Question 4:

Why am i so afraid of women? and why am i so bored with my wife?

 

 

All men are afraid of women, and all women are afraid of men. They have good reasons to mistrust each other, since they have been trained from early years to be enemies of each other. They are not born to be enemies, but they achieve enmity. And after about twenty years of such training in being afraid of each other they are supposed to marry one day and find complete trust in each other.

 

All this for a five rupee marriage license? Twenty years training of being afraid of each other... In a sixty, seventy-year life, one third of your life, and the most delicate and sensitive part of your life...

 

Psychologists say a man learns fifty percent of his whole life's learning by the time he is seven. In the remaining sixty-three years he will learn only fifty percent more. Fifty percent is learned by the time you are seven. By the time you are twenty almost eighty percent is learned. You have become fixed, hard. Distrust has been taught to you. The boys have been told, "Avoid girls, they are dangerous."

 

The girls have been told, "Avoid boys, they are nasty, they will do something evil to you." And then after this complete conditioning of twenty years - just think, twenty years of constantly being taught by the parents, by the school, by the college, by the university, by the church, by the priest - one day suddenly how can you drop this twenty years of conditioning?

 

This question arises again and again. So many people come and tell me that they are afraid of women. Women tell me they are afraid of men. You were not born afraid. Otherwise no man would enter into a woman's womb. If he was really afraid then no woman would be conceived, because she can be conceived only through a man.

 

You were not afraid in your beginnings. A child is born simply unafraid. Then we teach him fear and we condition his mind.

 

This has to be dropped. This has driven people almost neurotic. Then people fight, then they are constantly fighting - husbands and wives constantly fighting. And they are worried about why they go on fighting. And all relationships turn sour. Why does it happen? You have been poisoned, and you have to consciously drop that conditioning. Otherwise you will remain afraid.

 

There is nothing to be afraid of in a man or a woman. They are just like you - just as much in need of love as you are, hankering just as much to join hands with you as you are hankering. They want to participate in your life. They want others to participate in their lives - because the more people participate in each other's lives, the more joy arises. People are looking very sad. They have become very lonely. Even in crowds people are lonely because everybody is afraid of everybody else. Even if people are sitting close to each other, they are holding themselves, holding so much so that their whole being becomes hard. A hard crust surrounds them, an armor arises around their being. So even when they meet there is no real meeting. People hold hands but those hands are cold, no love is flowing. They hug each other, yes, bones clash with each other, but the heart remains far away.

 

People have to love. Love is a great need, just as food is a need. Food is a lower need, love is a higher need, a much higher-order value.

 

Now psychologists have been doing much research work on children who were brought up without any love. Almost fifty percent of children die if they are brought up without love; within two years they die. They are given good food, nourishment, every scientific care, but mechanically. The nurse comes, gives them a bath, feeds them; every care is taken, but no human love. The nurse will not hug them close to her heart. The nurse will not give her warm body to the child; warmth is not given.

 

Within two years fifty percent of those children die. And this is strange, because there is no visible reason why they die. They were perfectly healthy, the body was going perfectly well, they were not ill or anything, but suddenly, for no reason at all, they start dying.

 

And the remaining fifty percent are in more trouble than those who die. Those who die are more intelligent. Those who survive become neurotic, schizophrenic, psychotic, because no love has showered on them. Love makes you one piece. It is like glue - it glues you together. They start falling into fragments. There is nothing to hold them together, no vision of life, no experience of love - nothing to hold them together. Their lives seem meaningless, so many of them turn neurotic, many of them become criminals. Because love makes a person creative, if love is missing then a person becomes destructive.

 

Had Adolf Hitler's mother loved him more, the world would have been totally different.

 

If there is no love the person forgets the language of creativity, becomes destructive; so criminals, politicians are born - they are the same types of people. There is no difference in them, no qualitative difference. Their faces differ, their masks are different, but deep down they are all criminals. In fact, you have been reading the history of human crimes and nothing else. You have not yet been taught the real history of humanity, because the real history consists of Buddhas, Christs, Lao Tzus.

 

That's what I am trying to do here! Now talking about Lu-tsu - you may not even have heard his name - now talking on this tremendously beautiful book, THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER, I am trying to make you aware that a totally different human history exists which has been kept out of the schools. History takes note only of crimes, history takes note only of destruction. If you kill somebody on the streets you will be in the newspapers, and if you give a roseflower to somebody you will never be heard of again. Nobody will know about it.

