Man’s Way, Woman’s Way

Osho never ceases to amaze you.

This morning I was going through The Book of Secrets, his discourses on the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra. The discourses are very deep, thorough and detailed - the book itself is about ten pages long in translation and Osho’s discourses on it are about 1.200 pages long! And what amazing discourses! As amazing as the book itself!

I am posting it here something beautiful that I read in the book. While responding to a question about the need to hurry towards one’s spiritual goals and the need to play along unhurriedly, Osho talks about the feminine way and the masculine way and the difference between the two.

If you liked what is posted here, go to the original book.

Question

YESTERDAY YOU SAID THAT ONE SHOULD HURRY TOWARDS THE GOAL BECAUSE WHATEVER TIME WE HAVE IS VERY LITTLE. HOWEVER, SOME TIME AGO YOU ALSO SAID THAT THE WHOLE PROCESS OF ATTAINING THE GOAL SHOULD BE AN EFFORTLESS PLAY. HOW WOULD YOU RECONCILE THE TWO WORDS ‘HURRY’ AND ‘PLAY’? -- BECAUSE THE ONE WHO HURRIES NEVER GETS THE JOY OF PLAYING.

The first thing: don’t try to reconcile different techniques. When I say don’t be in a hurry, forget time completely, don’t be serious, don’t make any effort, surrender, be in a let-go, this is a different technique. This is suitable only for a part of humanity—all cannot do this technique—and the type of person who can do this cannot do the opposite one. This technique is for the feminine mind. All females are not necessarily feminine, and all males are not necessarily male, so when I say a feminine mind, I don’t mean females. A feminine mind means a mind who can surrender, who can be receptive like a womb, who can be open, passive. Half of the humanity can be of this type, but the other half is totally opposite. As man and woman are the two halves of humanity, in just the same way the feminine mind and the masculine mind are the two halves of the human mind. The feminine mind cannot make effort. If it makes effort it will never reach anywhere. The effort will be the undoing for it; it will only create anguish and tension and no achievement.

The very working of the feminine mind is to wait and allow things to happen. Just like a woman: even if she is in love, she will not take the initiative. And if a woman takes the initiative, you have every reason to be afraid and escape, because that attitude is the male attitude—in the feminine body there is a masculine mind, and you will be in difficulty. If you are really male, immediately the woman will lose attraction. If you are feminine—male in the body but feminine in the mind—only then can you allow the woman to take initiative and you will be happy. But then physically she is a woman and you are a man; mentally you are feminine and she is masculine, she is male. A woman will wait. She will never utter the words ‘I love you’ before you have uttered them and you have committed yourself. In the very waiting is the feminine power. The male mind is aggressive. It has to do something. It has to move and go and take initiative. The same happens on the spiritual path. If you have an aggressive mind, a male mind, effort is necessary. Then make hurry; then don’t lose time and opportunity. Then create an urgency and crisis so that you can put all your being into your effort. When your effort has become total you will achieve. If your mind is feminine, then there is no hurry at all. There is no time.

You may or may not have observed that women have no sense of time—they cannot have.

So the husband is standing outside the house and he is honking the horn and saying, ‘Come down!’ And the wife says, ‘I have told you a thousand times that I am coming in one minute. Continuously for two hours I have been telling you that I am coming in one minute. So don’t get mad. Why are you honking the horn?’ 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.

Look at this situation from a different angle. The east is feminine and the west is masculine. The east has never been concerned much about time; the west is mad after time. The east has been very leisurely: moving slowly as if not moving at all; no change, no revolution. Such a silent evolution that it creates no noise anywhere. The west is just mad: every day revolution is needed, and everything has to become a revolution. Unless everything is changing, it seems we are not going anywhere; we have become static. If everything is changing and everything remains in an upheaval, then the west feels that something is happening. And the east thinks that if there are upheavals, it means we are diseased. Something is wrong; that’s why there is change. If everything is okay, there is no need for any revolution, for any change.

The eastern mind is feminine.

That’s why in the east, we have praised all the feminine qualities: compassion, love, sympathy, non-violence, acceptance, contentment—all feminine qualities. In the west, all the masculine qualities are praised: will, willpower, ego, self-esteem, independence, rebellion—these are the values praised there. In the east—obedience, surrender, acceptance. The basic attitude is feminine in the east and masculine in the west. These techniques are not to be compromised, are not to be in any way synthesized. The technique of surrender is for the feminine mind. The technique of effort, will, endeavor, is for the masculine mind. And they are bound to be polar opposites, so if you make any synthesis between the two you will create a hodge-podge—meaningless, absurd, and even dangerous. It will not be of use for anyone.

