But you have to start from your conscious mind, so if your conscious mind is feminine, surrender will be helpful. And remember, being a woman is not necessarily synonymous with having a feminine mind. That creates the difficulty. Otherwise everything would be very easy: then women would follow the path of surrender and men would follow the path of will. But it is not so easy. There are women who have masculine minds – their very approach towards life is aggressive. And they are growing every day.

The women’s lib. movement will create more and more masculine women. They will be more and more aggressive, and the path of surrender will not be for them then. And because women are becoming competitive with man, man is regressing from aggression; he is becoming more and more feminine. More and more the path of surrender will be useful for man in the future.

So you have to decide about yourself. And don’t think in terms of valuation. Don’t think that you are a man, so how can you have a feminine mind? You can have, and nothing is wrong in it; it is beautiful. And don’t think that you are a woman, so how can you have a masculine mind? Nothing is wrong in it; it is beautiful. Be authentic towards your own mind. Try to understand what type of mind you have, then follow the path that is for you, and don’t try to create any synthesis.

Don’t ask me how I am going to reconcile these two. I am not going to. I am never for reconciliation, and I am not for non-contradictory statements. They are stupid and childish. Life is contradictory, and that’s why life is alive. Only death is consistent and non-contradictory. Life lives through opposition, through encountering the opposite pole, and this opposition, challenge, creates energy. It releases energy, and life moves through it. This is what Hegelians say: a dialectical movement – thesis, antithesis, and then the synthesis again becomes a thesis and creates its own antithesis, and this goes on. Life is not monotonous. It is not logical. It is dialectical.

You must understand the difference between logical and dialectical. The question is because you think life is logical, so you ask how you will reconcile, because logic always reconciles; logic cannot tolerate the contradictory. Logic cannot tolerate the contradictory. Logic has to somehow explain that it is not contradictory, and if it is contradictory then both cannot be true; then one must be wrong. Both can be wrong, but both cannot be true. Logic tries to find non-contradiction everywhere.

Science is logical. That’s why science is not totally true to life, cannot be. Life is contradictory, illogical. It works through the opposite. It is not afraid of the opposite; it uses the opposite. The opposites are only apparently opposite; deep down they work together. It is dialectical, not logical. It is a dialogue between the opposites – a continuous dialogue.


From Osho, The Book of Secrets, Chapter 62

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