Womb

 

 

Some people never come out of the womb. Even when they are dying, their need for others' presence, their need for contact, relationship, continues. They have not come out of the womb. Physically they have come out many, many years before -- the man may be eighty, ninety. Ninety years before, he had come out of the womb, but all these ninety years also he has been living in contact -- seeking, always greedy for body contact. He has lived in a lost womb again and again in his dreams.

 

It is said that whenever a man falls in love with a woman -- whatsoever he thinks, that is not the point -- he is again falling in the womb. And maybe, it is almost certain -- I say "maybe" because it is not yet a scientifically proved hypothesis -- that the urge to enter the woman's body, the sexual urge, may be nothing but a substitute for entering the womb again. All sexuality may be a search how to enter the womb again. And in all the ways that man has invented to make his body comfortable, psychologists say he is trying to create a womb outside. Look at a comfortable room: if it is really comfortable it must have something in common with the womb -- the warmth, the coziness, the silk, the velvet -- the inner touch of the mother's skin. The pillows, the bed -- everything gives you a feeling of comfort only when somehow it is related with the womb.

 

Now in the West they have made small tanks, womblike. In those tanks lukewarm water is filled, exactly of the same temperature as the mother's womb. In deep darkness the man floats in the tank, absolutely comfortable -- in darkness, just as in the womb. They call them meditation tanks. It helps: one feels very, very silent, an inner happiness arising -- you have again become a child. A child in the womb floats on liquid of a certain temperature. The liquid has all the ingredients of the sea, the same salty water with the same ingredients. Because of that scientists have come to realize that man must have evolved from fishes -- because still in the womb the atmosphere of the sea has to be maintained.

 

All comfort is, deep down, womblike. And whenever you are Lying with a woman, curled up, you feel good. Every man, howsoever old, becomes a child again; and every woman, howsoever young, becomes a mother again. Whenever they are in love the woman starts playing the role of the mother and the man starts playing the role of the baby. Even a young woman becomes a mother and an old man becomes a child.

 

-Osho, "Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 6, #3"