Question 1:

Osho,

Can you say something about the mystery of women?

 

 

Devageet, it is one of the ancientmost questions. Man has always puzzled about women, and the real problem is neither man nor woman. Reduced to the factual, to the existential, the problem is between the head and the heart.

 

The head cannot understand the mystery of the heart. The head is logical, rational, mathematical, scientific; the heart knows nothing of reason, nothing of logic. The heart functions in a totally different way. Its functioning creates in the head the idea of the mystery. It is not a question about women; it is a question that arises because women function through the heart and man functions through the head. Have you ever heard any women asking, "What is the mystery of man?" They simply know it.

 

The problem arises out of logical reasoning. It is a very superficial phenomenon. It is good with objects, with dead things; it deals with them perfectly because a dead thing has no interiority, a dead thing has no inner being, it has no life. The scientist is perfectly right about objects, but the moment he comes to think about subjectivity -- the interiority -- he is baffled, because reason cannot function there.

 

The heart knows without any process of knowing, without any syllogism, without any argument. How do you know that the rose is beautiful? Is it a rational conclusion? If you bring reason in, you will not be able to prove that the rose is beautiful, because reason cannot fathom the phenomenon of beauty.

 

When you say the rose is beautiful, you are functioning from the heart. When you say the starry night overwhelms you, it is not a rational statement; if you are forced to prove it rationally, you will be at a loss. Then suddenly you will become aware that it was the heart that has spoken, and the head is absolutely incapable of figuring out how the heart functions.

 

But the heart is not in the same difficulty about the head, because the head is superficial and the heart is deep down within you. The lower cannot understand the higher. The higher simply understands the lower, there is no need of any reasoning. Your heart is both higher than your head and deeper than your head. The woman can be a poet, but cannot really be a mathematician. Mathematics is purely a game of the mind. Poetry is a totally different phenomenon.

 

I am reminded of Frau Einstein, Albert Einstein's wife. She was a poet, and Albert Einstein was perhaps the greatest scientific thinker of all the ages. Naturally Frau Einstein wanted her husband to know about her poetry. Einstein tried to avoid the subject as much as he could, but finally one night, the full moon in the sky, Frau Einstein could not resist the temptation. She had composed a beautiful poem about the full moon, and she recited the poem.

 

Albert Einstein looked at her with great surprise, almost shocked. She could not understand, "Why is he looking at me in this weird manner? At the most he can say that the poetry is not great... but he is looking at me as if I am insane!" After the recital of the poem she asked Albert Einstein, "What do you think?"

 

He said, "I had never thought that you are so crazy. You talk about the moon as beautiful, you talk about the moon reminding you of your beloved. It is sheer nonsense! The moon is too big, it cannot be substituted for your beloved. And the moon is not at all beautiful!

 

It is just as ordinary as the earth, even more ordinary because there is no greenery, no water, just barren land. And the light that you see reflected from the moon is not its own.

 

That light is borrowed from the sun, it is not coming from the moon. The sunlight falls on the moon and the rays are reflected back, and those reflected rays are coming to your eyes;the moon is not the source of them. I had always thought that you are well educated, but you don't know even the ABC of physics!"

 

Now was the chance for Frau Einstein to look at him as if he is insane, because for centuries poets have sung songs about the moon -- its beauty, its tremendous magnetic force, its cool light. It has a certain hypnotic spell on the heart... and it is now also proved by facts that it has a certain hypnotic spell.

 

More people -- in fact all except Mahavira -- have become enlightened on a full-moon night. Mahavira is the only exception; he became enlightened on a no-moon night.

 

Gautam Buddha was born on a full-moon night, became enlightened on a full-moon night, died on a full-moon night. He is a perfect example of the hypnotic spell of the moon. Many more people go mad on the full-moon night -- these are approved statistics - - and more people commit suicide on full-moon nights.

