Chapter 10. City of Love - Osho

Life of Osho

Chapter 10. City of Love

As the numbers of people arriving in Poona began to multiply, you would seemoreandmoreyoung couplesamongthem. Truth to tell, they didn’t always look that good. Bedraggled from the heat and dust, and more and more often arriving straight from theWest, straight from the lunacy ofBombayairport – from being hustled by every imaginable kind of low-life, from having stumps and tin bowls thrust in their faces, from the terrifying taxi ride up through theWestern Ghats, from the grubby hotel at the railway station where they had finally been dumped – they didn’t always look that much ‘in love’ at all. More often they looked as though they would like to kill one another.

That was one of the main ways Osho really opened up people’s lives during those early years in Poona: by opening up their sexual lives. So far as I know Osho is unique among mystics in his insistence that sexual love between a man and a woman is a deeply ‘religious’ experience: falling in love is the one time in their lives when everyone spontaneously experiences meditation. But by the same token he would denounce most ‘relationships’ as being the very death of love…In the lecture you could hear it coming when he was about to go on a roll about couples. He would pause, and his voice would go just a little too solicitous, a little too polite – suddenly you’d hear the birdsong and the distant train whistles very clearly – and he would ask, well, what did all these relationships in which everyone was involved have to do with ‘love’? Were all these couples you saw walking around together really in love? Mmm? Weren’t they, on the contrary, both just taking one another for granted? Mmm? Hadn’t that delight in the otherness of the other long disappeared? “My own observation” he said sadly “is that I have seen millions of people carrying dead love affairs which have gone dead long before, but carrying out of fear, clinging – just clinging with the known, with the familiar, although it is just misery and nothing else, but clinging.

“When love dies, it dies.”

You could feel bits of Chuang Tzu stiffen up; sense that people didn’t want to look at one another. But there was no way he was going to stop. Weren’t most of these relationships an almost…political arrangement? Weren’t both partners sexually attracted to other people, yet had some unspoken agreement that neither would do anything about it if the other didn’t? What kind of a deal was that, then? Mmm? Was that what ‘love’ was…?

‘The sex guru’ that’s what the Poona Herald called Osho. The sex guru. The Bombay press had dubbed him that after a series of lectures he had given on sexuality, From Sex To Superconsciousness, during the height of the summer of 68. Originally given to huge audiences in downtown Bombay, it was these lectures which first catapulted Osho into nationwide notoriety in India.

Traditionally, he began his first lecture by saying, sex has been seen as totally opposed to religion – however, so far as he was concerned, nothing could be further from the truth.

“My conjecture” he said, “is that man had his first luminous glimpse of samadhi during the experience of intercourse.”

“Man cannot ordinarily reach the depths of his being that he reaches in the consummation of the sexual act. In the ordinary course of his life, in his daily routine, a man has a variety of experiences – he shops, does business, earns his living – but intercourse reveals the deepest of experiences to him. And this experience has profound religious dimensions: there, man reaches beyond himself; there he transcends himself.

“Two things happen to him in those depths. “First, in copulation the ego vanishes. Egolessness is created. For an instant, there is no ‘I’; for an instant, one does not remember oneself. Did you know that the ‘I’ also dissolves completely in the experience of religion, that in religion the ego also dissolves into nothingness? In the sexual act the ego fades away. Orgasm is a state of self-effacement.

“The second thing about the experience of sex is that time is undone for an instant. Timelessness is created. As Jesus Christ has said of samadhi, “There shall be time no longer.” In orgasm, the sense of time is non-existent. There is no past, no future; there is only the present moment. The present moment is not a part of time; the present is eternity.

“This is the second reason man is so eager for sex. The craving is not for the body of a woman by a man or viceversa, the passion is for something else: for egolessness, for timelessness.”

At various points in his early work Osho gave explicit accounts of Tantric lovemaking. While much that he says – that Tantra is concerned with a ‘valley’ rather than a ‘peak’ orgasm; that the man should remain passive, the woman initiating movement – has become, in the quarter century since then, a commonplace of sex manuals, the main point he is making has not.

Sex is the perfect situation for meditation. For once, everything is focused naturally in the present moment. The mind is disappearing, the body is disappearing, the sense of self and other is disappearing – you just have to hold it there, on the very edge of the world…

Structurally you can see something very similar at the heart of Osho’s own approach to meditation. If there is a prototype for his Dynamic then it is to be found in Tantric sex – the same building up, up, up of energy…then the immobility.

“All meditation” he said “is essentially the experience of sex without sex.”

However, while Poona was certainly one of the most sexually liberated societies in recent history – by the end of the 70s it was an open secret the town was revolving round free love the way a Las Vegas, for instance, revolves round gambling – Osho himself never saw this as an end in itself. “Nothing wrong in it” he’d go;- but it wasn’t the liberation of sex which really interested him, it was the liberation of energy.

