Thursday 16 May 2013


Women Have Been Taught…



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. 

Man has to kill. To remain man, he has to kill. Seventy-five percent of energy is put into war effort, into creating more bombs, hydrogen bombs, neutron bombs, and so on and so forth. 

It seems that man’s whole purpose here on earth is war. The war heroes are respected the most. The war politicians become the great names in history: Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong – these names are going to remain. Why? – Because they fought great wars, they destroyed. Whether in aggression or in defense – that is not the point – but these were the warmongers. 

And nobody ever knows who was aggressive – whether Germany was aggressive or not. It all depends on who writes the history. Whosoever wins will write the history, and he will prove the other was the aggressor. History would be totally different if Adolf Hitler had been victorious. Yes, the Nuremberg trials would have been there, but the Americans and English and French generals and politicians would have been on trial. And history would have been written by Germans; naturally they would have a different vision. Nobody knows what is true. 

But one thing is certain: that man puts his whole energy into war effort. The reason? – The reason is that man has been taught to be just man, his woman has been denied. So no man is whole. 

And so is the case with woman – no woman is whole. She has been denied her male part. When she was a small child she could not fight with boys, she could not climb on the trees; she had to play with dolls, she had to play ‘house’. This is a very, very distorted vision. 

Man is both, so is woman – and both are needed to create a real, harmonious human being. The existence is dialectical; and opposites are not only opposites, they are complementaries too.

Osho, The Heart Sutra


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