Question to Osho – DEAR OSHO, ARE YOU REALLY JUST A MAN WHO GOT ENLIGHTENED?
Just the other way round: a god who got lost and has found himself again; a god who rested and slept deeply and dreamt of being a man and is now awake. And the same is true about you. You are not just men. You are gods – dreaming that you are men. It is not that men have to become God. It is only that gods have to become a little awake; then the dream of “man” disappears.
This is the difference between the Eastern attitude and the Western. The West tries to explain the highest by the lowest. If you attain to samadhi – for example, Ramkrishna attains to samadhi, is lost in the infinite – ask Freud. He will say this is a sort of repressed sex. Samadhi is to be explained by sex. Ask me about sex, and I will say this is a first glimpse of samadhi.
The highest is not to be reduced to the lowest. The lowest has to be raised to the highest.
Ask Marx and he will say consciousness is nothing but a by-product of matter. Ask me; I will say matter is nothing but an illusion of consciousness.
In the East we have tried to explain the mud, the dirty mud, by the lotus. In the West you have tried to explain the lotus by the dirty mud it comes out of. And it makes a great difference. When you try to explain the lotus by the dirty mud it comes out of, the lotus disappears; only dirty mud in your hands. All beauty, all greatness, all truth disappears; only dirtiness in your hands. Everything can be reduced to the lowest because the highest and the lowest are joined together. The highest rung of the ladder is joined to the lowest rung of the ladder, so nothing seems to be wrong in it, but there is much which is important to be understood.
If you explain the dirty mud by the lotus and you say, “When the lotus has arisen out of this dirty mud, even this dirty mud is not really dirty; otherwise how can the lotus arise out of it ? The lotus is hiding in it. We may not have been able to see the lotus in it – that is our limitation” – if you explain the dirty mud by the lotus, the dirty mud disappears: your hands are full of lotuses.
Now it is for you to choose. The East makes you suddenly rich, superb, divine. The West makes you suddenly very ordinary, material, it reduces you to things, and all that is grand in human beings becomes suspicious, suspected.
Remember, you are an evolution from God to God. In between is the world; that’s why we call it a dream. Maya, a dream: a god dreaming he is lost. Enjoy it, nothing wrong with it. Sooner or later you will awake and you will laugh; it was a dream.
If you ask psychoanalysts about God, they say it is something in your imagination. You ask Shankara, you ask Eastern sages, and they say you are something in God’s imagination. Tremendously beautiful. You are something in God’s imagination, God imagining you, dreaming you. Ask Freud; he says, “God ? You are dreaming; you are imagining something.”
Both are true! And it is for you to choose. If you want to be in despair, anguish, agony, forever and ever, choose the Western attitude. If you want to Flower and be happy – unconditionally – choose the Eastern attitude.
Question to Osho – YOU HAVE BEEN TALKING A LOT ABOUT SEX, WHICH IS GOOD, BECAUSE IT HAS BEEN FOR SUCH A LONG TIME KEPT IN THE DARK. HOWEVER, I HAVE PERSONALLY NEVER HEARD YOU TALK ABOUT HOMOSEXUALITY; ONLY VERY, VERY BRIEFLY, AND ACTUALLY ALWAYS TO PUT IT DOWN.
PLEASE WOULD YOU TALK ABOUT IT, BECAUSE NO MATTER WHAT IS THE CAUSE OF “THIS PERVERTED ACT,” AS YOU DESCRIBE IT, HOMOSEXUALITY DID AND DOES EXIST IN THE WORLD. CAN’T THE MOON SIDE MEET THE SUN SIDE IN WHATEVER BODY? IS TANTRA ONLY FOR HETEROSEXUAL PEOPLE? SHOULD PEOPLE REPRESS THEIR HOMOSEXUAL TENDENCIES?
The first thing, the questioner has not signed his question. That shows that he is also feeling guilty about it. He does not want his name to be known. In not signing the question, he has already condemned homosexuality.
I am not against anything, but I am for many things. Let me repeat: I am not against anything, but I am for many things. I am not against the mud, but I am for the lotus. Sex has to be transformed. If it is not transformed, you remain at the lowest rung of your being. So the first thing to be understood: I talk about sex so that you can understand it and transcend it.
Homosexuality is even lower than heterosexuality. Nothing wrong in it – you still have a lower rung in your ladder. That has to be transcended. So the first thing, sex has to be transcended. The second thing to be remembered: homosexuality is a lower rung.
Every child is born autosexual, every child is masturbatory. That’s a stage; the child has to go beyond it. Every child likes to play with his genital organs. And it is pleasurable, nothing wrong in it, but it is childish. It is the first learning of sex rehearsal, a getting ready, preparation. But if you are thirty-five, forty, sixty, and still masturbatory, then something is wrong.
When I say something is wrong, I only mean you have not been able to grow; your mental age has remained retarded.
After the masturbatory period I call “autosexual,” the child becomes homosexual. Near the age of ten, the child becomes homosexual. He becomes more interested in bodies similar to the body he has. This is natural growth. First he is interested in his own body; then he becomes interested in others’ bodies which are like his – a boy is interested in boys, a girl is interested in girls. That’s a natural stage. But the boy is going away from himself, moving his sexual energy, his libido, to other boys. And this seems natural because other boys look more similar to him than do other girls. But he has taken a step; he has become homosexual. Good, nothing wrong in it, but at the age of sixty if you are still homosexual, then you are retarded – you are “boyish.” That’s why homosexuals retain the boyish attitude and they look “gay.” They look more happy than the heterosexual, that’s certain. Even in their faces they retain the boyishness. It is very difficult to hide your homosexuality; your face, your eyes, everything shows it. You remain boyish. It is good to pass through it, but it is bad to cling to it.
