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Respect Woman
- If you cannot respect women, you cannot respect anybody else -
Osho on Woman
Woman Has Been Repressed Continuously
“Man has ruled over women for millennia. He has been given every opportunity and chance and woman has been repressed continuously, has been crippled. She has not been allowed to compete with man shoulder to shoulder in life. That’s why we don’t know how many Gautam Buddhas on the women’s side did not get the opportunity to blossom. We don’t know how many Albert Einsteins have simply been denied any possibility for growth.
“It is a very strange thing that even dimensions like poetry, music, dance are dominated by men. The greatest dancers in the world have been men, not women. In fact, women should have been ahead of any male dancer. But one needs opportunity. One needs education, one needs training. If you bar the whole of womankind from education, training, discipline, you are making the whole society and the whole world poor, unnecessarily poor.
“My emphasis is to give respect to women – and equality is not against men. It is a world which belongs to you both and you both have to be together to make it as beautiful and as divine as possible. Man alone – you have been creating only wars. In three thousand years, five thousand wars…Is life just to fight? Is life just to kill, massacre, rape? Your whole history is full of murder and you call those murderers your great men.”
- Osho, Sat-Chit-Anand: Truth-Consciousness-Bliss, Talk #26
The Woman Should Be Given Every Freedom
“If all over the world the woman is allowed freedom to grow to her potential, there will be many, many women enlightened; many, many women mystics, poets, painters. And they will enhance not only the woman’s part of the world – because the world is one – they will enhance the whole world. They will give man also new dimensions because their ways of seeing things are different. Man looks at things in one way; the woman looks from a different perspective. Life will become richer.
“It is for the betterment of both man and woman that the woman should be given every freedom and equal opportunity for her individuality. Then there will be a sense of humor. And the woman can laugh more gracefully than man, she has every potential for it – but it is repressed, condemned, criticized. She has lived a life of such misery that you cannot hope that she will show some sense of humor.
“But the day is not far away…then the whole earth will be full of laughter. Instead of talks about war, instead of politicians giving speeches all around the world, instead of the sermons of stupid priests who know nothing, it will be far better that every man and every woman is able to see the hilarious side of life and to enjoy it.”
- Osho, The New Dawn, Talk #31
Christianity Destroyed Thousands of Wise Women
“Christianity destroyed thousands of wise women, burned them alive. Even the name “witch” – which means “a wise woman” and nothing else – became so condemnatory…and the same happened in the East. All the religions prohibited women, and I can see that the reason is a great fear that if women are allowed the same opportunity as is given to men, they will be far ahead in the experience of God. And that is against the ego of man.”
- Osho, The Hidden Splendor, Talk #22
Half of Humanity Is Deprived of Raising its Consciousness
“Man has been beating women, repressing women, condemning women. And not knowing that condemning women, repressing women is making them inferior, half of humanity is deprived of raising its consciousness. And you are deprived, because you could also have learned the art of moving upwards from half of the universe. You could also have moved on the same way, on the same path; hence I always say, the liberation of women is also the liberation of man. It is more the liberation of man than the liberation of women."
- Osho, Socrates Poisoned Again After 25 Centuries, Talk #21
Unless Women Are Liberated, Men Will Never Be Liberated
“I have accepted women for the first time on an equal basis to men. I am in favor of women’s liberation because I know that unless women are liberated, men will never be liberated. Their liberation is together, because they are two sides of the same coin. Naturally many more women have come, because for centuries they were denied, they were insulted, they were never accepted as equal to men. Naturally, more and more women will be coming – and only those men will be here who are ready to accept women as their equal. No male chauvinists can remain around me. It is a family of equal people, with equal dignity.
“If women had been respected in the past, humanity would not have been in such a mess as it is today – because women are half of humanity. Half of humanity has remained undignified, uneducated, deprived of all freedom, all movement. We have hampered, handicapped ourselves. We have destroyed half of ourselves, and if we are in misery then who is to be blamed?
“I am all in favor of women’s liberation – but not the way the women’s liberation movement is going. It is taking a reactionary attitude, it is not a real revolution. It is trying to imitate man. And remember, imitation never makes you equal; imitation at the most will make you a carbon copy – but the original is original.”
- Osho, Socrates Poisoned Again After 25 Centuries, Talk #7
Man Suffers from a Great Inferiority Complex
“Man suffers from a great inferiority complex because he cannot give birth to children. It is one of the deepest unconscious inferiorities in man. He knows the woman is superior, because in life there can be nothing higher than giving birth to life.
“Man’s function, his participation in giving birth to life, is negligible. It is not more than a syringe injection. It can be done by a syringe – he can be absolutely relieved of taking part in reproduction. He must have felt it from the very beginning. And the only way to overcome this inferiority complex was to reduce the woman in every possible way to such an inferior position that man can forget his inferiority complex and start believing that he is superior.
“All the societies of the world, all the cultures, all the religions in different ways have been doing the same: reducing the woman to a secondary category of humanity not equal to man.”
- Osho, The Sword and the Lotus, Talk #17
The Woman Has Been Enslaved
“Almost all the religions have denied women the possibility of entering into paradise from the body of a woman. She can be virtuous. Her husband is her god. She should serve the husband with total commitment and devotion. This is the only religion as far as the woman is concerned. This will bring her into the body of a man in her next life, and then the doors open. Then she can strive for spiritual heights. Then she can become an enlightened master.
“There are religions which don’t allow women to read the religious scriptures. There are religions which don’t allow the women to enter their temples. The woman has been enslaved. She has been reduced into producing children, taking care of them her whole life. She has not to be respected as a human being. She is just a reproductive mechanism.
“Man has done everything wrong that can be done, everything inhuman that can be done. In Hinduism, if the husband died, the woman had to jump alive into his funeral pyre. This was thought to be something spiritual. This is pure murder – and a very crude and primitive murder. For thousands of years it was a great spiritual thing, but it is strange that the man never did such a great spiritual thing. No man in the whole of history has ever jumped into the funeral pyre of his dead wife. No brahmin followed the rule that he has made for women. If it is true, then is it not very strange why the man is not doing the same?”
- Osho, The Sword and the Lotus, Talk #17
There Are a Few Differences Between Men and Women
“Most of the differences between men and women are because of thousands of years of conditioning. They are not fundamental to nature, but there are a few differences which give them unique beauty, individuality. Those differences can be counted very easily.
“One is that the woman is capable of producing life; man is not. In that way he is inferior, and that inferiority has played a great role in the domination of women by men. The inferiority complex works in this way: it pretends to be superior – to deceive oneself and to deceive the whole world. So man down the ages has been destroying the woman’s genius, talents, capacities, so that he can prove himself superior – to himself and to the world.
“Because the woman gives birth, for nine months or more she remains absolutely vulnerable, dependent on man. Men have exploited this in a very ugly way. And that is a physiological difference; it makes no difference at all.
“The psychology of the woman is corrupted by man telling her things which are not true, making her a slave to man, reducing her to a secondary citizen of the world. And the reason for that was that he is muscularly more powerful. But the muscular power is part of animality. If that is going to decide the superiority, then any animal is more muscular than a man.”
- Osho, The Sword and the Lotus, Talk #5
The Woman Can Be Satisfied with one Love
“But real differences are certainly there, and we have to search for them behind the pile of invented differences. One difference I see is that a woman is more capable of love than a man is. A man’s love is more or less a physical necessity; a woman’s love is not. It is something greater and higher; it is a spiritual experience. That’s why the woman is monogamous and man is polygamous. The man would like to have all the world’s women, and still he would not be satisfied. His discontent is infinite.
“The woman can be satisfied with one love, utterly fulfilled, because she does not look at the body of the man, she looks at his innermost qualities. She does not fall in love with a man who has a beautiful muscular body, she falls in love with a man who has charisma – something indefinable, but immensely attractive – who has a mystery to be explored. She wants her man not to be just a man, but an adventure in discovering consciousness.
“The man is very weak as far as sexuality is concerned; he can have only one orgasm. The woman is infinitely superior; she can have multiple orgasms. And this has been one of the most troublesome matters. The man’s orgasm is local, confined to his genitals. The woman’s orgasm is total, not confined to the genitals. Her whole body is sexual, and she can have a beautiful orgasmic experience a thousandfold bigger, deeper, more enriching, more nourishing than a man can have.
“But the tragedy is that her whole body has to be aroused, and the man is not interested in it, he has never been interested in it. He has used the woman as a sex machine just to relieve his own sexual tensions. Within seconds he is finished. And by the time he is finished, the woman has not even begun.”
- Osho, The Sword and the Lotus, Talk #5
The Woman Has the Capacity for Multiple Orgasms
“When love happens, it has beauty. When it is made to happen, it is ugly.
“And while you are making love with the man on top of the woman…it is known as the missionary posture. The East became aware of this ugliness that the man was heavier, taller and more muscular; he was crushing a delicate being. In the East, the way has always been just the opposite: the woman on top. Crushed under the weight of the man, the woman has no mobility. Only the man moves, so he comes to orgasm within seconds and the woman is simply in tears. She has been a partner, but she was not involved in it. She has been used.
“When the woman is on top she has more mobility, the man has less mobility, and that will bring their orgasms closer to each other. And when both go into orgasmic experience, it is something of the other world. It is the first glimpse of samadhi; it is the first glimpse that man is not the body. He forgets the body, he forgets the world. Both the man and the woman move into a new dimension they have never explored.
“The woman has the capacity for multiple orgasms, so the man has to be as slow as possible. But the reality is, he is in such a hurry in everything that he destroys the whole relationship. He should be very relaxed so that the woman can have multiple orgasms. His orgasm should come at the end, when the woman’s orgasm has reached to the peak. It is a simple question of understanding.”
- Osho, The Sword and the Lotus, Talk #5
The Man Is Afraid
“A woman is more centered than a man… She is more serene, more silent, more patient, is capable of waiting. Perhaps because of these qualities she has more resistance to diseases and she lives longer than a man. Because of her serenity, her, she can fulfill a man’s life immensely. She can surround man’s life in a very soothing, cozy atmosphere.
“But the man is afraid – he does not want to be surrounded by the woman, he does not want to let her create a cozy warmth around him. He is afraid because that way he will become dependent. So for centuries he has been keeping her at a distance. And he is afraid because he knows deep down that the woman is more than he is. She can give birth to life. Nature has chosen her to reproduce, not man.
