Q: Is it possible to find a synthesis between Yoga and Tantra?
No, it is impossible. It is as impossible as if you try to find a synthesis between man and woman. Then what will be the synthesis? A third sex, an impotent person, will be the synthesis and that will neither be man nor woman. Rootless, that man will be nowhere.
Tantra is absolutely opposite, diametrically opposite to Yoga. You cannot make any synthesis, and never try such things because you will be more and more confused. One is enough to confuse you; two will be too much! And they lead in different directions. They reach the same summit; they reach the same peak — synthesis is there at the top, at the climax — but at the foothill, where the journey starts, they are absolutely different. One goes to the east, the other goes to the west. They say goodbye to each other; they have their backs to each other. They are like man and woman — different psychologies, beautiful in their difference.
If you make a synthesis, it becomes ugly. A woman has to be a woman…so much of a woman that she becomes a polarity to man. In their polarities they are beautiful because in their polarities they are attracted to each other. In their polarities they are complementary, but you cannot synthesize. Synthesis will be just poor, synthesis will be just powerless. There will be no tension in it.
At the peak they meet, and that meeting is orgasm. Where man and woman meet, when their bodies dissolve, when they are not two things, when yin and yang are one, it becomes one circle of energy. For a moment, at the summit of bio-energy, they meet and then they fall again.
The same is with Tantra and Yoga. Tantra is feminine, Yoga is male. Tantra is surrender, Yoga is will. Tantra is effortlessness, Yoga is effort…tremendous effort. Tantra is passive, Yoga is active. Tantra is like the earth, Yoga is like the sky. They meet, but there is no synthesis. They meet at the top, but at the foothill where the journey starts, where you all are standing, you have to choose the path.
Paths cannot be synthesized. And people who try that, they confuse humanity. They confuse very deeply and they are not a help; they are very harmful. Paths cannot be synthesized, only the end. One path has to be separate from another path…perfectly separate.
Tantra has no concept of sin, no guilt. Move into sex. Just remain alert, watching what is happening. Be alert, mindful of what is going on. But don’t try to control, don’t try to contain yourself; allow the flow. Move into the woman; let the woman move into you. Let them become a circle and you remain a watcher. Through this watching and let-go, Tantra achieves a transcendence. Sex disappears. This is one way to go beyond nature because going beyond sex is going beyond nature.
Yoga says don’t waste energy: bypass sex completely. No need to go into it: you can simply bypass it. Conserve energy, and don’t be fooled by nature. Fight nature, become a willpower; become a controlled being, not floating anywhere.
The whole of the Yoga methods are to make you capable so that there is no need to let go into the nature, no need to allow nature to have its own way. You become a master and you move on your own against nature, fighting nature. It is a way of the warrior — the impeccable warrior who continuously fights, and through fighting transcends.
These are totally different. They lead to the same goal: choose one; don’t try to synthesize. How can you synthesize? If you go through sex, Yoga is dropped. How can you synthesize? If you leave sex, Tantra is dropped. How can you synthesize? But remember, they lead to the same goal: transcendence is the goal. It depends on you — on your type.
Are you a warrior type, a man who fights continuously? Then Yoga is your path. If you are not a warrior type, if you are passive — in a subtle way feminine, you would not like to fight with anybody, really non-violent — then Tantra is the path, and because both lead to the same goal, there is no need to synthesize.
Synthesizers, to me, are always almost wrong.
Don’t bother about synthesis. You simply choose your path and stick to it. And don’t be lured by others who will be calling to you to come to their path.
The only thing to be worried about is to feel your type and choose. I am not against anything; I am for everything. Whatsoever you choose, I can help you that way. But no synthesis Don’t try for synthesis.
OSHO
Yoga: The Alpha and Omega
What can you say is, in a nutshell, your attitude towards all the many different paths?
I am teaching a synthesis.
My feeling is that the man who has only been experimenting with Yoga will remain partial, will grow only in part…as if a man’s hand has become too big and the whole body remains small. He will be a monster unless he can experiment with Tantra also, because Tantra is complementary to Yoga.
