And it is simply energy. It can move in any direction, downwards, upwards. If you accept it, in the very acceptance it starts moving upwards because you are befriending it.  The moment you reject it you are creating an enmity, a division in yourself.

This division between God and devil is not just there in the holy books. It has penetrated you, it has made you schizophrenic. One part thinks, “This is me — the good part — and the bad part must belong to the devil.” You are split. Now, how are you going to change that part you have rejected from your being as not yours? It is there, and it is intensely powerful. Your rejection makes it more intense because you don’t use it, you go on collecting it, you go on repressing it.

Ninety percent of the mind diseases in the world are nothing but repressed sexuality, and fifty percent of body diseases are repressed sexuality. If we can accept sexuality naturally, ninety percent of your mental diseases will simply disappear, and fifty percent of physical diseases will simply disappear, leaving no trace behind. And you will find human beings, for the first time, in a totally new age of health, well-being, wholeness.

Only that wholeness is holy, when your schizophrenia is no longer there; when you are one, integratedly one — and courageous enough to accept everything, that, “This is me. Whatsoever it is, it is me, and I am going to make use of it the best I can?”

Sexual energy is another name for your life-force. The word ‘sex’ has become condemned by the religions; otherwise there is nothing wrong in it. It is your very life. Sexual energy is a natural energy: you are born out of it. It is your creative energy. When the painter paints or the poet composes or the musician plays or the dancer dances, these are all expressions of your life-force.

Not only are children born out of  sexual energy, but everything that man has created on the earth has come out of sexual energy. Sexual energy can have many transformations: at the lowest it is biological; at the highest it is spiritual. It has to be understood that all creative people are highly sexual. You can see the poets, you can see the painters, you can see the dancers: all creative people are highly sexual, and the same is true about the people whom I call the mystics. Perhaps they are the most sexual people on the earth, because they are so full of life energy, abundant, overflowing….

Sexual energy is your potentiality for spiritual growth. You can become enlightened only because of your sexual energy.  Has there ever been an enlightened, impotent person? There is no incidence recorded anywhere. An impotent person has never been a great poet either, or a great singer, or a great sculptor, or a great scientist. What is the problem with the impotent person? He has no life-force; he is hollow. He cannot create anything — and to create oneself as an enlightened being needs tremendous energy….

Sex has become a thing of the marketplace. On the one hand, religions have been repressing sexual energy and creating perversions which have culminated in the dangerous disease AIDS, which has no cure. The whole credit goes to religions, and if they have any sense of being human, then all the churches and all the monasteries and the Vatican itself should be turned into hospitals for the people suffering from AIDS, because these are the people who have created them. Theirs is the responsibility. They have forced men to live separately from women; they have insisted that celibacy is the very foundation of a religious life. But celibacy is unnatural, and anything unnatural cannot be the foundation of a religious life.

Because celibacy is unnatural, and religions have divided men and women into different monasteries, they have created the situation for homosexuality. They are the pioneers of homosexuality, and homosexuality has led to AIDS, which cannot be called simply a disease because it does not come into the category of diseases. It is death itself. So on the one hand religions have created perversions; on the other hand they insisted on monogamy, which in fact means monotony. That has created the profession of the prostitute. The priest is responsible for the prostitute. It is so ugly and sick that we have created objects, commodities, things to be exploited out of so many beautiful women.

Even today, it is not understood exactly what sex is. It need not be repressed, because it is your very energy. It has to be transformed, certainly; it has to be raised to its highest purity.  And as you start moving upwards — the name of the ladder is meditation— sex becomes love, sex becomes compassion, and ultimately sex becomes the explosion of your inner being, the illumination, the awakening, the enlightenment. But it is sexual energy: it can rot, it can go into perversions. But if it is to be understood naturally and helped through meditation to move upwards towards silent spaces, to pass through your heart and reach to the seventh centre at the highest point in your body, you will feel grateful towards the energy. Right now you feel only ashamed.

This shame and guilt is created by the religious organizations, founders of religion. Naturally the question arises: Why did they make sex a mess? And through making a mess of sex they have messed up the whole world and its mind and its growth. Why? — because this was the simplest way to keep humanity in slavery. This was the simplest way to keep people guilty, and anybody who feels guilty can never raise his head in revolt. So all the vested interests wanted man to lose his dignity, self-respect, to feel guilty, ashamed. They have been condemning sex continuously, and their condemnation has led the whole world into a very miserable, psychologically abnormal state….

