75 of 75 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Only for conoisseurs!, December 18, 2003
This review is from: Sex Matters (Paperback)
This is the first book I have read from Osho, and I will say that he did a very good job in explaining important things, using few words and pages. It is a little book that will not take you much time to read. What will take longer is thinking about the important points the book makes.
One thing that is important to understand is that this is not a book about sex, at least not in the usual way. So if you are looking for tricks about how to improve your sex life, you are in the wrong place. Instead, this is a work that will give you a different perspective of what sex should be and mean. Is it only for people who believe in the spirit and spiritual evolution.
It will also tell you that the lessons that religion and church sometimes teach -- that sex is sinful, etc. -- is completely mistaken. The book states that it is this teaching we received while young that made this society depraved.
Osho considers that our contemporary society completely forgot about the sacramental and fundamental role mankind once gave to sex. From his point of view, a sexual experience should be a thoughtful act, an experience of love, a means to reach what is beyond our consciousness.
The journey to from sex to to what Osho calls Samadhi (the divine ecstasy) is long, but this should be our final goal. The kind of love that we all know and desire is only the first step. But people who refuse even this first step will never be able to reach the second and from this point of view they will never evolve spiritually.
The main point is that sex is not a end to itself, it is only the beginning, it is only a means through which people who understand the subject correctly can reach the final goal - the "super consciousness."
If you are not interested in topics like spirituality and spiritual evolution, I think you should not buy this book. But if you are open to this, reading Sex Matters will be an extremely interesting and challenging experience that will give you a different take on life. Enjoy!
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34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An antidote to stagnant thinking...., August 25, 2008
This review is from: Sex Matters (Paperback)
I was watching Oprah Winfrey the other day and she had this couple on and it was a man and a woman, married with children, but the guy was all dressed and made himself up to look like a woman so it looked like a pair of women. And they were going to stick it out, blah, blah... but in the two minutes I watched it the man who looked like a woman said: "Sex is between the legs and gender is in the head," which obviously was a rationalizing definition. Oprah nodded somberly, repeated the definition, and then she said, "I get it." My point here is that a lot of people say a lot of stupid things about sex and a lot of people go along with it.
The point is made throughout Osho's work that religion and culture is more to blame for violent sex and deviant attitudes about sex than pornographers by repression and shame. This book is about psychology and spirituality and the sexual experience. That is Osho's point; get rid of your conditioning; you have been conditioned by thousands of years of culture which has poisoned your perceptions. He also makes the point that love is rare, that most people don't love and they don't know they don't love.
He states that while most marriages are composed of ugliness, painted faces and everything dead inside, the point of marriage is a deep spiritual communion, a training ground for egolessness (149):"There are many things you can never develop alone. Even your own growth needs someone to respond-someone so intimate that you open yourself to him or her." Osho makes the point that a marriage which is a spiritual communion is vastly different than a marriage with simply a physical or psychological basis, that their offspring will be radically evolved humans, hopefully the future of mankind.
Well, Osho is all about the evolution of human potential and he may have something. He speaks of a future where people live religion and no longer talk about it, where the new man will not be a talker but will live life, a time of no longer "great men" but rather of a general lifting of the quality of humanity. He speaks a future where sex is nobody else's concern and is more like a game, a dance of two energies together, than a serious affair. Osho is remarkable, especially so when you consider that he was born in backwater India and died in 1990, he did an astounding job of identifying how to acheive consciousness and identifying evolutionary trends. His thesis is that the evolution of everything has to be for a reason, for refinement of humankind, a progression towards connection with their souls and producing less volume and higher quality human beings. Osho is anti-formal religion like Eckhart Tolle. This perspective is that religion is inside of us naturally and the external formalized dogmas and culture got it mostly wrong.
The goal is to detach from your ego, to let the ego wither and die from lack of attention. In order to do that, you must witness yourself, stand apart and know yourself and when you acheive the loss of your ego you will experience timelessness and superconsciousness. He says (132): "Sexuality is a simple biological phenomenon. It should not be given so much importance. Its only significance is that the energy can be transformed into higher planes; it can become more and more spiritual. And the way to make it more spiritual is to make it less serious."
The thrust of his argument is that sexual energy is the ONLY energy of life and we can use the sexual experience to open the gateway of our consciousness to our soul by meditation/being aware/witnessing/encountering the whole process during sex instead of just cycling the energy and acheiving nothing. He states that if you don't have sexual energy you don't have the energy to transform; lukewarm people have difficulty reaching enlightenment. Love (heart) will pull the energy upward. Meditation (head) will pull the love energy up. Osho cautions against doing dull things, being dull in conversation, but advocates full energy, passion as a way of life.
