When will the condition of women improve?

Question: OSHO, HOW CAN INDIA BE FREE WHEN HER WOMEN ARE NOT? So every Indian mind is full of bullshit... or you can call it 'holy cowdung'! That will look far more Indian and far more religious too! Holy cowdung is sacred and if your head is full of it you are bound to go to heaven because holy cowdung is the only thing in the world that defies gravity. It will take you up and up and up until you reach heaven! This male-chauvinistic country has lived in many kinds of slaveries, slaveries within slaveries. For twenty-two centuries India has been in slavery, political slavery. A country can live in slavery for twenty-two centuries only if somewhere deep down it is spiritually ready to accept slavery.

Question: BELOVED MASTER, 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.

Osho, the other day in darshan you were talking about women and transforming their energy. You said that in the past masters such as jesus mahavira, and even gautam the buddha were not able to understand and transform women's energy and allow it to come to a peak. You said that this time here with you it will be possible for women as well as for men to flower and come to a peak. Somehow I was touched by this very deeply. Can you say something more about this difference between man and woman and how you work with us in different ways?

If you allow your own inner woman freedom to meet with the man inside you, to have a deep togetherness, an orgasmic quality, so that as far as your consciousness is concerned it is no more split as man and woman... It is one, it is human, it is whole. It is no more a conflict; it is a concord. It has attained to the highest synthesis possible. When this happens one is whole; whether one is man or woman does not matter. But for centuries man has dominated, and the only way to dominate is to destroy the outer woman, to reduce her into a slave, to reduce her into a commodity, sellable, purchasable, something of the marketplace. This is the ugliest thing that has happened in the past. Because of this the whole past of humanity is rotten, unbalanced, insane. And if the man represses the woman on…

Women’s average lifespan is five years more than men. If men live seventy years, women live seventy-five. And what labor women bear with the body! For the labor it takes to bring forth a child is greater than the labor to produce an atom bomb. A woman can bear twenty children and still live five years longer than a man. Women fall ill less. And whatever illnesses women have are not women’s; they are due to the trouble of the society men have made. Women fall ill less; and even among their illnesses, seventy percent of the cause is the arrangement men have created—man-dominated—not the woman. Because the entire structure is the man’s; it is man-dominated. And man organizes in his own way. The woman has to adjust to it. That is the cause of her illness. Hysteria in a man’s society is the result of women having to adjust.

Osho, the scholars of scripture say that for women the recitation of the Vedas, listening to the Gayatri Mantra, and uttering the word Om are forbidden. Master, Om slips out of my mouth spontaneously; especially during Nadabrahma meditation one has to chant it. So a kind of fear arises in the mind—why has this been said? Should women not pronounce Om? Kindly have mercy and explain.

Mallibai must truly have been an extraordinary, dignified woman! She must have had a powerful presence—radiant, luminous! So luminous that while she was alive even the Jains had to accept her as a tirthankara. But after her death, the crafty cannot help their craftiness—they simply changed the name. As a child when I read the list of tirthankaras, it never occurred to me that Mallinath was not Mallinath but Mallibai. And one thing is certain: in those days there were no operations as there can be now—turning a woman into a man or a man into a woman. There is no mention anywhere of such operations. There is one possibility: occasionally, by accident, some women become men and some men become women, due to a disturbance in hormones. The difference in hormones between male and female is a matter of degree; a little more or less and a woman can…