 

If love is missing in childhood the person will become either a politician or a criminal, or will go mad, or will find some destructive way because he will not know how to create. His life will be meaningless.

 

He will not feel any significance. He will feel very very condemned, because unless you have been loved you cannot feel your worth. The moment somebody loves you, you become worthy. You start feeling you are needed, existence would be a little less without you. When a woman loves you, you know that if you are gone somebody is going to be sad. When a man loves you, you know that you are making somebody's life happy, and because you are making somebody's life happy, great joy arises in you. Joy arises only in creating joy for others; there is no other way. The more people you can make happy, the more you will feel happy.

 

This is the real meaning of service. This is the real meaning of religion: help people become happy, help people become warm, help people become loving; create a little beauty in the world, create a little joy, create a little comer where people can celebrate and sing and dance and be. And you will be happy. Immense will be your reward. But the man who has never been loved does not know it.

 

So the fifty percent that survive prove to be very dangerous people.

 

Love is such a basic need; it is exactly the food for the soul. The body needs food, the soul also needs food. The body lives on material food, the soul lives on spiritual food. Love is spiritual food, spiritual nourishment.

 

In my vision of a better world children will be taught to love each other. Boys and girls will not be put apart. No division, no disgust with each other should be created. But why has this disgust been created? - because there has been a great fear of sex. Sex is not accepted; that is the problem - because sex is not accepted children have to be kept apart. And humanity is going to suffer unless it accepts sex as a natural phenomenon. This whole problem of man/woman arises because sex is condemned.

 

This condemnation has to go - and now it can go. In the past I can understand there were reasons for it. For example, if a girl became pregnant, then there would have been problems. Parents were very much afraid, the society was very much afraid, people lived in fear. The boys and girls had to be kept apart, great walls had to be raised between them. And then one day, after twenty years, suddenly you open the door and you say, "She is not your enemy, she is your wife. Love her!" and, "He is not your enemy, he is your husband. Love him!" And what about those twenty years when he was the enemy? And what about those twenty years' experiences? Can you suddenly drop them so easily? You cannot drop them. They linger on, they hang around you your whole life.

 

But now there is no need. In my understanding, the greatest revolution in the world has been that which is created by 'the pill'. Lenin and Mao Zedong are nothing compared to the pill. The pill is the greatest revolutionary. This is going to create a totally different world because fear can be dropped; now there is no need to be afraid. The fear of pregnancy has been the cause of condemning sex.

 

Now there is no need to condemn it at all, it can be accepted.

 

Science has prepared the ground for a new culture, and I am heralding that future! That's why all those who are burdened with their pasts are going to be against me. They cannot understand me, because I SEE into the future, what is going to happen in the future, and I am preparing the way for it. Man and woman have to be brought as close as possible. And now there is no fear.

 

In the past, I understand the fear was there. I can forgive those people in the past, because they were helpless. But now you cannot be forgiven if you teach your children to be separate and antagonize them against each other. There is no need. Now boys and girls can mix and meet and be together, and all fear about sex can be dropped. And the beauty is that because of the fear and because of the condemnation and because of the denial sex has become so important; otherwise it is not so important.

 

Try to understand a simple psychological law: if you deny something too much it becomes very important. The very denial makes it important. You become OBSESSED with it. Now boys and girls have to be kept apart for twenty years - they become OBSESSED with each other. They only think of the other, they cannot think of anything else.

 

I have heard of an incident that happened to former Ambassador Ellis while he was an envoy to Greece. Both he and his secretary had been preoccupied by an approaching deadline. He had to fly to Rome to give a report before a European security conference. She, a healthy, buxom lass of twenty-three, was two days away from her wedding to a handsome Marine guard after a six-month engagement. Naturally, her mind was on the state of her trousseau rather than on the state of the Greek government. Ambassador Ellis was trying to finish up his paper on Greece before rushing to the airport. He had entitled his study - a report saying that the political situation was more shaky than the economic - 'Man Shall Not Live by Bread Alone'. Before he had a chance to really go over the copy, he had to race to the Athens airport. He left word that the speech should be teletyped to the Rome Embassy so they could type in for distribution for the next day's conference. When he arrived in Rome he was met by a group of foreign service officers who were to take him to the hotel to deliver the speech. They were a bit puzzled by the printed title of the report; Ambassador Ellis looked at one of the mimeographed copies. The bride-to-be's rendition of the Ambassador's dictated Biblical saying came out not 'Man Shall Not Live by Bread Alone' but 'Man Shall Not Love in Bed Alone'.

