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 whoever looks at her, to whoever comes in contact with her. Great jealousy arises in the egoist, male chauvinist mind….
“In India… 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 orgasms. The 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 multiple orgasms, 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 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 was discovered 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 an 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 hundred and 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, 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 a 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….
“The child sleeps the whole day. In the mother’s womb he sleeps twenty-four hours; then, slowly, slowly…twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty…but he is almost always asleep. And in the night, he wakes up.
The whole day he will be asleep and in the night he will wake up to torture you.
“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….
“I remember Friedrich Nietzsche….
“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.”
END
Abridged from Osho, Sermons in Stones, Talk #17 – The Poetry of the Feminine
You can read this complete talk and see all the available formats here.