“Man’s function in reproduction is almost nil. This inferiority has created the greatest problem – man started cutting the woman’s wings. He started in every way reducing her, condemning her, so that he could at least believe that he is superior. He has treated women as cattle – even worse. In China, for thousands of years, the woman was not thought to have a soul, so the husband could kill her and the law would not interfere – she was his possession. If he wanted to destroy his furniture, it was not illegal. If he wanted to destroy his woman, it was not illegal. This is the ultimate insult – that the woman has no soul.”
- Osho, The Sword and the Lotus, Talk #5
Half of Humanity Is Kept in a Downtrodden State
“Man has dominated women for centuries and forced the idea on them that they are the weaker sex, that they cannot do anything that man can do. They can do small homely things – that is their world. I want to destroy that idea completely…
“And this is a strange way: to keep half of humanity in a downtrodden state. How much is the loss? Half of humanity means that women, if they were accepted as equal, would have produced a Dostoevsky, a Turgenev, a Chekhov, a Gorky, a van Gogh, a Picasso, a Nijinsky. They may have proved a Buddha, a Jesus. Half of humanity! It is a vast ocean to whom you have denied all possibilities of creation, expression. And you have behaved with women as if they are cattle, not human beings.”
- Osho, The Last Testament, Vol. 1, Talk #19
Women’s Slavery is Automatically Men’s Slavery
“Women’s liberation is automatically men’s liberation. Women’s slavery is automatically men’s slavery. They go together.”
- Osho, The Last Testament, Vol. 1, Talk #19
'Boys Will Be Boys'
The last question: Osho, I become interested in other women besides my wife, but when my wife shows interest in some other man I become very jealous. I burn in a terrible fire.
“Men have always created freedom for themselves, but obstructed women. Men have imprisoned women within the four walls of the house and have allowed themselves freedom. Those days are gone. Now women are as free as you are. And if you don’t want to burn in jealousy, there are only two ways: one way is that you yourself become free of desire. Where there is no desire, jealousy cannot remain. And the other way: if you don’t want to become free of desire, then at least give the same rights to the other as you have. Gather this much courage. I would like you to become free of desire.
“If you have known one woman, you have known all women. If you have known one man, you have known all men. Then the differences are only in the outer form. And the one who has not known all women in knowing the one woman, understand that he is living unconsciously. Even knowing innumerable women he will not be able to know, he simply will never know. Knowing happens through awareness, and he is unconscious. He will go on chasing women, dropping one to go after another.
“Certainly you will burn, because it hurts the male ego. You think it is completely fine that you become interested in other people’s women, that there is no problem in it. We say: 'Boys will be boys.' Men have created this saying because they think that a man will not be satisfied with one woman, that a man wants many women, but that a woman will be satisfied with only one man. These are just male tricks. A woman should be satisfied with one man – and that one is you! But you? – how can you be satisfied with one? You are a man! You think there should be more freedom for a man…
“Your wife has as much right to her freedom as you demand for yourself. And if you find that, no, it is not right that your wife becomes interested in other men, then your being interested in other women is also not right. What you expect of your wife you should become, you should act in the same way. Only then do you have any right.”
- Osho, Die O Yogi Die , Talk #8
In a Better World a Man Will Be Both, a Woman Will Be Both
“Man has been taught to be just a man: never to show any feminine traits, never to show any softness of the heart, never to show any receptivity, always be aggressive. Man has been taught never to cry, never weep – because tears are feminine.
“Women have been taught never to be in any way like the male: never to show aggression, never show expression, to always remain passive, receptive. This is against reality, and this has crippled both.
“In a better world, with better understanding, a man will be both, a woman will be both – because sometimes a man needs to be a woman. There are moments when he needs to be soft – tender moments, love-moments. And there are moments when a woman needs to be expressive and aggressive – in anger, in defence, in rebellion. If a woman is simply passive, then she will turn into a slave automatically. A passive woman is bound to become a slave – that’s what happened down the ages. And an aggressive man, emphatically aggressive and never tender, is bound to create wars, neurosis in the world, violence.
“Man has been fighting, continuously fighting; it seems that man exists on the earth just to fight. In three thousand years there have been five thousand wars. War continues somewhere or other, the earth is never whole and healthy…never a moment without war. Either it is in Korea, or it is in Vietnam, or it is in Israel, or India, Pakistan, or in Bangladesh; somewhere the massacre has to continue.”
- Osho, The Heart Sutra, Talk #3
The Womb Is a Central Phenomenon in the Feminine Body
“The first thing to be understood: men and women are different; not only different, but opposites. But they are not unequal, they are equal. There is difference, there is oppositeness, there is a polarity, but they are not unequal, they are equal. Two opposites are always equal, otherwise they cannot oppose each other.
“The second thing to be understood: The female body exists for a totally different purpose – biologically, physiologically, chemically. It has a different function to fulfill than the male body. And it is so different from the male body that unless you penetrate into the deeper layers of biology you will not be able to understand the difference. They exist as if in two worlds apart. The woman carries a womb.
"The very word ‘woman’ comes from ‘man with a womb’. And the womb is so important – nothing is more important than the womb, because a new life has to come through it. The whole moving phenomenon of life passes through it; it is the very gate into this world. And because of the womb, the woman has to be receptive, she cannot be aggressive. The womb cannot be aggressive; it has to receive, it has to be an opening, it has to invite the unknown. The womb has to be a host; the man will be the guest.
"Because of the womb being a central phenomenon in the feminine body, the whole psychology of woman differs. She is non-aggressive, non-inquiring, non-questioning, non-doubting, because all those things are part of aggression. The man doubts, he inquires, he goes in search; she waits. The man will come in search of her. She will not take the initiative, she simply waits – and she can wait infinitely.“
- Osho, The Mustard Seed, Talk #18
on Need of Contemporary Woman
Question : What do you see as the greatest need of Contemporary Woman?
Because the woman has been dominated for centuries, religion has disappeared from the earth. If religion comes back, the woman will again gain respect. And because the woman has been dominated, tortured and reduced to a nonentity, she has become ugly. Whenever your nature is not allowed to go according to its inner needs it turns sour, it becomes poisoned; it becomes crippled, paralyzed -- it becomes perverted.
The woman that you find in the world is not a true woman either, because she has been corrupted for centuries. And when the woman is corrupted, man cannot remain natural either, because after all, the woman gives birth to the man. If she is not natural, her children will not be natural. If she is not natural -- she is going to mother the child, male or female -- those children naturally will be affected by the mother.
Woman certainly needs a great liberation, but what is happening in the name of liberation is stupid. It is imitation, it is not liberation. Here there are many women who have been in the Liberation movement, and when for the first time they come here they are very aggressive. And I can understand their aggression: centuries and centuries of domination have made them violent. It is a simple revenge. They have become insane, and nobody is responsible except man. But slowly slowly, they soften, they become graceful; their aggressiveness disappears.
They become, for the first time, feminine. Real liberation will make the woman authentically a woman, not an imitation of man. Right now that's what is happening: women are trying to be just like men. If men smoke cigarettes then the woman has to smoke cigarettes. If they wear pants then the woman has to wear pants. If they do a certain thing then the woman has to do that. She is just becoming a second-rate man.
This is not liberation, this is a far deeper slavery -- far deeper because the first slavery was imposed by men; this second slavery is deeper because it is created by the women themselves. And when somebody else imposes a slavery on you, you can rebel against it, but if you impose a slavery on yourself in the name of liberation, there is no possibility of rebellion ever. I would like the woman to become really a woman, because much depends on her.
She is far more important than man because she carries in her womb both the woman and the man, and she mothers both, the boy and the girl; she nourishes both. If she is poisoned then her milk is poisoned, then her ways of bringing up children are poisoned. If the woman is not free to be really a woman, man will never be free to be really a man either. The freedom of woman is a must for the freedom of man; it is more fundamental than man's freedom.
And if the woman is a slave -- as she has been for centuries -- she will make a slave of man too, in very subtle ways; her ways are subtle. She will not fight with you directly; her fight will be indirect, it will be feminine. She will cry and weep. She will not hit you, she will hit herself, and through hitting herself, through crying and weeping, through using these Gandhian methods, she will dominate you.
Even the strongest man becomes henpecked. A very thin, weak woman can dominate a very strong man simply by using Gandhian methods. Gandhi is not the inventor of those methods; they have been used for centuries by women He simply rediscovered them and used them politically.
The woman has been using them for centuries, but only in a family context. The woman needs total freedom so that she can give freedom to man too. This is one of the fundamentals to be remembered: if you make somebody a slave you will be reduced to slavery ultimately, finally; you can't remain free. If you want to remain free, give freedom to others; that's the only way to be free.
- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol. 7, #10"
on the women's liberation movement
Osho, Are you against the women's liberation movement?
Shakti, I am not against women, I am all for them. But the liberation movement is something ugly - and I know the responsibility is on the male chauvinists. They have been doing so much harm to women down the ages that now the woman wants to take revenge. But whenever you start taking revenge you become destructive. The movement is still in a destructive phase; it has not become creative. And I am against destructiveness.
It is of no use to go on looking at past wounds. It is of no use to take revenge because of the past. One should learn to forgive and forget. Yes, it was wrong - accept it.
Whatsoever has been done to women down the ages was absolutely wrong. Man HAS exploited them. Man has been very brutal, very animalistic. Man has reduced women to slaves; even more than that, he has reduced them to things, to possessions. But what is the point of taking revenge? Then you become the pursuer and man becomes the pursued. Then another kind of chauvinism begins to take form and shape. Then the female chauvinist is born. And this is not going to put things right. Then the women will start doing harm to men, and sooner or later they will take revenge. Where is this going to stop? It is a vicious circle.
And my feeling is that instead of men stopping it, it is far easier for women to stop it, to come out of the vicious circle - because they are more loving, more compassionate.
Man is more aggressive, more violent. I don't have much hope from men, I hope much from women. Hence I am not in favor of the aggressive attitude and approach of the Women's Lib movement. [....]
Men and women are different worlds; hence it is difficult to understand each other.