 

The mind can become preoccupied. Twenty years' training in anti-sexual teachings makes the mind preoccupied, and all kinds of perversions arise. Homosexuality arises, lesbianism arises, people start living in fantasies, pornography arises, dirty films, 'blue films' arise - and this whole thing goes on because of the nonsense that you do.

 

Now you want pornography to stop; it cannot stop. You are creating the situation for it. If boys and girls could be together, who would bother to look at a nude picture?

 

You go and meet some aboriginal tribe in India who live naked and you show your PLAYBOY magazine to them and they will all laugh. I have lived with them, and I have talked with them, and they all laugh. They cannot believe: "What is there?" They live naked, so they know what a woman looks like and they know what a man looks like.

 

Pornography is created by your priests; they are the foundation of it - and then all kinds of perversions... because when you cannot actually meet the other pole for which the attraction is natural, you start fantasizing. Then a greater problem arises: twenty years of fantasies and dreams, and then you meet a real woman and she falls very low, very low in your expectations - because all those fantasies! You were completely free to fantasize; no real woman is going to satisfy you.

 

Because of your fantasies and dreams you have created such ideas about a woman - which no woman can fulfill, and you have created such ideas about men - which no man can fulfill. Hence the frustration. Hence the bitterness that arises between couples. The man feels cheated - "This is not the woman." He was thinking, dreaming, and he was free to create whatsoever he wanted in his dream, and this woman looks very poor compared to his fantasy.

 

In your fantasy women don't perspire - or do they? - and they don't quarrel with you, and they don't nag you, and they are just golden, just sweet flowers, and they always remain young. They never become old. And they don't get grumpy. Because they are your creations, if you want them laughing, they laugh. Their bodies are made not of this world.

 

But when you meet a real women she perspires, her breath smells, and sometimes it is natural to be grumpy. And she nags, and she fights, and she throws pillows and breaks things, and she won't allow you a thousand and one things. She starts curbing your freedom. Your fantasy women never curbed your freedom. Now this woman seems to be like a trap. And, she is not as beautiful as you had been thinking; she is not a Cleopatra. She is an ordinary woman, just as you are an ordinary man. Neither you are fulfilling her desire nor she is fulfilling your desire. Nobody has the obligation to fulfill your fantasies! People are REAL people. And because this twenty years' starvation creates fantasy, it creates trouble for your future life.

 

You ask me, "Why am I afraid of women? And why am I bored with my wife?"

 

You must have fantasized too much. You will have to drop your fantasies. You will have to learn to live with reality. You will have to learn to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. That needs great art.

 

A woman is not just her skin, not just her face, not just her body proportion. A woman is a soul! You have to be intimate with her, you have to get involved in her life, in her inner life. You have to merge and meet with her energies. And people don't know how to meet and how to merge; they have never been taught. The art of love has not been taught to you, and everybody thinks that they know what love is. You don't know. You come only with the potential of love but not with the art of it.

 

Fifty years ago, near Calcutta, in a jungle, two girls were found, Kamala and Vimala. They were brought up by wolves. Maybe they were unwanted children and the mother had left them in the forest. It has happened many times: almost in every part of the world, once in a while, a child has been found who has grown up with the animals.

 

Those two girls were absolutely inhuman. They walked on all fours, they could not stand on two feet.

 

They learned from the wolves to walk on all fours. They howled like wolves. They could not speak Bengali. And they were very dangerous - they ran like wolves. No Olympic champion would have defeated them, they were so quick and fast. And if they jumped, if they became angry, they would tear you in parts. They looked human, but their whole training had been that of the wolves.

 

You are born with a capacity to learn language, but you are not born with a language itself. Exactly like this, you are born with the capacity to love, but you are not born with the art of love. That art of love has to be taught, has to be imbibed.

 

And just the opposite is happening: you have been taught the art of hate and hatred, not of love.