In fact from the time of his From Sex To Superconsciousness lectures onwards he denied there was any such thing as ‘sex energy.’ There was only energy itself – an élan vital which was one and indivisible. There were however a number of evolutionary forms through which this energy could pass. Sex, physical sex, was the most basic of these, and Osho was concerned with it primarily not for its own sake, but because if energy was blocked there it would be blocked all along the line. For you cannot just repress sex: you have to repress energy as a whole. What he was really concerned with was the transformation of sex energy into love.

“Only sex energy can flower into the force of love. But we have filled man with antagonism towards sex and the result is that love has not flowered. What comes later, the form-tocome, can only be made possible by the acceptance of sex. The stream of love cannot break through because of the strong opposition. Sex, on the other hand, keeps churning inside, and the consciousness of man is muddled with sexuality.”

Towards the end of those Sex To Superconsciousness lectures he spoke of the role played in the past by the Tantric ‘sex temples.’

The function of a Konarak, of a Khajuraho or a Puri, had been completely misconstrued. The vast mass of erotic statuary was not just some simple-minded paean to natural sexuality, not exclusively – it was something far more sophisticated than that. Primarily the erotic sculpture was there for people to meditate on. In the past people had been taught to observe it, and their own reactions to it, until any element of unconsciousness about physical sex was gone. Khajuraho was a kind of psychiatry in stone – a provocation of the unconscious, of the obsessive channel of lust it contains, to surface and become fully integrated. The temples were antipornography machines…As the seeker consciously came to terms with these outer sculptures he or she would be allowed deeper and deeper into the temple, and as they did so the chambers became simpler and simpler, and all the sculpture gradually faded away. And at the core of all Tantric temples, so Osho says, they would always find themselves confronted with one thing and one thing alone: a totally empty room.

What a world it was for lovers, Koregaon Park. I’ve not described that properly, the spell of Osho’s Poona – the enchanted wood, the Midsummer Night’s Dream quality to it…

In those days Koregaon Park was still separate from the town itself, still sleepy; backing up against the river on one side, and open fields on another, it was almost in the country.

Once the most famous of all the Raj hill-stations, the resort to which Bombay high society moved in April and May, to get away from the stifling heat of the pre-monsoon, it had sunk into neglect and been all but abandoned since the British left in 47. When we first got there the whole place had this overgrown, sequestered quality. It was like Sleeping Beauty. The banyans with which the narrow lanes had originally been planted had grown enormous over the years; in many places they met and joined overhead, letting through only isolated shafts of light. Hanging roots had re-rooted themselves and the bougainvillea which grew everywhere climbed up them into the trees – higher and higher until it reached the sunlight and flowered, purple, amber, vermilion, as though it were the banyans themselves which were blossoming.

There was hardly anyone around. Just the occasional Indian slowly clattering by on his ancient bicycle, through the heat and silence. Many of the old mansions had been boarded up for years and looked after by only a few shuffling servants. Padlocked rusty gates (the padlock itself an outlandishly huge Indian thing, already out of a fairy story) through which you could catch a glimpse of pillars, of sweeping verandahs, of defunct fountains and broken arbours, lost in the depths of the greenery. Koregaon Park was the perfect set for a romantic comedy.

“What is love?” Time after time in his lectures, Osho would come back to the same question. What happens when you fall in love? Why is it so magical – and why does it always go wrong..?

They became known as his ‘Sufi’ lectures, these talks where he explored the nature of love. His voice would go all velvety; Chuang Tzu would sort of melt…

“What is love?

“It is the deep urge to be one with the whole, the deep urge to dissolve I and Thou into one unity. Love is that because we are separated from our own source; out of that separation the desire arises to fall back into the whole, to become one with it...

“Man can find his earth through the woman, he can become earthed again through the woman, and the woman can become earthed through the man. They are complementary. Man alone is half, in a desperate need to be whole. Woman alone is half. When these two halves meet and mingle and merge, for the first time one feels rooted, grounded. Great joy arises in the being.

“It is not only the woman that you get rooted in, it is through the woman that you get rooted in God. The woman is just a door, the man is just a door. Man and woman are doors to God.”

When Asha and I were courting time kept coming to a stop. I remember one appallingly hot afternoon when we escaped from our jobs at the ashram, climbed over the back wall and dropped into the shade of the road on the other side.

We were both involved in the protracted, messy end of other long-term relationships, a typical Poona scenario, and often did not see one another for days on end. When we did…our minds just stopped. All the things it had seemed so important to say vanished without a trace. That afternoon we were just sitting there in silence, holding hands, on the curb of a crumbling gateway. Above our heads was a gulmohr tree and all around us was a carpet of the crimson and orange petals the tree produces in such profusion.