And the past has been full of misunderstandings, but that is not necessarily to be so in the future. We can learn a lesson from the past, and the only lesson is that man and woman have to become more understanding of each other and more accepting of each other's differences. Those differences are valuable, they need not create any conflict; in fact, they are the causes of attraction between them. If all the differences between men and women disappear, if they have the same kind of psychology, love will also disappear because the polarity will not be there. Man and woman are like negative and positive poles of electricity: they are pulled towards each other magnetically; they are opposite poles. Hence, conflict is natural. But through understanding, through compassion, through love, through looking into the other's world and trying to be sympathetic to it, all the problems can be solved. There is no need to create more conflict - enough is enough.
Man needs as much liberation as woman. Both need liberation - liberation from the mind. They should cooperate with each other and help each other to be liberated from the mind. That will be a true liberation movement.
That's what sannyas is all about.
- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol. 10, #2"
Respect Woman
“If you cannot respect women, you cannot respect anybody else — because it is from women you come. The woman mothered you for nine months, then she took every care, she loved you for years. And then again... you can’t live without a woman. She is your solace, your warmth. Life is very cold; the woman becomes your warmth. Life is very uninspiring; the woman becomes your inspiration. Life is very very arithmetical; the woman becomes your poetry. She gives grace to your life. She takes care of you. She loves you, she goes on loving you, tremendously, totally.”
- Osho, "Take It Easy, Vol 1, #10"
“The whole history of man is a history of condemnation of women by all the societies, by all the cultures, by all the religions. Among even the greatest human beings who have walked on the earth there is not a single one who has respected women. Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Mahavira, even Buddha, have condemned women in some way or other. I am the first man who has given womankind the same respect as is given to man. It has nothing to do with sex appeal.”
- Osho, "The Last Testament, Vol 6, #12"
“For centuries this male chauvinistic attitude has prevailed. In India the so-called saints go on saying that the woman is the door of hell, but they don’t say the same thing about men. They go on condemning the women, but they never say anything about the men. If the woman infatuates man, then the man infatuates the woman. But even your saints are not true sages — they are male chauvinistic pigs! Otherwise man and woman are two aspects of the same humanity; they require the same respect. But the whole past has been condemnatory about women. It only shows one thing, nothing else: that your saints were deep down afraid of women, hence they were creating all kinds of barriers around themselves, that “the woman is the door to hell.” They were trying to convince themselves that the woman consists only of bones and blood and pus and mucus. And what they consist of? — gold, silver, diamonds? It is very strange! Not a single saint says what he consists of — and he comes from the woman. From the woman’s womb he comes, brings all the blood and the bone and the pus and the mucus from the woman, and he condemns the woman. He is really afraid, afraid of his own sexuality; afraid because he has been told that sex is sin. And of course to him the woman symbolizes sex.
Nobody bothers about the woman, what is her situation. In fact, women are very non-aggressive as far as sexuality is concerned. NO woman can rape a man, only a man can rape a woman. Man’s sexuality is aggressive, woman’s sexuality is receptive. Woman can live without sex far more easily than man, hence nuns are far more true than the monks — the monks are hypocrites. But the poor woman is condemned continuously. I would like to change this whole ugly tradition. The woman will be respected only when sex is also respected, remember it. The woman will be accepted only when sex is also accepted as natural. These popes, these shankaracharyas, these IMAMS, these so-called saints have created a very ugly situation. It has to be completely destroyed and a new beginning has to be made in which man and woman are no more separate, are no more thought separately, in which man and woman are considered equally because they are two aspects of the same sex, two sides of the same coin.”
- Osho, "I Am That, #16"
“Every religion is afraid of women, because every religion is afraid of sex. Every religion is repressive of sex, against sex. Naturally, it is a byproduct that every religion has to be against the woman, the woman has to be condemned. If you condemn sex you are bound to condemn the woman. If you respect the woman — it is a corollary — you will respect sex also, as a natural thing. And why were these people against sex? They are different in their attitudes about everything except sex. About sex all religions agree; that seems to be the only agreement amongst religions. So it seems to be tremendously important that we should go deep into the whole phenomenon: why they are afraid of it. They are afraid of sex because it is the greatest energy in man, the most powerful pull of nature and biology. There is no way to destroy it. Either you can condemn and repress it, or you can understand and transform it. But the second is a long and arduous path and needs tremendous intelligence, awareness — because sex is an unconscious force in you. Each cell in your body is made of it, is vibrant with it. Your conscious mind is nothing compared to your unconscious sexual energy; hence the fear that the unconscious can take possession of you any moment.”
- Osho, "From Unconciousness to Consciousness, #6"
“No woman in the whole world has created any ideology, any great metaphysics, any great philosophy. Her concern is not the outside; her concern is the inside. That’s why I have immense respect for women. Perhaps no man in the whole world ever had as much respect for women as I have. Women have been loved, but not respected. And without respect the love is nothing but lust; you label it with a beautiful word, but deep down inside you it is always sex, always sex. Man has reduced woman and her spirituality to such a state that she has become only an object of sex. And if the American trend has to be followed — where everything has to be used once and thrown away — the ultimate consequence is coming closer: use the woman once and throw away. They are already doing it in a way....
- Osho, "The Great Pilgrimage - From Here to Here, #8"
“Millions of women hate their husbands for the simple reason that they feel used, as if they are just machines for your sexual lust to be relieved so that you can have a good night’s sleep. No woman can ever respect you if she feels she is being used. Each being is an end unto himself. Never use a woman, never use a man, never use anybody. Nobody is a means for your purposes. Respect — love is a sharing, it is not using the other, it is not trying to snatch something from the other. On the contrary, it is giving wholeheartedly for no reason at all, just for the sheer joy of giving.”
- Osho, "The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 7, #4"
“Man’s past history, Devageet, has been really not human. It can be human only if the woman and the man are no longer just sex partners; that drags them both to the very lowliest spaces. If they can love each other with respect, not using each other as commodities, men and women both will have a great uprising of consciousness. The more your sex energy becomes love, the more you are a spiritual being. Sex is only a reproductive process forced by nature on you. Nature has been using you just like a factory — and you don’t have even the dignity to declare, “I am not a factory.” But this can happen only if you are alert, aware, conscious of what you are doing, what you are thinking, how you are behaving. And that brings such grace and such beauty, that the physical beauty simply disappears. I have seen many beautiful women with very ugly minds. I have seen many beautiful men, but their beauty is not more than skin-deep. And this is the trouble: beauty is always skin-deep, and ugliness goes to the very bones. Go on digging to the bones, to the marrow, and you will find it… it is there. Love is the alchemy to change that ugliness from within. And once it disappears from within, even an ordinary face, a homely face, starts shining with the bliss and joy of the beyond.“
- Osho, "The Great Pilgrimage - From Here to Here, #8"
“Kahlil Gibran should be remembered forever as one who gives respect and dignity to women. All your so-called bogus religious leaders of the world have only condemned the woman. Even the greatest of them, for whom I have great respect, but with reservations — even Gautam Buddha who is certainly the highest peak ever attained up to now, the Everest. Even he was not respectful towards women. For years he continuously refused to initiate any women. And finally, after twenty years of continual refusal, continual insult, humiliation, he reconsidered. Because of a strange situation, he had to concede and accept women initiates. He must have been very reluctant even in that moment. He had to agree because the woman was almost his real mother… because his mother died when he was born, immediately. His own mother never saw him; neither had he any remembrance of his mother.”
- Osho, "The Messiah, Vol 1, #5"
“All these people... even a man like Jesus, did not allow any women as apostles, although he was born of a woman. Jesus had no respect for women, not even for his own mother. One day he was speaking in a village in the marketplace, amongst a small crowd, and somebody from the outside of the crowd shouted “Jesus, your mother is waiting here.” And the words that came out from Jesus’ mouth… one hopes they had not come out that way; it degrades Jesus. Jesus said, “Tell that woman” — he does not even use the word `mother’ — “Tell that woman that my father is high above in the skies. On the earth nobody is my father, nobody is my mother; my real home is far away in the sky.” It must have hurt the woman immensely.
He was loved and trusted the most by one prostitute — one of the most beautiful in Judea, Mary Magdalene — and her sister, Martha, and another woman, Maria, but they were not allowed to be his apostles, his messengers. And the most surprising thing is that when he was crucified, all his men apostles disappeared; nobody wanted to be there because somebody may recognize that these are the intimate followers of Jesus, and the same may be their fate — crucifixion. But these three women — Jesus’ mother whom he had called “that woman”, and the prostitute who was condemned by the whole Judea, Mary Magdalene, and Maria — did not leave the place. Not only did they not leave the place, they remained close to the body of Jesus, and when the body was taken down from the cross, those three women took care of it; they carried the body into the cave. But still Christianity has no respect for women.“
- Osho, "The Messiah, Vol 2, #24"
“No religion has shown any respect to women. I sometimes wonder what kind of religions we have produced. Even the finest people, like Gautam Buddha, were not ready to initiate women into sannyas. Buddha was more afraid about his male sannyasins... that if women become sannyasins the celibacy of his male sannyasins will be in danger. What kind of celibacy is it? — so fragile, not confident of itself. And it is not surprising that these monks created homosexuality in the world. You can avoid the woman, but by avoiding the woman you cannot destroy the sexuality of man. Mahavira, a man of tremendous compassion, who brought the concept of non-violence to the world, is very violent about women. He says that a woman cannot become enlightened as a woman. First she has to earn enough virtue to be born as a man, and then there is a possibility of her being enlightened. But as a woman he absolutely denied the possibility. Jesus talks of love so much, but when he chose his twelve apostles he did not include a single woman — although there were three women who were very close to him... far more understanding than those apostles. And it is a historical fact to be remembered that when he was crucified, all his twelve apostles disappeared, afraid that if they were caught, perhaps the same treatment would be given to them too.”
- Osho, "The Razors Edge, #16"
“You are asking why more women are attracted. All the religions have condemned women. I am the first man who is trying to compensate for all the harm and the wounds that have been done by the past and its so-called religious people. My respect for women is equal to my respect for men. This has not been the case in the past. Gautam Buddha, a man I respect, I love — but that does not mean I agree with him on every point — denied for years initiation for women. He was not ready to initiate women, only men. Why? The woman is not so spiritual. Strange... the same people who go on saying that the soul is neither man nor woman, on the other hand start saying that the woman is less spiritual than man. Only bodies are different; the souls cannot be different. And now we are more knowledgeable scientifically, a man can be changed into a woman just by plastic surgery. Then what will Buddha do? Will he initiate the man or not? — because he is a woman... But plastic surgery cannot do any harm to the soul. Many women are changing into men. What is Buddha going to do? In fact, he will not ever be able to decide: is this woman really a woman or just a case of plastic surgery?”