So remember this. These techniques many times will look contradictory, because they are meant to be for different types of mind, and there is no effort to make any synthesis. So if you feel something is contradictory, don’t get uneasy about it—it is. And only very small minds become afraid of contradiction—very small minds, petty minds. They become uneasy, they feel a discomfort. They think everything must be non-contradictory, everything must be consistent. This is nonsense, because life is inconsistent. Life is contradictory itself, so truth cannot be uncontradictory; only lies can be uncontradictory, only lies can be consistent.

Truth is bound to be inconsistent, because it has to cover everything that is in life. It has to be total. And life is contradictory. There is man and there is woman: what can I do and what can Shiva do? And man is totally the polar opposite to woman; that’s why they are attracted. Otherwise there would be no attraction. Really, the opposite type of being, the difference, creates the attraction. The polar opposite becomes a magnetic force. That’s why when man and woman meet there is happiness, because when two polar opposites meet they negate each other. They negate each other because they are opposites. They negate each other, and for a single moment when man and woman really meet—not just bodily, but totally; when their beings meet in love—for a single moment both disappear. Then there is neither man nor woman; pure existence exists—that’s the bliss of it. The same can happen within you also, because deep analysis shows that within you also there is a polarity. Now modern deep psychoanalytic approaches have revealed that the conscious mind and the unconscious mind are polar opposites within you also. If you are a man, your conscious mind is masculine, your unconscious mind is feminine. If you are a woman, your conscious mind is feminine, your unconscious mind is masculine. The unconscious is the opposite of the conscious. In deep meditation there comes a deep orgasm, an intercourse, a love, between your conscious and unconscious—they become one.

When they become one you attain to the highest bliss possible. So man and woman can meet in two ways. You can meet a woman outside you: then this meeting can be only momentary, very momentary. For a single second the peak comes, and then things start falling away. There is another meeting of man and woman that happens within you: your conscious and unconscious mind meet. When this happens, this meeting can be eternal. The sexual pleasure is also a glimpse of the spiritual—only momentary—but when the real meeting happens within, then it becomes samadhi, then it becomes a spiritual phenomenon.

But you have to start from your conscious mind, so if your conscious mind is feminine, surrender will be helpful. And remember, being a woman is not necessarily synonymous with having a feminine mind. That creates the difficulty. Otherwise everything would be very easy: then women would follow the path of surrender and men would follow the path of will. But it is not so easy. There are women who have masculine minds—their very approach towards life is aggressive. And they are growing every day. The women’s lib. movement will create more and more masculine women. They will be more and more aggressive, and the path of surrender will not be for them then. And because women are becoming competitive with man, man is regressing from aggression; he is becoming more and more feminine.

More and more the path of surrender will be useful for man in the future. So you have to decide about yourself. And don’t think in terms of valuation. Don’t think that you are a man, so how can you have a feminine mind? You can have, and nothing is wrong in it; it is beautiful. And don’t think that you are a woman, so how can you have a masculine mind? Nothing is wrong in it; it is beautiful. Be authentic towards your own mind. Try to understand what type of mind you have, then follow the path that is for you, and don’t try to create any synthesis.

Don’t ask me how I am going to reconcile these two. I am not going to. I am never for reconciliation, and I am not for non-contradictory statements. They are stupid and childish. Life is contradictory, and that’s why life is alive. Only death is consistent and non-contradictory. Life lives through opposition, through encountering the opposite pole, and this opposition, challenge, creates energy. It releases energy, and life moves through it. This is what Hegelians say: a dialectical movement—thesis, antithesis, and then the synthesis again becomes a thesis and creates its own antithesis, and this goes on. Life is not monotonous. It is not logical. It is dialectical.

You must understand the difference between logical and dialectical. The question is because you think life is logical, so you ask how you will reconcile, because logic always reconciles; logic cannot tolerate the contradictory.

Logic cannot tolerate the contradictory. Logic has to somehow explain that it is not contradictory, and if it is contradictory then both cannot be true; then one must be wrong. Both can be wrong, but both cannot be true. Logic tries to find non-contradiction everywhere.

