Osho: Man has three layers: the body, mind and the soul. So whatsoever you do, you can do in three ways. Either it can be just from the body, or it can be from the mind, or it can be from the soul. Whatsoever you do, any act of yours, can have three qualities. Sex is love through the body; romantic love is sex through the mind; compassion is through the soul. But the energy is the same. Moving in a deeper way, its quality changes but the energy is the same.
If you live your love life only through the body, you live a very poor love life because you live very superficially. Sex, just of the body, is not even sex — it becomes sexuality. It becomes pornographic; it becomes a little obscene; it becomes a little brutal, ugly because it has no depth in it. Then it is just a physical release of the energy. Maybe it helps you to become a little less tense, but just to become a little more relaxed you are losing tremendously valuable energy.
If it can become love, you will not be losing it. In the same act you will be gaining also. On the physical level, there is only loss — sex is simply a loss of energy. Sex is a safety valve in the body: when the energy is too much and you don’t know what to do with it, you throw it out. You feel relaxed because you are emptied of energy. A sort of rest comes because the restless energy is thrown out, but you are poorer than before; you are emptier than before.
So very soon, sex becomes meaningless. And a person who has known only sex of the body and has not known the deeper dimension of love becomes mechanical. His sex is just a repetition of the same act again and again. It is miserable. It simply gives you a mechanical release. You can become addicted to it: you don’t enjoy it then, but you will miss it. If you don’t go into it you will feel restless, if you go into it there is nothing in it.
At the most, people know something about what they call romantic love — that too is not love; that is repressed sex. When you don’t have the possibility of making a sexual contact that repressed energy becomes romance. Then that repressed energy starts becoming cerebral, it starts moving into the head. When sex moves from the genital organs toward the head, it becomes romance. Romantic love is not really love, it is pseudo; it is a false coin. It is again the same sex but the opportunity was not there.
In the past ages, people lived very much in romantic love because sex was not so easy. It was very difficult; society created so many obstacles. Sex was so difficult that people had to repress it. That repressed energy would start moving into their heads, would become poetry, painting and romance, and they would have dreams, beautiful dreams.
OSHOSPEAK
1. Man has three layers: the body, mind and soul. So whatsoever you do, you can do in three ways.
2. If you live your love life only through the body, you lead a poor love life because you live superficially.
3. In love, body and mind meet. The other’s presence is so fulfilling that it completes you.
Now that has disappeared, particularly in the west. In the east it is still there. In the west it has disappeared because sex has become available. So much of it is available, more than you need, and that has created a problem. Romantic love has disappeared. Now, no romantic poetry is being written in the west.
Love Is Healthy
Romantic love is the other side of physical sex, the repressed side. It is not love. Both are ill. What you call sex, sexuality and romantic love, both are ill states of affairs. When body and mind meet, there is love. Love is healthy. In sexuality only body is there, in romantic love only head is there. Both are partial.