The Book of Woman

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Man is a mystery, woman is a mystery, everything that exists is a mystery – and all our efforts to figure it out are going to fail. … Maybe what they have done is really crappy or maybe Osho is wrong and that religion is so nice but then who cares?? You can live it, you can rejoice in it, you can become one with the mystery, but the idea of understanding as an observer is not at all possible. Talking about government fear of his outspokenness, and his rebellious childhood, Osho urges us all to go beyond the mind and behavior imposed by society and religions. Responsibility means moving beyond one’s psychology and into consciousness.

Oh, where do I start with this book? Osho is mystic and guru, also known as Chandra Mohan Jain, Acharya Rajneesh, and Bhagwan Shree Ranjeesh. Osho looks to the female spirit in all of us as a way to nurture the soul and cultivate a healthy relationship with spirituality.It seems to me that you are the first man this planet has ever known who really understands women and accepts them. Please comment. Then things start to get weird. Osho has this contrarian view about the institution of marriage, as well as education and child reading, as seen in society. Abolish the practice of marriage and allow women to engage in polyandry. Develop of society (much akin to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World), where men and women are not tied to one another and free to explore their sexual instincts. This would reduce the pain, jealousy, envy and suffering which monogamy promotes, he argues. That's why every marriage is a failure: You cannot find your mother. The woman you have married has not come to your house to be your mother, she wants to be your wife, a lover. But the Upanishadic blessing, almost five thousand or six thousand years old, gives an insight to modern psychology. A woman, whatsoever she is, is basically a mother. A father is an invented institution, it is not natural. But the mother will remain indispensable. They have tried experiments: They have given children all the facilities, medication, all the food … every perfection from different branches of science, but strangely the children go on shrinking and will die within months. Then they discovered that the mother's body and her warmth is an absolute necessity for life to grow. That warmth in this vast, cold universe is absolutely necessary in the beginning; otherwise the child will feel abandoned. He will shrink and die. 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.

A point comes when you have to leave logic and rationality and just listen to nature. I call it the ultimate understanding – but not in the ordinary sense of understanding. You know it, you feel it, but there is no way to say it. With Albert Einstein the whole history of science has taken a very different route because the more he went into the deepest core of matter, the more he became puzzled. All logic was left behind, all rationality was left behind. You cannot dictate to existence, because it does not follow your logic. Logic is man-made. There was a point in Albert Einstein’s life when he remembers that he was wavering about whether to insist on being rational…but that would be foolish. It would be human, but not intelligent. Even if you insist on logic, on rationality, existence is not going to change according to your logic; your logic has to change according to existence. And the deeper you go, existence becomes more and more mysterious. A point comes when you have to leave logic and rationality and just listen to nature. I call it the ultimate understanding – but not in the ordinary sense of understanding. You know it, you feel it, but there is no way to say it.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. A man should make love the way a painter paints—when he feels the urge filling his heart—or the way the poet composes poetry, or a musician plays music. The woman's body should be taken as a musical instrument; it is. When the man is feeling joy, then sex is not just a release, a relaxation, a sleeping method. Then there is foreplay. He dances with the woman, he sings with the woman—with beautiful music vibrating the love temple, with the incense that they love. It should be something of the sacred, because there is nothing sacred in ordinary life unless you make love sacred. And that will be the beginning of opening the door to the whole phenomenon of superconsciousness.