Tantra: The Way of Acceptance by Osho

• The basic principle of Tantra is that the world is not divided into the lower and the higher, but that it is one piece.
  • The lower has to be allowed to move upward and in that way the lower becomes the higher.
  • The earth and the sky meet in Tantra; it is the meeting of polar opposites.
  • This is the ultimate for Tantra, to become gods and yet be part of this world.
• Never condemn anything.
  • By condemning something, you deny yourself the possibilities that would have become available to you if you had encouraged the lower to evolve.
  • Don’t condemn the mud, because the lotus is hidden in the mud.
• Sex is as sacred as Samadhi. The lowest and the highest are part of one continuum. The lowest rung is as much part of the ladder as the highest rung: they are nowhere divided. If you deny the lower you will never be able to reach the higher.
• It is simply psychology that if you prohibit somebody from something, that something becomes more attractive, more magnetic.
  • If you say, “Don’t do this!” You can be sure it will be done.
• Never feel guilty about anything! All that happens is good. The bad does not happen and cannot happen – the world is so full of godliness, how can the bad happen? The bad must be our interpretation.
• There is no separation between divine love and human, four-lettered love. It is one continuity. You love and divine love are two ends of the same phenomenon, the same energy.
• Accept yourself, because only through acceptance is transformation possible.
  • If you start feeling guilty, you will become repressive.
  • All is accepted, because all is divine.
• The inner most core is nothingness, and the outermost circumference is a carnival. The innermost core is meditation, samadhi, and the outermost circumference is sexuality.
• Tantra is the way of wholeness – neither obsession with the world, nor withdrawal from it. It is being in the world lightly, with a little smile. It is playfulness. It doesn’t take things seriously. It is light of heart, it laughs.
  • Tantra is playfulness. Yes, it is sincere – but not serious. It is joyous.
• Life is a dance. You have to participate in it. The more silent you become, the deeper your participation.
  • When you have known how to remain still – dance – and the dance will give you the background in which the stillness will come loud and clear.
• There is no reason for this world, but there is a rhyme and a rhythm.
• There are only two basic paths: the path of devotion, prayer, and love, and the path of meditation and awareness.
  • Either you can approach reality through thinking or you can approach reality through feeling.
  • On Shiva’s path you no longer love the form, you no longer love the person – you start loving the whole existence.
  • If you can be alone and blissful, then choose Saraha; if you cannot be blissful when you are alone, if your bliss comes only when you relate, then choose Shiva.
• This is one of the greatest renunciations – it is easy to renounce wealth, it is easy to renounce a great kingdom, but to renounce knowledge is the most difficult thing in the world…It is the greatest austerity there is, to become ignorant again, to become again innocent like a child.
• To go into Tantra you need the cooperation of a wise woman; without a wise woman, you will not be able to enter the complex world of Tantra.
• The less civilized, the more primitive, the more alive a person is.
  • The more you become civilized, the more you become plastic – you become artificial.
  • If you become too cultivated, you lose your roots in the earth.
• To be in the middle means the pendulum just hangs there in the middle, moving neither to the right nor to the left. Then the clock stops. Then the world stops. Then there is no time; then the state of no-time arises.
• Buddha says, To be worldly is to be worldly, and to be otherworldly is also to be worldly; to worship money is to be mad, to be against money is to be mad; to seek power is foolish, to escape from it is also foolish.
  • You have moved from the left to the right, but money is still at the center of your consciousness.
  • You can change from one desire to another, but you remain the same, the disease persists.
  • When things are natural, you are either for nor against. Both are obsessions.
• To be total in action is to be free of action. Karma is created because you are not totally in your acts. If you are totally in an action, it leaves no trace.
  • Karma means incomplete actions.
  • Mind has a great temptation to complete things. Complete anything, and the mind is gone.
  • Mind is the accumulated past of all incomplete actions.
  • Do any action totally and you are free of it; you don’t look back because there is nothing to see.
  • …to be in life, to go on doing trivial things, but with such absorption that the profundity is revealed in every action.
• Inference is just inference, it is not experience.
• That is real knowledge – to know that which cannot be known, to realize that which unrealizable, to attain that which cannot be attained. This impossible passion is what makes a person a spiritual seeker.
  • By “impossible,” I don’t mean that it will not happen; I mean that it cannot happen unless you are utterly transformed. As you are, it cannot happen, but there are difference ways of being, and you can be totally new.
  • Only the destructible will be destroyed and the indestructible will be there. When you attain to that indestructible element in your being, to that eternal awareness in your being, you are a new consciousness. Through that consciousness the impossible is possible, the unattainable is attained.
• Reproduction – the word is ugly (is the woman a factory?). Love is Fun! Make love when you are feeling happy, joyous, when you are at the top of the world. Share that energy…Make love out of joy, out of abundant joy. Give when you have it.

Though the house lamps have been lit, the blind live on in the dark. Though spontaneity is all-encompassing and close, To the deluded it remains always far away. – Saraha

• The only way to get rid of the form is to know it so deeply that it has no attraction anymore.
