The name is love, but the game is politics.
The name is love, but the game is politics.
The very effort of man is to dominate the woman, to reduce her to an inferior status, not to allow her to grow, so she always remains retarded.
For thousands of years, what man has done to woman is simply monstrous: no education – she cannot read the holy scriptures.
She cannot think of her selfas equal to man. And she has been conditioned so deeply that even if you say she is equal, she isnot going to believe it.
It has become almost her mind – the conditioning has become her mind, thatshe is less in everything: physical strength, intellectual qualities...
Man has made a society in which he has become the protector and the woman is the protected.
The Hindu scriptures say that in childhood the father should protect the girl; in youth the husband should protect the woman; in old age the son should protect the mother.
But she is always to be protected, and man is to protect her.
He has made her weak, uneducated, uncultured; he has stopped her movement in the society.
And the worst thing he has done is, he has taken her liberty,her financial freedom, which cuts her very roots to be free.
She has to be dependent; she is notcapable of earning for herself.
For centuries there was a certain logic in it because the woman had to become a mother. And out of ten children, nine children were dying, so a woman was pregnant for almost the whole period of her life until menopause.
How can she work?
How can she earn?
She is carrying a child, and she is caring for other small children, looking after them, looking after the house.
In short, man made women slaves – and very cheaply, without purchasing her.
You can see the irony...
In India... and I think in other countries also, in different ways, the same thing happens.
In India,when a boy has been born he is welcomed with bands, dancing, singing, so the whole town knows that a boy has been born.
But when a girl is born there is no celebration.
The whole town knows by the silence that a girl has been born.
What is the problem for the parents?
To them, a daughter or a son should be the same.
But the problem is that the son is going to earn, is going to help them in their old age, is going to have the inheritance of the family.
The daughter, on the contrary, is a financial loss.
You feed her, you clothe her – and when you marry her you have to give a dowry.
Strange – she is becoming a slave, and the parents have to pay: ”Please accept my daughter as your slave.”
The dowry is the payment.
Ordinarily slaves are purchased, and whoever purchases has to pay.
In the case of women, the parents of the woman have to pay instead – give the daughter and pay enough money.
The woman does not want – nobody wants – to be dependent.
Nobody wants to be a slave.
Nobody Wants to be inferior because nobody is inferior.
People are different; the question of superiority and inferiority is simply absurd.
So she starts taking revenge unconsciously.
She cannot love the man who owns her as property, who does not recognize her as a human being equal to himself.
One of the Hindu saints – I don’t call him a saint, but Hindus worship him, read his book more than that of any other saint – is Tulsidas.
He condemns woman in such ugly terms.
He says if you want to remain in control of a woman, you have to beat her once in a while; any excuse will do.
Keep her afraid.
She should not be given any equality, any friendship.
And this has been called – for centuries– ”love.”
The woman is boiling – unconsciously of course – and she explodes in small ways.
Whatever she can do, she does. She cannot beat the husband because she has been told, ”Your husband is your god.
You cannot beat him, you have to worship him.” So she beats herself. Having no choice, in anger she beats herself.
When I started criticizing Mahatma Gandhi I said that what he is doing is nothing but the age-old,feminine strategy.
You cannot fight with the foreign rulers; you don’t have arms,
you don’t have strength, and you don’t have even the desire.
All his nonviolence, passive resistance, is nothing but what the woman has always been doing.
But nobody has given her the credit of creating a philosophy of non violence!
She does not beat anyone when she is angry, she tortures herself.
And the man who has reduced the woman to such a state also cannot love her.
Love can exist only in equality, in friendship.
OshO 💕
CHAPTER 30. THE NAME IS LOVE, BUT THE GAME IS POLITICS
The Path of the Mystic
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