Then comes the third stage, heterosexual. A boy becomes interested in a girl, a girl becomes interested in a boy. That is the highest stage as far as sex goes, but that too up to a point. If you are still interested in sex after the age of forty-two, something is missing.
Then you have not lived it rightly; otherwise by the time you become forty-two…. At the age of fourteen, you become really sexual, ready to give birth to a child, to become a mother or a father. It takes fourteen years to prepare you. After another fourteen years, by the age of twenty-eight, you are at the peak of your sexuality. After another fourteen years, at the age of forty-two, you are moving back. The circle is complete. Jung has said, “After the age of forty, whosoever comes to me has a religious problem.” If after the age of forty-two you are still sexually puzzled and in a problem, something in your life has missed.
After another fourteen years, by the age of fifty-six, one is simply freed of sex. Another fourteen years, from fifty-six, to seventy, again the next childhood. Before death you have to reach; to the same point as when you were born. The circle is complete: a child.
That’s what Jesus means when he says, “Unless you become like children, you will not enter into my kingdom of God.”
This is the seventy-year cycle, more or less. It will differ if you live eighty years or a hundred years; then you can divide.
I am not against anything, but I will not help you to cling to any place. Go on, go on, never cling to any place. I am not condemning anything. Use that opportunity, but go on.
Homosexuality is a retarded state, but in the West it is becoming more and more prevalent. There are reasons. I would like to tell you a few.
Animals, in their wild state, are never homosexual; but in zoos they turn. In their wild states animals are never homosexual, but in zoos, where they are not free and don’t have enough space and are crowded too much, they become homosexual. The world is getting too crowded; it is becoming more like a zoo. All natural growths are disappearing and people are becoming too tense. That is one of the causes of homosexuality growing.
The second thing. In the West sex is thought to be more like fun than a commitment. One wants to have casual affairs. To get involved with a woman is to get into troubled waters.
To get involved with a woman means a great involvement in children, family, job, house, car, and a thousand and one things. Once the woman enters in, the whole world enters in.
The Western mind is becoming more and more afraid of getting involved; people would like to remain uninvolved. It is easier to be uninvolved in a homosexual relationship than in a heterosexual relationship. No children, and immediately the commitment becomes almost none.
The third reason. Women are becoming lesbians in the West because of the lib movement, the idea that man has oppressed women up to now. And man has oppressed; it has been one of the greatest-slaveries ever. No other class has been oppressed as much as women. Now the revolt, the reaction. There are organizations of Western women which promote lesbianism, homosexuality – get out of all relationships with men. Forget loving the enemy. Man is the enemy; get out of all relationships with men. It is better to love a woman; a woman loves a woman.
Women are getting more and more aggressive. Man is getting more and more afraid of getting into relationships.
These situations are creating homosexuality, but it is a perversion. If you are in it, I don’t condemn you. I simply say get deeper into your feelings, meditate more, and by and by you will see that your homosexuality is turning into heterosexuality. If you are masturbatory, I would like you to become homosexuals; that is better. If you are homosexuals, I would like you to become heterosexuals; that is better. If you are already heterosexual, I would like you to become celibates; that is better. But go on.
I don’t condemn anything.
The questioner says, “… homosexuality did and does exist in the world.” Right.
Tuberculosis also did exist and exists, cancer also, but that is no reason for it. A really better world will become more and more heterosexual. Why? Because men and women, or yin and yang, when they meet, the circle becomes complete, as negative electricity and positive electricity meet and the circle becomes complete. When a man meets man, it is negative electricity meeting negative, or positive electricity meeting positive. It will not create the inner energy circle. It will leave you incomplete. It will never be fulfilling. It can be convenient, mind. It can be convenient, but it can never be fulfilling, and fulfillment is the goal, not convenience.
Remember that if inside you are going to become asexual one day, the brahmacharya has to arise, the purest celibacy has to arise; then it is better to move on the natural way. It is my understanding that it is simpler for a heterosexual to go beyond sex than for a homosexual. Because one rung is missing, it will take more effort for a homosexual, and unnecessary effort.
But still I am not against anything. If you feel good, you have to decide. I don’t call it a sin, and I am not saying that if you are homosexuals you are going to be thrown into hell.
All nonsense. If you are homosexual you will miss something, the feeling when yin meets yang, the feeling where negative meets positive, night meets day. You will miss something. Not that you will be thrown into hell, but you will miss something of heaven in your life.
But still you have to decide. I am not giving you a commandment.
We helped him to get out of it. So when people come to me and confess that they are homosexuals, I say don’t be worried. I am here. I will bring you out of it.
Sex continues to be important to the very end of life – if you are not alert, if you are not transforming it. And to die sexual; is an ugly death. One should come to a point when sex has been dropped far back.
And when your energy is not moving lower, low-wards, downwards, then it starts rising higher and reaches to sahasrara, where the ultimate lotus is waiting for the energy to come and to help it flower.
Tags: Evolution From God To God Patanjali
