It is your responsibility to bring Neelam also out into the sun, into the rain, into the wind, so that she can drop all her conditionings. You have to help her; you have to teach her how to enjoy Sarjano’s place, and not go on eating the Punjabi food her whole life…how to enjoy Japanese food or Chinese food. If men and women really love each other, they will help each other to be unconditioned from the past.
Man does not have many conditionings, and they are superficial. He can drop them very easily, the way you drop your clothes. The woman has been conditioned so much that it is not like dropping her clothes, it is like peeling her skin. It is hard and unless you really love a woman…. It will be impossible, on her own, to get rid of all those conditionings, help her. Give her also the taste that in the world there are so many other foods; in the world, other than you, there are many more beautiful men. Your woman must know all of them. It is part of your love that your woman becomes more and more rich in her experiences. And the richer she is, she will not only give you satisfaction; she will start giving you excitement and ecstasy.
You say, “It’s not that I don’t want to eat out occasionally, but I’d like to feel it is in my hands whether I do or not….” It is in your hands, but it can be in your hands only if it is in the hands of Neelam too. As far as I am concerned and my concept of the new man and new woman is concerned, there should be equal opportunity for both. Not that you are the master and your woman is your slave; that she can remain satisfied with you, and you can go, once in a while, fooling around the neighborhood. She has every right to fool around in the same neighborhood! And there is no need to feel guilty; you have to help her not to feel guilty.
It is a very strange phenomenon that woman’s liberation will be man’s liberation, too; their slavery is together. Because you don’t allow your woman to be free, how can she allow you to be free?
Freedom has to be, from both sides, a precious value – loved, recognized, respected.
You say “…and not be a victim of this hormonal conspiracy.” If you want to get beyond the hormones and the biology; live it totally, exhaust it. My own understanding is that by the age of fourteen your hormones start working, and if you allow them total freedom if you go with them joyously by the age forty-two, they will like to go to rest. And this transcendence will be natural; it will not be a celibacy imposed. It will be a sacred celibacy that is coming to you from the beyond, because you have lived your life totally and now nothing in the ordinary life interests you. Your interest is in higher values, for a deeper search about life, about truth, about creativity. You have passed a childish age. By the age of forty-two, according to me, a man really becomes adult, but only if he lives naturally. If he lives halfheartedly then it will take a longer time – maybe forty-nine years, maybe seventy-five. Maybe even when he is dying he is thinking only of sex and nothing else; he never transcends it.