Osho,
Often during the lecture I find a part of me waiting for your glance. When you finally look at me, something in me runs away. The feeling is like being in a desert, waiting for ages for some water to come, and when it finally rains, the mouth snaps shut. Why is this?

No need to think that there is some great secret in it: just the woman, just the woman within you. That is the way of the woman. She waits for something, she attracts something, she asks, invites something, and when it comes she becomes afraid and escapes. It is the way of all women. And unless you understand it and drop it, your whole life will become miserable.

First you attract, and when the thing that you have invited comes to you, you become afraid and you escape. This hide-and-seek goes on. This has been my observation: that the feminine mind asks for something, but when it rains, it is never there to receive it. So the feminine mind becomes a long, endless waiting. Every moment the fulfillment was possible, but whenever it comes close, the woman becomes afraid. The woman asks for love and is afraid of love, because when love comes it brings death with it. Love has to bring death because only then can you be reborn. There is no other way.

I will read the question again: “Often during the lecture I find a part of me waiting for your glance. When you finally look at me, something in me runs away.”

You wait for my glance. A deep love arises in you, a waiting. But when my glance comes to you, it brings death. Then you become afraid, you escape, because you were waiting for love and the glance brings death also. It brings love also, but love and death are two aspects of the same glance. If I really love you, I have to be a death to you. There is no other way, the love cannot happen in any other way. And when the glance penetrates you something shrinks, escapes; something runs away, becomes afraid. Then my glance moves. Then you are again at ease waiting for me.

There is no other secret in it: just the woman. And when I say “the woman” you should not misunderstand me. Many men behave just like a woman. In love everybody behaves like a woman. You would like to take a jump into the unknown and you don’t want to renounce the known. You want to move on two boats together and they are moving in different dimensions, diametrically opposite. You want to be yourself, and you would like to have a new life also.

You ask the impossible. You want to cling to whatsoever you have and you would like to grow also – and that very clinging is preventing you from growth. No, both are not possible together.