So bodymind has all the experience; good or bad, happy, unhappy, it makes no difference. You are never the experiencer; you are always the awareness of the experience. So Patanjali says in a very bold statement, Experience is the result of the inability to differentiate… All experience is an error. The error arises because you don’t discriminate, you don’t know who is who.

It happens many times. In the Amazon there is a small tribe of primitive people. When the wife is giving birth to a child, the husband also lies down on a cot; the wife starts screaming and yelling, and the husband also starts screaming and yelling. When for the first time it was discovered, it was unbelievable. What is the husband doing, and for what? The wife is passing through pain, but why this husband is doing this? Is he simply acting? And then much research was done upon it and it has been found that the husband is not acting. The pain really starts happening once you get identified. Since millennia, the mind of that tribe has been conditioned that because the wife and husband both are the parents of the child, both should suffer.

Seems perfectly okay…the women’s lib movement would agree with them. Why only women? And these husbands just go on…they don’t suffer, they don’t carry the child in their womb for nine months…and then again when the child is born, the whole responsibility seems to be of the mother. Why this?

But that tribe has lived that way. Psychologists, medical research workers, have observed the man really goes through pain – really. Unbelievable to us because we are not identified that way; the husband is so identified with the wife – the very identification that “she is going through pain” – he starts having pangs.

You may have watched it sometimes. If you love somebody very much and he is suffering, you start suffering. That’s what empathy is; if your loved one is suffering, you start suffering; if your loved one is happy, you start feeling happy; if your loved one is dancing, you feel like dancing. You get in tune with your loved one – you become identified.

Now this seems to be a very absurd case that this society has continued and the husbands really suffer almost as much as the wife, and there is no difference. Now, new light has come upon women’s suffering also. One psychoanalyst in France has worked deeply upon it, and he says that women are suffering only because they believe that way; there are tribes in which not even the wife suffers.

In India there are tribes. In primitive societies the wife will go on working in the field, cutting wood, carrying wood, and suddenly she will give birth to a child, put the child in her bucket, and go home. She will give birth to the child in the field, put the child under a tree and continue her work; the work has to be finished, and by evening she will take the child home. No pain. What has happened? That too is a belief, a conditioning.