• Truth is one, only lies are many. Health is one; diseases are many. One health conquers all disease and one truth conquers all lies.
• Remember, a mystic has no proof.
  • I am not here to convince you logically, I am here to convince you existentially.
• You never happen; you are always there. Things happen in you, you never happen.
  • Things happen just like clouds happen in the sky. You are the silent watcher of the play of clouds.
• When you watch a person’s behavior, you are focusing on the cloud. When you watch the innermost purity of the person’s being, you are watching the sky.
  • Actions are clouds, Doings are clouds. Being is like the sky.
• Whatever you do will bring some good into the world and will bring some bad into the world – whatever you do. Because no action can be just white or just black. To be it has to be both.
  • In the overall reality, each act brings something good and something bad.
• You can accumulate great knowledge or you can remain ignorant; that is only on the periphery. No knowledge can make you more knowing that you already are. Nothing can be added to you. Your purity is infinite; there is no way to improve upon it.
  • Its [the sea] perfection is such that you cannot take anything out of it and you cannot add anything to it.
  • Saraha says: you can give me all the honors that are possible, and nothing is added to me. Or you can take all the honors away and insult me. You can do whatever you want to destroy my respectability, but nothing is happening to me. No matter what, I remain the same. I am that which never increases and never decreases.
• The mask has to be put aside. Hence, a love and a trust is needed – that you can be utterly nude, without any fear.
• Tantra is not an intellectual proposition, it is an experience. Only when you are receptive, ready, and vulnerable to the experience, is it going to come to you.
• It is like a seed – how can a seed rest and relax? Rest and relaxation is known only by flowers. The seed has to be deep in anguish; the seed has to continuously tremble. The trembling is because it does not know whether it will be able to become actual, whether it will find the right soil, whether it will find the right climate, whether it will find the right sky. Is it going to happen, or will it simply die without ever being born? The seed trembles inside. The seed has anxiety, anguish.
• Friedrich Nietzsche has said man is a bridge. Exactly right! Man is not a place to rest, he is a bridge to pass over. Man is a door to go through. You cannot rest at being human.
  • Man is a tension.
• Words are meaningless with reality. Silence is meaningful. Silence is pregnant; words are dead. You have to learn the language of silence.
• How can you misunderstand somebody without thinking? Can you? Can you misunderstand me without thinking?
  • The moment you think, you are not looking at me; you are avoiding me. You are hiding behind your thought. Your thoughts come from your past. I am here, present.
• For those few seconds of orgasm when you are out of the mind, you can relate.
  • When orgasm comes, there is no union – there is unity. The duality is lost.
• It is only husbands and wives who talk. Lovers fall silent.
  • In fact, the husband and wife cannot keep silent because language is a way to avoid each other. If you are not avoiding the other, if you are not talking, the presence of the other becomes embarrassing.
• Only a deep sensitivity can understand anything; only a deep feeling, a deep moving into it, can understand anything.
  • You can understand sex only if you move in it as a poet moves amidst flowers – only then! If you feel guilty about flowers, you may pass through the garden, but you will pass with closed eyes.
• Tantra says there is duality; it is only an appearance.
• If you fight, you are bound to create an ego. And the more you fight, the more strengthened the ego will be. If you win your fight, then you will achieve the supreme ego.
• Remember, it is ultimately your mind that makes anything attractive or unattractive. You are the deciding factor.
• Sex carries something of the ultimate in it, something of samadhi, of transcendence.
• …when you die, then you know who you are…Die to the mind and you will know who you are. Death is the way to know.
• Emotions have to be relieved, relaxed. When you feel like crying you must cry; when you feel like laughing you must laugh. You must drop this nonsense of repression, you have to learn expression, because only through your sentiments, your emotions, and your sensitivity, do you come to that vibration through which communication is possible.
• The heart is in the middle – three centers below it, three center above it. The heart is the door from the lower to the higher, or from the higher to the lower.
• Love is not just sentimental. Love has more depth than sentiment; love has more validity than sentiment. Sentiments are momentary.
  • Liking is not love. Never misunderstand liking for love, otherwise your whole life you will be only driftwood…you will be drifting from one person to another and intimacy will never grow.
• Tantra say: Only speak when you have come to the fifth center via the fourth – only speak through love; otherwise, don’t speak. Speak through compassion; otherwise, don’t speak!
  • …then your words have a fragrance, a music to them, a dance. Then whatever you say is poetry, whatever you utter is sheer joy.
• If you avoid the fourth chakra, then you go into the head. To be in the head means not to be in love; to be in thoughts means not to be in trust; to be thinking means not to be looking.
• Tantra is transcendence. It is neither indulgence nor repression. It is walking on a tightrope in one of the greatest balances. It is not as easy as it appears – it needs delicate awareness. It is a great harmony.
• Tantra says: The other has not to be the focus, neither this way nor that way.
• Tantra is scientific. The word science means understanding. The word science means knowing. Tantric says: knowing liberates.
• There are two types of people who act out of that ignorance [avoidance]: one who indulges madly and one who becomes tired and escapes.