 

The full moon somehow drives man's mind into dimensions beyond reasoning. And it is not only man that is affected by the full moon; even the ocean is affected. But a physicist, a mathematician will not be able to understand it -- and Frau Einstein never again mentioned poetry to Albert Einstein in her whole life. Although she went on composing, she was not publishing them. It was decided on the first recital that that kind of dialogue is not possible between her and her husband -- but it is not any exceptional case.

 

No husband and no wife are in the situation of understanding each other.

 

Misunderstanding is the natural situation. The man says something, the woman immediately understands something else. The man cannot believe how she has come to this conclusion -- and to the woman that conclusion is absolutely clear, there is no doubt about it. And whatever she says, the man is at a loss to figure it out.

 

Psychologists have started calling couples intimate enemies. They are... because no one understands each other. But the reason is not the woman and the man. The reason is far deeper. It is the head and the heart.

 

So I would like to emphasize the point, Devageet, that the question from the very beginning has been formed in a wrong way. It is not the mystery of women, it is the mystery of the heart -- which the head is incapable of figuring out. The heart has no problem about the head;it is a lower, more superficial layer, and the heart understands it.

 

So when men say that women are mysteries, women simply smile amongst themselves:Look at these idiots! Have you ever heard any woman saying that women are mysteries? They know each other perfectly well. There is no mystery.

 

It will be better to understand in a different dimension too. Forget about man and woman; just think about your own head and your own heart. Do they have a communion? Are they capable of understanding each other? I have not met Albert Einstein, but I would have loved to meet him for the simple reason that I wanted to ask him how he fell in love with Frau Einstein. What physics, what mathematics, what science is behind the experience of falling in love?

 

But perhaps he never thought about it. Love is coming from the heart; it cannot come from the head. Even the greatest scientist once in a while goes astray from the head. One beautiful sunset and he is overwhelmed. He forgets that he is a scientist and he is not allowed to do such things, feminine things; he is a male mind. And every scientist falls in love with a woman without ever thinking what love is. It is a mystery... even your own heart is a mystery to you.

 

My own understanding is that Mahavira at first denied any women to be initiated into sannyas. The same was the case with Gautam Buddha;he denied women to be initiated into sannyas. And the same is the case with other religions; they have all put woman in a secondary place. And the reason, according to me, is that all our so-called religions are head-oriented... too much head. Their God is not their love, their God is their idea. It is a hypothesis. They have created a system -- rational, logical, flawless -- but it is their own mind which is creating the system. It is not a discovery. It is not unveiling the mystery of existence.

 

And why have all these religions been so afraid of women? There were other reasons, but the most fundamental reason is that all the founders of religions were male, and their theologies were from the head. To allow women among their fellow travelers was to create unnecessary trouble, because they speak different languages, they understand different languages. They are coming from different spaces. At the most, they can tolerate each other.

 

That is what is happening between every wife and every husband: they are just tolerating each other. There seems to be no possibility of a sane conversation. Any conversation between a wife and husband immediately leads to conflict, and the woman starts behaving, according to man, in such a crazy way... throwing things, breaking things. He cannot understand -- what argument is this? But the woman knows perfectly well that only this argument will decide the thing -- and it decides! The man simply agrees, "You are right, but just don't destroy more things!" In every argument with a woman, the woman is the winner, although she knows nothing about argumentation.

 

The day he initiated the first woman into sannyas, Gautam Buddha said, "My religion was going to last for five thousand years. Now it will last only five hundred years" -- not a great welcome to the poor woman!

 

Asked why he was saying so, he said, "It is impossible to include both women and men without them coming into conflict. The religion will destroy itself from within. If it had remained just confined to males there was a possibility for it to continue at least for five thousand years, because they can understand each other."

 

You have to be very alert about it.... I am the first man who makes no difference between initiating men and women, and my feeling is -- if I were to reply to Gautam Buddha, I would say, "If it was only males it would last for only five hundred years. Now it is men and women together it can last for eternity."

 

When heart and head are together, you are more complete and more whole. Heart is a part, head is a part, but together... if a communion is possible, your strength is not doubled, it is multiplied. How can the head and the heart come to a point of meeting?

 

And it is a multidimensional question:

 

It is between the woman and the man.

