is finished. Next life we will choose some other woman or some other man, but this life is gone, and nothing can be done. And the children are there, and a thousand and one problems"... and the prestige and the society and the respectability - so they have suffered and they have remained martyrs.

Now they are no longer ready to suffer so they have moved to the other extreme: now they are indulging in all kinds of sex, but that too is not giving any contentment.

Neither the Indian is contented nor is the American. Nobody is contented, because the basic thing is missed by both. The basic thing is unless you become capable of decoding the inner mystery of your woman or your man, you will sooner or later get fed up, bored. Then either you become a martyr - remain with it, suffer it, wait for death to deliver you - or you start indulging with other women. But whatsoever you have done with THIS woman will be done with the other, and you will get fed up with the other, and with the other, and your whole life will be just changing partners. That is not going to satisfy either.

Unless you learn the secret art of Tantra...

Tantra is one of the most important secrets ever discovered. But it is very delicate because it is the GREATEST art. To paint is easy, to create poetry is easy, but to create a communion with the energy of the other, a dancing communion, is the greatest and the most difficult art to learn.

People are against me because I am telling people how to love. I am telling people how to make love a prayer. I am telling people how to love so deeply that love itself becomes your religion - that your woman one day disappears and you find God there, that your man one day disappears and you find God there; that one day, in deep communion, in deep orgasmic experience, in that ecstasy, for a moment you both disappear and there is only God and nothing else.

You have been taught down the ages to be against sex, and that has made you very sexual. Now this paradox has to be understood. If you want to understand me, this paradox has to be understood very very deeply, clearly: you have been made sexual by all the condemnation of sex.

Just the other day one government officer came to look around the Ashram... because the government is very worried: "What is going on here?" - what am I teaching people? And he kept a very haughty posture. Sheela took him around the Ashram, Sheela was walking with him. He started moving closer and closer to Sheela, he started touching her body; so she would keep aloof, but he would come close again. And Sheela was worried, "What to do with this man?" She was worried; she could have hit him. And I have told her that next time it happens, give him a good beating. He needs it, he deserves it.

He had come to find out what was going on here - particularly about sex. And when he found Sheela alone - she was taking him around - he came close, perspiring, and asked, "Can I kiss you?" Now this man is sent here to inquire about what is happening here.

Remember it: next time you find a government official here, give him a kiss of death!

And in the office he again became very holier-than-thou.

This repressed sexuality...

I have heard of the visit of J.P. Morgan to the home of Dwight Morrow. The great American financier was noted, among other things, for a bulbous red nose of unsurpassing ugliness.

"Remember, Anne," Mrs. Morrow kept saying to her daughter, "you must not say one word about Mr.

Morgan's red nose. You must not even look at it very much."

Anne promised, but when Morgan arrived her mother watched and waited tensely. Anne was as good as gold, but Mrs. Morrow dared not relax. Turning to the financier with a gracious smile, she prepared to pour tea and said, "Mr. Morgan, will you have one or two lumps in your nose?"

That's what has happened to the whole humanity: repressed sex has become the obsession.

People think I am teaching sexuality? I am teaching transcendence. Soon this will be the only place where nobody will be obsessed with sex. It is already the experience of hundreds of sannyasins.

Every day I receive letters: "What is happening, Osho? My sex is disappearing, I no longer find much interest in it" - men and women both.

That interest is a pathological interest that has been created by repression. Once repression is taken away that interest will disappear. And then there is a natural feel - which is not obsessive, which is not pathological. And whatsoever is natural is good. This interest in sex is unnatural. And the problem is: this is being created by the priest and by the politician, by the so-called MAHATMAS.

They are the culprits. And they go on creating it, and they think they are helping humanity to go beyond sex. They are not! They are throwing humanity into this whole mess.

If you understand me rightly, then you will be surprised by the experience that you will go through in this commune. Soon you will find sex has become a natural phenomenon. And finally, as your meditations will deepen, as you will start meeting with each other's souls more and more, the body contact will become less and less. A moment comes when there is no need for sexuality to be there, it has taken a new turn. The energy has started moving upwards. It is the same energy - at the lowest rung it is sex, at the highest rung it is SAMADHI.

I have written one book - not written, my discourses have been collected in it - it is called FROM SEX TO SUPERCONSCIOUSNESS. Now fifteen years have passed. Since then nearabout two hundred books have been published, but nobody seems to read any other book - not in India. They all read FROM SEX TO SUPERCONSCIOUSNESS. They all criticize it also, they are all against it.

Articles are still being written, books are written against it, and MAHATMAS go on objecting to it.

And I have written two hundred books, and no other book is mentioned, no other book is looked at.

Do you understand?

"Mr Morgan, will you have one or two lumps in your nose?" - as if I have written only one book.

People are suffering from a wound. Sex has become a wound. It needs to be healed.

Remember, there is no need to be afraid of women, no need to be afraid of men. We are all alike, the same God. We have to learn how to love each other. We have to come closer to each other because that is the only way to come close to God. Love is one of the greatest doors to God, just as awareness is another.

The East has followed the way of awareness and become lopsided. The West has followed the way of love and has become lopsided. I teach you both: a loving awareness, a conscious love And with this you will become integrated, you will attain individuation.