- Osho, "Socrates Poisoned Again After 25 Centuries, #7"
“To perceive truth one needs enormous capacity; one needs a wide-open mind that is constantly alert. The creative totality can only be perceived by a man with great clarity of mind. That is why I say over and over again that if you want your children to know the truth you must give them the chance to think creatively. Stop conditioning them with beliefs; allow them to understand things for themselves. Creativity will become their capacity for life; creativity will become their wisdom. That capacity and that wisdom will lead them to the uncharted sea of truth. Did you know that Aristotles, that a man of his stature has written that women have less teeth than men! How could he write such a thing? Was there no woman around so he could count her teeth? Although there was no scarcity of women, he simply accepted the traditional belief and saw no reason to check things out for himself. And he even had two wives of his own! All he had to do was ask either the first Mrs. Aristotle or the second Mrs. Aristotle to open her mouth so he could count her teeth! But he never bothered. He never doubted tradition. He simply accepted the belief that women have less teeth than men. If the truth be known, the male ego is not prepared to accept that women can be equal to men in any respect, not even in the number of teeth! And when a man like Aristotle did not doubt a popular belief then who else would”
- Osho, "The Long, the Short and the All, #3"
Religion is female.
Lao Tzu says the nature of the existence is more like the female, more feminine. And the analogy is beautiful. He is not saying that existence is female - remember this. This is not logic, he is not trying to prove that existence is female. He is not for the lib movement - no. He is simply giving an analogy.
A man can also be feminine. A Buddha is feminine, a Lao Tzu is feminine, a Jesus is feminine. Then he lives, he lives in the moment, unhurried; he enjoys the moment unhurried.
Jesus says to his disciples: Look at the lilies in the field. How beautiful they are! Even Solomon in all his glory was not so beautiful. But what is the secret of the lilies? - they are just flowering here and now. What will happen the next moment is not a worry; the next moment has not entered into their consciousness yet.
A man can live a feminine existence - then he becomes a mystic. That is the only way. So all mystics become in a certain way feminine. And they are the real religious men, not the founders of religion.
Remember, this is a difference.... Buddha is not the founder of Buddhism - no. His disciples are the founders. Jesus is not the founder of Christianity - no. His apostles, they are the founders. Mahavir is not the founder of Jainism. Gautam, his disciple, who was a scholar and great pundit, was. These are the men.
Jesus himself is feminine. To show this, in India we have never painted avataras, teerthankaras, Buddhas, with beards and mustaches - no - just to show this that they are feminine. Have you ever seen Ram with a mustache? Krishna with a beard? It is not that they were somehow lacking in hormones. They were not the third sex. They were men; beards existed. But this is just an analogy.
We have dropped the beards to show that they have become feminine: the feminine mystic has come into being. They existed without any hurry, they existed not as a tense man but as a non-tense woman, and you can feel around them the feminine warmth, the roundness of a Buddha.
THE SPIRIT OF THE VALLEY NEVER DIES. IT IS CALLED THE MYSTIC FEMALE. THE DOOR OF THE MYSTIC FEMALE IS THE ROOT OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. THE DOOR OF THE MYSTIC FEMALE IS THE ROOT OF HEAVEN AND EARTH...
And if you can find the key to open the door of the mystic female you have opened the door of existence. Everybody has to enter that door non-tense, balanced, satisfied, content - that's the secret of feminine being.
When I say this there are two possibilities of misunderstanding: women can misunderstand and think that they have nothing to do; men can misunderstand and think that this Lao Tzu is not for them.
No, it is for you both. But remember... women are not pure women, they have lost the feminine mystique themselves. They have to gain it again. It will be easier for them of course to gain it than men, because man has gone farther away. And don't think that if you are a man Lao Tzu is not for you - he is particularly for you, otherwise you will go farther and farther away from existence and life's ecstasy. Everybody has to come back to the mother; that is the feminine mystique.
You are born out of the mother's womb, and you have to find the womb again in existence. If you can find the womb again in existence, the same warmth, the same life, the same love, the same care in existence - then existence becomes your home, your mother.
Hindus are better when they call their god "mother" - mother Kali - than Christians and Mohammedans and Jews, who go on calling their god "father." Those three religions are man- oriented, that's why they have been so violent. Mohammedans and Christians have killed so many, they have been a catastrophe on the earth. They have been murderers. In the name of religion they have been only killing and doing nothing else. This is man-oriented religion.
Buddhism has not killed, Jainism has not killed, Hinduism has not killed, because they are more and more inclined towards the feminine mystique. And you cannot complain against Lao Tzu at all, with him there exists no organized religion. Once a religion becomes organized, violence enters into it.
Organization is going to be violent, it has to fight its way, it is bound to become male. Organization is male; religion is female.
[....]
the organization will do everything that we cannot do, and they always do it better. I have learned it through history. I will create a church... and I will not be involved in it at all. In fact, they do it on their own. I just simply encourage and help."
Once the pope is there, Christ is forgotten; once the church is there, the Buddha is killed and murdered. It is always on the corpse of a Buddha that a religion stands.
These are analogies. Women can attain to their feminine mystique easily; that is the reason more women become attracted towards religion. They don't create religion - but more women, almost four times more than men, become interested in religion. Among Mahavir's disciples, forty thousand were women and ten thousand men; and the proportion was the same with Buddha's disciples. Go to any church and any temple and just count - you will always find four women to one man, and that one may have come just because the wife has come; he may not be really there.
Women can become more easily attuned; they are mothers, they are nearer nature. Man will find it a little difficult to come back; he has involvements, commitments, investments in his anxiety and tension. Even if he comes he will create an anxiety around religion.
This is my everyday observation: women come to me - if they surrender, they surrender totally. If they meditate at all, they meditate totally. Then simply they start growing.
Men come to me - if they surrender they cannot surrender totally, a part they always save. And when you surrender half-heartedly it is not a surrender at all. Then they meditate, but then meditation becomes an anxiety. And they come and they say, "Now this meditation is creating anxiety. I cannot sleep. I am constantly thinking about it - how it is going to happen, how I am to manage it."
It is not a management. You cannot manage it. You have to be in a let-go, a great let-go. It is difficult for man; he is so disciplined for anxiety, so trained to be tense. From the very childhood, the society forces men to become MEN - aggressive, violent, always reaching for something, trying to achieve something, ambitious. If they start playing with dolls the parents say, "Why? What are you doing?
Are you being a sissy? This is for girls, not for boys. Home is for girls; to play with dolls is for girls, not for boys. They have to go out, and fight their way into life. They have to struggle - that is for them."
If home is for girls then at-homeness will also be for girls. Then you are never at home; and at- homeness is meditation.
-Osho, "Tao: The Three Treasures, Vol 1, #3"
on Feminine Qualites
“Grace is a feminine quality.”
- Osho, "Is the Grass Really Greener...?, #8"
“A woman is more humble, more grateful, more loving.”
- Osho, "Communism and Zen Fire, Zen Wind, #5"
“To be feminine is to become passive, to be feminine is to allow; to be feminine is to wait, to be feminine is not to be in a hurry and tense; to be feminine is to be in love. Yes, the ashram is run by women, because I want it to be run by the heart.”
- Osho, "Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 5, #9"
“Love, trust, beauty, sincerity, truthfulness, authenticity — these are all feminine qualities, and they are far greater than any qualities that man has. But the whole past has been dominated by man and his qualities. Naturally in war, love is of no use, truth is of no use, beauty is of no use, aesthetic sensibility is no use. In war, you need a heart which is more stony than stones. In war, you need simply hate, anger, a madness to destroy. In three thousand years, man has fought five thousand wars. Yes, this is also strength but not worthy of human beings. This is strength derived from our animal inheritance.”
- Osho, "Sermons in Stones, #17"
“A woman should keep her separateness, should save all her feminine qualities and purify them. In this way she is going, according to her nature, towards enlightenment. Of course once you are enlightened, you have gone beyond the discrimination of sexes. Beyond enlightenment, you are simply human beings. But before that…. Be proud of your qualities. Increase them, refine them because they are the path towards godliness. Man is not in a better position than woman as far as religious experience is concerned.”
- Osho, "Sermons in Stones, #17"
“Respect the feminine — it is higher, certainly higher, than the male qualities. But the male chauvinist mind is incapable of accepting it. Out of an inferiority complex the male mind has tried to repress the feminine and of course because the male is aggressive, violent, destructive, he can repress it. The feminine is receptive, surrendering; it knows how to let go, it knows how to adjust, so it has become adjusted even to the male chauvinist attitude. The whole past of humanity is ugly and the reason is that we have not allowed the feminine qualities to blossom. So become more and more receptive, sensitive, creative, loving, dancing, singing — and that’s how you will go on becoming more and more meditative. And the more meditative you are, the more you will find feminine qualities blossoming in you. The moment the male energy becomes feminine a Buddha is born, a Christ is born.”
- Osho, "Is the Grass Really Greener...?, #10"
“A really wise man is feminine, receptive, passive. That’s why Buddha looks so feminine. That quality of passiveness, that quality of receptivity… He is just a receptacle. He reflects life: he allows life to reflect in him, to be reflected through him. He sings the song that existence wants to sing through him. He has no ideas of his own; he does not hinder.”
- Osho, "The Sun Rises in the Evening, #1"
“For centuries manliness has been praised. It is time to drop that whole nonsense. It is because of that praise that humanity has suffered much. Manly qualities are aggressive, violent. We should start praising feminine qualities. The most feminine quality is receptivity, openness, vulnerability. Man has dominated long enough and that domination has been destructive of all that is fragile, beautiful, of all that is flowerlike. Only rocks have remained, flowers have disappeared. My whole effort here is to praise the feminine qualities. The world needs them. If I love Buddha, Jesus, Krishna, the most fundamental reason for my love is that they are all feminine, they are not masculine. Friedrich Nietzsche has condemned Buddha and Christ for the same reason — they are not manly enough. I praise them for the same reason — they are not manly enough. That is good; they have a grace, the feminine grace. We have to change the whole gestalt of human consciousness. we have to make it more surrendering, more receptive, we have to teach it how to relax and how things can happen in a deep let-go. all that is great — truth, love, bliss, god, freedom — happens in a state of let-go. You cannot force them to happen. that is not possible, that is not i the nature of things at all. You can only be a host, you can only be pregnant with those qualities, you can allow then to happen. Don’t hinder, that’s all that you can do. Keep the doors open, keep the heart open, and you become a song. God starts singing through you. You become a joyous spirit, you become a celebration.”
