________________
CHAPTER 6. SELF ENERGY FROM SEX ENERGY
I have heard a story. Jesus was passing through a town. It was night, and a man in the cemetery was beating his chest, and was scratching his body with stones and bleeding. Jesus approached that man and asked why he was doing that. The man replied, I am only doing what the whole world is doing, and again began to scratch. Blood was flowing out. He was beating his head Jesus asked, what is your name, O mad man. The man replied, my name is Legion. I do not have one name. I have thousands of names.
Jesus used to tell this story often, that one man told me he had a thousand names, because I am a thousand persons, I am not one person. There are a thousands of persons within us also. We also have a thousand names. Someone is trying to protect himself, another wishes to beat someone, the third wishes to make love, and the fourth wishes to murder someone, another wishes to live, another wishes to construct a stone structure on his tomb, another is entering God's temple. Someone tells within us, everything is falsehood, everything is untrue, there is no such person as God. On one side, our one personality is ringing the bell of the temple and at the same time another personality is laughing at it within, and is asking himself, what is this mad thing you are doing? Nothing will be achieved by ringing that bell. Another personality is turning the beads of a mala and at the same time, is running a shop within himself. That person was right when he said my name is Legion. I have a thousand names. What name shall I give you? I am not one person. I am a thousand different persons. Possessing a thousand names within us causes destruction - fritters away of our energy. If those thousand people become one, an integrated person, our energy will be preserved. Whatever you do, do it totally, with all your heart. And when the work is over, something within you will begin to get accumulated, to be integrated.
Gurdjieff used to say totality is crystallization. When a person does any activity totally, many things within him get crystallized. That crystallization - that integration gives birth to individuality. It is the birth of Man. I explained this with the intention that you should experiment with it, should understand it, should check it so that it can be clearly fixed in your mind.
FOOD AND SUBLIMATION OF SEX ENERGY
The word aahar has a very deep connotation. It is deeper in meaning than diet. Let us first understand the word aahar, than we shall talk a little more on it.
Food is whatever we take in from outside. If we look at a beautiful flower with our eyes, the activity is food. Eyes are taking the food of beauty. When we hear with ears, we are eating music as food. Ears are eating noises as food. The hand is eating the food of touch when it touches somebody's body. The smell of something touches the nose, then the nose is eating its food. Thus the whole body is taking food, every small hair is taking breath in, is coming in contact with some other object. Our whole body is a food-machine. All our organs are doing the work of taking the outer world within us. But only food we eat is understood as aahar by us, this is our mistaken view.
It is necessary to understand the entire field of food for the sublimation of sex energy, because it is possible the food you have eaten may help in raising the sex energy up instead of pushing it down. But eyes may have seen such scenes or ears may have heard such noises, or the body may have touched such objects which may push the sex energy downwards, so it is necessary to examine all the sides of food, to see the meaning of food from all points of view. We take food with eyes, nose, mouth, with a touch of even the minutest hair on our body. We are eating for all the twenty-four
The Perennial Path: The Art of Living
67
Osho