What’s Sex Got to Do With Violence and War?

When we repress our natural sexual urges, this inner tension feeds anger, fear, greed and violence

Tantra Yoga is a Remedy 

The truth is no matter the color of our skin, where we were born, or our cultural influence or affluence, we all have the same basic human needs for bonding behaviors, love, and sensual touch as healthy channel or outlet for our primal energy.

Our primal energy is our life force energy, our urge to create, express or procreate; the basis of our aliveness and vitality.  When we are conditioned or even trained by our sex negative culture to not celebrate and enjoy our most erotic and sensitive parts, our genitals, natural ways of expression become lost. In their place, focus in our society is on toilet training, to be nice, not real when it comes to being nude or having an erect anything!  Especially lips, nipples or wands.

Susie Bright’s blog on Mad Men, Ft. Hood and the Stupak Amendment inspired me to address how tantra is a remedy for repressed sexual urges that can build and lead to negative emotional outbursts.                                   

“Meanwhile, in real life, Nidal Malik Hasan, the deranged Army psychiatrist who went on shooting spree at Ft. Hood, also turns out to be…a failed surgeon. The detail that caught my eye was the anecdote revealed by his uncle, who said that Hasan went into psychiatry after he fainted in the O.R. during a routine childbirth. The sight of a baby emerging from a woman’s vagina sent Nidal over the edge.
With that clue, something in me snapped.  This was a guy who by all accounts so far, has never been on a date, and routinely complained to his mosque’s imam that he couldn’t find  woman “pious” enough to marry, a virgin who would wear a veil around the clock. Hassan is being scrutinized for any potential ties to espionage, fanatical religious beliefs, and vicarious PTSD from treating so many broken soldiers.

But this man’s craziness is more clearly understood in the context of his severe and distorted sexual repression.”

After a few weeks of reactions around the psychiatrist murders and mandatory health care mandating women have no coverage for abortion options, I received this email from my friend I am collaborating with on a creative project. He has been a sanyasin (spiritual devotee to Osho) since he was 14 and lived in India for nearly 20 years.                                                                          

“Dear Grace,

I wanted to say one or two more things about our conversation from that night. I often feel that most of what we think, believe, and feel is not ours specifically but that it exists in the collective consciousness at some level or another and that we as actors  in this great theater just act out different versions of these thought forms in order to keep life “interesting”.

For example, I was shockingly aware that on the night we 2 therapists had our fight that another therapist, who could be called a more extreme version of thought forms in the collective, the army psychiatrist in Texas, murdered a bunch of people when he went off the deep end.

I was reading in Osho quote today saying that if sex is repressed it becomes violence and if violence is repressed, it becomes greed (for example for food to repress all that sex and violence!) and if all three, sex, violence and greed are repressed, it becomes pride, the kernel of the spiritual ego and so called religion.

Interesting huh? I have been watching in my self the place which all 4, sex, violence, greed and pride take and I would say that it makes up  huge part of my role on the great stage of life, that I have tried for 30 years to nurture some consciousness bout it but that it continuously takes new turns and twists where I fall into one aspect of repression or expression.

Another example is on Wed. this week I have been having some sexual frustrations with my girl friend because we rarely have time or place to have sex these days. She was late again for something and I became angry and impatient. Oddly enough I remember saying to her exactly mostly in jest, but truly because I was angry bout her continuously being late, ‘Is it wrong for a boyfriend to want to kill his girlfriend?’ She laughed it off in her disarmingly charming way.

The very next day, Thurs, my mom called to tell me that her handyman had murdered his girlfriend and tried to kill himself, maybe you heard about it in the Portland news as it was all over since Friday. I was shocked a bit but later remembered my own comment and this is what I meant about thought forms moving simultaneously in the collective consciousness.

All I could take away for myself is that I have a slightly greater level of awareness and detachment than the Texas psychiatrist or the handyman- otherwise it is just degrees of separation although my general tendency is to hurt myself long before hurting someone else (another version of the same).

I am not sure why I am sharing all this with you but I think it is because recently I have been feeling alienated and cutoff from connection to others and kind of futility and deep angst at the huge undercurrent of pain and discontent in the collective which results in so much suffering and longing for global anesthesia and eventually suicide.

One of Osho’s favorite assertions to the people he met and I think the world he met was Sanyasin or suicide. How true this always seems to me. Anyhow these are my middle of the night ramblings, happy to hear your feedback, hope you are well. Love, K”

“If society is allowed total freedom about joy, nobody will be destructive.” Osho

Repression is not the way; transformation is the way. Osho claimed he was trying to change people’s anger into sex. Kabir he described as a great observer, a very minute observer. This is what awareness is. “He is watching; he represses his sexual desire and watches- “now what is happening inside?” Soon he finds that he becomes more angry for no reason at all, just angry, irritated, ready to fight with anybody, any excuse will do.”

The premise of tantric yoga is to bring the unconscious to light. Sex can be transformed because it is natural energy; anger is not so natural, one step removed from nature. Now it will be difficult to change anger. First anger will have to be changed into sex, only then can anything be done- that’s what Osho was attempting to do.

He was condemned by our society for trying to free people from inner perversions that developed from repressing natural sensual urges. Tantra Yoga is a remedy to help us become more natural human beings. To become natural and accept our primal nature that includes survival, sexual and power centers. As we accept the gestalt of our embodiment on earth and love our humanness as much as our divine nature our heart center naturally opens.

Allowing our feelings to move through us as energy in motion gives us a consistent way to let go of the past programming. Bringing the base energies up to the heart for clearing cultivates our senses and sensitivity to energy and how it moves in our bodies. This is a tantric way to transmute our basic instincts from desire to connection and flow with divine source energy. Tantra becomes a remedy to make love, not war.