- Osho, "If You Choose To Be With Me, You Must Risk Finding Yourself, #8"
“The woman has to be herself. And not only that: the woman has to be herself and she has to help man to become a little more feminine. Not only does the woman have to be liberated from men, the man has also to be liberated from men. There is a great need for a men’s liberation movement — not liberation from women, but liberation from all the nonsense that has been taught to him down the ages: Be hard! Be steel! Don’t bend! Break but don’t bend! Man has been taught to be hard like a rock — man has missed much. And now women are following in the same tracks. It is a dangerous situation. If the woman also follows the man, she will be a second-rate citizen, she will never be equal to man. And not only that: if she follows man and becomes hard, as lib women ARE becoming — their faces are becoming hard, their bodies are losing roundness, softness, vulnerability, they are becoming more and more angry and less and less loving — the danger is that that will be the end of the whole of humanity, if it happens. The only hope for humanity is in the quality of feminineness — the only hope. The hope is not with Friedrich Nietzsche, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini: the hope is with Buddha, Chaitanya, Meera — with a totally different kind of people. And we have to turn men and women BOTH into a kind of feminine lovingness.”
- Osho, "The Fish in the Sea is Not Thirsty, #4"
“It is absolutely right to be feminine. You should feel fortunate, because this is the quality that one needs in the search for god. One can move towards god only in utter passivity. One cannot be aggressive towards god. In the East we have a saying: ‘God is the only male and everybody else is female.’ It is in deep feminine receptivity that god penetrates. So this is the quality of a disciple, of a devotee. The problem is arising because of your Western conditioning. In the West the male ego is praised. To be active is thought to be very valuable. In the East we have learned something more profound. To know the art of inaction is the greatest thing in the East — we call it tao, wu-wei. And this inaction is not lethargy. Much action happens through it, but you are not the doer. The doer is god, you are just a vehicle. So it is not lethargy. Action will be there but it will come through inaction. And you are ready for that jump.”
- Osho, "The Sacred Yes, #15"
“A woman always wants to belong. That has nothing to do with any particular individuals; it is something to do with the very nature of womanhood. It is part of the feminine mind to lean to somebody, to possess and to be possessed. So it is not a question of somebody being like that. All women, more or less, are like that. That is their intrinsic quality. And when a woman loses that quality, she loses something of her womanhood. Then she is not worth much. She is almost like a man; she has a male mind. You will not feel that softness, that fragileness that gives grace and beauty to a woman. It is just like a creeper. The creeper needs some tree to belong to, to creep upon, to be supported by. The creeper cannot stand on its own. But that is one of the most beautiful experiences — that somebody belongs to you and you belong to somebody. Belonging is one of the most desired states of the human mind. You feel rooted when you feel that you belong to somebody.”
- Osho, "The Cypress in the Courtyard, #22"
“A man may be physically a man and may not be psychologically a man; he may have a feminine psyche. Hence things become complicated. A woman may have a masculine psyche. There is no necessity that the body should decide the psyche. The woman, the feminine quality I call the moon type, and the masculine quality I call the sun type. Their paths are bound to be different. Of course the goal is the same; they reach the same peak but they follow different paths. The feminine psyche follows the path of love. Sufism is basically a feminine approach towards existence. The masculine spirit will not find any appeal in Sufism, in the path of love; it will be more attracted to Zen, the path of meditation. The path of love is more of feelings, emotion; it is greener. The path of meditation has the beauty of a desert, the silence, the infinity of a desert.”
- Osho, "Dance Til the Stars Come Down From the Rafters, #3"
“Unless one becomes a womb one never becomes pregnant with god. One cannot conquer god, one can’t be aggressive — that is the sure way to fail. One can only surrender and allow god to happen. That’s what the quality of being feminine really is. That is the essential core of meditation.”
- Osho, "Dance Til the Stars Come Down From the Rafters, #2"
“The lotus is the most loved flower in the East and it is tremendously significant as a symbol. The lotus is the most soft flower, the most feminine, very receptive, and that’s what the East has been searching for: the quality of being feminine, soft, receptive. Because god cannot be conquered — one has to surrender to god, and only the feminine can surrender. God has to be a guest and only the feminine can become the host. God has to be received and welcomed, and one has to learn infinite patience because one never knows when the guest will come; there is simply no way of predicting it. its ways of coming are infinite but there is no way to know them beforehand. its ways are mysterious, and only the feminine heart can understand the mysterious.”
- Osho, "The Sacred Yes, #30"
“My whole work consists of creating more and more of the feminine quality. So when it starts growing in you, the old mind says ‘Now you are vulnerable, weak — how are you going to face that ugly world?’ Here you were protected, here you lived with like-minded people. All freedom was there. Everybody was ready to accept you — whosoever you are, whatsoever you are, with all your flaws and faults and limitations; there was no imposition on you. You relaxed, you started growing; you became softer and softer. Now, I can understand the fear, but don’t be worried — you are not weak; you have simply become more feminine. Start feeling this as your strength; it is strength. And soon you will see that it goes on growing: on the one hand you become more and more soft, on the other hand more and more strong. But this strength is subtle, not gross; this strength is divine, not that of the beast. This strength is that of a buddha. It grows slowly, slowly. Have you not looked at the statue of Buddha — how feminine he looks? Don’t be worried… and I am coming with you!”
- Osho, "The Madman's Guide to Enlightenment, #30"
“Be passive. In your passivity, God comes. Be feminine. In your femininity, God comes. Have you not watched it? Buddha looks very feminine, Krishna looks very feminine. Why? — because it is simply a metaphor. They have been depicted as feminine, graceful, to show that that is their inner quality — receptivity. When you are doing something you are being aggressive. When you are not doing anything you are non-aggressive. And God cannot be conquered; you can only allow him to conquer you.”
- Osho, "The Diamond Sutra, #4"
“All the great artists of the world slowly slowly start growing a quality of feminineness, grace, elegance, exquisiteness. A certain flavor of softness, relaxedness, calmness and quietness surrounds them. They are no longer feverish. What I am teaching here is really to turn the whole world feminine.”
- Osho, "The Book of Wisdom, #7"
“Receptivity is always feminine. The male quality is aggressive, the feminine quality is receptive. It is not only physically that a woman has a womb, it is also spiritually true. When when a man attains to the truth he has to learn the art of being feminine. Hence you will see in the statues of Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna, Christ, a certain quality of femininity, a grace, a sensitivity, an availability, a vulnerability, because truth has to be received, welcomed. You cannot conquer truth, you have to allow the truth to conquer you. There is no way to be aggressive as far as truth is concerned. Aggression is violence and the violent person becomes incapable of knowing the truth. One has to be utterly loving. The feminine quality makes you a host and then the guest can come at any moment. Whenever your receptivity is ripe the guest inevitably arrives. Not even a single moment is lost.”
- Osho, "I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am, #21"
“The feminine mind has both qualities, the negative and the positive. The positive is love, the negative is jealousy; the positive is sharing, the negative is possessiveness; the positive is waiting, the negative is lethargy, because waiting can look as if it is waiting and it may not be, it may be just lethargy. And the same happens with the male mind: the male mind has a positive quality that he inquires, goes in search, and a negative quality that he always doubts. Can you be an inquirer without doubt? Then you have chosen the positive. But you can also be a doubtful man without inquiring, just sitting and doubting.”
- Osho, "The Mustard Seed: My Most Loved Gospel on Jesus, #18"
“To be motherly is a totally different phenomenon. It is something absolutely human; it transcends animality. It has nothing to do with biology. It is love, pure love, unconditional love. When a mother loves unconditionally — and only a mother can love unconditionally — the child learns the joy of unconditional love. The child becomes capable of loving unconditionally. And to be able to love unconditionally is to be religious. And it is the easiest thing for a woman to do. It is easy for her because naturally she is ready for it.”
- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 9, #7"
“Tantra believes that just as a man has to be born out of a woman, so the new birth of a disciple is also going to be out of a woman. In fact, all the Masters are more mothers than fathers. They have the quality of the feminine. Buddha is feminine, so is Mahavir, so is Krishna. You can see the feminine grace, the feminine roundness; you can see the feminine beauty; you can look into their eyes and you will not find the male aggressiveness. So it is very symbolic that a Buddha took the form of a woman. Buddhas always take the form of a woman. They may be living in a male body, but they are feminine — because ALL that is born is born out of the feminine energy. Male energy can trigger it but cannot give birth. A Master has to keep you in his womb for months, for years, sometimes for lives. One never knows when you will be ready to be born. A Master has to be a mother. A Master has to be tremendously capable of feminine energy, so that he can shower love on you — only then can he destroy. Unless you are certain about his love, you will not allow him to destroy you. How will you trust? Only his love will make you able to trust. And through trust, by and by, he will cut limb by limb. And one day suddenly you will disappear. Slowly, slowly, slowly..and you are gone. GATE, GATE, PARA GATE — going, going, going, gone. Then the new is born.”
- Osho, "The Tantra Vision, Vol 1, #1"
“Man has been condemning women. Perhaps there is a reason; perhaps he was aware of some superiority in woman — the superiority of love. No logic can be higher than love, and no mind can be higher than the heart. But the mind can be very murderous; the mind can be very violent, and that’s what the mind has done for centuries. Man has been beating women, repressing women, condemning women.”
- Osho, "Socrates Poisoned Again After 25 Centuries, #21"
“The man and the woman are not really two separate entities, but the personality of the man needs the supporting qualities of the woman. If those supporting qualities are not there, the man will fall apart. And the same will happen to the woman. She cannot exist only on female qualities, she needs male supporting qualities. So each human being is a composite whole of two polarities which appear opposed to each other but are not really opposed; they are basically, absolutely essential components of each other.”