 

You have been taught how to hate people. Christians have been taught to hate the Mohammedans, Mohammedans have been taught to hate the Hindus, Indians have been taught to hate the Pakistanis. Hate has been taught in many ways. Man has been taught to hate the woman, the woman has been taught to hate the man, and now suddenly one day you decide to get married...

 

and you get married... to your ENEMY! And then the whole turmoil starts; then the life becomes just a nightmare.

 

You are bored with your wife because you don't know how to enter into her soul. You may be able to enter her body, but that is going to become boring very soon because that will be the repetition.

 

The body is a very superficial thing. You can make love to the body once, twice, thrice, and then you become perfectly acquainted with the body, its contours. Then there is nothing new. Then you start becoming interested in other women: you think they must be having something different from your wife - at least behind the clothes it appears they must be having something different. You can still fantasize about them.

 

Clothes have been invented to help your sexual desire. A naked woman leaves nothing to your fantasy. That's why naked women are not so attractive; neither are naked men. But when a woman or a man is hidden behind clothes, they leave much to your fantasy. You can fantasize about what is behind it, you can imagine again.

 

Now you cannot imagine about your wife; that is the trouble. You can imagine about your neighbor's wife, she looks attractive.

 

I have heard...

 

A man had a severe coronary and was told that if he wanted to live he had to completely cut out drinking, smoking and all forms of physical exertion. After six months he went into the doctor's office for a check-up. After he was told he was progressing fine, he said to the doctor, "You know, sometimes I want a drink so much - not a lot, just a taste of it. Could I not have - just one drink or two? Maybe once a week on a Friday or Saturday night?"

 

"No," the doctor said, "but I will tell you what. I will allow you one glass of wine with your evening meal."

 

Some months later he was back for another physical. This time he told the doctor, "You know, doctor, sometimes I just crave for a cigarette. If I could just puff one when I wake up and another after each meal."

 

"No," said the doctor. "You would soon be smoking a pack a day. But if you want you can smoke one cigar a week, perhaps after your Sunday dinner."

 

Months went by, and our friend's health as well as state of mind improved. There was only one thing that gnawed at him. When he went to the doctor again he came out with it very bluntly. "Doctor, it is not normal to go without sexual relations. Surely I am healthy enough to be able to resume that."

 

"No," said the doctor. "The physical exertion as well as excitement could just be too much. But I will tell you what: I will allow you once a week to have sex - but only with your wife."

 

People feel bored with their wives and with their husbands. The reason is they have not been able to contact the other's real soul. They have been able to contact the body, but they have missed the contact that happens heart to heart, center to center, soul to soul. Once you know how to contact soul to soul, when you have become soul-mates, then there is no boredom at all. Then there is always something to discover in the other because each being is an infinity, and each being contains God Himself There is no end to exploring.

 

That's why I say Tantra should become a compulsory phenomenon for all human beings. Each school, each college, each university, should teach Tantra. Tantra is the science of contacting souls, of going to the deepest core of the other. Only in a world which knows the art of Tantra will this boredom disappear; otherwise it cannot disappear. You can tolerate it, you can suffer it, you can be a martyr to it. That's how people have been in the past - martyrs. They say, "What to do? This is fate. This life is finished. Next life we will choose some other woman or some other man, but this life is gone, and nothing can be done. And the children are there, and a thousand and one problems"... and the prestige and the society and the respectability - so they have suffered and they have remained martyrs.

 

Now they are no longer ready to suffer so they have moved to the other extreme: now they are indulging in all kinds of sex, but that too is not giving any contentment.

 

Neither the Indian is contented nor is the American. Nobody is contented, because the basic thing is missed by both. The basic thing is unless you become capable of decoding the inner mystery of your woman or your man, you will sooner or later get fed up, bored. Then either you become a martyr - remain with it, suffer it, wait for death to deliver you - or you start indulging with other women. But whatsoever you have done with THIS woman will be done with the other, and you will get fed up with the other, and with the other, and your whole life will be just changing partners. That is not going to satisfy either.

 

Unless you learn the secret art of Tantra...

 

Tantra is one of the most important secrets ever discovered. But it is very delicate because it is the GREATEST art. To paint is easy, to create poetry is easy, but to create a communion with the energy of the other, a dancing communion, is the greatest and the most difficult art to learn.

