Sexual suppression and freedom from sex?

What is the difference between great sexual suppression and freedom from sex? On the surface, both have no interest in sex. How does suppressed sex bubble up?

First, suppressed sex has more interest than expressed sex can ever have. The interest is not direct - it is indirect, it is vicarious, it is cunning; the interest is there, immensely there.

If your sex life is normal, unrepressed, uninhibited, the interest cannot be so much, because you will have a kind of satisfaction, a contentment.

It is like when you have taken your food, you forget about food. But if you fast, then you continuously think about food. Fast one day and then go to the market, and you will see only hotels, restaurants, food stores, and you will smell only food smells coming from everywhere. And you had been to this place before many times. It had never happened like that.

Repression cannot free you from interest. The repressed person becomes more interested in sex than anybody else. Maybe he shows antagonism, that’s possible, but antagonism is interest.

That’s why your so-called religious scriptures are full of antagonism towards sex, condemnation. Your so-called mahatmas go on cursing sex. That simply shows their interest, nothing else. They are still haunted by it. They may be sitting in their caves in the Himalayas, but they are condemning sex. Why?

It is deep inside them, in their very guts, they are fighting with it.

Their condemnation is a way of their fighting with it: they condemn it so that they can remain on top of it. If you don’t condemn for even a single day, they start feeling afraid that the real thing from inside may surface, may throw away them and their control and their saintlihood and their holiness.

~ OSHO

I Say Unto You , Vol 02

Chapter 4 : Respect and Accept