All these crimes are perpetuated by your so-called virtuous leaders, religious saints. But they have been doing this harm for thousands of years. Rather than helping man to sublimate his energies, to make them creative, they have only been able to force man to repress his energies. And repressed energies become a cancer, repressed energies create all kinds of perversions.

Medicine has given man longer life. There are people in the Soviet Union who have passed their one hundred and eightieth year, and they are still young; there is every possibility that they will pass their second century. There are thousands who have passed beyond one hundred and fifty, and no religious leader condemns it, saying that medicine should be stopped from giving people health and longevity. No religious leader goes on saying that diseases should be allowed because they are God-created.

Medicine can be used; people can be made more healthy…and naturally when they are more healthy they are more sexually powerful. But, there should be birth control methods for two reasons: birth control methods will keep the world healthy, nourished; secondly, once birth control methods are used, sex loses its profanity — or its sacredness. It becomes simple fun, it becomes just a joyful exchange of energies. Birth control is the greatest invention that man has made. It is the greatest revolution because it can make man and woman equal, liberated. Otherwise the woman is constantly pregnant, and because of her pregnancy she cannot be independent financially, she cannot be independent educationally, she cannot be independent from man’s domination. Once she is free from being pregnant compulsorily she will have as much time, as much energy to be creative. Until now half of humanity has remained uncreative: no great poets, no great saints, no great musicians, no great artists. Women have had no time. Even the books on cookery are written by men, not by women. And the best cooks are men, not women: in all the great five-star hotels you will find great cooks, always men. Strange…that has been the domain of the woman forever, but she has no energy left. Because of these religious people she will never be liberated.

Sex energy has to be welcomed and transformed through the alchemy of meditation into higher states of being, into creativity in different dimensions, not only creating more and more children. Life has to be planned — it should not be accidental.”

How can you arrive at a natural death, living an unnatural life? Death will reflect the ultimate culmination, the crescendo of your whole life. In a condensed form, it is all that you have lived. So only very few people in the world have died naturally because only very few people have lived naturally. Our conditionings don’t allow us to be natural. Our conditionings, from the very beginning, teach us that we have to be something more than nature, that just to be natural is to be animal; we have to be supernatural. And it seems very logical. All the religions have been teaching this —that to be man means going above nature — and they have convinced centuries of humanity to go above nature. Nobody has succeeded in going above nature. All that they have succeeded in is destroying their natural, spontaneous beauty, their innocence. Man need not transcend nature. I say unto you, man has to fulfill nature — which no animal can do. That is the difference. The religions were cunning, cheating and deceiving people. They made the distinction that animals are natural and you have to be supernatural. No animal can do fasting; you cannot convince any animal that fasting is something divine. The animal only knows that it is hungry, and there is no difference between fasting and being hungry. You cannot convince any animal to go against nature.

This gave an opportunity to the so-called religious people, because man has the capacity at least to fight against nature. He will never be victorious, but he can fight. And in fighting he will not be destroying nature; he will be destroying only himself. That’s how man has destroyed himself — all his joy, all his love, all his grandeur — and has become not something higher than animals, but something lower, in every possible way. Perhaps you have never thought about it: no animal in the wild is homosexual. The very idea, and the whole world of animals will burst into laughter. It is simply stupid! But in a zoo, where females are not available, animals turn into homosexuals out of sheer necessity.

But man has turned the whole world into a zoo: millions and millions of people are homosexuals, lesbians, sodomists, and what-not — all kinds of perversions. And who is responsible? The people who were teaching you to go beyond nature, to attain supernatural divineness….

Whenever you enforce something, the result is not going to bring a betterment. In many spheres, by different religions, it has been tried to make man something above nature.  The result has been, without any exception, failure. You are born as a natural being. You cannot go above yourself. It is just like trying to lift yourself off the ground by pulling your legs. You may hop a little, but sooner or later you are going to fall to the ground, and you may have a few fractures. You cannot fly.

And that’s what has been done. People have been trying to raise themselves above nature, which means above themselves. They are not separate from nature, but the idea suited their egos: you are not animals so you have to be above nature; you cannot behave like animals.  People have even tried to make animals not behave like animals; they have tried to make them go a little above nature.