The air was thick with heat, and out of where it shimmered and warped in the empty lane a black shape began to form. It turned into a tattered figure, which turned into the magic-show wallah. He had the big wooden box where he kept the magic on a strap over his shoulder. In his hand he held a flute.

He came up to where we sat.

“Magic-show, sahib?” he said. “Memsahib?”

The magician was an old man, and was wearing a thick, high-collared jacket despite the heat. He had a cobra in his box, he said; he could make stones catch fire. Things happened in succession, one after the other, but there was no continuity, no link between one moment and the next. There was no sense of time passing. The way he approached us had been the same. He did not seem to be crossing space so much as getting bigger and bigger. Maybe babies see like that. None of us moved.

“One rupees only” the magician said gently, after a while, and to no one in particular. Then, as though he had done everything anyone could reasonably expect him to do, he shifted the strap on his shoulder and put his flute to his lips. Playing a few notes to himself he moved off across the carpet of fallen petals, and gradually dissolved back into the heat-warp... In my mind it is a wood, Koregaon Park, a magic wood like Brindavan, the wood sacred to Krishna in the North; and Osho himself often seems like Krishna, the Krishna of those garish lithographs they have in the chai-shops and puri-bhajji joints: Krishna playing his flute, sitting on a swing, surrounded by his gopis, by spellbound flowers...

In one Sufi lecture series, Sufis: People of the Path, Osho described what he called ‘the three stages of love.’ Love One, Love Two and Love Three. Love One is the normal ‘love’ between a man and a woman. They are attracted to one another and they become lovers. They are happy, they move in together... and the trouble starts. As soon as their first exaltation starts to fade they tend, however subtly, to become possessive; they tend, however subtly, to become manipulative. “The moment love becomes a relationship, it becomes a bondage, because there are expectations and there are demands and there are frustrations, and an effort from both sides to dominate. It becomes a struggle for power.”

The tragedy is that the lovers destroy the very quality which had attracted them to one another.

“The woman was beautiful because she was free. Freedom is such an ingredient in beauty that when you see a bird on the wing in the sky it is one kind of bird – but if you see the same bird in a cage, it is no more the same… The freedom is gone, the sky is gone. Those wings are just meaningless now. A kind of burden. They remind of the past, and they create misery.

“When you fell in love with a woman when she was free you had fallen in love with freedom. Now you bring her home, you destroy all possibilities of her being free, but in that very destruction you are destroying the beauty. Then one day suddenly you find that you don’t love the woman at all because she is no more beautiful. This happens every time; then you start searching for another woman and you don’t look what has happened. You don’t look in the mechanism, how you destroyed the beauty of the woman.

“This is the first kind of love, Love One…”

The second stage of love, Love Two, is something very much more evolved.

Love Two is not about relationship. Love Two is not really about emotion at all. Love Two is about a state of being…You are no longer attracted to someone for this or that reason: you are attracted because you are loving. “The loving state is unaddressed.”

You give because it is your nature – and what you give is the highest and finest thing any one person can give another… and this, Osho says, is freedom. “A mature person has the integrity to be alone. And when a mature person gives love, he gives without any strings attached to it: he simply gives. And when a mature person gives love, he feels grateful that you have accepted his love, not vice versa. He does not expect you to be thankful for it – no, not at all, he does not even need your thanks.

He thanks you for accepting his love.

“And when two mature persons are in love, one of the greatest paradoxes of life happens, one of the most beautiful phenomena: they are together and yet tremendously alone; they are together so much so that they are almost one. But their oneness does not destroy their individuality, in fact, it enhances it: they become more individual. Two mature persons in love help each other to become more free. There is no politics involved, no diplomacy, no effort to dominate.

How can you dominate the person you love? “In fact a mature person does not fall in love, he rises in love…”

But even this second stage of love does not exhaust the possibilities of what love can become. There is still Love Three. “In the first the object is important, in the second the subject is important, and the third…transcendence.

“One is not dividing love in any way. Subject, object; knower, known; lover, loved – all division has disappeared. Up to the second you are a lover. When you are a lover something will hang around you like a boundary, like a definition.

With the third all definition disappears. There is only love, you are not. This is what Jesus means when he says “God is love.” Love Third…God is love. One is simply love, not that one loves. It is not an act, it is one’s very quality...

“The first kind of love is I-It. The other is taken as a thing. That’s what Martin Buber says, I-It. The other is like a thing you have to possess. My wife, my husband, my child. And in that very possession you kill the spirit of the other.

The second kind of love Martin Buber calls I-Thou. The other is a person, you have respect for the other: how can you possess somebody you respect? But Martin Buber stops at the second; he has no understanding about the third, where I and Thou disappear, where there is only love.

“Martin Buber cannot understand Jesus, he remains a Jew. He goes up to I-Thou, a great step from I-It to I-Thou, but nothing compared to the step that happens from I-Thou to non-dualism, to advaita, to oneness.

“Only love remains.”