 

It is between the heart and the head.

 

It is between the East and the West.

 

One of the royal poets of England, Rudyard Kipling, has written two famous lines which have become better known than anything else that he wrote. Those lines are, "East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." Nobody has argued against it... and he was the royal poet of the British Empire.

 

But I disagree absolutely, without any conditions and reservations, because wherever you are standing East and West are meeting. Bombay is West to Calcutta, Calcutta is East to Bombay;Tokyo is East to Calcutta, and Calcutta is West to Tokyo. Wherever you are, you cannot say you are in the East or in the West. They are relative terms;they are not fixed territories. Wherever you are, in every man, in every tree, in every bird, East and West are meeting.

 

Rudyard Kipling is simply talking nonsense! But he has a point in his ridiculous statement -- and the point is the same. The West is head-oriented and the East is heart- oriented. It is the same question in different directions: How can they meet? How can there be an intimate love between the head and the heart, not intimate enmity? -- it is a contradiction in terms.

 

They meet in meditation, because in meditation the head is empty and the heart is empty:

 

the head is empty of thoughts and the heart is empty of feelings. When there are two emptinesses you cannot keep them separate, because there is nothing between them to keep them separate. Two zeros become one zero... Two nothingnesses cannot exist separately; they are bound to become one because there is not even a fence between them.

 

But Rudyard Kipling, although he lived in India almost his whole life, has never heard about meditation. It is meditation in which the head and heart lose each other, melt into each other. It is meditation in which man and woman melt into each other.

 

In India we have an ancient, very ancient statue -- one of the most beautiful pieces of art - - a statue of Ardhanarishwar. The statue is half man and half woman. It is the statue of Shiva, the Hindu God, and half of the body is of the woman and the other half of the body is of the man. Up to the time of Carl Gustav Jung it was thought that it is only a mythology, metaphor, poetry -- but this cannot be true. The whole credit goes to Carl Gustav Jung for introducing to the world that this is not a metaphor, this is a reality.

 

Every man and every woman are both, because every child is born of a father and a mother. So something of the mother and something of the father is present in every child, whether the child is a girl or the child is a boy. The only difference can be that the man is a little more man, perhaps fifty-one percent man and forty-nine percent woman, and the woman is fifty-one percent woman and forty-nine percent man. But the difference is not much.

 

That's why it has become scientifically possible to change the sexes -- because the other sex is also present, just the percentage of hormones has to be changed. What was fifty- one percent has to be made forty-nine, or what was forty-nine has to be made fifty-one...

 

then the man becomes woman and the woman becomes man.

 

But even within you, you are not at ease. There is a conflict, continuous conflict between the head and the heart, between the man and the woman. This conflict can be dissolved only if the head drops its thinking and the heart drops its feeling and both are just pure empty spaces. In that emptiness there is a great meeting and a great understanding.

 

I don't see any woman as a mystery. I have looked hard, and perhaps there will not be another man in the whole world who has come in contact with so many men and so many women. But neither the man seems to be a mystery nor the woman seems to be a mystery, because within myself the head and heart have melted into each other, and that has given me a new perspective and has changed the whole vision around me.

 

Devageet, if you really want to understand the mystery of women you will have to understand the art of melting your head into your heart. That will not only help you to know the mystery of women, it will also help you to know the mystery of men. Not only that, it will help you to know the mystery of the whole existence.

 

A shy young girl was about to get married, so she went to see her very experienced friend for some advice.

 

"Doris," she began, "it may sound silly, but there are a few things I just have to ask you."

 

"That's okay," said Doris. "Just go ahead."

 

"Okay," said the shy girl, "is it all right to talk to your husband while making love?"

 

"Well," said Doris, "I must admit that I have never done that, but I suppose there is nothing wrong in it -- as long as there is a telephone within reach."

 

There is mystery but it is not confined only to women. The whole existence is mysterious. This beautiful rain... this music of the falling rain... the joy of the trees. Don't you think there is great mystery?

