Up to the sixth you can stop and become stagnant. With each center there is a possibility that you may fall and become stagnant. If you become stagnant with the first, you will know only the material. If you become stagnant with the third, you will know only the sexual – and so on and so forth. The second and fifth are joined together, and so are the third and sixth. The third is the sex center and the sixth is the tantra center.

Now, one thing to be remembered always: if you are not very alert you may go on believing that you are moving into tantra, and you may be simply rationalizing your sexuality – it may be nothing but sex, rationalized in the terminology of Tantra. If you move into sex with awareness, it can turn into tantra. If you move into tantra with unawareness, it can fall and become ordinary sex. It has happened in India – because only India has tried it.

All Tantra schools in India, sooner or later, were reduced to sex orgies. It is very difficult to keep aware…it is almost impossible to keep aware. If from the very beginning the discipline has not gone very deep in you, there is every possibility that you will start deceiving yourself. Tantra schools arose in India with great energy, with great insight. And they had something – because that is the last center humanly available: the seventh is superhuman, the seventh is divine. The sixth is the spiritual center.

From sex to tantra: a great revolution, a mutation, is possible in man. And in the Eat, people became aware that if you become meditative while making love, the quality of sex changes and something new enters into it – it becomes tantric, it becomes prayerful, it becomes meditative…it becomes samadhi. And a natural flow happens: from the third you can jump to the sixth – you can bypass the fourth and the fifth. It is a great temptation, a great leap – you can bypass, a shortcut – but dangerous too, because you may be simply deceiving yourself…and man is very clever – very clever in finding rationalizations.

I have heard…

From the diary of a globe-trotting young cinema queen:

Monday: The Captain saw me on deck and was kind enough to ask me to sit at his table for the rest of the trip.

Tuesday: I spent the morning on the bridge with the Captain. He took my picture leaning against the “Passengers not allowed on this bridge” sign.

Wednesday: The Captain made proposals to me, unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.

Thursday: The Captain threatened to sink the ship unless I agreed to his proposals.

Friday: I saved eight hundred lives today.

You can find rationalizations. The temptation is always there – you can find good reasons for wrong motives.