Ignorance can make one irreligious; knowing can never make one irreligious. And if knowing can cause irreligiousness, I would still say that knowing which may be making people irreligious, is preferable over ignorance which may be making people religious. Because with an ignorance making people religious, even that religiousness will be worthless – a religiousness based on ignorance! A religiousness can only be true if it is based on knowing. And I cannot see that knowing can ever be harmful in any way to a person. It is always the darkness, the ignorance that harms.

If humanity has become debased, if it has become perverted and insane about sex, mad about sex, the responsibility is not on those who have reflected and meditated on the subject of sex, have cultivated some knowledge about sex, but on the moralists, on the pseudo religious people, saints and clergy who for thousands of years have tried to keep man encased in ignorance. Humanity would have been freed from sexuality long ago, but this was not to be. And this was not to be because of those who have been trying to keep the ignorance about sex intact.

I felt that if just a little ray of truth created so much restlessness in people, then it was right to discuss the full spectrum, to clear up the question of whether knowing makes man religious or irreligious. This is the reason I chose this subject. Had this not been so, it would not have suddenly occurred to me to choose this subject. Perhaps I would not have talked on this topic at all. From this point of view, those people deserve to be thanked for creating the opportunity where I had to choose this topic. Therefore, if you have a mind to thank, it is not me; instead, thank those at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan who had arranged that first meeting. They have led me to choose this subject. I have no hand in it.

If, as you say, it is the sex energy that transforms into love, do you then mean that the love of a mother for her child is also sex energy?

Few others have also asked similar questions. It will be helpful to understand this.

If you have listened to me attentively, you will remember my telling you that there are profound depths in the experience of sex, depths to which a person does not normally reach. There are three levels of the experience of sex and I wish to speak to you about them now.

One level of sex is physical, completely physiological. For example, a man goes to a prostitute. The experience he gets there cannot be any deeper than physical. A prostitute can sell her body but cannot sell her heart, and, of course, there is no way to sell the soul. Another person commits a rape. In rape, neither can one have the person’s heart nor the soul; rape happens on the physical level only. There is no way to commit a rape on the soul; there has never been one, there will never be one. The experience in rape is also only physical.

The primary experience of sex is never deeper than on the physical level, and those who stop there never attain the whole experience of sex. They simply cannot know the depths about which I have been speaking. And the majority of people have stopped at the physical level.