Science is logical. That’s why science is not totally true to life, cannot be. Life is contradictory, illogical. It works through the opposite. It is not afraid of the opposite; it uses the opposite. The opposites are only apparently opposite; deep down they work together. It is dialectical, not logical. It is a dialogue between the opposites—a continuous dialogue.

Think for a single moment: if there is no contradiction, life will be dead, because from where will come the challenge? From where will come the attraction? From where will the energy be released? It will be monotonous, dead, Life is possible only because of dialectics, because of the opposite. Man and woman is the basic opposition, and then the challenge creates the phenomenon of love. And the whole life moves around love. If your lover and you become so totally one that there is no gap at all, you both will be dead. You will not be able to exist then. You both will disappear from this dialectical process. You can only exist in this life if oneness is never total, and you have to move away again and again to come near.

That’s why lovers fight. That fight creates dialectics. The whole day they will fight. They will go far away from each other, they will become enemies. This means that they have now come to be really polar opposites; they have moved as far away as possible. The lover starts thinking how to kill this woman, and the woman starts thinking how to get rid of this man. They have moved to the very farthest corner possible. And then again in the evening they are making love.

When they are far away, so far away, again the attraction comes. Again they look from such a faraway point that they feel attracted. Then they have become simply man and woman again, not lovers. Then they are man and woman, strangers. They will fall in love again. They will come near. A point will come when they will become one for a single moment, and that will be their happiness, their joy.

But the moment they have become one, the process to go away starts again. In the very moment when the wife and husband are one, if they can be a witness to it, they will see they have started being separate again. The very moment the peak comes, the process starts to be different, to be separate, to be opposite. This goes on moving—again and again you come near and go away.

This is what I mean—life creates energy through polarities. Without polarities life cannot exist. If two lovers really become one, they disappear from life. They are liberated really. They will have no rebirth again; there will be no life in future. If two lovers can become so totally one, their love has become the deepest meditation possible. They have achieved what Buddha achieved under the Bodhi tree. They have achieved what Jesus achieved on the cross. They have achieved non-duality. Now they cannot exist.

Existence as we know it is dual, dialectical, and these techniques are for you who exist in duality. So there will be many contradictions, because these techniques are not philosophy; these techniques are meant to be done and lived. They are not mathematical formulas; they are actual life processes. They are dialectical, they are contradictory. So don’t ask me to reconcile them. They are not the same, they are opposite. Try to find out what is your type. Can you relax? Can you let go? Can you be in a passive moment, not doing anything? -- then all the techniques which require will are not for you. If you cannot relax, and if I say to you to relax and you immediately ask me how to relax, that ‘how’ shows your mind. That ‘how’ shows that you cannot relax without making an effort. Even for relaxation you need some effort, so you ask ‘how;. Relaxation is relaxation; there is no ‘how’ to it. If you can relax, you know how to relax. You simply relax. There is no effort, no method.

Just as in the night, you go to sleep.

You never ask how to go to sleep. But there are persons who have insomnia. If you say to them, ‘I just put my head on the pillow, and it’s okay, I am asleep,’ they cannot believe you. And their suspicion is meaningful. They cannot believe you; you are deceiving— because they also put their head on the pillow. They go on putting their head the whole night—nothing happens.

They are going to ask how—how to put the head on the pillow? There must be a secret which you are not telling them. You are deceiving; the whole world is deceiving them. Everybody says, ‘We just go to sleep. There is no ‘how’ to it. There is no technology.’ They cannot believe you, and you cannot blame them. You say, ‘We simply put down our heads, close our eyes, put off the light, and we are asleep.’ They also do the same procedure, they do the same ritual, and they do it more correctly than you have ever done, but nothing happens. The light is off, they have closed eyes, lying on their bed—nothing is happening. Once you lose the capacity to relax, then technique is needed. Then they need technique; then without technique they will not be able to sleep.

So if you have a mind which can relax, then surrender is for you. And don’t create any problems—then simply surrender. At least half of you can do this. You may not be aware, but fifty percent is the possibility, because masculine and feminine minds exist in a proportion.

They are always fifty-fifty, almost fifty-fifty, in every realm, because a man cannot exist without a woman opposing him. There is a deep balance in nature. Do you know? -- one hundred and fifteen boys are born to one hundred girls, because boys are weaker than girls—so by the time they are sexually mature fifteen boys will have died. One hundred and fifteen boys are born for every one hundred girls. Girls are stronger: they have more stamina, more resistance. Boys are weak, they don’t have so much resistance, so one hundred and fifteen boys are born for one hundred girls. Then fifteen boys die. The moment they become sexually mature, by the age of fourteen, the number will be the same. For each man a woman exists, for each woman a man exists, because there is an inner tension. They cannot exist without it; that polar opposite is needed.

