Pragmatism

 

 

I will put so many women in charge that even if I die it will take you years to discover that the man is no longer there! They will make so much fuss and dance and love and all kinds of foolish things that you will not even come to know whether I am still here or gone.

 

And I have put them in charge because they are more pragmatic than men, they have a greater capacity to cope with reality, they are earth-bound. Man leans more towards the sky and the woman is rooted in the earth. It is a very pragmatic arrangement.

 

If the woman takes charge of the whole world, the world will drop many stupid things. For example, wars will disappear. Of course there will be more beautiful clothes, fashion shows, modelling, but weapons, atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, etcetera, will disappear -- no woman is interested in all these things. Hiroshima and Nagasaki will not happen again; it is only the man who can do these things. Crusades will disappear, religious wars will disappear, JIHADS will disappear. No woman is interested; her interest is very pragmatic, real. She is more interested in clothes, in cosmetics, in beauty; and those concerns are good -- they keep you more alive. Man's concerns are very dangerous -- political, religious, economic -- and they make more and more mischief.

 

In the name of serving humanity more mischief happens than anything else: in three thousand years, five thousand wars have been fought and the whole credit goes to man. Millions of people are killed in the name of love, in the name of democracy, in the name of freedom, in the name of love. Now, no woman can do that. And I don't think you can have a world war because of cosmetics or clothes and designs and dramas and new dishes -- you can't have world wars because of these things!

 

I want my commune to be very earth-bound, because this is my experience, the observation of many lives: that the tree has first to go deep into the earth; the deeper the roots go, the higher the branches rise. If you want to touch the stars with your flowers then you have to go to the very rock-bottom of the earth.

 

All the religions of the world have remained a little foggy, confused, for the simple reason that they were all trying to reach the stars, the beyond, to the far away, without ever thinking about the roots.

 

Buddha was against women, he was not willing to initiate women. He said that his religion would have lasted five thousand years, but because finally he agreed to initiate women his religion would disappear within five hundred years. My own observation is just the opposite: without women it would not have lasted even five hundred years, because the moment Buddha died all the men started quarrelling -- ideological wars. Thirty-two sects were immediately born, the same day! Even Buddha's body was not yet totally burnt and thirty-two philosophical schools, thirty-two interpretations arose. The war had started.

 

When Jesus was crucified, all those twelve fools disappeared. Three women were there to take his body from the cross but not a single man. Mary Magdalene was there, the prostitute, her sister was there, Martha, and Jesus' mother Mary was there. And all those apostles, those fanatics, where had they gone? They were preparing for the Vatican, they were preparing for the future. Jesus was finished! Now the question was of theology, the philosophy, the ideology. But those three women were not concerned with theology or philosophy, they were concerned with his body. They were more pragmatic, they were more true, honest, sincere. They loved the man, they risked for the man, they were ready to be condemned. All those men had disappeared.

 

One of the most educated of Jesus' disciples was Judas; he betrayed him for only thirty silver coins. No woman could have done that. And he was the most intellectual amongst all of Jesus' disciples. But intellectuals can betray very easily: they are the most renegade people in the world because their hearts are not in it, only their head -- and the head is cunning, the head is calculating. The woman lives through the heart.

 

Hence, my commune is functioning in a totally new way: it has to be rooted first. That's the way of all gardeners: first you have to give soil, manure, roots to the plant, and then flowers come of their own accord. Flowers will come, but they cannot come without roots. Roots and flowers are like two wings: if you have both wings then the whole sky is yours. But the most important thing, the first, the basic, the fundamental, is the root.

 

The woman is the root of all life; man can at the most be a branch, a flowering branch, a beautiful branch -- a longing, an aspiration to touch the stars. They have to go together. That's why, Prasad, I have put so many women here, and slowly slowly they will take over the whole soil and leave you free, leave men free to grow into flowers.

 

A real commune will have men and women in a deep synchronicity. All the past communes had to die because they depended only on men; they never took any care of the women. And no woman has ever been able to create a commune because she does not aspire to the stars.

 

A commune means an aspiration, a longing, a tremendous longing to grow, an immense urge to explore. No woman can find reasons to put down the foundation stone for a commune. Man is always interested in the far away, so he becomes the original source of communes, but no man is capable of giving roots.

 

And this has been the problem in the past: the woman can provide roots but she is not interested in flowers, and the man can provide flowers but he is not interested in roots. A deep synchronicity is needed, a deep harmony. That's what I am trying to fulfill here. [....]

 

The morning after the office Christmas party the husband woke up with an agonizing hangover. "I feel terrible," he complained.

 

"You should," said his wife. "You really made a fool of yourself last night."

 

"What did I do?"

 

"You got into a quarrel with your boss and he fired you."

 

"Well, he can go to hell!"

 

"That's exactly what you told him."

 

"I did?" he said incredulously. "Then, screw the old goat!"

 

"That's just what I did," his wife replied. "You go back to work on Monday."

 

Very pragmatic!

 

-Osho, "The Goose is Out, #5, Q2"