From Lust 2 Love ...

    Energy is understanding, they are not two things. What kind
of energy is understanding? When the energy is unoccupied, it be-
comes understanding. When energy is occupied, it remains igno-
rance, it remains unconsciousness.
    For example, your sex energy is occupied with a woman or
with a man. It will remain ignorance because the energy is fo-
cused on the object; it is going outward, it is extroverted. If the en-
ergy is freed from the object, where will it go? It will start falling
into the subject, into your inner source. And energy falling back
into the source becomes understanding, becomes awareness.
    And I am not saying be against sex, no. But let sex be more a
subjective phenomenon than an objective phenomenon. And that
is the difference between sex and love. Love is subjective, sex is
objective.
    You become interested in a woman or in a man as an object,
and sooner or later the interest will be finished because once you
have explored the object, nothing is left. Then you are ready to
move to somebody else. Yes, the woman looks beautiful, but how
long can she look beautiful? An object is an object. She is not yet a
person to you, she is just a beautiful object. It is insulting. You are
reducing a soul into an object, a subjectivity into an object. You are
trying to exploit. You are turning her into a means. Your energy
will remain ignorant. And you will go on moving from one woman
to another, and your energy will go on running in circles. It will
never come back home.
     Love means you are not interested in the woman or the man as
an object. In fact, you are not there to exploit the other, you are
not there to get something from the other. On the contrary, you
are so full of energy, you would like to give some energy to the per-
son. Love gives. Sex only wants to get.
     And when love gives, it remains subjective, it remains rooted
in oneself. Lovers help each other to be more and more them-
selves. Lovers help each other to become authentically individual.
Lovers help each other to be centered. Love is respect, reverence,
worship. It is not exploitation. Love is understanding. Because en-
ergy is unoccupied with the object, it remains free, untethered to
anything. And that brings the transformation. It accumulates in-
side you.
     And remember: just as it happens in the world of physics, so it
happens in the world of metaphysics. After a certain quantity of
energy, a qualitative change happens. The qualitative change is
nothing but the outcome of the quantitative change.
     For example, if you heat water to the boiling point, it evapo-
rates. Up to the boiling point, it has not evaporated; it is still
water--hot, but still water. But beyond the temperature at which
it boils, it evaporates--it is no longer water. It has changed its
form. The transformation has happened.
    Just like that, when your energy accumulates, don't go on
wasting it on objects--and people are wasting it on objects. Some-
body is interested in money; he puts his whole energy into it. Of
course, he accumulates a lot of money, but in accumulating it he
dies, dissipates, becomes empty, becomes a beggar. Money goes on
accumulating, and he goes on becoming more and more beggarly.
Somebody puts his energy into politics, into power. He becomes a
prime minister, but deep down he is a beggar. He may be the most
important beggar in the country, but still he is a beggar.
    If you put your energy into objects, you will live a life of non-
understanding, unawareness. Don't put your energy into objects.
Let energy fall back into your being. Let it accumulate. Let your
life become a great reservoir. Let your energy just be there without
any occupation. And at a certain point--the jump, the quantum
leap, the transformation. Energy becomes luminous, turns into
awareness, becomes understanding.
    It is energy that becomes understanding. So when you are de-
pleted of energy, you start losing your understanding. When you
are tired, your intelligence is less. You have observed it. In the
morning your intelligence is fresher than in the evening. In the
morning you are more understanding, more compassionate, more
loving, than in the evening.
    Have you observed it? Beggars come in the morning to beg.
They understand the psychology. In the evening, who is going to
give to them? People are so angry by that time, so frustrated with
life. In the morning they have rested the whole night, a deep
sleep, their energy is fresh, they have accumulated eight hours of
energy. They are more understanding, have more compassion,
more love, more sympathy. It is possible to persuade them to give
something to you. They have something, so they can give. By the
evening, they don't have anything; they have lost all they had in
the morning, they are dead tired.
    Children are more understanding--have you observed it or
not?--than old people. Old people become hard, cruel, cunning.
Their whole life they have remained occupied with objects. Most
old people become Machiavellian. Young children are innocent,
trusting, closer to buddhas. Why? Their energy is overflowing.
    Young children learn things so fast. Why? The energy is there,
hence the intelligence. The older you become, the more difficult it
becomes to learn a thing. They say it is difficult to teach an old dog
new tricks. Why? It should not be so, because the dog knows so
many tricks already, he can learn a few more. It should be easier
for him because he has practiced learning so much that he can
learn a few more easily. But it is not so.
    Children learn fast. If a child is horn in a town where five lan-
guages are spoken, he starts learning all five; he becomes efficient
in all five. They all become his mother tongue. A child has infinite
capacity to learn, and the reason is only one: his energy is still
overflowing. Soon it will be dissipated in life.
    The man of meditation becomes the man of understanding be-
cause his energy accumulates. He is not wasting it. He is not inter-
ested in trivia; he does not put any energy at all into petty things.
So whenever the time arises to give, he has it to give.
    Energy is understanding. Be conscious of it and use your en-
ergy very consciously, and use your energy in such a way that you
don't simply go on wasting it.