• That’s what the person who indulges goes on doing: he creates great energy and then throws it out for no purpose, with no significance. Having it, he suffers the tension of it. Throwing it out, he suffers the weakness of it. He simply suffers.
• Tantra says: Beware. Beware of indulgence and beware of renunciation. Beware of both. Both are traps. Either way, you are trapped in the mind.
  • Tantra says: Awareness is the way.
  • Don’t go to the Himalayas, bring about a Himalayan silence within you. Don’t escape, become more awake. Look into things deeply with no fear…without fear, look into things deeply.
• It is awareness that brings change, not your effort. Why does it happen through awareness? Because the awareness changes you, and when you are different the whole world is different. It is not a question of creating a different world, it is only a question of creating a different you.
  • Awareness is the key, the master key that opens all the doors of life.
• The Four Mudras
  • First, be total in your action and the first seal is broken. Second, be honest in your knowing and the second seal is broken. Now, be just here and now and the third seal is broken.
• Joy and pleasure are the buds, grace and gratitude and glory are the leaves, and this ultimate flowering of bliss is the fulfillment, the fruition. You have come home.
• The unknown cannot be thought – there is no way to think about the unknown. All that you think is the know that goes on repeating in your mind. Yes, you can create new combinations of old thoughts, but just by making new combinations, you are not going got discover the real. You will be deceiving yourself.
  • Through intellect you create such a dust around yourselves that you cannot see the reality at all, and you are cut off from the existential.
• Philosophy is cheap. It does not require any involvement; it is not a commitment. You can sit in your chair and think. It is a dream. It does not require you to change in order to see reality. That’s where courage is needed; adventurous courage is needed.
• The journey is unknown, so unknown that you cannot even plan it. You have to take a jump into it. Blindfolded, you have to jump into it, in the dark night, with no map, not knowing where you are going, not knowing what you are going for. Only a few daredevils enter into this existential quest.
• Sex has not disappeared – the moralist have only poisoned it more and more. It is still there in a poisoned form. Yes, guilt has arisen in human beings, but sex has not disappeared. It cannot disappear because it is a biological reality. It is existential; it cannot simply be made to disappear by repressing it…the energy is released not by repressing but by understanding.
• Tantra says: Whatever exists has to be understood, and through understanding, changes occur of their own accord.
• Sex energy is life energy; it is uncontrollable.
• Tantra means expansion…When you become universal, you come home. When you become all, when you become one with all, when you are as huge as this universe, when you contain all…
• Tantra says: Drop character, be fluid, be flowing, live moment-to-moment.
  • It does not mean irresponsibility. It means greater responsibility because it means greater awareness.
  • A characterless person does not follow any rules – he follows his awareness. He doesn’t have any discipline – he has only his consciousness.
• Spontaneity means you don’t interfere, you are in a let-go. Whatever happens, you watch, you are a witness to it.
• Those who are too analytical, interpretative, continuously thinking in categories of the mind, are always divided. They are split. There is always a problem for them. The problem is not in existence; that problem comes from their own divided minds. That person’s own mind is not a single unity.
• An ugly woman can give you as beautiful an orgasm as a beautiful woman, but why don’t you like the ugly woman? She does not appeal to your brain, that’s all. Otherwise, as far as orgasm is concerned, both are equally capable. The ugliest woman or the most beautiful woman is, immaterial – your head, your brain, is more interested in form, in the beauty.
• The more you think logically, the bigger is the gap between the two hemispheres of the brain. The less you think logically, the closer they come. The more poetic, the more esthetic your approach is, the more they will come close and the more possibility of joy, delight, and celebration there will be.
  • That’s why an interpretative mind is never a happy mind.
• Tantra trusts in your body. No other religion trusts in your body. And when religions don’t trust in your body, they create a split between you and your body. They make you an enemy of your body and they start destroying the wisdom of the body.
  • Tantra teaches you to look at the body as the greatest creation of existence. Tantra is the religion of the body. Of course it goes higher, but it never leaves the body; it is grounded there…It is grounded in the earth: it has roots.
• Tantra says: First purify the body – purify it of all repressions. Allow the body energy to flow, remove the blocks.
• Do you ever come across a bird that is ugly? Do you ever come across a deer that is ugly? It never happens…They simply accept themselves and they are beautiful in their acceptance. In that very acceptance they shower beauty upon themselves.
  • The moment you accept yourself you become beautiful.
• Tantra can be understood only when your body is alive and your senses feel.
  • Free your senses from habits.
• Find new ways in everything. Let that be one of your disciplines. Tantra says: If you can continue finding new ways every day, your life will remain a thrill, an adventure…You will always be curious to know, you will always be on the verge of seeking the unknown and the unfamiliar. Your eyes will remain clear and your senses will remain clear, because when you are always on the verge of seeking, exploring, finding, searching, you cannot become dull…
• Bring individuality to things. To imitate is to miss life. To be imitative is to be neurotic. The only way to be sane in the world is to be individual, authentically individual. Be your own being.