Question – YOU SAY, REMOVE ALL YOUR MASKS AND BE AUTHENTIC. I THINK ONLY OF SEX, LOVE AND ROMANCE. I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ELSE EXCEPT THIS. AM I ON THE WRONG TRACK?
Osho – I don’t see anything wrong in sex, in love, in romance. You are on the right track. Love is the right track, and only through a lived life of love, prayer arises – never otherwise. Only out of deep experiences of love, sweet and bitter, pleasant and painful, high and low, heaven and hell; only out of deep experiences of pain and pleasure through love does one become aware. They are needed to make you aware.
Pain is as much needed as pleasure, because both work. And by and by, between the pleasure and the pain, you become a tightrope walker. You attain to balance. But for centuries love has been condemned, sex has been condemned. So of course, the idea arises in your mind that you must be on the wrong track. You are simply natural. To be natural is not to be the wrong track. If you think in that way and you become condemnatory, then you will be on the wrong track. Then you will repress, and whatsoever you repress will remain lurking in your unconscious, in your basement, and then much ugliness arises out of that repression.
Let me tell you a few anecdotes. It is said about a very rich and well known man, Lord Dewsberry: he was ninety years old to the day, and sat in the large bay window of his ground floor flat in Park Lane watching the Sunday morning strollers. Suddenly, he spotted a pretty, young, and fair girl wheeling a pram across to the park. ”Quickly James,” he said. ”My teeth; I want to whistle.”
Ninety years old! – but this happens.
The question is from Krishna Priya. Remember, if you don’t whistle now, then someday when your teeth are also gone, you will see some young man walking and, ”Quick, bring my teeth!” That will be ugly. Right now the teeth are okay; you can whistle. Everything should be done in its time. Otherwise, things become ugly.
A child running after butterflies is okay, but a man of forty running around butterflies will look mad. Young men are bound to be a little foolish. One expects that and accepts also. Nothing is wrong in it. That must be something basic to life: to be foolish at some times, because wisdom comes out of the experience of many foolishnesses. You cannot become wise suddenly. You will have to move, and go astray, and do many foolish things. And out of all those actions, foolish or otherwise, wisdom arises.
Wisdom is like fragrance, and experiences of foolishness work like manure. They stink! – but beautiful flowers come out of them. So don’t avoid the manure of life, otherwise you will miss the flowers of wisdom. And you can repress one desire from one side, but it will start arising from another side. You cannot deceive life.
”Mummy,” said the little monster, ”the lads at school keep saying I have got a very big head.”
”You have not got a big head at all,” said the mother. ”Just forget about those nasty boys and pop down to the shops for me. I want ten pounds of potatoes, five pounds of turnips, and two cabbages.”
”Alright, mummy. Where is the shopping bag?”
”Oh, don’t bother about that. Just use your cap.”
So from this way or that… just think again. Ten pounds of potatoes, five pounds of turnips and two cabbages – and just use your hat, just use your cap. You can suppress from one side; it bubbles up from another side. Never suppress anything. If sex is there, allow it before it is too late. Allow it, move into it, accept it. Et is a God-given thing. There must be a deep reason in it. There is. Never shirk any responsibility that God has given to you, otherwise you shirk from growth. And now, to ask such questions in this century, this twentieth century, is simply stupid.
The six-year-old was having his first trip to the zoo, and was asking awkward questions as usual.
”Hey Dad, where do baby elephants come from?” he asked; then added, ”and if you give me that old stork story this time, I will really know you are crazy.”
Elephants being brought by the stork? – so the six-year-old is saying, ”And if you give me that old stork story this time, I will really know you are crazy.”
Gone are those foolish days when people were thinking in terms of condemnation, of anti-life philosophies. After Freud, man has come to accept sex more naturally. A great revolution has happened in the world. Now to think in condemnatory ways is simply not to be contemporary. Now, Krishna Priya’s question was okay if she had asked it five hundred years ago, but now? It is absurd. And in my ashram?
Source: from Osho Book “Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10”
I WANT TO FREE FROM JANAM AND MARAN