Osho on Difference in Female mind and Male mind

 

 

Modern research has come to a very significant fact, one of the most significant achieved in this century, and that is that you don't have one mind, you have two minds. Your brain is divided into two hemispheres: the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere is joined with the left hand, and the left hemisphere is joined with the right hand -- crosswise.

 

The right hemisphere is intuitive, illogical, irrational, poetic, platonic, imaginative, romantic, mythical, religious; and the left hemisphere is logical, rational, mathematical, Aristotelian, scientific, calculative. These two hemispheres are constantly in conflict -- the basic politics of the world is within you, the greatest politics of the world is within you. You may not be aware of it, but once you become aware, the real thing to be done is somewhere between these two minds.

 

The left hand is concerned with the right hemisphere -- intuition, imagination, myth, poetry, religion -- and the left hand is very much condemned. The society is of those who are right-handed -- right-handed means left hemisphere. Ten per cent of children are born left-handed but they are forced to be right-handed. Children who are born left-handed are basically irrational, intuitive, non-mathematical, non-Euclidean... they are dangerous for society so it forces them in every way to become right-handed.

 

It is not just a question of hands, it is a question of inner politics: the left-handed child functions through the right hemisphere -- that society cannot allow, it is dangerous, so he has to be stopped before things go too far. It is suspected that in the beginning the proportion must have been fifty-fifty -- left handed children fifty per cent and right-handed children fifty per cent -- but the right handed party has ruled so long that by and by the proportion has fallen to ten per cent and ninety per cent.

 

Even amongst you here many will be left-handed but you may not be aware of it. You may write with the right hand and do your work with the right hand but in your childhood you may have been forced to be right-handed. This is a trick because once you become right-handed your left hemisphere starts functioning. The left hemisphere is reason; the right hemisphere is beyond reason, its functioning is not mathematical. It functions in flashes, it is intuitive, very graceful -- but irrational.

 

The left-handed minority is the most oppressed minority in the world, even more than Negroes, even more than the poor people. If you understand this division, you will understand many things. With the bourgeoisie and the proletariat the proletariat is always functioning through the right hemisphere of the brain: the poor people are more intuitive. Go to the primitive people, they are more intuitive. The poorer the person, the less intellectual -- and that may be the cause of his being poor.

 

Because he is less intellectual he cannot compete in the world of reason. He is less articulate as far as language is concerned, reason is concerned, calculation is concerned -- he is almost a fool. That may be the cause of his being poor. The rich person is functioning through the left hemisphere; he is more calculative, arithmetical in everything, cunning, clever, logical -- and he plans. That may be the reason why he is rich.

 

The bourgeoisie and the proletariat cannot disappear by communist revolutions, no, because the communist revolution is by the same people. The Czar ruled Russia; he ruled it through the left hemisphere of the mind. Then he was replaced by Lenin who was of the same type. Then Lenin was replaced by Stalin who was even more of the same type. The revolution is false because deep down the same type of people are ruling -- the ruler and the ruled mean the same, and the ruled are those of the right-sided hemisphere.

 

So whatsoever you do in the outside world makes no difference really, it is superficial. The same applies to men and women. Women are right-hemisphere people, men are left hemisphered. Men have ruled women for centuries. Now a few women are revolting but the amazing thing is that these are the same type of women. In fact they are just like men -- rational, argumentative, Aristotelian. It is possible that one day, just as the communist revolution has succeeded in Russia and China, somewhere, maybe in America, women can succeed and overthrow men.

 

But by the time the women succeed, the women will no more be women, they will have become left hemisphered. Because to fight, one has to be calculative, and to fight with men you have to be like men: aggressive. That very aggressiveness is shown all over the world in women's liberation. Women who have become part of that liberation movement are very aggressive, they are losing all grace, all that comes out of intuition. Because if you have to fight with men you have to learn the same trick;

 

if you have to fight with men, you have to fight with the same techniques. Fighting with anybody is very dangerous because you become like your enemy. That is one of the greatest problems of humanity. Once you fight with somebody, by and by you have to use the same technique and the same way. Then the enemy may be defeated but by the time he is defeated you have become your own enemy. Stalin is more Czar-like than any Czar, more violent than any Czar.

 

Of course it has to be so: to throw Czars, very violent people are needed, more violent than the Czar himself. Only they will become the revolutionaries, will come out on top. By the time they reach there they have become Czars themselves, and the society continues on the same way. Just superficial things change, deep down the same conflict remains. The conflict is in man. Unless it is resolved there, it cannot be resolved anywhere else. The politics is within you; it is between the two parts of the mind.

 

A very small bridge exists. If that bridge is broken through some accident, through some physiological defect or something else, the person becomes split, the person becomes two persons -- and the phenomenon of schizophrenia or split personality happens. If the bridge is broken -- and the bridge is very fragile -- then you become two, you behave like two persons. In the morning you are very loving, very beautiful; in the evening you are very angry, absolutely different. You don't remember your morning... how can youremember?

 

Another mind was functioning -- and the person becomes two persons. If this bridge is strengthened so much that the two minds disappear as two and become one, then integration, then crystallization, arises. What George Gurdjieff used to call the crystallization of being is nothing but these two minds becoming one, the meeting of the male and the female within, the meeting of yin and yang, the meeting of the left and right, the meeting of logic and illogic, the meeting of Plato and Aristotle.

 

If you can understand this basic bifurcation in your tree of then you can understand all the conflict that goes on around and inside you. The female mind has a grace, the male mind has efficiency. and of course, in the long run, if there is a constant fight, the grace is bound to be defeated -- the efficient mind will win. because the world understands the language of mathematics not of love. But the moment your efficiency wins over your grace, you have lost something tremendously valuable: you have lost contact with your own being.

