Love is not sexual passion

1. What happens with your sex energy depends on how you use it. What it can become does not depend on it alone, but on your understanding and on how you live your life. Have you not observed that it becomes brahmacharya, the state of celibacy when it is transformed? bramhacharya is not hostile to passion; brahmacharya is the purification, the transcendence, the sublimation of passion. In the same way, the energy that manifests itself in violence becomes peace, serenity and tranquility. It is only a question of transformation.
2. Love is not sexual passion. Those who mistake sex for love remain empty of love. Sex is only a passing manifestation of love. It is part of nature’s mechanism, a method of procreation. Love exists on a higher plane, and as love grows, sex dissipates. The energy that has been manifested in sex is transformed into love.
3. Love is the creative refinement of sex energy. And so, when love reaches perfection, the absence of sex automatically follows. A life of love, an abstinence from physical pleasures is called brahmacharya, and anyone who wishes to be free from sex must develop his capacity to love. Freedom from sex cannot be achieved through supersession. Liberation from sex is only possible through love.
4. The first thing: be a witness of sex too. Don’t be the controller of it. Don’t try to forcibly bring it under control, remain a witness of it too. Just as you are a witness of everything else, remain a witness of sex too. It is difficult, because you have been taught for centuries that sex is sin. That concept of sin has been fixed in your mind.
5. Both are easy: it is perfectly easy to go unconscious in sex, to completely forget what is going on, to get intoxicated is easy. To control sex, to force it to stop, to prevent yourself is also easy. But in both you miss. The one who indulges misses, the celibate misses too. The real brahmacharya happens when you stand in the middle between these two, then you are only watching. Then you will find that sex arises in the body and reverberates in the body; in the mind a shadow briefly falls and departs. You remain standing far away. How can sexual desire be in you? How can any desire be in you? You are nothing but the observer.
6. See life from a positive viewpoint. If you start being happy then the things that you grabbed onto because of your misery will drop by themselves. If meditation comes then wine will drop. If meditation comes, then meat-eating will drop. If meditation comes then slowly slowly sex energy begins to be transformed into brahmacharya. Just let meditation come.
7. Just by condemning nothing is destroyed. If you say sex is bad, you condemn it, but you cannot destroy it. Just by condemning it, it is not destroyed. Rather, it may become a more dangerous force, because when repressed, it may struggle to be expressed. And if you go on struggling with it, not allowing it, it will become perverted. Repression will make you more sexual, and the sex energy will struggle and will try to come out in any way, in any form.
8. All the perversions, all over the world – homosexuality or sado-masochist perversions are basically byproducts of so-called religions, particularly christianity: because the more they repress, the more the energy has to find paths of its own. Natural sex is beautiful; perverted sex is just ugliness. Natural sex can be made hallowed and holy, but perverted sex cannot be made holy because it is twice removed from the original source.
9. Sex is there: do not condemn it. Accept it. Do not create a division in your being, between parts of your being. Anger is there: accept it. Greed is there, or whatsoever: accept it. I do not mean be greedy. Rather on the contrary, the moment you accept you go beyond, because acceptance creates a unity, and when you are united within you have the energy to go beyond.
10. You are born of sex. Your every body cell is a sex cell, all your energy is sex energy. So if religions teach that sex is bad, sex is sin, they have condemned you completely. And not only have they condemned you, now you will condemn yourself. Now you cannot go beyond it and you cannot leave it, and now it is a sin. You are divided; you start fighting with yourself. And the more this guilt can be created in you – over the concept that sex is something unholy – the more neurotic you will become.
11. I take sex as the basic problem. And if your sex problem is solved, you are a different man or a different woman, because then all the perversions simply are no more. You have resolved the base. And when sex is solved and it is not a problem for you, not a fight, when you have deeply accepted it and said a deep yes to it, then you can transform it – because that is the energy which is alive in you. When you are dead, that energy will go on and on, more and more. You are just a wave in a sex ocean: the ocean continues, and the waves go on, die and disappear. The ocean continues. Sex is the BRAHMAN. If you go deep into sex, then it is the very life. If you forget it, then you remain on the surface. Then it is ugly. If you do not fight with it or sink into it, but drop into it, dissolve into it, melt into it, when you allow sex to become life, then suddenly it is transformed into love. That is how the mechanism automatically works. If you fight it, sex becomes hate. So those who are filled with hatred are those who are fighting with their sex.
12. If you do not fight it, if you accept it and melt into it, it becomes love. So love and hate are two faces of sex. If it is perverted, it becomes hate. If accepted deeply, it will become love. And you can create love out of your sex energies. If those energies transform into love, then you are at ease in the world, at home with the earth. That at-homeness is basic.
13. This is the beauty: if you accept sex, you will not reject anything else. That is why there is so much emphasis on it. If you reject sex, you will have to reject many things. Sex is the root rejection. If you reject sex, you will reject many things. Food will be rejected, then clothes will be rejected, then everything will be rejected. It is a long sequence, and in that sequence you will have to reject and reject, because the whole life is sexual. If you reject sex you will go on and on rejecting, and ultimately you will reject life. Then suicide is the only thing worth doing because even to take a breath is sexual. It goes to your sex cells and gives them life. To be alive is to be sexual. If you are against sex, then you will be against everything. And a person who is against everything is bound to be neurotic, mad, and you cannot help him.
14. When you are with a woman, if you are of the opposite sex, you begin to feel more alive than with a man. With a man you feel less alive because nothing is pulling you out. You are enclosed, the opposite energy pulls you out; the flame flickers, you can be more alive. And whenever you begin to feel more alive, you begin to feel happy.
15. The mechanism of sex is so much a momentary phenomenon that it only functions momentarily; if you do not cooperate at the right moment, it stops. At the right moment your cooperation is needed, otherwise it cannot work. It is only a momentary mechanism, and if you do not cooperate with it, it will stop by itself.
16. First the energy will try its best to be released sexually, because that is its usual outlet, its usual center. So one must first be aware of one’s downward “doors.” Only awareness will close them; only noncooperation will close them. Sex is not so forceful as we feel it to be. It is forceful only momentarily: it is not a twenty-four-hour affair, it is a momentary challenge.
17. One more point, thinking about sex is harmful than sex itself. Sex can be easy and natural but thinking about it too often is unnatural, is a perversion. After examining the experience of thousands of people, the psychoanalysts tell us that man is taking too much interest in mental sex and he does not derive any pleasure from the actual sex activity. The sex that is going on in the mind seems more interesting and colourful. If sex is thus perverted in the mind, confusion will be created within us. To think about sex is not the function of the mind. The intelligence of the person who uses his mind to do the work of sex centre becomes depraved — is spoilt. Gurdjieff used to say so. The intelligence is bound to get spoilt, because the functions of these two are different. It is like this: If a person tries to take food with his ear, his ear will certainly be spoilt, and food will not reach the stomach. Both will be harassed.