Osho on Tantra

The tantra attitude is the very being of Tilopa. You must understand first what the tantra attitude is, only then it will be possible for you to comprehend what Tilopa is trying to say. So something about the tantra attitude — the first thing: it is not an attitude, because tantra looks at life with a total vision. It has no attitude to look at life. It has no concepts, it is not a philosophy. It is not even a religion, it has no theology. It doesn’t believe in words, theories, doctrines. It wants to look at life without any philosophy, without any theory, without any theology. It wants to look at life as it is, without bringing any mind in between — because that will be the distortion. The mind then will project, the mind then will mix — and then you will not be able to know that which is. Tantra avoids mind and encounters life face to face, neither thinking, “This is good,” nor thinking, “This is bad”: simply facing that which is. So it is difficult to say that this is an attitude — in fact it is a no-attitude.

The second thing to remember, that tantra is a great yea-sayer; it says yes to everything. It has nothing like “no” in its vocabulary, there is no negation. It never says no to anything, because with no the fight starts, with no you become the ego. The moment you say no to anything, you have become the ego already; a conflict has come in, now you are at war. Tantra loves, and loves unconditionally. It never says no to anything whatsoever, because everything is part of the whole, and everything has its own place in the whole, and the whole cannot exist without anything missing from it.

It is said that even if a drop of water is missing, the whole existence will thirst. You pluck a flower in the garden, and you have plucked something out of the whole existence.

You harm a flower, and you have harmed millions of stars — because everything is interrelated.

The whole exists as a whole, as an organic whole. The whole exists not as a mechanical thing — everything is related to everything else.

So tantra says yes unconditionally. There has never been any other vision of life which says yes without any conditions — simply yes. No disappears; from your very being no disappears. When there is no NO, how can you fight? How can you be at war? You simply float. You simply merge and melt. You become one.

The boundaries are there no more. No creates the boundary. No IS the boundary around you. Whenever you say no, watch — immediately something closes in. Whenever you say yes, your being opens.

The real atheist is one who goes on saying no to life; his saying no to God is just symbolic. You may be believing in God, but if you say no to anything, your belief is not of any worth,

Your god is hocus-pocus — because only a total yes creates a real God, reveals the real God. When you say total yes to existence, the whole existence suddenly is transformed; then there are no more rocks, no more trees, no more persons, rivers, mountains — suddenly everything has become one, and that oneness is God.

A real theist is one who says yes to everything, not only to God… because mind is very cunning. You can say yes to God and no to the world. This has happened. Millions have lost their whole life because of this. They say yes to God and they say no to life. In fact, they think that unless you say no to life, how can you say yes to God? They create a division: they deny the world in order to accept God. But an acceptance that stands on a denial is no acceptance at all. It is false. It is a pretension. How can you accept the creator without accepting the creation? If you say no to the creation, how can you say yes to the creator? They are one. The creator and the creation are not two things: the creator is the creation. In fact there is no division between the creator and the creation, it is a continuous process of creativity. On one pole the creativity looks like the creator; on another pole the creativity looks like the creation — but they are both the poles of the same phenomenon.

Tantra says that if you say yes, you say simply yes; you don’t posit against some no. But all the religions have done that: they say no to the world and yes to God; and they say no to the world forcibly, so that their yes can become stronger. Many so-called saints have said, “God, we accept you, but we don’t accept your world.” But what type of acceptance is this? Is this acceptance? You are choosing. You are dissecting the existence into two. You are putting yourself above God. You say, “This we accept and that we deny.” All renunciation comes out of this. One who renounces is not a religious person. In the view of tantra, one who renounces is an egoist. First he was accumulating things of the world, but his attention was on the world. Now he renounces, but his attention is again on the world and he remains the egoist. The ego has subtle ways of fulfilling itself and coming again and again, in spirals. Again and again it comes back — with a new face, with new colors…

Tantra says: “You say yes. You say yes to everything. You need not fight, you need not even swim — you simply float with the current. The river is going by itself, on its own accord, everything reaches to the ultimate ocean. You simply don’t create any disturbance, you don’t push the river, you simply go with it.” That going with it, floating with it, relaxing with it, is tantra. If you can say yes, a deep acceptance happens to you. If you say yes, how can you be complaining? How can you be miserable? Then everything is as it should be. You are not fighting, not denying — you accept. And remember, this acceptance is different from ordinary acceptance. Ordinarily a person accepts a situation when he feels helpless; that is impotent acceptance. That will not lead you anywhere; impotence cannot lead you anywhere. A person accepts a situation when he feels hopeless: “Nothing can be done, so what to do? At least accept, to save face.” Tantra acceptance is not that type of acceptance. It comes out of an overfulfilment, it comes out of a deep contentment — not out of hopelessness, frustration, helplessness. It comes when you don’t say no, it suddenly surfaces in you. Your whole being becomes a deep contentment.