 

There was a hill station in the state where I was a professor for many years, and on that hill station was a resthouse far away deep in the hills, absolutely lonely. For miles there was nobody... even the servant who used to take care of the resthouse used to leave by the evening for his own home. I used to go to that resthouse whenever I could find time and sometimes it used to rain just like this... and I was alone in that resthouse and for miles there was nobody. Just the music of rain, just the dance of the trees... I have never forgotten the beauty of it. Whenever it rains I again remember it. It has left such a beautiful impact.

 

If you look, then each flower is a mystery. From where do those colors come? Every rainbow is a mystery, every moment of life is a mystery. Just to be here... is it not a mystery that you are nowhere else but here?

 

Once your eyes are clear and your head and heart are no more in conflict, everything starts becoming mysterious. Then you don't want to de-mystify it -- that is absolutely ugly and criminal! The mystery of existence has to be welcomed as it is. Dissecting it, demystifying it, is a violation, aggression, violence.

 

A man of meditation simply enjoys the flowers, the birds, the trees, the rain, the sun, the moon, the people. It is good that we are all engulfed in a mysterious whole. Life will be utterly boring if every mystery is decoded.

 

Science's whole effort is to demystify existence. Poetry and art are concerned in rejoicing, in welcoming the mystery of existence.And the mystic, the religious man, lives the mystery -- not from the outside as a poet, but from the very inside of it. He becomes himself mystery.

 

There is a beautiful story. Unfortunately it cannot be true. I would have loved it to have been true...! In the East there have been many lovers, very famous lovers -- Heer and Ranjha, Sheeri and Farhad -- and the most famous is the third couple, Laila and Majnu.

 

None of them could meet and live with each other. That is their great fortune; hence they remained loving each other for their whole life.

 

Majnu was a poor man. Laila was a very rich, super-rich girl, and the parents were not willing to give their only girl into the hands of Majnu, who was nobody at all, just a beggar. Just to avoid him, and to avoid any slander, the parents left the town for another city; they had businesses in many cities and houses in many cities.

 

The day they left, Majnu was standing outside the city by the side of a tree, hiding himself in the foliage of the tree, just to see for the last time his beloved Laila moving away. He saw Laila on her camel, and the whole caravan was moving away. He went on looking and looking as far as he could, and in a desert you can see very far, there are no obstructions.

 

Finally, beyond the horizon, they disappeared... but Majnu went on looking. This is where the story becomes a myth, but of tremendous significance. He never left that place.

 

He trusted his love, and he hoped that one day Laila will return from the same route.

 

There was no other route going out from the town.

 

After twelve years, Laila returned. The father was dead and now she was free at last. She never married anyone else; she had insisted that if she was going to marry anyone, she would marry Majnu. Her father had said, "If that is your decision, then my decision is that you will never marry." But when the father died, Laila came.

 

Now twelve years is a long time. In these twelve years Majnu had been standing by the side of the tree. The foliage had grown much; he had not eaten, he had not drunk water, and by and by he had become joined with the tree. Standing for twelve years was so long... slowly, slowly he became part of the tree.

 

Laila came and she enquired about Majnu in the town. The people said, "It is a very sad story. He had gone to say goodbye to you, but he never came back. Only once in a while in the deep silences of the night, from a certain tree, a sound comes calling your name:

 

'Laila, it is too long. When are you going to come back?' -- and people have become afraid of the tree because it seems the tree is haunted by ghosts or something. Nobody comes close to the tree."

 

Laila went to the tree. She heard the voice, she heard the joyful welcome, but she could not see where Majnu was hiding. She entered into the foliage of the tree. With great difficulty she could figure out that Majnu had become part of the tree.

 

It cannot be factual... but the mystic becomes part of the mystery of existence. And the story of Laila and Majnu is a Sufi story. Perhaps it is symbolic of the ultimate union with existence.

 

Not trying to demystify it, but becoming a part of the mystery yourself, that is the only true understanding. The mystery will remain amystery, but by becoming yourself a mystery, you will understand.

 

That is the only true understanding. All other understandings are only knowledge borrowed from others.

 

-Osho, “The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here, #27, Q1“