Remember, this is one of my basic insights: in life there are no contradictions. All contradictions are complementaries. Night is complementary to the day, so is summer to winter, so is death to life. They are not against each other. There is nothing against anything, because there is only one energy; it is one existence. My left hand and my right hand are not against each other, they are complementary. Opposites are just like wings of a bird, two wings: they look opposite to each other but they support each other. The bird cannot fly with one wing.
Tantra and Tao have to be experimented with together.
Now Yoga has a great insight into discipline, and Tao has a great insight into spontaneity. They are opposite on the surface, but unless your discipline makes you more spontaneous and unless your spontaneity makes you more disciplined, you will not be whole. Yoga is control, Tantra is uncontrol; and both are needed.
A man has to be so capable of order that if the need arises he can function in utter order. But order should not become a fixation; otherwise he will become a robot. He should be able to come out of his system, his discipline, whenever the need arises, and he can be spontaneous, floating, in a let-go. That he can get only through Tantra, from nowhere else.
I am bringing all the opposites into my sannyasins’ lives as complementaries.
Yogis will be against me because they cannot see how sex and love can be a part of a seeker’s life. They are afraid. They are afraid of sex because sex is the most spontaneous thing in your life. It has to be controlled. They know that once sex is controlled, everything else is controlled, so their basic attack is on sex.
Tantra says if your sex is not spontaneous your whole life will become robot-like. It has to be in freedom. Both are right, and both are right together! — this is my approach. I will look absurd because my approach is very illogical. Logic will always insist: either be a Yogi or be a Tantrika. I believe in life; I don’t believe in logic; and life is both together.
A great discipline is needed in life, because you have to live in a world with so many people. You have to live in discipline; otherwise life would become a chaos. Life would become impossible if you couldn’t live in a discipline. But if you only live in discipline and you forget spontaneity and you become the discipline and you are not capable of getting out of it, then again life is lost. You have become a machine. Now, these are the two alternatives that have been available to man up to now: either become a chaos — which is not good — or become a machine. which is not good either.
I want you to be alert, conscious, aware, disciplined, and yet capable of spontaneity. When you are working, be disciplined. But work is not all. When you are playing, forget all discipline.
I used to stay in a Calcutta house with a High Court judge. His wife told me, “My husband only listens to you. You are the only person who can bring something into his life. Our whole family is tired with his attitude. He remains the magistrate even in the house.” She said, “Even in bed he remains the judge of the High Court. He expects me to call him, ‘My Lord’. He is never spontaneous, and in everything he makes rules and laws. The children are tired. When he enters into the house the whole house falls silent, all joy disappears. We all wait for him to go to the court.”
Now, I know that man: he is a good judge, a very conscientious magistrate, very sincere, honest — and these are good qualities — but he has become a machine. If he comes home and remains the magistrate, that is not good. One has to relax too. One has to play with children, but he cannot play with children; that would be coming down too much. Even with his wife he remains on the high pedestal, far away; he still remains the magistrate.
This is what has happened to the followers of Yoga: they cannot be playful, they cannot rejoice in anything, they cannot participate in celebration…because they cannot relax.
Tantra alone creates chaos. Tantra alone makes you very, very selfish. You don’t care about anybody. You forget that you are part of a great whole, that you belong to a society, that you belong to existence and you are committed to this existence; without it you will be nowhere. You have to fulfill some demands from the side of existence, from the side of society. If you become utterly chaotic, then you cannot exist. Then nobody can exist.
So there has to be a great understanding between chaos and mechanicalness. Exactly in the middle there is a point where I would like my sannyasins to be, exactly in the middle; capable of going to both the extremes when needed, and always capable of moving away from there. I teach this fluidity, I teach this liquidity.
I don’t teach fixed life patterns, dead gestalts. I teach growing life syntheses, growing patterns, growing gestalts, and always capable of comprehending the other, the opposite. Then life is beautiful.
One can know truth only when one has been able to transform the opposites into complementaries. Then only is one’s life symmetrical. There is balance; positive and negative are both equally balanced. In that balancing is transcendence. In that balancing one knows the beyond, one opens up to the beyond. The Golden Flower blooms.
OSHO
The Book of Secrets