- Osho, "From Misery to Enlightenment, #9"
“A buddha laughs too, but his laughter has the quality of a smile. His laughter has the feminine quality of grace. When an ignorant person laughs, his laughter is very aggressive, egoistic. The ignorant person always laughs at others. The contented person, the person who knows life a little, laughs at himself — at the whole play of life itself. It is not addressed to anybody in particular. He just laughs at the absurdity of it all… the impossibility of it all.”
- Osho, "The Buddha Disease, #20"
“Sleep is a feminine energy. If you look at it — and here you come to a very significant point — the feminine energy functions in a totally different way than the male energy. The woman wants you to chase her. She does not want you simply to sit and wait for her to come. Even though the woman wants you, loves you, wants to be yours, first she will run away. She will not run very fast. She will run in such a way that you can catch her; she will give you every chance to catch hold of her. Every feminine energy has the same quality. Sleep is feminine, you cannot catch hold of her. You have just to close your eyes and lie down and wait. She will come … she is just in the other room. In the same category are all great values: friendship, love, peace, silence, and ultimately the realization of your godliness — they all happen. You are not the doer.”
- Osho, "Sermons in Stones, #6"
“Poetry has an indirect way of hinting at things. Poetry is feminine. Prose is masculine. Prose, the very structure of it, is logical; poetry is basically illogical. Prose has to be clear-cut; poetry has to be vague — that’s its beauty, its quality. Prose simply says what it says; poetry says many things. Prose is needed in the day-to-day world, in the marketplace. But whenever something of the heart has to be said, prose is always found inadequate — one has to fall back to poetry.”
- Osho, "Take It Easy, Vol 1, #1"
"A woman has perfect qualities to become a disciple. Surrender is easy for her. It is natural, part of the feminine being. Surrender is easy; surrender comes easily. A woman becomes a good disciple. And you will always find: wherever you will find four disciples, three will be women. This will be the proportion all over the world. Mahavir had forty thousand sannyasins — thirty thousand were women. The same proportion with Buddha. You go in any church, any temple and just count — you will always find the proportion three to one. In fact, all the religions are supported, fed, by women; but they are disciples."
-Osho, "Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 6, #6"
Celebrate Your Feminine Qualities
Question 1: Osho, Why is it still so difficult for me to see the worth of my feminine qualities? there is still something in me that judges them as weak and having a feeling of not being able to survive. can you please say something about this?
It is the long condemnation of feminine qualities that has gone deep into the blood and the bones of women. It is man's conspiracy to prove himself superior to women - which he is not.
Man is deep down aware of the fact that the woman has something which he does not have. In the first place the woman is attractive to him, she looks beautiful. He falls in love with the woman, the woman becomes almost an addiction to him - and that's where the trouble arises.
The feeling of dependence on women which every man feels, makes him react in such a way that he tries to manage the woman as a slave - spiritually a slave. He's also afraid because she is beautiful; ... she is beautiful not only to him - she is beautiful to whomever looks at her, to whomever comes in contact with her. Great jealousy arises in the egoist, male chauvinist mind. He has done with women what Machiavelli suggests to the politicians - marriage is politics too. Machiavelli suggests that the best way of defense is offense, and man has used the idea for centuries - centuries before Machiavelli recognized it as a basic fact in all political spheres.
Wherever there is some kind of domination, offense is certainly the best way of defense. In defense, you are already losing ground; you have already accepted yourself as the defeated side. You are just protecting yourself.
In India, hundreds of invaders have come - small groups of invaders but they conquered this vast country, which is a subcontinent, it is a world in itself. By the end of this century, one man in every four will be Indian. It is one-fourth of humanity.
In this country, there are religious scriptures like manusmriti, five-thousand years old, and they suggest that if you want to have peace in your house, giving a good beating to the woman once in a while is absolutely necessary. She should be kept almost imprisoned. And that's how she has lived - in different cultures, different countries, but her imprisonment has been almost the same.
And because man wanted to prove himself superior.... Remember, whenever you want to prove something that means you are not that thing.
A real superiority needs no proof, no evidence, no witness, no argument. A real superiority is immediately recognized by anybody who has even a small amount of intelligence.
The real superiority has its own magnetic force. Because men condemned woman - and they had to condemn her to keep her in control - they reduced her almost to a subhuman category. What fear must have led man to do this? - because it is sheer paranoia....
Man continuously compares and finds the woman superior. For example, in making love to a woman, a man is very inferior because he can have only one orgasm at a time while the woman can have at least half a dozen, a chain - multiple orgasm. Man simply feels utterly helpless. He cannot give those orgasms to the woman. And this has created one of the most miserable things in the world:
because he cannot give a multiple orgasm, he has tried not to give her even the first orgasm. The taste of the orgasm can create danger for him.
If the woman knows what orgasm is, she is bound to become aware that one orgasm is not satisfying; on the contrary, she is more thirsty. But the man is spent. So the most cunning way is not to let the woman know that anything like orgasm exists in the world.
It is only in this century that we have given recognition to a certain orgasmic state while making love. No sex manual, no treatise written on sex in the East or in the West even mentions the word orgasm. It seems to be a conspiracy. Vatsyayana, the first man in the history to write about sex energy, to explore it in a scientific way, wrote the first treatise on sexology five-thousand years ago - KAMASUTRAS, aphorisms on sex. He has gone into the subject as deeply as possible from all directions. He has not ignored the smallest detail. He describes eighty-four postures of lovemaking.
You cannot improve on it; you cannot find an eighty-fifth posture, he has done exhaustive work. But even Vatsyayana does not mention orgasm. That is simply unbelievable - that a man who inquired so deeply into sex did not come across the fact of orgasm.
No, my feeling is that he is hiding a fact - and to hide any fact is a crime, because that means you allow the false to continue as if it is the truth. And it is not an ordinary fact concerning chemistry or geography; it is something which is the most important in human life.
The experience of orgasm not only gives you the ultimate pleasure that the body is capable of, it also gives you the insight that this is not all. It opens a door. It makes you aware that you have been unnecessarily looking outside, your real treasure is within.
Meditation has been found by people who had deep orgasmic experiences. Meditation is a byproduct of orgasmic experience. There is no other way to find meditation. But orgasm brings you naturally into a state of meditation: time stops, thinking disappears, the ego is no more. You are pure energy. For the first time you understand: you are not the body and you are not the mind; you are something that transcends both - a conscious energy.
And once you enter into the realm of conscious energy, you start having the most beautiful experiences of life, the lightest, the most colorful, the most poetic, the most creative. They give you fulfillment and contentment on the one hand - as far as the body, the mind and the world are concerned.
On the other hand, they create a tremendous, divine discontentment. Because what you have experienced is great, but the very experience of it makes you certain, for no reason at all, that there must be greater experiences ahead. Before you knew anything about orgasm, you had never dreamed about it; now you know it. This is going to become an incentive to seek and search: Is there anything more juicy, more blissful, more psychedelic than any psychedelics can deliver to you?
This search led man toward meditation.
It was a simple insight into the orgasmic experience.
What happens? - time stops, thinking disappears. The feeling of I is no more there. There is a feeling of isness - pure, existential - but there is no ego attached to it. I, me, mine - they have all been left far behind. This gives you the clue for meditation. If you can manage a transcendence of time, a transcendence of mind, you will be entering into a orgasmic space alone - without a woman, without a man.
To be exactly true, meditation is non-sexual orgasm. But half of humanity has not known orgasm for centuries. And because the woman has not known orgasm, you should not think that man has been in a better position. Not giving orgasm to the woman, he has to lose his own orgasm too.
Something significant has to be understood: Man's sexuality is local, it is confined to the genitals and a sex center in the brain. But with the woman, it is different. Her sexuality is all over her body. Her whole body is sensitive, is erotic. Because man's sexuality is local, it is tiny. The woman's sexuality is something very great. Man is finished within a few seconds; the woman is not even warmed up.
Man is in such a hurry - as if he is doing some duty for which he is paid and wants to finish it quickly - making love is the same.
Why, in fact, does man bother to make love I wonder? - just two or three seconds and he is finished.
The woman was warming up and the man is finished - not that he has attained orgasm; ejaculation is not orgasm. The man turns on his side and goes to sleep. And the woman - not one woman but millions of women are crying tears after men have made love to them because they have been left in a limbo. You have encouraged them and before they can come to a conclusion, you are out of the game.
But this fact of the man finishing quickly has a very significant background; that's what I have been bringing you to. In not allowing the woman the first orgasm, he has to learn to finish as quickly as possible. So the woman has lost something tremendously beautiful, something sacred on the earth - and the man has lost.
Orgasm is not the only thing in which the woman is powerful. Everywhere in the world the woman lives five years longer than the man; her average age is five years more than the man's. That means she has more resistance, more stamina. Women are sick less than men. Women, even if they are sick, heal themselves more quickly than men. These are scientific facts.
One hundred and fifteen boys are born while one hundred girls are born. One wonders: why one and hundred fifteen? But nature knows better. By the time they are marriageable, fifteen boys will have popped off! Only one hundred boys and one hundred girls will be left. Girls don't die easily.
Women don't commit suicide as much as men; men's suicide rate is double. Although women talk about suicide more than men - man ordinarily never talks - women make much fuss about suicide but they always choose to survive because they don't use any drastic methods to kill themselves.
They choose the most comfortable and most scientific and most contemporary - sleeping pills. And strangely enough, no woman takes so many pills that it becomes impossible for her to be revived. So her suicide is not suicide but a kind of protest, a threat, a blackmail to make the husband understand that this is a warning for the future. Everybody is condemning him - the doctors, the neighbors, the relatives, the police officers. He has unnecessarily become a criminal, and everybody's sympathy is for the woman - although she was going to commit suicide.
As far as murder is concerned, the difference is vast. Man commits murder almost twenty times more; a woman, very rarely.
Women go mad less than men. Again, the proportion is the same: men go mad twice as often as women. And still, after all these facts established by science, the superstition continues that man is stronger. Only in one thing is he stronger and that is that he has a muscular body. He is a good manual worker.
