Sex to Superconsciousness
About This Book
Sex to Superconsciousness is one of Osho's most controversial and most intellectually serious works — a sustained argument that the spiritual repression of sexuality that has characterised most of the world's major religious traditions has produced, rather than reducing, the obsessive preoccupation with sex that characterises modern culture, and that the genuine spiritual transformation of sexual energy (rather than its repression or its indulgence) is both possible and necessary for genuine spiritual development. The book began as a series of discourses in 1968 and caused immediate controversy in India — where Osho's combination of explicit engagement with sexuality and insistence that the same energy that expresses itself as sexual desire is the energy that, when understood and redirected, expresses itself as the spiritual capacity for union with the divine was received as both profound and scandalous.
The central argument draws on the yogic and tantric understanding of energy as fundamentally one — the same prana that manifests in sexual desire also manifests in creative inspiration, in love, and in the states of expanded consciousness that meditation produces. The repression of sexual energy (attempting to prevent its expression without understanding or transforming its nature) does not redirect it upward but simply bottles it up, producing the neurotic preoccupation with sex that Osho observed in the most sexually repressive religious environments. The genuine transformation requires not repression but understanding — bringing conscious awareness to the experience of sexual energy so that its fundamental nature (the impulse toward union, toward dissolution of separateness, toward ecstasy) can be recognised and allowed to find its more universal expression.
What You'll Learn
• Understand the repression-obsession connection: Osho's specific argument that repression and obsession are not opposites but two sides of the same misunderstanding — that attempting to suppress sexual energy without understanding its nature produces the preoccupation with sex (in fantasy, in the distorted forms that repression takes) that it intends to prevent, and that the genuinely spiritual approach requires understanding rather than suppression
• Grasp the energy transformation teaching: the specific yogic and tantric understanding that sexual energy and spiritual energy are not two different things but the same energy at different levels of refinement — and how the conscious understanding of sexual experience (including its essentially unitive, ecstatic quality) can begin the process of redirecting this energy toward its more universal expressions
• Recognise the meditation connection: how Sex to Superconsciousness connects the teaching on sexuality to the practice of meditation — the understanding that genuine meditation produces a quality of inner expansion and ecstasy that is the more universal form of what the sexual impulse is reaching toward, and that the meditator who has developed genuine inner stillness does not repress sexuality but transcends the compulsive quality it has for the unmeditated consciousness
• Learn the tantric dimension: how Osho engages with the tradition of tantra — the approach that uses sexuality (along with other physical energies) as a vehicle for spiritual development rather than treating it as an obstacle — and how his own teaching relates to and differs from the traditional tantric schools
• Appreciate the cultural critique: how Sex to Superconsciousness situates its argument about sexuality and spirituality within a broader critique of religious culture — the specific ways in which spiritual traditions that repressed sexuality produced not saints but neurotics, not spiritual freedom but the particular form of psychological damage that comes from the systematic denial of a fundamental dimension of human experience
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