He challenges everything: don't fall in love (biological and invasive and blind), rise in love (spiritual and respectful and insightful). On page 206 he talkes about couples who have "risen in love" and their synchronicity, understanding without words, energies relating directly without words. Consciousness as the master, not biology; companions of each other, not masters of one another. He says to go on developing/discovering the love inside you because a loving heart will attract a loving heart.
He sees tantric sex as a way out of unconsciousness, along with meditation during your everyday life. But Osho's point is that the sexual experience is so charged with energy and potential consciousness that it is unique and can bring you to egolessness and timelessness. Ultimately, Osho states that sexual energy will turn away from physical sex and that bio-electrical energy will convert to great love and great compassion.
Osho makes the point that even medicine has gotten into the culture on the subject informing people that they are healthier with more frequent sex. So people are being led by common culture to think frequency is the goal. Osho takes the point that you should only do it when you are flowing at a higher level so that the experience adds to your totality, your consciousness, and not using sex for other goals or letting it become boring. Osho writes (page 265): "Wait for the right moment. There are a few spaces - they come; nobody can manage them. Sometimes they are there. They are just divine gifts. One day suddenly you feel you are flowing. You don't have any weight, feel like you are flying. Some day you feel that you would like to give everything you can to your woman; that is the right moment. Meditate, dance, sing, and let love happen amid dance, singing, meditation, prayer. Then it will have a different quality - the quality of the sacred... When love becomes sacred, it simply makes you so contented, so tremendously at ease and at home." Not for the sake of duty, not because there is nothing to do, not as a path to reconciliation or just to satisfy the person you are living with. Only out of joy. That's one message among many.
The book (and his others) are an argument for tantric sex and other ways to become conscious and superconscious. Tantric sex is not really about sex; it is meditation in everything you do all day and night, including sex. Now, back in the 70s these concepts were tossed around more with young adults than nowadays, but it was also held up to ridicule and misrepresentation by the middle-aged and older people who thought it was just a bunch of crass hippy stuff. While the lowest experience of sex is relief, like a sneeze, tantric sex is meditation during sex, which is a whole different experience. Energy is recycled and creative and takes the experience to a higher plane in which ego and time vanish. It is not just about making an experience memorable; it is about continuing to evolve your consciousness, and create new circuitry. In the 70s we were determined not to be embarrassed about sex, to deconstruct sexual conditioning, and some people were content with that goal. But there was more; there were people who were constructing notions of being careful with your sexuality but in a different way, sex as a luxury not a need, as part of a whole life-awareness to achieve higher consciousness. To be a witness, to increase your aliveness and to aspire to a higher level of consciousness with your sexualilty is very different than simply seeking multiple experiences with multiple partners. The goal of tantric sex is that only by remaining aware does past conditioning not enter the experience and a new circuit is created... circuitry into a higher consciousness that remains with you outside the sexual experience. The mind becomes empty, centered, and old ideas drop away. You and your partner can dissolve into the greater energy and drop the ego from the heart. If you don't work on transcending your ego you will end up old with "very strengthened deep-rooted ego," a 70-80 year old ego. In contrast, childhood is nostalgic because the child feels himself or herself part of the cosmic flow, pre-ego.
A few points as a lot of science has been done that would be taking into consideration:
1. Osho is for people not being shamed by their bodies or overstimulated by nudity, sexual experiementation for males and females alike, which is the direction things are going mainly due to birth control and condoms for protection against pregancy and disease. However, sexual experimentation with multiple partners for women has a biological drawback which is that oxytocin is excreted creating a bonding effect during the sexual experience. Data indicates that this can "wear out" and young women having multiple partners appear to reach a point where they cannot "fall in love" biologically even with their spouse and perhaps affect bonding with their children. Psychologically, the risk is that either sex could bond with the wrong person in casual experiementation.
2. Neurotheology is being questioned. Is it that when the brain stops mysteriously God happens or are we looking at a predictable neuron thing? Brain-mapping indicates that the poserior superior parietal lobe weaves sensory data into the feeling of self ends and the rest of the world begins. If that becomes inactive by deprvivation of sensory input, by inward concentration, the orientation area of the brain cannot find the border between self and the world. The brain has no choice but to perceive the brain to be endless, to be connected with everything - one with creation, exactly what mystics report as a result of prolonged meditation.
It seems to me, however, that there is a lot to say for not entrenching one's ego, that it is beneficial...
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