You are born as a body; you live as a body; you become ill as a body; you are treated, given medicine, helped, made whole and healthy, as a body. You become young as a body, you will become old as a body, you will die as a body. Your whole life is body-centered – centered around the body. You will love someone. You will make love to someone and you will create other bodies; you will reproduce other bodies.

What are you doing the whole life? Preserving yourself. What are you preserving with food, with water, with shelter? The body is preserved. What are you doing by reproducing children? The body is being reproduced. The whole life, ninety-nine point nine percent, is body-oriented. You can go beyond, but that journey has to be through the body, by the body, and you have to use the body. But why do you ask? Because the body is just the outer thing. Deep down the body is a symbol of sex.

So those traditions which are against sex will be against the body. Those traditions which are not against sex can only be friendly toward the body. Tantra is absolutely friendly, and Tantra says that the body is sacred, holy. For Tantra, to condemn the body is a sacrilege. To say that the body is impure or to say that the body is sin is nonsense for Tantra – a very poisonous teaching. Tantra accepts the body – not only accepts it, but says that the body is holy, pure, innocent. You can use it and you can make it a vehicle, a medium, to go beyond! It helps even in going beyond.

But if you start fighting with body, you are lost. If you start fighting with it, you will become more and more diseased. And if you go on fighting with it, you will miss an opportunity. Fighting is negative; Tantra is a positive transformation. Do not fight with it – there is no need. It is as if you are sitting in a car and you start fighting with the car. Then you cannot move because you are fighting with the vehicle – which has to be used, not fought against. And you will destroy the vehicle by your fighting, and then it will be more and more difficult to move.

The body is a beautiful vehicle – very mysterious, very complex. Use it, do not fight with it. Help it. The moment you go against it you are going against yourself. It is as if a man wants to reach somewhere, but he fights with his own legs and cuts them. Tantra says, know the body and know the secrets of it. Know the energies of it and know how those energies can be transformed – how they can be moved and turned into different dimensions.

For example, take sex, which is the basic energy in the body. Ordinarily, sex energy is just used for reproduction. One body creates another body and it goes on. The biological utility of sex energy is only in reproduction. But that is only one of the uses, and the lowest. No condemnation is implied, but it is the lowest. The same energy can do other creative acts also. Reproduction is a basic creative act – you create something. That is why a woman feels a subtle well-being when she becomes a mother: she has created something.