 

You may become very efficient, but you will be no more a real person. You will become a machine, a robot-like thing. Because of this here is constant conflict between man and woman. They cannot remain separate, they have to get into relationship again and again -- but they cannot remain together either. The fight is not outside, the fight is within you. And this is my understanding: unless you have resolved your inner fight between the right and the left hemispheres, you will never be able to be peacefully in love -- never -- because the inner fight will be reflected outside.

 

If you are fighting inside and you are identified with the left hemisphere, the reason hemisphere, and you are continuously trying to overpower the right hemisphere, you will try to do the same with the woman you fall in love with. If the woman is continuously fighting her own reason inside, she will continuously fight the man she loves. All relationships -- almost all, the exceptions are negligible, can be left out of account -- are ugly. In the beginning they are beautiful; in the beginning you don't show the reality; in the beginning you pretend.

 

Once the relationship settles and you relax, your inner conflict bubbles up and starts being mirrored in your relationship. Then come fights, then come a thousand and one ways of nagging each other, destroying each other. Hence the attraction for homosexuality. Whenever a society becomes too divided between man and woman, homosexuality erupts immediately. Because at least a man in love with a man is not that much in conflict.

 

The love relationship may not be very satisfying, may not lead to tremendous bliss and orgasmic moments, but at least it is not so ugly as the relationship between a man and a woman. Women become lesbians whenever the conflict becomes too much, because at least the love relationship between two women is not so deep in conflict. The same meets the same; they can understand each other. Yes, understanding is possible, but the attraction is lost, the polarity is lost -- it is at a very great cost. Understanding is possible, but the whole tension, the challenge, is lost.

 

If you choose challenge, then comes conflict, because the real problem is somewhere within you. Unless you have settled, come to a deep harmony between your female and male mind, you will not be able to love. This is the difficulty of the whole modern mind. All relationships are becoming by and by casual. People are afraid of any sort of commitment,, because they have come to know at least one thing out of bitter experience -- whenever you become related too much, the reality erupts, and your inner conflict starts being reflected by the other and then life becomes ugly, horrible, intolerable.

 

If you are outside of it, it may look like a beautiful oasis in the desert but as you come close the oasis starts drying and disappearing. Once you are caught in it, it is an imprisonment, but remember, the imprisonment doesn't come from the other, it comes from within you. If the left-hemisphere brain goes on dominating you, you will live a very successful life -- so successful that by the time you are forty you will have ulcers; by the time you are forty-five you will have had at least one or two heart-attacks; by the time you are fifty you will be almost dead -- but successfully dead. You may become a great scientist, but you will never become a great being.

 

You may accumulate enough of wealth, but you will lose all that is of worth. You may conquer the whole world like an Alexander, but your own inner territory will remain unconquered. There are many attractions to follow the left-hemisphere brain -- that is the worldly brain. It is more concerned with things: cars, money, houses, power, prestige. That is the orientation of the man who in India we call a GRUSTHA, a householder.

 

The right-hemisphere brain is the orientation of the SANNYASIN. one who is more interested in his own inner being, his inner peace, his blissfulness, and is less concerned about things. If they come easily, good; if they don't come that is also good. He is more concerned with the moment, less concerned with the future; more concerned with the poetry of life, less concerned with the arithmetic of it. There is a way to follow life through arithmetic and there is another way to follow life through dream -- through dreams and visions. They are totally different.

 

Just the other day somebody asked, 'Are there ghosts, fairies, and things like that?' Yes, there are -- if you move through the right-hemisphere brain, there are. If you move through the left-hemisphere brain, there are not. All children are right-hemisphered, they see ghosts and fairies all around, but you go on talking to them and putting them in their places and saying to them, 'Nonsense. You are stupid. Where is the fairy?

 

There is nothing, just a shadow.' By and by you convince the child, the helpless child; by and by you convince him and he moves from the right-hemisphered orientation to the left-hemisphered orientation -- he has to. He has to live in your world: he has to forget his dreams, he has to forget all myth, he has to forget all poetry, he has to learn mathematics. Of course he becomes efficient in mathematics -- and becomes almost crippled and paralyzed in life. Existence goes on getting farther and farther away and he becomes just a commodity in the market, his whole life becomes just rubbish... although, of course, valuable in the eyes of the world.

 

A Sannyasin is one who lives through the imagination, who lives through the dreaming quality of his mind, who lives through poetry, who poeticizes about life, who looks through visions. Then trees are greener than they look to you, then birds are more beautiful, then everything takes a luminous quality. Ordinary pebbles become diamonds; ordinary rocks are no longer ordinary -- nothing is ordinary. If you look from the right hemisphere, everything becomes Divine, sacred. Religion is from the right hemisphere.

 

A man was sitting with his friend in a cafeteria drinking tea. He studied his cup and said with a sigh, 'Ah, my friend, life is like a cup of tea.' The other considered that for a moment and then said, 'But why? Why is life like a cup of tea?' The first man replied, 'How should I know? Am I a philosopher?' The right-hemisphere brain only makes statements about facts, it cannot give you reasons. If you ask, 'Why?' it can only remain silent, there comes no response from it.

 

If you are walking and you see a lotus flower and you say, 'Beautiful!' -- and somebody says, 'Why?' what will you do? You will say, 'How am I to know? Am I a philosopher?' It is a simple statement, a very simple statement, in itself total, complete. There is no reason behind it and no result beyond it, it is a simple statement of fact. The right hemisphere is the hemisphere of poetry and love. A great shift is needed; that shift is the inner transformation.

 

-Osho, "Ancient Music in the Pines, #1"