    Sex is the energy. So I will not say sexual energy because there
is no other energy. Sex is the only energy you have. The energy can
be transformed, it can become a higher energy. The higher it
moves, the less and less sexuality remains in it. And there is an
end peak where it becomes simply love and compassion. The ulti-
mate flowering we can call divine energy, but the base, the seat, re-
mains sex. So sex is the first, bottom layer of energy and godliness
is the top layer. But the same energy moves.
    The first thing to be understood is not to divide your energies.
Once you divide, then a dualism is created. Once you divide, then
conflict and struggle are created. Once you divide your energies,
you are divided--then you will be for or against sex.
    I am neither for nor against, because I don't divide. I say sex is
the energy, the name of the energy; call that energy x. Sex is the
name of that x energy, the unknown energy, when you are using
it only as a biological reproduction force. It becomes divine once it
is freed from biological bondage, once it becomes nonphysical;
then it is the love Jesus talks about or the compassion of Buddha.
    People are obsessed today because of Christianity. Two thou-
sand years of Christian suppression of sex energy have made the
Western mind too obsessed with it.
    first, for two thousand years the obsession was with how to
kill it. You cannot kill your sex energy. No energy can be killed, en-
ergy can only be transformed. There is no way to destroy energy.
Nothing can be destroyed in this world, it can only be trans-
formed, changed, moved into a new realm and dimension. De-
struction is impossible.
    You cannot create a new energy, and you cannot destroy an old
energy. Creation and destruction are both beyond you. They can-
not be done. Now, scientists agree, not even a single atom can be
destroyed.
    For two thousand years, Christianity was trying to destroy sex
energy. Their idea has been that religion consists of becoming ab-
solutely without sex. That created a madness. The more you fight,
the more you suppress, the more sexual you become. And then sex
moves deeper into the unconscious. It poisons your whole being.
    So if you read the lives of Christian saints, you will see they are
obsessed with sex. They cannot pray, they cannot meditate. What-
soever they do, sex comes in. And they think that the devil is play-
ing tricks. Nobody is playing tricks. If you suppress, you are the
devil.
    After two thousand years of continuous sex repression, the
West became fed up with it. It was too much and the whole wheel
turned. Then, instead of repression, indulgence became the new
obsession. From one pole the mind moved to the other pole. The
disease remained the same. Once it was repression, now it is to in-
dulge more and more in it. Both are sick attitudes.
    Sex has to be transformed, neither repressed nor indulged.
And the only possible way to transform sex is to be sexual with
deep meditative awareness.
    Move into sex, but with an alert, conscious, mindful being.
Don't allow it to become an unconscious force. Don't be pulled
and pushed by it. Move knowingly, understandingly, lovingly. But
make sexual experience a meditative experience. Meditate in it.
This is what the East has done through Tantra.
    And once you are meditative in sexual experience, the quality
of it starts changing. The same energy which is moving into sexual
experience starts moving towards consciousness.
    You can become so alert in a peak sexual orgasm as you can
otherwise never become, because no other experience is so deep,
no other experience is so absorbing, no other experience is so total.
In a sexual orgasm, you are totally absorbed, root and all--your
whole being vibrating, your whole being in it. Body, mind--both
are in it. And thinking stops completely. Even for a single second,
when the orgasm reaches its peak, thinking stops completely, be-
cause you are so total you cannot think.
    In a sexual orgasm you are. Being is there without any think-
ing. In this moment, if you can become alert, conscious, then sex
can become the door to the divine. And if in this moment you can
become alert, that alertness can be carried in other moments also,
in other experiences also. It can become a part of you. Then eat-
ing, walking, doing some work, you can carry that alertness.
Through sex, the alertness has touched your deepest core. It has
penetrated you. Now you can carry it.
    And, if you become meditative, you will come to realize a new
fact. That fact is that it is not sex that gives you bliss, it is not sex
that gives you the ecstasy. Rather, it is a thoughtless state of the
mind and total involvement in the act that gives you a blissful
feeling.
    Once you understand this, then sex will be needed less and
less, because that thoughtless state of mind can be created without
it; that's what meditation means. And that totality of being can be
created without sex. Once you know that the same phenomenon
can happen without sex, sex will be needed less and less. A mo-
ment will come when sex will not be needed at all.
    Remember, sex is always dependent on the other. So in sex, a
certain bondage remains. Once you can create this total orgasmic
phenomenon without any dependence on anybody else, when it
has become an inner source, you are independent, you are free.
    That's what is meant when the mystics have said that only a
truly celibate person can be free, because now he is not dependent
on anybody else, his ecstasy is his own.
    Sex disappears through meditation, but this is not destroying
the energy. Energy is never destroyed; only the form of the energy
changes. Now it is no longer sexual, and when the form is no
longer sexual, then you become loving.
    Really, a person who is sexual cannot love. His love can only be
a show, his love is just a means towards sex. A person who is sexual
uses love just as a technique towards sex. It is a means. A sexual
person cannot really love, he can only exploit the other; and love
becomes just a way to approach the other.
    A person who has become nonsexual, and the energy is moving
within, has become auto-ecstatic. His ecstasy is his own. Such a
person will be loving for the first time. His love will be a constant
showering, a constant sharing, a constant giving. But to achieve
this, you should not be antisex. To achieve this, you have to accept
sex as part of life, of natural life. Move with it, only move with
more consciousness.


				*From Lust 2 Love ...*