I would like women to take power

I don’t deal in theories.

Whatever I say is a practical experience, and unless I have a practical observation I don’t make a theoretical statement about it. The theory comes later, the reality comes first.

Women have not been in power for millennia. Man has always been in power, and his power has only created wars and destruction. It has not caused humanity to evolve, it has been in the service of death.

I would like women to take power. For the time being there will be difficulties because so much is repressed in a woman that it will explode. She may move to the other extreme. It is just like a man who has been fasting for ten days and then you place delicious food before him. He is bound to eat more than is needed. He may fall sick. What fasting has not been able to do, the delicious food may be able to do – he may even die.

There is an interim period which we will have to accept because of millions of years of repressed power. But this will subside; it will take some time but it will disappear. When the woman is certain of her power she will not be revengeful, she will not hate men. This is only for a time until the whole past is erased from the consciousness of woman.

The woman is a better ruler for the simple reason that she has a more loving heart, is more human – she is more kind and more compassionate.

Then finally, there is no question of who rules. Whoever has the merit, man or woman, rules. And the basic quality of the ruler is that he should be the servant of the people, that his power to rule is not the power to torture.

So finally, it will be a mixed phenomenon. In every sphere – in the offices, in the home, in the government, in the fields – everywhere, man and woman should not be understood as separate species.

But we have to repent for the past and we have to compensate women for the past. The past has done so much harm to them – who is going to erase all that whole history from their consciousness?

In the beginning they will be suspicious. In the beginning they may burst out with all kinds of revengefulness, but that will settle soon. You cannot be revengeful to people who are compensating for the dead who have tortured you. We have not tortured them; they cannot be antagonistic to us.

It takes a little time to settle, perhaps a few years. Let men and women mix at every stage of life. From the kindergarten to the university they should be mixed, and they should be clear that they are complementary parts to each other. But they should not become similar, they should retain their individuality. They should search and find what makes them women, what makes them men, and where they are different – not in conditioning but by understanding.

We have to create a world where there is no question that somebody is superior and somebody is inferior, and that will be a far more natural world.

You can enter any house and you can immediately see whether any woman lives there or not. She has an aesthetic sense, she has a certain clarity about beauty. Man is crude; he has no aesthetic sense. He can go on living in a house without bothering how the house looks and he will be perfectly happy. Just that sensitivity is missing.

I was at the university studying – and I am a lazy man. I had my bed just beside the door so I could leave my shoes outside the door and jump into the bed. So I didn’t have to worry about the whole room. I never entered the other part of the room because so much dust was gathering there.

In my class there were two girls. One was very much interested in me. She used to come every Sunday to clean my room. I told her, “You are unnecessarily wasting your time because I never enter inside the room. You can see my bed is just by the door. I simply jump into the bed, close the door and go to sleep. Why should I bother about the whole room and cleaning? I cannot do such things!”

But she said that she thought for the whole week about my room that it should not look like this.

I could see the difference when she would come and clean the room, fix the pictures on the walls, clean my books, put them in the right place. I knew that there was a great difference. It was beautiful. But I told her, “You cannot teach me. I appreciate what you do. I love it but I cannot do it.”

For two years continuously she went on coming every Sunday to clean. And she was the daughter of the Collector of the city so it became a great scandal in the university because she had so many servants in her house. The Collector was the highest officer in the district. She was hoping that some day I would learn, but I told her it was too late. And in the night when it is dark everywhere, who bothers whether the books are dusted or not, whether the room is full of dust or not?

The woman has a sense of cleanliness, of beauty, of the right arrangement of things. In Japan the women have developed many arts. Flower arrangement… even drinking tea is a ceremony and is done in such a way as if you are meditating.

The woman can contribute immensely to making human society more delicate, more beautiful. And if women are part of society everywhere I don’t think we will go to war, because whenever man goes to war it is the woman who suffers. Either a mother suffers because her son has died, or a wife will live her whole life waiting for the husband who is never going to return.

Man fights; the woman suffers. And whenever there is an invasion of one country by another, it is strange… the invading soldiers rape women as if the real purpose was not to conquer the country but to rape the women.

The woman is the loser. Either the father dies, or the husband or the son… but it is always the woman who suffers, and then she is raped, brutally raped. Those soldiers cannot make love, they can only rape.

So my idea is for the woman to keep her uniqueness. We don’t want secondhand men; it is insulting.

The man also should keep himself unique. Men and women should melt and merge into each other, not as contradictories but as complementaries. That will change all the qualities that they had separately. The woman will become more strong, the man will become more sensitive, because now they will be functioning together as one unit.

Okay?

Osho, The Sword and the Lotus, Ch 5 Q 2