Tantric Sex for Men: Making Love a Meditation (2 page)

Our body of knowledge is based on personal experience and has been confirmed by thousands of couples who have passed through our weeklong residential “Making Love” retreats over the past twenty years. During the retreats there is no nudity, no partner swapping, and each couple arrives committed to each other for the week. The atmosphere is respectful, supportive, and professional. We sometimes share with couples how fortunate we feel to have the best work in the world. Actually, it is pure pleasure and not work at all. We experience unlimited joy in seeing couples rise in love out of stagnation right in front of our eyes, in a handful of days. This is not only one couple, but twenty-five or more couples simultaneously. Everything proceeds easily, gently, naturally, and with virtually no effort on our part.

Although sex has been practiced in certain ways for thousands of years, we don’t believe it has to continue in the same way forever. Over the years we have come to recognize that changing the way we make love changes and empowers our lives in loving, magical, mystical ways. However, this kind of transformation happens only through direct experience, and not by simply thinking that it sounds like a great idea. To gain access to insider knowledge, the experience has to be lived fully by the individual on a cellular level. Transforming our basic sex energy into its higher vibration of love, as described in the chapters ahead, raises the quality of love on personal, social, and cosmic levels of consciousness.

During our time working in the field of sexuality some couples who have attended our retreats have naturally separated and gone different ways. Our approach is not foolproof; rather, it depends on individual awareness, curiosity, and an interest in change. To our great astonishment, over the years we have witnessed a steady trickle of men returning to our retreats with a new lover. Actions are said to speak louder than words, and the return of so many men is their living endorsement of the immense value of changing the way one makes love. Once a man has been fortunate enough to have a taste of his male potency flowing into and through a woman, and being received by her, he naturally hopes to create similar experiences for himself in the future.

Sometimes women are more ready than men to change their sexual ways. If your woman is ready to embark on an adventure into the unknown, follow her lead and let her take you to new horizons. Give it a whirl; there is really nothing to lose. Quite possibly you will gain more love and insight than you can imagine.

Humans have progressed in countless amazing ways, yet sex, the dimension closest to home, remains unexplored territory. Perhaps now is the time to move beyond the familiar and take a step in human sexual evolution.

To those men and women who have already taken this step and have written to us about their profound personal experiences, we extend our deep gratitude to you for allowing us to use your words in encouraging others to explore their sexual potential.

Our spiritual master, Osho, formerly known as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, is the source of the tantric inspiration we now pass on to you. Osho’s interpretation of the ancient Tantra scriptures addresses the search for harmony, wholeness, and love that is at the core of all religious and spiritual traditions, and that is also an integral aspect of the tantric relationship between two people. It is our privilege to include some excerpts of Osho’s tantric inspiration throughout this book. His words, appearing in text form, were initially delivered as spontaneous oral discourses and later published in book form. The quotes included here are those that inspired us on our journey, and in no way represent the full range and extraordinary diversity of Osho’s spiritual insight into the human condition.

We are both vitally aware that our lives have been shaped by Osho in ways that could not have been imagined at the outset, and for this honor we extend to him our eternal love and gratitude.

Osho Speaks on Sex

Osho’s Spiritual Insight into the Human Condition

I have almost four hundred books in my name. Out of four hundred books there is only one book on sex, and that too is not really on sex; it is basically on how to transcend sex, how to bring the energy of sex to a sublimated state, because it is our basic energy. It can produce life. . . . It is only man who has the privilege to change the character and the quality of sexual energy. The name of the book is
From Sex to Superconsciousness
—but nobody talks about superconsciousness. The book is about superconsciousness; sex is only to be the beginning, where everybody is.

There are methods that can start the energy moving upwards, and in the East, for at least ten thousand years, there has developed a special science, Tantra. There is no parallel in the West of such a science. For ten thousand years people have experimented with how sexual energy can become your spirituality, how your sexuality can become your spirituality. It is proved beyond doubt—thousands of people have gone through the transformation. Tantra seems to be the science that is, sooner or later, going to be accepted in the whole world, because people are suffering from all kinds of perversions. That’s why they go on talking about sex as if that is my work, as if twenty-four hours a day I am talking about sex. Their repressed sexuality is the problem. My whole effort has been how to make your sex a natural, accepted phenomenon, so there is no repression—and then you don’t need any pornography; so that there is no repression—and then you don’t dream of sex. Then the energy can be transformed.

There are valid methods available through which the same energy that brings life to the world can bring a new life to you. That was the whole theme of the book. But nobody bothered about the theme, nobody bothered about why I have spoken on it. Just the word sex was in the title, and that was enough.

