Love has to arise out of lust. If you avoid lust, you will be avoiding the whole possibility of love itself. Love is not lust, true; but love is not without lust – that too is true. Love is higher than lust, yes, but if you destroy lust completely, you destroy the very possibility of the flower arising out of the mud. Love is the lotus, lust is the mud the lotus arises out of. Remember it; otherwise you will never attain love.
At the most, you can pretend that you have transcended lust. Because without love, nobody can transcend lust; you can repress it. Repressed, it becomes more poisonous. It spreads into your whole system, it becomes toxic, it destroys you. Lust transformed into love gives you a glow, a radiance. You start feeling light, as if you can fly. You start gaining wings. With lust repressed you become heavy, as if you are carrying a weight, as if a big rock is hanging around your neck. With lust repressed, you lose all opportunities to fly in the sky. With lust transformed into love, you have passed the test of existence. You have been given a raw material to work, to be creative. Lust is raw material.
If you want to become a Buddha, then don’t be afraid of sex. Move into it, know it well, become more and more alert about it. Be careful; it is tremendously valuable energy. Make it a meditation and transform it, by and by, into love. It is raw material, like a raw diamond: you have to cut it, polish it; then it becomes of tremendous value. If somebody gives you an unpolished, raw, uncut diamond, you may not even recognize that it is a diamond. Even the Kohinoor in its raw state is worthless.
Lust is a Kohinoor: it has to be polished, it has to be understood. He questioner seems to be afraid and antagonistic: “It is all my hidden cravings for sex and all that.” There is a condemnation in it. Nothing is wrong; man is a sexual animal. That’s how we are. That’s the way life means us to be. That’s how we have found ourselves here. Go into it. Without going, you will never be able to transform it. I’m not speaking for mere indulgence. I’m saying move into it with deep meditative energy to understand what it is. It must be something tremendously valuable because you have come out of it, because the whole existence enjoys it, because the whole existence is sexual.
Sex is the way God has chosen to be in the world, notwithstanding what Christians go on saying — that Jesus was born out of a virgin woman — all foolishness. They pretend that sex was not involved in Jesus’ birth. They are so afraid of sex that they create foolish stories like this: that Jesus is born out of a virgin Mary. Mary must have been very pure, that’s true; she must have been spiritually virgin, that is true — but there is no way to enter into life without passing through the energy that sex is. The body knows no other law. And nature is all-inclusive: it believes in no exceptions, it allows no exceptions.
You are born out of sex, you are full of sex energy. But this is not the end; this may be the beginning. Sex is the beginning but not the end. There are three types of people. One thinks that sex is the end also. They are the people who live a life of indulgence. They miss, because sex is the beginning but not the end. Then there are people who are against indulgence. They take the other, the opposite extreme: they don’t want sex even to be the beginning, so they start cutting it. Cutting it, they cut themselves. Destroying it, they destroy themselves, they wither away. Both are foolish attitudes. There is the third possibility: the possibility of the wise man who looks at life, who has no theories to enforce on life, who just tries to understand. He comes to see that sex is the beginning but not the end. Sex is just an opportunity to grow beyond it, but one has to pass through it. – OSHO