Otherwise, on every point he feels - and he has felt for centuries - a deep inferiority complex. To avoid that complex, the only way is to force the woman into an inferior position. And that is the only thing that is more powerful in man: he can force the woman. He is more cruel, he is more violent, and he has forced the woman to accept an idea which is absolutely false: that she is weak.
And to prove that the woman is weak, he has to condemn all the feminine qualities. He has to say that they are all weak, and all those qualities together make the woman weak.
In fact, the woman has all the great qualities in her. And whenever a man becomes awakened, he attains to the same qualities which he has been condemning in women. The qualities that are thought to be weak are all the feminine qualities. And it is a strange fact that all the great qualities come into that category. What is left are only the brutal qualities, animal qualities.
The woman is more loving. The man has not shown greater love than the woman. Millions of women have died - they have jumped alive into the funeral pyre with their beloveds because they could not conceive of a life without their husband or friend. But don't you think it is a little weird that in ten- thousand years not a single man has dared to jump into a funeral pyre with his wife? Enough time, enough opportunity... and you are stronger. The delicate woman, the fragile woman, jumps into the funeral pyre and the stronger Mohammed Ali goes on doing his push-ups. And he is still stronger!
Strength has many dimensions. Love has its own strength. For example, to carry a child in the womb for nine months needs strength, stamina, love. No man could manage it. An artificial womb could be placed in man - now scientific technology has come to the point where man could have a plastic womb implanted but I don't think he could survive nine months! - they are both going to jump into the ocean.
It is difficult to give life to another soul, to give a body to another soul, to give a brain and mind to another soul. The woman shares wholeheartedly in giving to the child whatever she can manage.
And even after the child is born, it is not easy to bring up children. To me, it seems to be the most difficult thing in the world.
Astronauts and Edmund Hillary... these people should first try to bring up children. Then only can we accept that they have done something by going to Everest; otherwise it is pointless. Even if you have reached the moon and walked on the moon, it does not matter. It doesn't show that you are stronger.
A living child - so volatile, such an energy overflowing that he will tire you within hours. Nine months in the womb and then a few years.... Just try one night to sleep with a small baby in your bed. During that night, in your house, something is going to happen. Either the child will kill you or you will kill the child. Most probably, you will kill the child, because children are the nastiest people in the world.
They are so fresh and they want to do so many things and you are dead tired. You want to go to sleep, and the child is fully awake and he wants to do all kinds of things and he wants your advice, and questions, and if nothing works then he wants to go to the bathroom! He's feeling thirsty. He's feeling hungry in the middle of the night.... [....]
I don't think there is any man who can have a pregnancy or who can bring up children. It is the strength of the woman. But it is a different strength. There is one strength which is destructive, there is another strength which is creative. There is one strength which is of hatred and there is another strength which is of love.
Love, trust, beauty, sincerity, truthfulness, authenticity - these are all feminine qualities, and they are far greater than any qualities that man has. But the whole past has been dominated by man and his qualities.
Naturally in war, love is of no use, truth is of no use, beauty is of no use, aesthetic sensibility is no use. In war, you need a heart which is more stony than stones. In war, you need simply hate, anger, a madness to destroy.
In three thousand years, man has fought five thousand wars. Yes, this is also strength but not worthy of human beings. This is strength derived from our animal inheritance. It belongs to the past, which is gone, and the feminine qualities belong to the future, which is coming. There is no need to feel yourself weak because of your feminine qualities. You should feel grateful to existence that what man has to earn, you have been given by nature as a gift.
Man has to learn how to love. Man has to learn how to let the heart be the master and the mind be just an obedient servant. Man has to learn these things. The woman brings these things with her, but we condemn all these qualities as weaknesses. Even if you have chosen women as great individuals, you can see what you have chosen - you have chosen a man. Because you have chosen the qualities of man that were in the woman. For example, Joan of Arc had all the qualities of man. The Queen of Jhansi in India had all the qualities of man: she could fight with a naked sword, could kill people without any problem. Such women have been chosen in history and great tribute is paid to them by the historians. And they don't represent women. In fact, that is the reason why they have been chosen, because they are just carbon copies of men.
The women's liberation movement has to learn one fundamental thing: that is not to imitate man and not to listen what he says about feminine qualities, the feminine personality. The feminine qualities are clear.
Friedrich Nietzsche has a great insight into many areas of life, but he could not create a coherent, comprehensive system of philosophy. And the reason was not that he was not capable - he was the most capable of all Western philosophers. The problem was, he had so much to give that it was not possible for him to make a whole system; otherwise, much would not be part of it. Hence, he chose an aphoristic style of writing. Just as you can write in a very condensed form, many things which ordinarily you would write in an essay, Friedrich Nietzsche would write in four lines or at the most in a paragraph. But that has created great misunderstanding about the poor man. Because it is too condensed - unless you have the clarity to see into the density of his insight, into the far-reaching effects of his insights, into all the implications which are not said but are there... you will have to search for them and then you will be surprised.
Nietzsche is going to come back. Now is the time that he should be understood perfectly well. Adolf Hitler misunderstood him. His followers misunderstood him, his enemies misunderstood him. But to be misunderstood is a seal from human beings, that you had something really important. Otherwise, who cares to understand or misunderstand?
Nietzsche had this insight: that men have to suppress women. Otherwise, if things had gone naturally, it would be more possible that the woman would be the master and the man would be the servant, because his qualities are those of a servant - of a soldier at the most. And the feminine qualities are almost divine. They have a royalty about them.
Drop all the ideas of man that he has been putting in your heads. And also drop the ideas of the women's liberation movement, because they are also putting nonsense into your minds. Their nonsense is that they are trying to prove that men and women are equal. They are not - and when I say they are not, I don't mean that someone is superior and someone is inferior. I mean that they are unique.
Women are women and men are men; there is no question of comparison.
Equality is out of the question. They are not unequal and neither can they be equal. They are unique.
Rejoice in your feminine qualities, make a poetry of your feminine qualities. That is your great inheritance from nature. Don't throw it away, because the man does not have them. To be equal, you may start doing idiotic things.
And that's what is happening in the women's liberation movement. The women are smoking cigarettes or, if there is an opportunity, then a joint. Now in the East, the woman cannot even think - neither can the man think... if you go home and find your wife relaxing on the sofa with a cigarette, you will not be able to believe what has happened.
We have a deep respect for feminine qualities and those qualities prohibit many things, encourage many other things. The woman should not try to imitate man, because even if you succeed.... It is difficult to succeed. Imitation is always imitation, it is never equal. But for argument's sake, if we accept that you can become exactly like a man, you will lose all that you have and you will not gain anything. Because even in the eyes of man, you will not be beautiful anymore, and in your own eyes, you will be shattered. It was better to be unequal than to be equal, because now the man takes no interest.
A woman should keep her separateness, should save all her feminine qualities and purify them.
In this way she is going, according to her nature, towards enlightenment. Of course once you are enlightened, you have gone beyond the discrimination of sexes. Beyond enlightenment, you are simply human beings. But before that....
Nor should man try to imitate woman, which he has been doing.
[....]
Be proud of your qualities. Increase them, refine them because they are the path towards godliness.
Man is not in a better position than woman as far as religious experience is concerned. But he has one quality and that is of the warrior. Once he gets a challenge, then he can grow any kind of qualities. Even the feminine qualities, he can grow better than any woman can. His fighting spirit balances things.
Women have qualities inborn. Man needs only to be provoked, given a challenge: these qualities have not been given to you - you have to earn them. And if men and women both can live these qualities, the day is not far away when we can transform this world into a paradise.
Again, I remember Friedrich Nietzsche. He said that Jesus Christ, Gautam Buddha... these were not real men, because their qualities are feminine. Nobody else has said that; no follower, no enemy.
But Nietzsche certainly has a knack of finding absolutely fresh insights. He is against Jesus and against Gautam Buddha, because if people follow them, everybody will become feminine. He loves the qualities of man - particularly of the warrior. He says that in his life, the most remarkable, unforgettable experience happened in a strange way... and perhaps nobody will believe it.
He was sitting on the terrace of his house and a group of soldiers marched on the road by the side of the house with naked swords, their shining boots, walking in rhythm... a beautiful morning with the sun, no clouds.
Nietzsche said, "Those shining swords, that music of the soldiers' boots was the greatest aesthetic experience to me. I have never seen anything more beautiful, more musical."
He is for the qualities of man: the naked sword moving in the sun gives him the most beautiful experience. The sound of the boots gives him the greatest music. He is for the qualities of man.
I am for the qualities of women. Because of Nietzsche's insistence for man's qualities, Adolf Hitler was born. Adolf Hitler, Goebbels, and the whole bunch of criminals who surrounded him, are pygmies compared to Friedrich Nietzsche as far as intelligence is concerned. They misunderstood him completely. They took out portions that supported fascism, murder, invading innocent people, killing innocent people.
I am here to counter Nietzsche. I love the man, I love his insights, but that does not mean that I agree with him. I disagree with him.
I would like the whole world to be full of feminine qualities. Then only can wars disappear. Then only can marriage disappear. Then only can nations disappear. Then only can we have one world:
a loving, a peaceful, a silent and beautiful world.
So drop all the conditionings man has given to you. Find your own qualities and develop them. You are not to imitate the man; neither is the man to imitate you. When I say he has to grow feminine qualities, I don't mean that he has to imitate women.
Every person, whether man or woman, is born of a father and of a mother. Half of his being is contributed by man and half by woman, so everybody is both. If you are a man, then the man is on top and underneath it, hidden, are all the feminine qualities, the contribution from your mother.
If you are a woman, then your feminine qualities are on top and your male qualities are underneath it; that is the contribution of your father. And there is no need of any conflict between you, because you are man and woman together, simultaneously.
Rather than creating a conflict, my whole work is to indicate to you the path, how you can create an orchestra of all your qualities together. That will be your wholeness as a human being.
-Osho, "Sermons in Stones, #17, Q1"
Woman and Men
Love should be the only way for men and women to live together. No other ritual is needed.
-Osho, "Sermons in Stones, #29"
There is nothing worse than this that you can do, that you are capable of: reducing a being to a thing. And that's what possession is. Only things can be possessed; beings cannot be possessed.
You can have a communion with a being. You can share your love, your poetry, your beauty, your body, your mind. You can share but you cannot do business. You cannot bargain. You cannot possess a man or a woman.