And similar is the case with the inner mind also. The existence, the nature, needs a balance, so half of you are feminine and can be deeply in surrender very easily. But you can create problems for yourself. You may feel that you can surrender, but you think, ‘How can I surrender?’ You feel that your ego may be hurt. You become afraid of surrendering, because it has been taught to you: ‘Be independent. Remain independent. Don’t lose yourself. Don’t give your control to someone else. Always be in control.’

This has been taught; these are taught difficulties.

So you can feel that you can surrender, but then other problems arise which have been given to you by society, culture and education. And they create problems. If you really feel that surrender is not for you, then forget it. It is not to be worried about. Then put all your energy in effort.

So these are the two extremes. One: if you are a really feminine mind, you have nowhere to go. There is no goal, no God to be achieved, no future heaven—nothing. Don’t be in any hurry now, remain true to the moment, and all that can be achieved by the male mind through hurry, effort, you will achieve here and now without any effort. Right now you are at the goal, if you can relax.

The male mind will have to run round about and round about until it is tired completely, and then it falls down; only then it can relax. Aggression, effort, endeavor, are necessary for the male mind to be exhausted. When that exhaustion happens, then it is possible for it to relax and to surrender. That surrender will come only in the end; for the feminine mind it is always in the beginning. You reach the same happening but the ways of reaching are different.

So when I said yesterday, ‘Don’t waste time,’ I said it to the male mind. If I said be in a hurry and create such an emergency that your total energy and being becomes pinpointed, concentrated, and only in that concentrated effort your life will become a flame, this is for the male mind, the masculine mind.

For the feminine mind, relax and you are already a flame. Because of this, you have Mahavir, you have Buddha, you have Jesus, Krishna, Ram, Zarathustra, Moses, but you don’t have a similar list of women. Not because women have not achieved such a state of mind. They have achieved, but their ways are different. And this whole history has been recorded by man, and man can understand only the masculine mind. Man cannot understand the feminine mind. That’s the problem. It is really very difficult.

A man cannot understand that a woman, just by being a simple housewife, can achieve something which a Buddha achieves with so much difficulty, so arduously. A man cannot conceive, it is impossible for him to conceive that a woman can achieve just by being a housewife: living moment to moment, enjoying moment to moment, just near and here and now, and not bothering about anything else—no goal, no spirituality; just loving the children, loving the husband, just being an ordinary woman, but blissful. No need to make such arduous effort as a Mahavir is making—twelve years of long arduous effort. But man will appreciate Mahavir, because he can appreciate effort.

If you achieve a goal without the effort, for man it is not worth it. He cannot appreciate it. He can appreciate someone, a Tensing, a Hillary, reaching the Everest—not because Everest is worth it, but because so much effort is needed and it is so dangerous. And if you say that you are already on the Everest he will laugh, because Everest is not meaningful—the effort to reach it is meaningful. The moment Everest becomes easy to reach, for the masculine mind all attraction is lost. There is nothing to be achieved on the Everest. When Hillary and Tensing reached there, nothing was there to be achieved, but the masculine mind feels such a glory.

When Hillary reached, I was in a university; all the professors were just thrilled. I asked one woman professor, ‘What do you say about Hillary and Tensing who have reached Everest?’

She said, ‘I cannot understand why there is so much fuss about it. What is the point? What have they gained by reaching there? Even reaching to the market, to a shop, would have been better.’

For the feminine mind it is useless. Going to the moon? -- why such danger? There is no necessity. But for the masculine mind, it is not the goal. Really, the effort is the thing, because then he proves that he is masculine. They very effort, the very aggression, and the very possibility of death, gives him the thrill.

Danger is very appealing to the masculine mind. For the feminine mind it has no appeal at all. Because of this, human history is really half-recorded. The other half has been totally unrecorded, left unrecorded. We don’t know how many woman became Buddhas; it is impossible to know, because our measurement, our criterion, cannot be applied to the feminine mind.

So first decide about your own mind. First meditate about your own mind—what type of mind you have got—then forget all those methods which don’t belong to you. And don’t try to reconcile them.

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