In the Victorian age in England dogs were clothed when people used to take them for a walk. The dogs had coats to prevent them being natural, to prevent them being naked and nude— which is suitable to animals. These kind of people are trying to raise their dogs a little higher than animals.

You can be more natural than any animal. You can go to the abysmal depths of nature, and you can go to the very heights of nature, but you will not be going beyond in any way. You will be becoming more natural, you will be becoming more multi-dimensionally natural. The religious man is not one who is above nature, but is the man who is totally natural, fully natural, who has explored nature in all its dimensions, who has not left anything unexplored.

Animals are prisoners; they have a certain limited area of being. Man has the capacity, the intelligence, the freedom to explore. And if you have explored nature totally, you have come home — nature is your home. And then death is a joy, is a celebration. Then you die without any complaint; you die with deep gratitude, because life gave you so much, and death is simply the ultimate height of all that you have lived.  It is just like before the flame of a candle goes out it burns brightest. The natural man, before he dies, lives brightest for a moment; he is all light, all truth. To me this is natural death. But it has to be earned, it is not given to you.  The opportunity is given to you, but you have to explore, you have to earn, you have to deserve.

Even to see the death of an authentic man, just to be near him while he is dying, you will be filled suddenly with a strange joy. Your tears will not be of sadness, sorrow; they will be of gratitude and blissfulness — because when a man dies naturally, living his life fully, he spreads his being into the whole of nature. Those who are present and close to him are bathed…a sudden freshness, a breeze, a new fragrance and a new feeling that death is not something bad, that death is not something to be afraid of that death is something to be earned, to be deserved.

Learn the art of life. But it can be called also the art of death. They are both the same.

Hindus have waited five thousand years for Krishna. He promised not only that he would come once, he promised that whenever there was misery, suffering, whenever vice was on top of virtue, whenever nice and simple and innocent people were exploited by the cunning and the hypocritical, he would come. But for five thousand years no sign has been seen of him.

Jesus has promised he will come, and when asked when, he said, “Very soon.” I can stretch “Very soon,” but not for two thousand years; that is too much. The idea that our misery, our pain, our anguish will be taken away is no longer appealing. The idea that there is a God who cares for us seems to be simply a joke.

Looking at the world, it doesn’t seem as if there is anybody who cares. In fact, in England there are almost thirty thousand people who are devil worshippers — just in England, a small part of the world. And their ideology is worth looking at in reference to your question. They say that the devil is not against God, the devil is God’s son. God has abandoned the world, and now the only hope is to persuade the devil to take care as God is not taking care. And thirty thousand people are worshipping the devil as a son of God…and the reason is they feel that God has abandoned the world — he no longer cares about it. Naturally, the only way is to appeal to his son; if somehow he can be persuaded by rituals, by prayer, by worship, perhaps the misery, the darkness, the sickness can be removed. This is a desperate effort.

The reality is that man has always lived in poverty. Poverty has one thing beautiful about it; it never destroys your hope, it never goes against your dreams, it always brings enthusiasm for tomorrow. One is hopeful, believing that things will be better: this dark period is already passing; soon there will be light. But that situation has changed. In the developed countries…and remember, the problem of depression is not in undeveloped countries — in the poor countries, people are still hopeful — it is only in the developed countries, where they have everything that they had always longed for. Now paradise will not do anymore; nor can a classless society help anymore.  No utopia is going to be better. They have achieved the goal — and this achievement of the goal is the cause of depression. Now there is no hope: tomorrow is dark, and the day after tomorrow will be even darker.

All these things that they have dreamed of were very beautiful. They had never looked at the implications of them. Now that they have got them, they have got them with the implications. A man is poor, but he has an appetite. A man is rich, but he has no appetite. And it is better to be poor and have an appetite than to be rich and have no appetite. What are you going to do with all your gold, all your silver, all your dollars? You cannot eat them. You have everything, but the appetite has disappeared for which you have been struggling all along. You succeeded — and I have said again and again that nothing fails like success. You have reached a place that you wanted to reach, but you were not aware of the by-products. You have millions of dollars, but you cannot sleep….

The experience that you went through is always possible when someone is dying All that is required is a little alertness. The man who was dying was aware — not much awareness is needed for this experience.