That acceptance has a beauty of its own. It is not forced; you have not practiced for it. If you practice, it will be false, it will be a hypocrisy. If you practice, you will be split in two: on the outside it will be acceptance; deep down, the turmoil, the negation, the denial. Deep down you will be boiling up to explode any moment. Just on the surface you will pretend that everything is okay.

Tantra acceptance is total, it doesn’t split you. All the religions of the world, except tantra, have created split personalities. All the religions of the world, except tantra, have created schizophrenia. They split you. They make something bad in you and something good.

And they say the good has to be achieved and the bad denied, the devil has to be denied and God accepted. They create a split within you and a fight. Then you are continuously feeling guilty, because how can you destroy the part that is organically one with you? You may call it bad, you may call it names; that doesn’t make any difference. How can you destroy it? You never created it. You have simply found it — given. Anger is there, sex is there, greed is there — you have not created them; they are given facts of life, just like your eyes and your hands. You can call them names, you can call them ugly or beautiful or whatsoever you like, but you cannot kill them.

Nothing can be killed out of existence, nothing can be destroyed.

Tantra says a transformation is possible, but destruction? — no. And a

transformation comes when you accept your total being. Then suddenly everything falls in line, then everything takes its own place; then anger is also absorbed, then greed is also absorbed. Then without trying to cut anything out of your being, your whole being rearranges itself. If you accept and say yes, a rearrangement happens, and whereas before there was a noisy clamor inside, now a melody, a music is born, a harmony comes in…

Tantra says you are a noise right now as you are. Nothing is wrong in it — simply you don’t have a center. Once you have a center, everything falls in line, and everything becomes beautiful. When Gurdjieff gets angry it is beautiful. When you get angry it is ugly. Anger is neither ugly nor beautiful. When Jesus gets angry it is sheer music — even anger. When Jesus takes a whip in the temple and chases out the traders, out of the temple, there is a subtle beauty to it. Even Buddha lacks that beauty; Buddha seems to be one-sided. It seems anger has nothing in it to play; the tension of anger, the salt of it is not there. Buddha doesn’t taste as good as Jesus. Jesus has a little salt in him, he can get angry — even his anger has become part of his whole being; nothing has been denied, everything has been accepted.

But Tilopa is incomparable. Jesus is nothing…. The tantra masters are simply wild flowers, they have everything in them. You must have seen Bodhidharma pictures; if you have not seen, look again — so ferocious that if you meditate on Bodhidharma’s picture in the night, alone, you will not be able to sleep: he will haunt you. It is said of him that once he looked at anybody, that man would have nightmares continuously. He would haunt him; the very look, so ferocious. When Bodhidharma or Tilopa spoke, it is said their speaking was like a lion’s roar, a thundercloud, a tremendous waterfall — wild, fiery. But if you wait a little and don’t judge them too soon, you will find within them the most loving of all hearts. Then you will feel the music, the melody in them. And then suddenly you will realize that they have not denied anything; they have absorbed everything, even ferociousness. A lion is beautiful, even its ferociousness has a beauty of its own. You take the ferociousness out of a lion and he is just a stuffed lion, dead.

Tantra says everything has to be absorbed, EVERYTHING! — remember, without any condition. Sex has to be absorbed, then it becomes a tremendous force in you. A Buddha, a Tilopa, a Jesus, they have such a magnetic force around them — what is that? Sex absorbed. Sex is human magnetism. Suddenly you fall into their love. Once you come across their path, you are being pulled to a different world altogether. You are torn from your old world, and you are being pulled to something new, something that you never even dreamt about. What is this force? It is the same sex which has become transformed; now it has become a magnetism, a charisma. Buddha has anger absorbed; that very anger becomes compassion. And when Jesus takes the whip in his hand, it is because of compassion. When Jesus talks in fire, this is same compassion.

