48. At the start of sexual union keep attentive on the fire in the beginning, and so continuing, avoid the embers in the end.
49. When in such embrace your senses are shaken as leaves, enter this shaking.
50.. Even remembering union, without the embrace, transformation.
51. On joyously seeing a long absent friend, permeate this joy.
52. When eating or drinking, become the taste of food or drink, and be filled.
Sigmund Freud has said somewhere that man is born neurotic. This is a half-truth. Man is not born neurotic, but he is born in a neurotic humanity and the society around drives everyone neurotic sooner or later. Man is born natural, real, normal, but the moment the newborn becomes part of the society neurosis starts working.
As we are, we are neurotic, and the neurosis consists of a split — a deep split. You are not one: you are two or even many. This has to be understood deeply; only then can we proceed in tantra. Your feeling and thinking have become two different things: this is the basic neurosis. Your thinking part and your feeling part have become two, and you are identified with the thinking part, not with the feeling part. And feeling is more real than thinking; feeling is more natural than thinking. You have come with a feeling heart, but thinking is cultivated; it is given by society. And your feeling has become a suppressed thing. Even when you say that you feel, you only think that you feel. The feeling has become dead, and this has happened for certain reasons.
When a child is born, he is a feeling being: he feels things. He is not a thinking being yet. He is natural, just like anything natural in nature — just like a tree or like an animal. But we start molding him, cultivating. He has to suppress his feelings because without suppressing his feelings he is always in trouble. When he wants to cry he cannot cry because his parents will not approve of it. He will be condemned. He will not be appreciated, he will not be loved. He is not accepted as he is. He must behave: he must behave according to a particular ideology, ideals. Only then will he be loved.
Love is not for him as he is. He can be loved only if he follows certain rules. Those rules are imposed; they are not natural. The natural being begins to become suppressed, and the unnatural, the unreal, is imposed over it. This unreal is your mind, and a moment comes when the split is so great that you cannot bridge it. You go on forgetting completely what your real nature was — or is. You are a false face; the original face is lost. And you are also afraid to feel the original, because the moment you feel it the whole society will be against you. So you yourself are against your real nature.
This creates a very neurotic state. You do not know what you want; you do not know what are your real, authentic needs. And then you go on after non-authentic needs because only the feeling heart can give you the sense, the direction, of what are your real needs. When they are suppressed you create symbolic needs. For example, you may go on eating more and more, stuffing yourself with food, and you may never feel that you are filled. The need is for love; it is not for food. But food and love are deeply related, so when the need for love is not felt, or is suppressed, a false need for food is created and you can go on eating. Because the need is false, it can never be fulfilled, and we live in false needs. That is why there is no fulfillment.
You want to be loved; that is a basic need — natural. But it can be diverted into a false dimension. For example, the love need, the need to be loved, can be felt as a false need if you try to divert the attention of others to yourself. You want that others should pay attention to you, so you may become a political leader. Great crowds may pay attention to you, but the real basic need is to be loved. And even if the whole world is paying attention to you, that basic need cannot be fulfilled. That basic need can be fulfilled even by a single person loving you, paying attention to you because of love.
When you love someone, you pay attention to him. Attention and love are deeply related. If you suppress the need for love, then it becomes a symbolic need; then you need the attention of others. You may get it, but then too there will be no fulfillment. The need is false, disconnected from the natural, basic need. This division in the personality is neurosis.
Tantra is a very revolutionary concept — the oldest and yet the newest. Tantra is one of the oldest traditions and yet non-traditional, even anti-traditional, because tantra says unless you are whole and one you are missing life altogether. You should not remain in a split state: you must become one. What to do to become one? You can go on thinking, but that is not going to help because thinking is the technique to divide. Thinking is analytical. It divides; it splits things. Feeling unites, synthesizes, makes things one. So you can go on thinking, reading, studying, contemplating. It is not going to help unless you fall back to the feeling center. But it is very difficult, because even when we think about the feeling center, WE THINK!
When you say to someone, “I love you,” be aware of whether it is just a thought or whether it is a feeling. If it is just a thought, then you are missing something. A feeling is of the whole: your whole body, mind, everything you are, is involved. In thinking, only your head is involved, and that too not totally, but just a fragment of it. There is only a passing thought; it may not be there the next moment. Only a fragment is involved, and that creates much misery in life — because with a fragmentary thought, you give promises which you cannot fulfill. You can say, “I love you and I will love you forever.” However, the second part is a promise which you cannot fulfill because it is given by a fragmentary thought. Your whole being is not involved in it. And what will you do tomorrow when the fragment has gone and the thought is no more there? Now the promise will become a bondage.
Sartre said somewhere that every promise is going to be false. You cannot promise because you are not whole. Just a part of you promises, and when the part is no more there on the throne and another part has taken over, what are you going to do? Who will fulfill the promise? Hypocrisy is born because when you go on trying to fulfill, pretending that you are fulfilling, then everything becomes false. Tantra says fall down deep within to the feeling center. What to do and how to fall back? Now I will enter the sutras. These sutras, each sutra, is an effort to make you whole.
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