At the moment of death your physical body and your spiritual body start separating.  Ordinarily, they are so much involved with each other that you don’t feel their separation. But at the moment of death, just before death happens, both the bodies start getting unidentified with each other. Now their ways are going to be different; the physical body is going to the physical elements, and the spiritual body is on its pilgrimage onwards to a new birth, in a new form, in a new womb.

If a person is little alert he can see the body that is sick himself, and because the healthier body is you, and the body that is sick and dying is not you…. In those moments, to trust is very easy because it is happening just before the eyes of the person himself; he cannot identify with the body that is falling apart, and he can immediately recognize the fact that he is the healthier one, the deeper one.

The experience of  man, of getting unidentified with the physical body, immediately changed the energy in the room; it became silent, peaceful. But if you had learned the art of how to help a dying man, you would not have stopped where

you stopped. A second thing was absolutely necessary to tell him because he was in a trusting state — everybody is, at the moment of death.

It is life which creates problems and doubts and postponements, but death has no time to postpone. The man cannot say, “I will try to see,” or, “I will see tomorrow.” He has to do it right now, this very moment, because even the next moment is not certain. Most probably he is not going to survive. And what is he going to lose by trusting? Death, anyway, is going to take away everything. So the fear of trust is not there; time to think about it is not there. And a clarity is there that the physical body is getting farther and farther away.

“You are the healthier body.” The second step would be, “You are the witness of both the bodies; the body that is dying is physical, and the body that you are feeling is healthy is psychological. But who are you? You can see both the bodies…certainly you must be the third; you cannot be one of these two.” This is the whole process of the Bardo. Only in Tibet have they developed the art of dying. While the whole world has been trying to develop the art of living, Tibet is the only country in the world which has developed the whole science and art of dying. They call it the Bardo.

If you had told the person, “This is good that you have taken one step, you are out of the physical body; but now you have got identified with the psychological body. You are not even that, you are only awareness, a pure consciousness, a perceptivity….” If you could have helped the person to understand that he is neither this body nor that body, but something bodiless, formless, a pure consciousness, then his death would have been a totally different phenomenon.

You saw the change of energy; you would have seen another change of energy. You saw silence descending; you would have seen music also, a certain dancing energy also, a certain fragrance filling the whole space. And the man’s face would have shown a new phenomenon — the aura of light. If he had taken the second step also, then his death would have been the last death. In the Bardo they call it “the great death,” because now he will not be born into another form, into another imprisonment; now he will remain in the eternal, in the oceanic consciousness that fills the whole universe.

So remember it — it may happen to many of you. You may be with a friend or with a relative, your mother, your father. While they are dying, help them to realize two things: first, they are not the physical body — which is very simple for a dying man to recognize.  Second — which is a little difficult, but if the man is able to recognize the first, there is a possibility of the second recognition too — that he is not even the second body; he is beyond both the bodies. He is pure freedom and pure consciousness.

If he had taken the second step then you would have seen a miracle happening around him — something, not just silence, but something more alive, something belonging to eternity, to immortality. And all of you who were present there would have been overwhelmed with gratitude that this death has not been a time of mourning but it has become a moment of celebration.

If you can transform a death into a moment of celebration, you have helped your friend, your mother, your father, your brother, your wife, your husband. You have given them the greatest gift that is possible in existence. And close to death it is very easy. The child is not even worried about life or death; he has no concern. The young man is too much involved in biological games, in ambitions, in becoming richer, in becoming powerful, in having more prestige; he has no time to think of eternal questions. But at the moment of death, just before death is going to happen, you-don’t have any ambition. And whether you are rich or poor makes no difference; whether you are a criminal or a saint makes no difference. Death takes you beyond all discriminations of life and beyond all stupid games of life.

But rather than helping people, people destroy that beautiful moment. It is the most precious in a man’s whole life. Even if he has lived one hundred years, this is the most precious moment. But people start crying and weeping and showing their,  sympathy, saying, “This is very untimely, it should not happen.” Or they start consoling the person, saying, “Don’t be worried, the doctors are saying that you will be saved.”

These are all foolishnesses. Even the doctors play a part in these stupid things.  They don’t tell you that your death is coming. They avoid the subject; they go on giving you hope. They say, “Don’t be worried, you will be saved,” knowing perfectly well that the man is going to die. They are giving him a false consolation, not knowing that this is the moment when he should be made fully aware of death — so acutely and so impeccably aware that pure consciousness is experienced. That moment has become a moment of great victory. Now there is no death for him, but only eternal life.”