Osho,
Could dry leaves really be falling at such a young age? I am thirty, and I enjoy sex when it comes, though I don’t come so often. I don’t feel I am holding something down; on the contrary, I find I usually have to hold it up.
Osho, it now takes me all night to do what I used to do all night. Am I missing, or is it missing?
Nityanando, this is the difference between the Eastern evolution of consciousness and the Western mind.
In the East, to get rid of sex is a blessing; in the West, it is the ultimate calamity, it is dying before death. The day one starts feeling that his sexual energy is getting down, he starts counting days – that death is not far away.
In the East, the day one gets beyond sex, he rejoices – the earlier the better – because now the time has come to grow into a new dimension, into freedom from biology, into freedom from body, into freedom from mind. It is the beginning of the experience of your innermost self.
Sex is continuously taking you away from yourself. Whether you are a man or a woman, it doesn’t matter: sex takes you away from yourself. The moment sex is not there, there is no drive to go away from yourself. You start settling within.
So old leaves are really falling because new leaves want to grow. And old leaves have to go and give space for new experiences, new spaces. It is a blessing – don’t take it according to the Western, rotten mind.
The West has everything, but it has forgotten itself. And once you are no longer aware of yourself, then sex becomes the ultimate reality. In the West, sex is God. Sex is now the only God worshipped in the West. But sex simply means you are no longer independent: you depend for your happiness, for your joy, on somebody else – and that dependence is the greatest misery.
It is not incidental that men and women, husbands and wives, are continuously quarreling. Even if they are not quarreling, they are in the mood, and the reason is that nobody wants deep down to be dependent on the other. It brings many other diseases by the side: if you are dependent on the woman you love, you will be jealous, you will be continuously watchful…you will start becoming a detective, a CIA, a KGB, an FBI agent, upon your own wife! You will put your children on alert: Be careful, when I am away…what happens in the house.
Why this jealousy…? The fear is that perhaps she may start loving someone else. And the fear is natural, because you are starting to think of other women: why should she not think of other men? This is a natural corollary that goes on in both the minds. So she goes on detecting you, she goes on looking into your letters, she goes on searching into your pockets, any address, any phone number…
One night a phone rang, and as the bell was ringing Mulla Nasruddin went there, said “Okay,” and put it down.
The wife said, “Who was there?”
He said, “It was nobody. I have just been unnecessarily disturbed by someone phoning on the wrong number.”