The book is not for sex; it is the only book in the whole existence against sex, but strange. . . . The book says that there is a way to go beyond sex, you can transcend sex—that’s the meaning of “from sex to superconsciousness.” You are at the stage of sex while you should be at the stage of superconsciousness. And the route is simple: sex just has to be part of your religious life, it has to be something sacred. Sex has to be something not obscene, not pornographic, not condemned, not repressed but immensely respected, because we are born out of it. It is our very life source. And to condemn the life source is to condemn everything. Sex has to be raised higher and higher to its ultimate peak. And that ultimate peak is
samadhi,
superconsciousness.

OSHO, TRANSCRIBED TEACHINGS,
SEX MATTERS: FROM SEX TO SUPERCONSCIOUSNESS

Tantric Inspiration

And about sex also people are very, very worried. That very worry and that very effort to do something is the problem. Sex happens; it is not a thing that you have to do. So you have to learn the eastern attitude toward sex, the Tantra attitude. The Tantra attitude is that you be loving to a person. There is no need to plan, there is no need to rehearse in the mind. There is no need to do anything in particular: just be loving and available. Go on playing with each other’s energy. And when you start making love there is no need to make it great. Otherwise you will be pretending and so will the other person. He will pretend that he is a great lover and you will pretend that you are a great lover . . . and both are unsatisfied. There is no need to pose anything. It is a very silent prayer. Making love is meditation. It is sacred, it is the holiest of holies. So while you are making love, go very slowly . . . with taste, taking in every flavor of it. And very slowly: there is no hurry, no need to hurry, enough time is there.

OSHO, TRANSCRIBED TEACHINGS,
THE OPEN SECRET

1

MALE BURDEN OF PERFORMANCE

Sex plays a central and crucial role in the life of a man from his early years onward, and remains significant regardless of whether a man is often having sex, seldom having sex, or not having sex at all. Since sex is pivotal to life, there are underlying aspects to the act that get hidden from sight, never brought into the light of day to be examined or questioned. Scratch the surface a little, however, and surprisingly soon men will start to express their feelings. Most men freely admit they would like to have sex more often, yet again and again they share with us in our seminars that as important as sex is, it is also experienced as a burden and a form of stress, which is sometimes subtle, other times not so subtle. The pressures implicit in sex can become a source of anxiety, which gives rise to a sense of insecurity and a lack of self-confidence.

When a man first gets together with a woman there is considerable pressure to be a good lover; perhaps he will even attempt to be the best lover this particular woman has ever had. There are many expectations, and the stakes are high. First, there has to be an erection, which is not guaranteed even in the most ideal situation, as we all know. Next, if and when the erection happens, it has to be maintained for as long as possible, which means that a certain level of stimulation and excitement is required. At the same time the man is praying that he doesn’t ejaculate too quickly, at least not before the woman has her orgasm. And if everything works out just right, maybe it will even be possible to have an orgasm at the same time.

There are so many variables involved in the process that it is easy to get lost in the midst of monitoring and orchestrating the situation to best effect. At the beginning of a love affair a man’s stress and performance anxiety are usually more obvious to him (but hopefully not to her), since he is more directly confronted by his wish to be successful. But after a while, as the relationship begins to unfold and assume a more day-to-day familiarity, his anxieties about performance temporarily bury themselves under a comfortable sexual routine. Even when a man is not consciously aware of his insecurity in sex, he nonetheless carries the emotional tension around with him each and every day of his life.

And in truth, the bottom line is that a woman can criticize a man about many things—being a lousy cook, a bad driver, unsuccessful at work, or even a miserable father. These criticisms are not easy to receive, but somehow they are manageable. But when a woman dares to criticize our sexual behavior, when she brings our performance into question, the words hit home and touch us at our most vulnerable place, rattling our male ego. To be not appreciated or valued as a lover can be very difficult for a man to digest.

RELAXING INSTEAD OF PERFORMING

Whether we are aware of it or not, much of our personality, identity, and self-perception is rooted in sex and in how we perceive ourselves as sexual beings. Sex also acts as a confirmation of our power and potency, thereby becoming connected—consciously or unconsciously—with pressure and performance in an attempt to prove our true value and worth.

Men who begin to experiment with a relaxed style of sex, as outlined in the chapters ahead, say it is an unbelievable relief to have the stress taken out of sex. All the big-time action that is unquestioningly accepted as part of sex simply falls away, because there is no longer a need for it. To relax in sex a man needs to be encouraged to abandon the idea that he, as the man, is 100 percent responsible for the quality of the shared sexual experience, whether it is very good, quite good, or unsatisfactory. In place of carrying the overall responsibility for the sexual interaction, which involves tremendous effort on his part, the man can discover how to simply
be
in sex—intensely present, in the here and now—and explore a more relaxing style of sex that does not include performance, effort, or tension.

Removing the Goal Removes the Pressure