Osho,
What are your views on sexual ethics?

My views on sexual ethics are against all the views that have been held up to now. They were all repressive of sex; they were condemnatory and created a split in the human mind. The whole schizophrenia and all the perversions of man are rooted in those wrong sexual ethics.

I conceive of sex as a natural phenomenon. There is nothing profane in it and there is nothing sacred in it. It is purely natural life energy of tremendous importance. If you cannot sublimate it, it can destroy you; and it has destroyed humanity.

It is the energy man, everything, is born out of. Naturally there is no higher energy than sexual energy, but biological reproduction is not the only function. The same energy can have different creative dimensions. And the same energy, joined with meditative practices, can be sublimated to the highest peak of consciousness – I call it enlightenment.

My sexual ethics is not a law, it is love.

Two persons can be sexually related only if love allows. When there is no love, and only law remains as a binding force, it is sheer prostitution. And I am against prostitution.

But it is strange that all the religions are the cause of the prostitution in the world, but nobody stands up and says that prostitution exists because you have replaced love with law.

Law is not love. Marriage is valid only if there is love. The moment love disappears, the marriage is invalid. It means millions of people are living unlovingly, unethically, unnaturally, because of the religions that have forced an arbitrary bondage of marriage and have tried to make it permanent.

Life is continuously changing; nothing is permanent. Love also is not permanent. Only plastic flowers are permanent, real flowers cannot be permanent. If you are too addicted to permanence then you will end up with plastic flowers. And that’s how people have ended up with plastic marriages, plastic relations – phony, hypocritical. And it gives no pleasure to anybody.

Prostitution is vast all over the world. Ordinarily, you go to a prostitute, you purchase her for one night. At least it is straightforward. But you marry a woman, promising her that you will love her always, even beyond death. And even before the honeymoon ends, the love disappears – then you live in deception. Now you are using a human being as a thing, as a sexual object. I condemn it.

According to me love should be the only law, the only deciding factor.