 

People are against me because I am telling people how to love. I am telling people how to make love a prayer. I am telling people how to love so deeply that love itself becomes your religion - that your woman one day disappears and you find God there, that your man one day disappears and you find God there; that one day, in deep communion, in deep orgasmic experience, in that ecstasy, for a moment you both disappear and there is only God and nothing else.

 

You have been taught down the ages to be against sex, and that has made you very sexual. Now this paradox has to be understood. If you want to understand me, this paradox has to be understood very very deeply, clearly: you have been made sexual by all the condemnation of sex.

 

Just the other day one government officer came to look around the Ashram... because the government is very worried: "What is going on here?" - what am I teaching people? And he kept a very haughty posture. Sheela took him around the Ashram, Sheela was walking with him. He started moving closer and closer to Sheela, he started touching her body; so she would keep aloof, but he would come close again. And Sheela was worried, "What to do with this man?" She was worried; she could have hit him. And I have told her that next time it happens, give him a good beating. He needs it, he deserves it.

 

He had come to find out what was going on here - particularly about sex. And when he found Sheela alone - she was taking him around - he came close, perspiring, and asked, "Can I kiss you?" Now this man is sent here to inquire about what is happening here.

 

Remember it: next time you find a government official here, give him a kiss of death!

 

And in the office he again became very holier-than-thou.

 

This repressed sexuality...

 

I have heard of the visit of J.P. Morgan to the home of Dwight Morrow. The great American financier was noted, among other things, for a bulbous red nose of unsurpassing ugliness.

 

"Remember, Anne," Mrs. Morrow kept saying to her daughter, "you must not say one word about Mr.

 

Morgan's red nose. You must not even look at it very much."

 

Anne promised, but when Morgan arrived her mother watched and waited tensely. Anne was as good as gold, but Mrs. Morrow dared not relax. Turning to the financier with a gracious smile, she prepared to pour tea and said, "Mr. Morgan, will you have one or two lumps in your nose?"

 

That's what has happened to the whole humanity: repressed sex has become the obsession.

 

People think I am teaching sexuality? I am teaching transcendence. Soon this will be the only place where nobody will be obsessed with sex. It is already the experience of hundreds of sannyasins.

 

Every day I receive letters: "What is happening, Osho? My sex is disappearing, I no longer find much interest in it" - men and women both.

 

That interest is a pathological interest that has been created by repression. Once repression is taken away that interest will disappear. And then there is a natural feel - which is not obsessive, which is not pathological. And whatsoever is natural is good. This interest in sex is unnatural. And the problem is: this is being created by the priest and by the politician, by the so-called MAHATMAS.

 

They are the culprits. And they go on creating it, and they think they are helping humanity to go beyond sex. They are not! They are throwing humanity into this whole mess.

 

If you understand me rightly, then you will be surprised by the experience that you will go through in this commune. Soon you will find sex has become a natural phenomenon. And finally, as your meditations will deepen, as you will start meeting with each other's souls more and more, the body contact will become less and less. A moment comes when there is no need for sexuality to be there, it has taken a new turn. The energy has started moving upwards. It is the same energy - at the lowest rung it is sex, at the highest rung it is SAMADHI.

 

I have written one book - not written, my discourses have been collected in it - it is called FROM SEX TO SUPERCONSCIOUSNESS. Now fifteen years have passed. Since then nearabout two hundred books have been published, but nobody seems to read any other book - not in India. They all read FROM SEX TO SUPERCONSCIOUSNESS. They all criticize it also, they are all against it.

 

Articles are still being written, books are written against it, and MAHATMAS go on objecting to it.

 

And I have written two hundred books, and no other book is mentioned, no other book is looked at.

 

Do you understand?

 

"Mr Morgan, will you have one or two lumps in your nose?" - as if I have written only one book.

 

People are suffering from a wound. Sex has become a wound. It needs to be healed.

 

Remember, there is no need to be afraid of women, no need to be afraid of men. We are all alike, the same God. We have to learn how to love each other. We have to come closer to each other because that is the only way to come close to God. Love is one of the greatest doors to God, just as awareness is another.

 

The East has followed the way of awareness and become lopsided. The West has followed the way of love and has become lopsided. I teach you both: a loving awareness, a conscious love And with this you will become integrated, you will attain individuation.

 

- Osho, "The Secret of Secrets Vol 2, #10"