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. 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. He claims that it is not natural for humans to be monogamous and supports cheating. Further, he thinks this should not be a problem for the other partner if they are cheated on. A few things on this:

Because the woman gives birth, for nine months or more she remains absolutely vulnerable, dependent on man. Men have exploited this in a very ugly way. And that is a physiological difference; it makes no difference at all. The psychology of the woman is corrupted by man telling her things which are not true, making her a slave to man, reducing her to a secondary citizen of the world. And the reason for that was that he is muscularly more powerful. But the muscular power is part of animality. If that is going to decide the superiority, then many animals are more muscular than a man. I was there for this book at the beginning. I kept thinking, "Hey! This guy is on to something here." Then the problems began: The romantic young man turned to the beautiful young girl in his bed and asked, "Am I the first man you ever made love to?" Man is very egoistic. That's why I call him male chauvinistic. Man has created this society, and in this society there is no place for the woman. And she has tremendous qualities of her own! For example, if man has the possibility of intelligence, the woman has the possibility of love. It does not mean she cannot have intelligence; she can have intelligence, she just has to be given the chance to develop it. But love she is born with—she has more compassion, more kindness, more understanding. Man and woman are two strings of one harp, but both are in suffering separate from each other. And because they are suffering and do not know the reason, they start taking revenge on each other. 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.

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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.

But the real differences are certainly there, and we have to search for them behind the pile of invented differences. One difference I see is that a woman is more capable of love than a man is. A man's love is more or less a physical necessity; a woman's love is not. It is something greater and higher, it is a spiritual experience. That's why the woman is monogamous and man is polygamous. The man would like to have all the world's women, and still he would not be satisfied. His discontent is infinite. 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.

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Most of the differences between men and women are because of thousands of years of conditioning; they are not fundamental to nature. But there are a few differences which give them unique beauty, individuality. Those differences can be counted very easily.

One is that the woman is capable of producing life; man is not. In that way he is inferior, and that inferiority has played a great role in the domination of women by men. The inferiority complex works in this way: It pretends to be superior—to deceive oneself and to deceive the whole world. So man down the ages has been trying to destroy the woman's genius, talents, capacities, so that he can prove himself superior—to himself and to the world.

When the woman is on top she has more mobility, the man has less mobility, and that will bring their orgasms closer to each other. And when both go into orgasmic experience, it is something of the other world. It is the first glimpse of samadhi; it is the first glimpse that one is not the body. One forgets the body, one forgets the world. Both the man and the woman move into a new dimension they have never explored. So this time he put Adam in a coma and took out -- the first surgery in existence -- a rib bone, and out of the rib bone he created Eve. She will never claim to be equal to man; she is just a rib bone. She will serve man, surrender to man, obey man, worship man. In India, the husband and wife cannot talk in the daytime in front of the elders of the family. They can only whisper in the darkness of the night. For hundreds of years many husbands have not been able to see their own wife’s face, because in the daytime they cannot meet. In a joint family there is always some elder there. Only in the darkness of night…. And then too, in a joint family where fifty or sixty people are living in one house like cattle, there is no possibility of communication, of discussing something philosophical, something religious. Osho defies categorization. His talks, which run into thousands, cover everything from the individual quest for meaning to the most urgent social and political issues facing society today. Osho's books are not written but are transcribed from audio and video recordings of his extemporaneous talks to international audiences. As he puts it, 'So remember: whatever I am saying is not just for you . . . I am talking also for the future generations.' The shopkeeper said, "You don't understand. It is made in such a way that nobody can solve it—mathematician or no mathematician."