Ordinarily we think sex makes people loving - sex can never make people loving. In fact, it is sexuality that prevents love from growing - because it is the same energy that has to become love. It is being destroyed in sex. To become love, the same energy has to move to the heart centre.
There have been only two taboos in the world: sex and death. It is very strange why sex and death have been the two taboos not to be talked about, to be avoided. They are deeply connected. Sex represents life because all life arises out of sex, and death represents the end. And both have been taboo - don't talk about sex and don't talk about death.
Total relaxation is the ultimate. That's the moment when one becomes a buddha. That is the moment of realization, enlightenment, christ-consciousness. You cannot be totally relaxed right now. At the innermost core a tension will persist.
You ask me, "Will you say something more about relaxation? I am aware of a tension deep in the core of me and suspect that I have probably never been totally relaxed."
God is a synergetic experience. Science can never reveal it, philosophy can never come to it - only a poetic approach, a very passive, very loving approach, can.
If the mind wants to comprehend reality, it will have to come out of the past and the future. But coming out of the past and the future, it is no longer the mind at all. Hence the insistence of all the great masters of the world that the door to reality is no-mind.
When you are here and now, sitting totally, not jumping ahead, the miracle has happened. To be in the moment is the miracle.
The question of surrender is political, it is not a question of love. And relationship is not love at all; it means love has ended and relationship has begun. It begins very soon after the honeymoon - mostly in the middle of the honeymoon. It is not easy to live with another person whose life-style is different, whose likings are different, whose education and culture is different, and above all the other happens to be a woman - even their biology is different.
Freedom is not to be destroyed in the name of love. Freedom is a far higher value than your so-called love.
Sex has become more and more attractive because of its condemnation by priests
But ordinarily you think otherwise: you think if you are silent you will be sad. Ordinarily you think, how can you avoid sadness if you are silent? I tell you, the silence that exists with sadness cannot be true. Something has gone wrong. You have missed the path, you are off the track. Only celebration can give proof that the real silence has happened.
Participation is bliss because the whole universe is celebrating. Every moment it is celebrating. It is a great celebration, a constant celebration. Only we are not part of it. We have detached ourselves and are in misery. Man is in misery because of the mind. The flowers are participating in the celebration, the moon is participating, the stars are participating, the earth is participating, the oceans are participating, the air and the clouds - everything is participating in that continuous, eternal celebration.
But there is a world of difference between dancing and watching a dance performed by a group of professionals who are paid for it. You work hard during the day, and when you are tired in the evening you go to a concert to watch others dancing. It is all you can do, but it is not even an apology for celebration.
That's why real awareness always leads you beyond sex, and celibacy happens on its own accord. Because to be in sex you have either to be identified with the male or identified with the female. A real celibate is one who has gone beyond, who is neither.
If attachment is the conditioning factor, then non-attachment will become the unconditioning factor. If expectation leads you in misery, then non-expectation will lead you into non-misery. If anger creates a hell within you, then compassion will create a heaven. So whatsoever the process of misery, the reverse will be the process of happiness. Unconditioning means you have to understand the whole knotted phenomenon of human consciousness as it is.
When you are not the doer how can the attachment happen? You do a small thing and you become attached. You say, "I have done this." You would like everybody to know that you have done this and you have done that. This ego is the barrier for the supreme understanding. Drop the doer and let things happen. That's what Tilopa means by being loose and natural.
Attachment is misery, but from the very beginning the child is taught for attachment. The mother will say to the child, "Love me; I am your mother." The father will say, "Love me; I am your father" - as if someone is a father or a mother so he becomes automatically lovable.
Real health has to happen somewhere inside you, in your subjectivity, in your consciousness, because consciousness knows no birth, no death. It is eternal. To be healthy in consciousness means: first, to be awake; second, to be harmonious; third, to be ecstatic; and fourth, to be compassionate.
Life in its infinite forms exists as one organic unity. We are part of it: the part should feel reverence for the whole. That is the idea of vegetarianism. It simply means: don't destroy life. It simply means: life is God - avoid destroying it, otherwise you will be destroying the very ecology.
Pythagoras was the first to introduce vegetarianism to the West. It is of profound depth for man to learn how to live in friendship with nature, in friendship with creatures. That becomes the foundation. And only on that foundation can you base your prayer, your meditativeness. You can watch it in yourself: when you eat meat, meditation will be found to be more and more difficult.
That is the ultimate synthesis - when Zorba becomes a Buddha. I am trying to create here not Zorba the Greek but Zorba the Buddha.
Zorba is beautiful, but something is missing. The earth is his, but the heaven is missing. He is earthly, rooted, like a giant cedar, but he has no wings. He cannot fly into the sky. He has roots but no wings.
The inner emptiness is the door to God.
In rain during a dark night, enter that darkness.
The authentic religion teaches you to discover your immortality, to discover the god within you.