Everything in existence
happens in its own time, a time for which one has to wait with tremendous patience.
Everything has its season; nothing happens out of season. Time and occasion
have great importance in life. And it is necessary to go into it from different
angles.
I don’t believe that Ahilya
had actually turned into stone; this is just a poetic way of saying that she lived
a stony life, a dull and dreary life until she met Rama whose love transformed
her life. It is possible a woman will come to her flowering only through a
particular man like Rama, and that she will patiently wait for such a man to
come into her life.
It is a poetic metaphor to say
that Ahilya had turned into stone. It means to say that with the right opportunity,
with real love, even stone comes alive. It also says that no one except Rama
could have fulfilled her. The crux of the story is that everybody and
everything has its own season, its own moment of fulfillment for which one must
wait with patience. Until this moment comes, it is not going to happen. Only
the touch of her lover, his warm hug can fulfill her.
Let us understand it in
another way. Woman is passive; passive waiting is her way. She cannot be aggressive;
she is receptive. She has not only a womb in her body, even her mind is like a
womb. The English word woman,”wo-man”, is very meaningful; it means a man with
a womb. Woman’s whole makeup is receptive, while man’s makeup is active,
aggressive. And although these two qualities, receptivity and aggressiveness,
seem to be contradictory, in reality they are complementary to each other. And
as man and woman are complementary, so are their attributes. Man has what woman
lacks and woman has what man lacks. That is how both together make a complete
whole.
Woman’s receptivity turns into
waiting and man’s aggressiveness into search, into exploration. So while Ahilya
will wait for Rama like a piece of stone, Rama will not do so. Instead, Rama
will search many paths. It is interesting to note that a woman never takes the
initiative in proposing love to a man; she always receives proposals from the
man. She does not take the first step; it is man who takes it, Not that she
does not begin loving someone, but her love is always a kind of waiting.
Waiting is her way of love, and she can wait long – for lives.
In fact, when a woman becomes
aggressive she immediately loses a part of her femininity, she loses her
feminine attraction, her beauty, her significance, her very soul lies in
passive waiting, in infinite waiting. She can wait endlessly; she can never be
aggressive. She will not go to a man and tell him, ”I love you.” She will not
say it even to a man she loves with all her heart. She will, on the contrary, want
the man she loves to come to her and say that he loves her. Another beauty of
feminine love is that it never says a straightforward yes when the man a woman
loves comes to propose his love to her. While verbally she says no – which
means yes – she says yes with her silent gestures, with her whole being turned
into love. It is always man who takes the initiative. A woman can wait
endlessly for Krishna, she can never be fulfilled without him. It is in this
context that, in the past, we had an extraordinary rule, and it is good to know
it and understand it. Women did not ordinarily propose love to men, but if once
in a long while a woman came forward to propose her love to a man, he had to
accept her; it was utterly immoral to say no to her. Since it happened rarely, it
was ruled that such a proposal could not be turned down. If ever a man said no, it was thought
that he had failed in his manhood. It was thought to be an insult to womanhood,
which was so much respected in this country in the past.
There is an anecdote in the
life of Arjuna which is worth mentioning here, Arjuna is under a vow of celibacy
for one year. A beautiful young woman falls in love with the ascetic-looking
young man, and tells him, ”I wish I had a son like you.” It is significant that
when a woman makes a request, a proposal, she does not propose to be a beloved
or a wife, but a mother. Arjuna was put into a dilemma. He was under a vow of
celibacy which could not be broken before its time. And it was equally wrong to
violate the rule which said it was immoral to say no to a woman who came with a
proposal of love. Arjuna did not want to be that immoral. A male energy ceases
to be male if a man turns down the request of a woman – the receiving energy –
to make love to her.
Arjuna’s difficulty was real.
So he told the young woman,”I am ready, but how is it certain that our son will
be like me? It is therefore better that you accept me as your son. I will
become your son; this fulfills your desire.”
A similar anecdote is recorded
in the life of George Bernard Shaw. A French actress, the most beautiful
actress of the times, made a similar proposal to Shaw. In a letter she wrote
that she wanted to marry him. Although the western woman has moved a long way
from being a woman, yet this French actress expressed a womanly desire to be a
mother. She said in her letter that she wanted to have a son by Bernard Shaw,
because this son would be something marvelous, combining her beauty and Shaw’s
intelligence.
I say that this western woman
could not suppress the inherent feminine desire to be a mother, because
motherhood is a woman’s highest fulfillment. A woman does not feel guilty in
becoming a mother, she feels great. And when a woman expresses her desire to be
a mother, she is not transgressing her modesty, she is not demeaning herself,
she is not falling behind man. To become a mother she makes use of man in a
very small way; she does the rest of it all herself. But to be-a wife she needs
the man the whole way.
Bernard Shaw was faced with
the same difficulty as Arjuna, but Shaw could not answer the woman in the way
Arjuna did. Since Arjuna belonged to the East, his answer was typically
eastern. And Shaw’s answer was clearly coarse and vulgar. Bernard Shaw wrote
back asking the actress how she would feel if their son received his looks and
her intelligence. No man in the East could say this; it is an insult to
womanhood. Shaw not only turned down a woman’s love, he did it in a very
indecent manner.
Kubja has waited long for
Krishna; she has waited for him for many lives. Krishna cannot say no to her,
because no has no place in his life. Even if Kubja asks for love on the
physical level, Krishna will not refuse her, because he is not opposed to the
body. The body is as muck accepted as anything else; it has its own place in
life The body is not everything, but it has its significance; it has its own juices
and joys. The body has its own existence.
Krishna does not deny it He
accepts both body and soul; he embraces both matter and God. He cannot insult
womanhood by refusing sex on the physical level; he can go to any length to
respect womanhood. He is prepared to fulfill every wish of Kubja’s, and he will
not have to persuade himself, strain himself in the matter. He will not have to
make any effort to oblige Kubja; he will naturally and happily accept that
which is.
For us it is difficult to
think that Krishna would go in for physical sex; it seems outrageous. It is so because
we are divided, we are duelists; we believe that the body and soul are
separate, and while the soul is great the body is something lowly. But I don’t
view – nor does Krishna – the body and soul, sex and superconsciousness, matter
and God as separate entities. They are all one and the same. The body is that
part of the soul which is within the grasp of our senses – like our eyes and hands
– and the soul is that part of the body which is beyond the grasp of our senses
and intellect.
The body is the visible soul
and the soul is the invisible body. They are united and one; nowhere do they
separate from each other or contradict each other. What is sexual joy at the
physical level becomes ecstasy at the level of the soul. To Krishna’s mind
there is no conflict between sex and ecstasy. The joy of sex is nothing but a
faint reflection, a faint trace of ecstasy, and therefore sex can become a door
to ecstasy, to samadhi.
I cannot say what there is in
the mind of Kubja, but I can speak very well for Krishna. I don’t think Kubja
has any readiness to use sex as a door to samadhi. That is not even relevant
here. What is relevant is that whatever Kubja desires, Krishna is ready to
fulfill it. He does not care if her desires are petty; he does not tell her to
ask for something great because he has it and he can give it. Kubja approaches
him with a request for physical gratification; she does not know what it is to
be fulfilled spiritually. And Krishna is not going to turn her down because of
it. He meets Kubja on Kubja’s ground, and that is how a physical union between
the two could be possible.
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy
Osho
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