-Osho, "From Darkness to Light, #20"
Never reduce anybody to being just a sexual object, and never allow anybody to reduce you to being just a sexual object. If sex follows love, if it becomes a harmony in love, it has a totally different quality to it. Then it is no more sexual.
When it comes as a part of love... you love a person, you want to share everything with the person. When you love the person you want to share your mind, you want to share your body, you want to share your soul, you want to share your meditation, you want to share your... whatsoever you have. If you have an aesthetic sense, you want the person you love to share your poetry, to share your painting, to share your vision, to share your dreams.
-Osho, "The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 1, #4, Q2"
Every man should be respectful to women: they are your mothers, they are your beloveds. Every woman should be respectful towards men: they are your children, they are your lovers. There is no question of any conflict between man and woman: they are two sides of the same coin.
-Osho, "From Bondage to Freedom, #14, Q1"
In three thousand years five thousand wars have been fought -- this is what the male mind has done. I am in support of a matriarchal system. I would like the power to go to women because basically they are non -- aggressive; they are loving, they are compassionate. But it has nothing to do with biology really; even the male mind can become feminine. And the whole process of transforming the male mind is the art of meditation.
-Osho, "Is the Grass Really Greener...?, #10"
It is very simple to understand. Marriage is the ugliest institution invented by man. It is not natural; it has been invented so that you can monopolize a woman. You have been treating women as if they were a piece of land, or some currency notes. You have reduced the woman to a thing. Remember that if you reduce any human being to a thing -- unaware, unconscious -- you are also being reduced to the same status; otherwise, you will not be able to communicate. If you can talk with a chair, you must be a chair. Marriage is against nature.
-Osho, "From the False to the Truth, #15, Q3"
All religions of the world are male-oriented and are somehow afraid of women. The greatest fear is that the women can distract their attention from God. And in fact, there is no God, just their idea that any beautiful woman will be able to distract… They are right!
-Osho, "Om Shantih Shantih Shantih, #12"
There is no need for man to feel inferior to woman. The whole idea arises because you take man and woman as two species. They belong to one humanity, and they have complementary qualities. They both need each other, and only when they are together are they whole. [....]
Life should be taken with ease. Differences are not contradictions. They can help each other and immensely enhance each other. The woman who loves you can enhance your creativity, can inspire you to heights you have never dreamed of. And she asks nothing. She simply wants your love, which is her basic right.
Most of the things that make men and women different are conditional. Differences should be maintained because they make men and women attractive to each other, but they should not be used as condemnation.
In the West, the women's liberation movement is destroying women by forcing them to be equal to men. There is no question of equality or inequality. By becoming equal to men, women will lose some softness, some grace, some beauty --and I can see it happening.
In the East, you will find women in the highest strata of society such as you cannot find in the West. The Western woman is trying to become like a man. She may succeed --she is succeeding, but she will always be a second-class man. She should try to be a first-class woman.
I see the grace disappearing from the Western woman in every sphere. In their dress the grace is disappearing, in their behavior, in their language... grace is disappearing. Just to compete with men they are smoking. Now, no high-society, cultured woman in India will ever think of smoking unless she is westernized. She will not think of using clothes which men use, because it is not only the clothes --they will change your whole body. It is the mind that changes everything.
The Western woman is losing her breasts, they were something that gave her a beautiful roundness, something unique. The whole history of painting, poetry, literature, talks about the beautiful breasts of women, but the Western woman is losing them. What has happened?
It is a change in the mind. She is losing her buttocks. She is becoming a straight line with no curves. And those curves were making her body a beautiful phenomenon --they were really a tremendous art. She is losing proportion. Her face is becoming harsh, dry. Even the most beautiful woman in the West looks hard, ready to fight. That is neither going to help womanhood nor its liberation.
-Osho, "The Sword and the Lotus, #5"
Women live longer than men, almost five years more; that’s why you see so many widows in the world. And women are more resistant to illness, disease. Women are more tolerant, more accepting. From where comes this strength? — it comes from their receptivity.
-Osho, "The Beloved, Vol 2, #9"
Women are more patient, more tolerant than men. Men are very impatient and very intolerant. Women are less violent than men. Women don’t commit murders; it is the man who commits murders, who wages crusades, who is always getting ready for war, who invents all kinds of deadly weapons — atomic bombs, nuclear weapons. The woman is completely out of this whole game of death.
-Osho, "Beyond Enlightenment, #17"
Men and women should not be in a contract, like marriage. They should be in love — but they should retain their freedom. They don’t owe anything to each other.
-Osho, "The Razor's Edge, #26"
Women cannot be competitive: they cannot fight, they cannot struggle. And if you find a woman somewhere who struggles and fights, who is competitive, then something of womanhood is missing in her. Physically she may be a woman, psychologically she is a man. So remember, passivity is not laziness. Passivity has its own kind of activity. It is non-tense, relaxed.
-Osho, "The Beloved, Vol 2, #9"
A woman is not much interested in sex. She is much more interested in warmth, in cuddling, in friendliness, in love. Man is much more interested in sex. These are the fallacies which show that God never created the world, because nothing fits together. He does not seem to understand that man and woman have to live together. They should be made in such a way that they fit with each other, but they are absolutely misfitting. Man's sexuality is genital and local. It's like a local anesthesia. [....]
Women have a totally different kind of being. Her whole body needs love. It is not sexuality. Her whole body is orgasmic. That’s why there is tremendous trouble. Man comes to orgasm quickly — within two minutes — and the woman has not even started. The woman takes a little time. Her whole body has to become ready, ecstatic. Her whole body has to join the dance. Only then can she feel orgasmic joy. So she is not actually interested in the prick. She is more interested in hugging, in being close to you, in the warmth of your body. She wants to be surrounded by your love, she wants to surround you with her love.
-Osho, "Sat Chit Anand, #9"
I would like the woman to become as feminine as possible, only then can she flower. And the man needs to be as masculine as possible, only then can he flower. When they are polar opposites, a great attraction, a great magnetism, arises between them. And when they come close, when they meet in intimacy, they bring two different worlds, two different dimensions, two different richnesses, and the meeting is a tremendous blessing, a benediction.
-Osho, "The Book of Wisdom, #7"
We can make a better world together. Men and women should be really half-and-half of a whole. There are qualities which men have and women do not have; there are qualities which women have and men do not have. Both together, the human being will be richer in every possible way.
-Osho, "The Last Testament, Vol 1, #19"
A man is not of necessity masculine, a woman is not of necessity feminine. A woman can be masculine, for example, Joan of Are or, in India, Laxmibhai. These women were warriors, great soldiers; they were not feminine at all. Biologically, of course, they were feminine, their bodies were those of women, but their very souls were those of men. They have to be counted as masculine. And there have been men — poets, dancers, musicians, singers, painters — who were very feminine. So soft, so round was their being that psychologically they were women. They may have been able to reproduce children, they may have been able to become fathers and husbands, but deep down they were not masculine; their psychology can only be called feminine. It happens -- in fact, it happens more often than you will ever think.
-Osho, "Tao: The Golden Gate, Vol 1, #5"
The feminine mind cannot have a sense of time. It is the male, aggressive mind who is time-worried, time-conscious. They are totally different.
The feminine is not in any hurry -- there is no hurry. Really, there is nowhere to reach. That's why women cannot become great leaders, great scientists, great warriors -- they cannot become. And if sometimes there are freak women, they have a male mind. For example, Joan of Arc, or Laxmi Bai: they are only feminine in body; the mind is not feminine at all. It is masculine.
For the feminine mind there is no goal, and our world is man-oriented. So women cannot be really great in a man-oriented world, because greatness is related to the goal. Some goal has to be achieved; then you become great -- and the feminine mind is not after any goal. Here and now she is happy. Here and now she is unhappy. There is nowhere to move.
The feminine mind exists in the moment. That's why the feminine curiosity is never for the far-away; it is always about the neighborhood. She is not interested in what is happening in Vietnam. She is interested in what is happening in the other house -- the intimate, the here. The man looks absurd: `Why are you worried about what Nixon is doing or what Mao is doing?' The woman is interested in the love affairs that are going on in the neighborhood. She is curious about the near; the far is meaningless. Time doesn't exist.
Time exists for those who have a goal to reach. Remember, time can exist only when you have to reach somewhere. If you don't have to reach anywhere, what is the meaning of time? Then there is no hurry.
-Osho, "Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, Vol 2, #22"
Man has to be taught to be more heartful because from the heart goes the way to being. You cannot bypass the heart. The woman is in a better position, she can go directly towards being from the heart. But instead of recognizing this immense quality in women, man has been condemning women. Perhaps there is a reason; perhaps he was aware of some superiority in woman -- the superiority of love. No logic can be higher than love, and no mind can be higher than the heart. But the mind can be very murderous; the mind can be very violent, and that's what the mind has done for centuries.
Man has been beating women, repressing women, condemning women. And not knowing that condemning women, repressing women is making them inferior, half of humanity is deprived of raising its consciousness. And you are deprived, because you could also have learned the art of moving upwards from half of the universe. You could also have moved on the same way, on the same path; hence I always say, the liberation of women is also the liberation of man. It is more the liberation of man than the liberation of women.
Yes, women have more love, but they should also be made aware of the other side of the coin. Man has logic. The other side can be illogical. It is not dangerous, it is just a mistake; it can be corrected. That's why I said the way of the heart is beautiful but dangerous.
The other side of love is hate; the other side of love is jealousy. So if a woman gets caught into hate and jealousy, all the beauty of love dies and she is left only with poisons in her hands. She will poison herself and she will poison everybody who is around.
To be loving one has to be more alert because you can fall into the ditch of hate which is just very close by. Every peak of love is very close; the dark valley of hate is surrounding the peak from everywhere -- you can slip very easily.
Perhaps that is the reason many women decide not to love. Perhaps that is the reason man has decided to live in the head and forget all about the heart... because it is so sensitive, it feels hurt very easily, its moods change just like the climate changing.
One who really wants to learn the art of love has to remember all of these things, and has to save his love from falling into all these ditches of hatred, jealously; otherwise, going to the being will become impossible -- more impossible than it is from the head.
The woman has to drop jealousy, she has to drop hatred. The man has to drop logic and be a little more loving.
- Osho, "Socrates Poisoned Again After 25 Centuries, #21, Q2"
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