The Body is Sex.

You are born as a body, you live as a body, you become sick as a body; you are treated, medicated, helped, made completely healthy as a body. You become young like a body, you will become old like a body, you will die like a body. Your whole life is body-centered, centered around the body. You will love someone, you will make love to someone and you will create other bodies, you will reproduce other bodies.

What are you doing your whole life? Preserving yourself. What are you preserving with food, with water, with shelter? The body is preserved. What are you doing playing? The body is being reproduced. The entire life, ninety-nine point nine percent, is body-oriented. You can go further, but that journey has to be through the body, by the body, and you have to use the body. But why do you ask? - because the body is just the external thing... Deep down, the body is a sex symbol.

So those traditions that are against sex will be against the body. Only those traditions that are not against sex can be body-friendly. Tantra is absolutely friendly and tantra says the body is sacred, pure. For tantra, condemning the body is sacrilege. To say that the body is very poisonous. Tantra accepts the body - not only accepts it, but says the body is holy, pure, innocent. You can use it, and you can make it a vehicle, a means, to go further! It even helps to go further.

But if you start fighting with the body, you are lost. If you start to struggle with it, you will become sicker and sicker. And if you keep fighting him, you'll miss an opportunity. Fighting is negative; tantra is a positive transformation. Don't fight him - there's no need.

It's like you're sitting in a car and you start fighting with the car. Then you cannot go forward, because you are fighting with the vehicle - which has to be used, not fought. And you will destroy the vehicle with your struggle, and then it will become more and more difficult to go forward.

The body is a beautiful vehicle - very mysterious, very complex. Use it, don't fight it. Help him. The moment you go against him, you are going against yourself. It's as if a man wants to get somewhere but fights against his own legs and cuts them off. Tantra says: know the body and know its secrets. Know his energies and know how those energies can be transformed - how they can be moved and transformed in different dimensions.