Question – Beloved Osho, does returning to the heart center mean becoming more passionate? Is the heart also the source of passion? Can a man who is authentically centered at the heart be called passionate?
Osho – Heart is not the center of passion; rather, heart is the center of compassion. And the man who lives in the heart cannot be called passionate, but can be called compassionate. Passion comes from the sex center, all passion comes from the sex center. You can join the sex center and the heart, but from the heart only love flows, not passion.
Love is a very silent flow, nonaggressive, almost passive; it is a very silent breeze. Sex is passion, violence, aggression, with force, with strong energy – it attacks. The heart and the sex center can join together, then love becomes passionate. If heart is not joined with the sex center then love becomes compassionate. Then love is there in its total purity and only then, when there is no passion in it, is love pure. It is silent, passive, nonaggressive. You can invite it but it will not knock at your door. It will not even ask to be invited. You can persuade it to come, it can become your guest, but it will not come uninvited.
Love cannot rape, and sex always rapes in many ways. Even when legally it is not a rape, sex is rape. You may persuade the other person legally, in the way the society allows, but in the mind rape remains the center. You are just thinking to rape the other person, you are aggressive, and all that you do before it is just a foreplay, just to achieve the end. That’s why, when two persons get married, foreplay disappears.
When you meet a girl or a boy for the first time, there is much foreplay! Before you enter into a sex relationship you have to go on playing, so that the sex doesn’t look like a rape, but that is on the mind, that is in the mind. In your mind you are constantly thinking of the end, and everything is just persuasion, seduction, just to make the whole thing appear loving. But the more you become intimate with the girl or the boy, the less foreplay is there; if you get married, no foreplay. Then sex becomes just direct, something to be done and finished with.
Look at this. If two persons are really in love, then not only foreplay but afterplay also will be there. If two persons are not in love then sex will happen and they will go to sleep, there will be no afterplay. Foreplay will not even be there, and afterplay is impossible, because what is the use? The thing has happened, the end has been achieved. Rape is in the mind.
The sex center knows only rape, it is the center of aggression. That’s why the military doesn’t allow sex for soldiers, because if they have sex relationships they cannot be good fighters. The aggression moves through the sex center. If sex is allowed and a soldier is living with his wife or with his beloved, he will not feel like fighting on the battleground.
This is one of the reasons why American soldiers are defeated everywhere: their girls follow them. They cannot be aggressive because the center of aggression is sex. If sex is allowed, aggression flows out of you and then you don’t feel like fighting. So the soldiers have to be prohibited from sex, they must suppress their sex; then the whole sex becomes aggression. Then rather than entering a woman’s body they can enter anybody’s body with a bullet. But it is the same thing – the entry. Your bullets, your knives, your guns, are just phallic symbols – to enter the other’s body, to destroy.
The coaches of athletes who go to the Olympics tell them, ”Don’t have sex at least for two weeks before,” because if you have sex you will not be a good runner. From where will you get the aggression to fight and run and compete? All religions all over the world – almost all, I will say, because only one wonderful sect, Tantra, is an exception – all religions all over the world have told their monks to be celibate, because they think that religion is also a sort of struggle. You have to fight with yourself, so retain the aggressive energy and fight with yourself.
Sex can easily become violence because it is passion, it is rape. Love, the heart center or the love center, is totally different. It is nonviolent, it is passive, not even active. It can come to you like a very silent perfume, and that too when you invite. That’s why persons like Buddha or Jesus, they have much love, but we cannot feel their love, because we can feel love only when it is too violent. We have become addicted to violence. And Buddha’s love is so silent. It showers on us but we cannot feel it, we have become so insensitive. Only when someone attacks do we start feeling.
The heart center is not the center of passion, but is the center of compassion. And compassion is absolutely different from passion, just the opposite. It is non-aggressive energy, moving without any noise, but you have to become very sensitive to feel it. So only very sensitive persons can become attracted to Buddha, because only very sensitive persons can feel that some love is flowing from him. If you are asking for strong doses of passion, then Buddha will just look dead; nothing is coming out of him.
Remember this: passion has to be transformed into compassion, only then will you move from the sex center to the heart center. Now even your heart has to follow your sex center, which is the higher following the lower. Then your sex center will follow the love center, the heart center – the lower following the higher. And this should be the order of your being – always the lower following the higher. Then the lower becomes totally different, the quality changes.
When sex follows love, sex becomes beautiful, a grace, a blessing. When love follows sex, love becomes ugly, a destructive force; you destroy each other through your love. All the courts of the world are filled with persons who have been in love and now are destructive to each other. Fifty percent of marriages break down completely, and the other fifty percent are continued somehow, not for love, but for other reasons – for children, for society, for family, for prestige, for money, for other reasons, but not for love. Fifty percent break down completely.
Love has become so destructive because it is following a lower center. Remember, this should be the law within you: always remember that the lower should follow the higher, then everything is beautiful and a blessing. Nothing is to be denied, there is no need to deny anything; only let the higher lead, because following the higher the lower changes its quality. And if the higher has to follow the lower everything becomes ugly.
Source – Osho Book “Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi”