From The Intelligent Optimist Magazine

Fall/Winter 2016

Selfishness stands in the way of fulfilling sexual love. As long as man is only chasing his own excitement, woman chooses selfishness as well and love is neglected and ignored. Loveless sex and ongoing suffering is the result. There’s another, divine way of love.

By Barry Long

Woman has learned to make love through man who does not know how to make love. Hence the dreadful mess that love is in. Since time began she has been manipulated and encouraged to feel that the finest expression of her love is to please men sexually. The truth is the other way round, The finest expression of love is to have man delight her sexually. This he can only do when he can forget his preoccupation with orgasm and excitement and be sufficiently selfless or present in love to collect and receive her divine energies. For him, these are the finest expression of her love.

By teaching her to please him and satisfy him down through the ages, man has taught woman to want him and to project herself sexually to make herself exciting to him. He addicted her to an emotional and physical craving for his sexual attention. And he did this by neglecting to love her.

Woman had no affirmation of love, her true nature, since there was no man to love her rightly. So she settled for sexual excitation, which men had persuaded her was love. Men addicted her to this by teaching her that there is no purpose to physical love outside of making babies or selfish pleasure.

Man in his selfishness taught woman to be selfish. He taught her to excite him physically whenever love was not present; to project herself sexually for their mutual entertainment, through clothing, make-up, dance and posing. And he encouraged her to let him excite her (and himself) through digital stimulation of her clitoris to the point of orgasm, instead of loving the beauty of her whole body.

The loveless narcotic of sex numbed her and like all addictions, engendered fear — fear of losing him or his attention, and fear of other women in the form of jealousy and female competition. If she didn’t satisfy him another woman soon would. And with this went the intimidating thought sown in her by all her sexual partners, that if she didn’t comply she’d be left all alone.

Woman’s subconscious dependence on the fluctuating sexual attention of men rules her choice of partner. She may go for either an exciting man whom she thinks she can control, or an agreeable and safe partner whom she can quietly bend to her wants. Both kinds of partner-ship usually end — either in disaster, or boredom and indifference.

‘Woman in her natural state is not dependent on man. She loves him. And in love there is no dependence, no attachment, and no fear of losing. She is the passive, attracting principle. She is an irresistible living magnet. She draws to herself a right man to love her truly and divinely. There’s no choice in it.

For woman today to return to her natural golden state takes time. But having suffered enough from man’s sexuality she gradually learns not to compromise where there is not enough love. Finally this brings her a man who can remove the shadow from woman who is his love.

A woman is only ever less than her true nature because of man’s lack of love. She went off into her dream to escape his sexuality. Her babies have long been a substitute for his love. Unlike man, a real woman can exist without sexual intercourse or masturbation. She waits for love, not sex. Woman only lusts for man when she identifies with the male sexuality he has induced in her. ‘Nymphomania’ is a male invention and fantasy projection, like sex-shops, pornography and prostitution, all kept going by male sexuality and lack of love in all concerned.

Woman has been utterly fooled by man, pathologically brainwashed. And as modern woman congratulates her-self on her progress in breaking down male domination in the world, she fails to perceive that she is as firmly hooked as ever on his orgasmic sexuality and his clitoral substitute for love, Her protests are really about love, not, equality; but that’s not heard in the strident male arena. It is man’s world and he built it on the strength of sexual aggression. Male domination began in sex and in sex it continues unabated. Woman cannot alter this position by marching with banners or withdrawing from sex. She has tried all the means at her disposal down through the centuries; none has worked and none will. The solution is now beyond the scope of any personal or social action. Only consciousness beyond the person or divine action can help.

Man can never be happy for long — until he has made sufficient love to replace his selfish attachment to sexual games-playing and sexual entertainment. Since world progress is his own clever invention to escape this responsibility, he has devised almost foolproof contraception methods (chemical: the pill; and surgical: vasectomy) to ensure the service of his own pleasure at the expense of love.

Man and woman today can enter the consciousness of love, which lies behind the part of the brain that controls the genitals. This is done through right loving, by being the feeling in the vagina or penis; by not trying to stay aloof, or hold on to a separate identity. Then the two poles of love on earth, the masculine and the feminine, are united in the magical consciousness, the divine presence of their mutual godhead.

In very few men or women is the body above the waist integrated with the body below it. The function of man or the masculine principle is to unify these two poles of love in woman. Although there is the same lack of integration in him, he only has to focus on loving and delighting his partner; everything will flow from that, including the resolution of his own sexual disharmony and frustration.

When woman’s whole system flows freely she is fulfilled with divine love. For this union of the upper and lower in the body, the ideal and the earthy, the unattainable and the attainable, produces the single current of divine love, a radiant golden energy. And when this is fully achieved, women are reunited with the original woman—physically, psychological and spiritually.

Love is actually only made between the penis and the vagina. Love made has a very profound function. It actually reduces the excitement in the sub-conscious or self. As you continue the process of making love, engaging in a minimum of foreplay, you will reach a stage of knowledge that you are no longer as excitable or projective as you were in the beginning. A demonstration of this will be a noticeable decrease in both of you in what was once considered normal emotional behaviour. Accompanying this will be a growing sense of stillness and peace and an increasing subtle detachment from worry and anxiety in the every-day life.