Remember this, that tantra accepts you in your totality. When you come to me, I accept you in your totality. I am not here to help you deny anything. I am here only to help you to rearrange, to get a center of all your energies, to converge them to a center. And I tell you that you will be richer if you have anger absorbed in it; you will be richer if you have sex absorbed in it; you will be richer if you have hatred, jealousy, absorbed into it — they are the spices of life, and you will taste…. You will not become tasteless, you will have an enrichment to your taste. You need a little salt. And anger is exactly in the same amount as it is needed. When it overpowers you, then it becomes ugly. If you eat only salt then you will die. Salt has a proportion, and in the proportion it is needed, absolutely needed. Remember this…

One lives one’s life, one goes through it: each shade of it has to be lived, and each taste of it has to be tasted. Even the wandering, even going astray is meaningful, because if you never go astray you will not achieve to an enriched enlightenment, you will never be simple. You may be a simpleton, but you will never be simple — and a simpleton is not simple.

Simplicity needs a very deep and complex experience behind it. A simpleton is simply without experience. He may be a fool, but he cannot be a sage. A sage is one who has lived all the sins of life, who has not denied anything, who has not called anything a sin, who has simply accepted whatsoever has happened,

who has allowed it to happen; who has moved with every wave, who has drifted, who went astray, who fell down to the very hell. Somewhere Nietzsche says, “If a tree wants to reach to the sky, its roots need to go to the very hell.” He’s right. If you want a real flowering into the sky, your roots will need to go to the deepest hell in the earth.

When a sinner becomes a sage, the sage has a beauty. When a sage is simply a sage, without becoming ever a sinner, he is just a simpleton, he has missed life. And no virtue can come out unless there has been a wandering away, going astray…

Tantra accepts everything, LIVES everything. That’s why tantra never could become a very accepted ideology. It always remained a fringe ideology, just somewhere on the boundary, outside the society, civilization, because civilization has chosen to be shallow; good, but shallow. Civilization has chosen to deny, to say no to many things. Civilization is not courageous enough to accept all, to accept everything that life gives.

The greatest courage in the world is to accept all that life gives to you.

And this is what I am trying to help you towards, to accept all that life gives you, and accept it in deep humbleness, as a gift. And when I say this, even those things which society has conditioned you to call wrong and bad. Accept sex, and then there will come a flowering out of it; a brahmacharya will come, a purity, an innocence will come; a virginity will come out of it — but that will be a transcendence. Through experience one transcends.

Moving in the dark alleys of life one’s eyes become trained, and one starts seeing the light even in darkness. What beauty is there if you can see light while there is day! The beauty is there when there is the darkest night, and your eyes are so trained into darkness that you can see the day hidden there. When in the darkest night you can see the morning, then there is beauty, then you have achieved. When in the lowest you can see the highest, when even in hell you can create a heaven, then, then you have become the artist of life. And tantra wants to make you the artists of life — not deniers, but great yea-sayers. Accept, and, by and by, you will feel the more you accept, the less is there desire. If you accept, how can desire stand there? Whatsoever the case is in this moment, you accept it. Then there is no movement for anything else. You live it moment to moment in deep acceptance. You grow without there being any goal, without there being any desire to go somewhere and be something else or somebody else.

Tantra says, “Be yourself” — and that is the only being you can achieve ever. With acceptance desires fall. With acceptance, a desirelessness comes into being by itself. You don’t practice it, you don’t force it upon yourself. You don’t cut your desires — just by accepting, they disappear.

And when suddenly one moment happens that you accept totally and all desires have gone, there is a sudden enlightenment. Suddenly, without doing anything on your part, it happens. That’s the greatest gift this existence can give to you. This is the tantra attitude towards life. There is no other life than this, and there is no other world than this. This very SAMSARA is the nirvana.

Just you have to be a little more understanding, more accepting, more childlike, less egoistic.

Source:

This is an excerpt from the transcript of a public discourse by Osho in Buddha Hall, Shree Rajneesh Ashram, Pune.

Discourse Series: Tantra: The Supreme Understanding

Chapter #5

Chapter title: The Innate Truth

15 February 1975 am in Buddha Hall

References:

Osho has spoken on ‘Tantra’ in many of His discourses. More on the subject can be referred to in the following books/discourses:

The Tantra Vision, Vol 1, 2
Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, Vol 1, 2
The Beloved, Vol 1
The Book of Wisdom
The Path of the Mystic
The Search
The Secret
The Secret of Secrets, Vol 1, 2
The Supreme Doctrine
The Zen Manifesto: Freedom From Oneself