CHAPTER 10. THE ORIGINAL SIGNATURE
If you have not loved your own body ever, then when somebody else loves your body you will shrink because you don’t know how to open. And if you have never loved your body and you have been taught to hate it, despise it, condemn it, when somebody else starts loving your body you will feel, ’How foolish. How is it possible? How can anybody love MY body?’ And you will not be able to love somebody else’s body either, because bodies are bodies – yours or others, does not make any difference. Body is body. First the body has to be loved, in deep reverence. In a more enlightened age, children will be taught how to love their body with respect, reverence, because the body is the temple of God. And from there their love will start flowering and will take a right direction. The second kind of love is homo. That too is normal, natural. First the child loves himself, and then, naturally, he loves somebody who is like himself – that is a natural growth. A boy cannot suddenly love a girl, that is going too far. The girl is so different, another kind of animal. The girl cannot love the boy immediately, a bridge is needed. To move from oneself to the opposite polarity one has to go through somebody like oneself. So from the masturbatory stage love moves to the homosexual stage. The boy will love a boy, the girl will love a girl. This is perfectly natural; there is nothing of pathology in it. Pathology comes in only when somebody is stuck. If somebody is stuck at the first stage and is not able to love anybody, then there is some pathology. Then somebody can be stuck at the second stage – the second stage is better than the first but lower than the third. One should take the jump and the man should be able to love the woman, and the woman should be able to love the man. That is the hetero stage – the polar opposite. This is the natural course. And then there is the fourth kind – the transcendence.. When you have passed all these three stages naturally, totally, a moment comes when you transcend sexuality. You are no more interested in sex – sex as such – your body, somebody else’s body . Men’s or women’s bodies don’t interest you. Not that you have any condemnation about the body; in fact, bodies disappear – there are only souls. The body is just the outermost core of it. It is a great shift in your consciousness. That is the fourth stage, the stage of the SIDDHA. In India we have called the fourth stage BRAHMACHARYA – the state of being divine. But that comes not by denying the third, not by denying the second, not by denying the first. It comes only if you go on fulfilling each plane in its own right. Now there are a few things to be understood. The hetero relationship is the most difficult relationship, the most inconvenient, conflicting, because two opposite polarities are there – man and woman. They exist differently, hence they are attracted to each other... because they are so different, so mysterious to each other. Man has never been able to understand how the mind of the woman functions, and so is the case from the woman’s side too. They are such different dimensions, hence the attraction to explore each other. But the difficulty is also there. Men and women love each other and hate each other; are together and are continuously nagging, fighting, struggling. There is a constant effort to dominate the other. So the hetero relationship is the most inconvenient, although the most fulfilling too. So there is a danger, but there is a thrill. The danger is that there will be conflict, continuous fight. But only through that fight is one fulfilled, and only through that fight does one transcend sex. Sufis: The People of the Path, Vol 1
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Osho