It’s all a matter of consciousness, of being more conscious. Consciousness means absence of excitement, absence of wanting and trying, absence of projection, absence of self. In absence, consciousness remains. Consciousness is the power to register what’s happening through the senses or body without using past experience to interpret it. This means that love starts to disappear as a feeling and is replaced by the direct sensation or knowledge of pleasure, a very rare state indeed. The way most people are today, the sensory pleasure is interpreted through the past and is therefore net conscious or immediate.

Consciousness converts the physical act into something profound and spiritually meaningful. Whereas lack of consciousness makes the act a coarser and more animalistic activity which produces all the emotional disturbances and conflicts you see within you and around you. The power of consciousness is always towards the realisation of God, the Most High, the non-existent and liberates the being from the old animalistic Identification.

Consciousness is holiness because there’s no self in it no personal gratification or selfish motivation.

Consciousness is what this whole teaching of love is about. So I must now speak to you from the point of consciousness which is the God point or love point that you and everybody on earth are endeavouring to make real as your own being.

In consciousness, woman represents the holy shrine and man, the holy worshipper of that shrine. Woman’s genital organ is the shrine; and the vital power in man’s penis is the worshipper. So we find in the experience of being human the compulsive need of man to worship at the shrine. His greatest desire is to get down on his knees before the shrine, to have the guardian pillars or thighs of the shrine open to him and then, parting the curtain of the shrine, to gaze into its mystery.

His next move is to experience the shrine with his other senses, to touch it, taste it, smell it and finally through his holy instrument of full penetration, to enter it. All this should be done in worship, that is in love that transcends every thought and feeling in the interchange of consciousness between the two. For as man looks and sees consciously so does the female part look back at him in consciousness. He is looking into the eye of God in existence.  This is where man and woman as separate beings vanish and the mystical union of consciousness occurs.

By practising together to make love rightly, without self-indulgence, without seeking emotional satisfaction and self-gratification, you will draw closer to the realisation of consciousness or love itself, and the conscious, timeless union of the male and female principles as one ineffable divine presence, realised as your own reality, the sublime selfless spirit of love and life. 

Excerpted with permission from Barry Long: Making Love, Sexual Love The Divine Way Barry Long Books, 1998

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Transforming sex into love

It is sexual energy that transforms into love. Humans have been set up against their own energy. On the surface, human beings are taught to support the dropping of all conflicts, all fights, all struggles. But deep down they are essentially being taught to fight: “The mind is poison, so fight against it.” And on the surface we are asked to drop all conflicts! The very teachings that are the basis of man’s inner conflict ask him to drop conflict! On one hand, drive people mad, and on the other, open asylums to treat them. On one hand spread the germs of sickness, and on the other build hospitals to treat the sick.

It is very important to understand one thing in this context. Human beings can never be separated from sex. Sex is the very source of one’s life; one is born out of it. Existence has accepted the energy of sex as the starting point of creation, and your holy men call it sinful… something that existence itself does not consider a sin!

You see a flower in bloom– have you ever considered that the blossoming of a flower is an act of passion, a sexual act? What is happening as the flower blossoms? The butterflies will sit on it and carry its pollen, its sperm, to another flower. A peacock dances in full glory– a poet will sing songs to it, your saints will also be filled with joy at the sight of it. But aren’t they aware that the dance is an overt expression of passion, that it is primarily a sexual act? The peacock is dancing to seduce its beloved. The peacock is beckoning to his beloved, his spouse. The bird is singing, the peacock is dancing, the boy has become an adolescent, the girl has grown into a beautiful woman– these are all expressions of sexual energy. These are all different manifestations of sexual energy. All life, all expression, all flowering is basically sex energy.

One has not to fight with sex, but to create a friendship with it, and elevate the stream of life to the heights. Sex can become love. It is only sexual energy that flowers into the energy of love.

But we have filled humans with antagonism toward sex, and the result is that not only has love not flowered in them– because love is an evolution beyond sexual energy, and can come only through acceptance of it– but their minds have become more and more sexual because of the opposition to sex. All our songs, all our poetry, all our art and paintings, all our temples and the statues in them have directly or indirectly become centered around sex. Our minds revolve around sex. No animal in the world is sexual like human beings are. Human beings are sexual around the clock– awake or asleep, sitting or walking, sex has become everything to them. Because of the enmity toward sex, because of this opposition and suppression, it has become like an ulcer to their being.

I want to say to you that sex is godly. The energy of sex is divine energy, godly energy. That is why this energy creates new life. It is the greatest, most mysterious force of all. 

Drop this antagonism toward sex. If you ever want love to shower in your life, renounce this conflict with sex. Accept sex blissfully. Acknowledge its sacredness. Acknowledge its benediction. Go on searching deeper and deeper into it, and you will be amazed that the more you accept sex with a quality of sacredness, the more sacred it will become.   

From Sex Matters, Osho, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2002, Copyright © 2002, Osho International Foundation, www.osho.com All rights reserved.