In the Upanishads there is a very strange blessing for new couples. A new couple comes to the seer of the Upanishads and he gives his blessing. He says to the girl specifically, “I
hope you will become a mother of ten children, and finally, your husband will be your eleventh child. And unless you become a mother to your husband, you have not succeeded in being a true wife.”
It is very strange but has immense psychological insight in it, because this is what the modern psychology finds, that every man is looking in the woman for his mother, and every woman is looking in the man for her father.
That’s why every marriage is a failure: you cannot find your mother. The woman you have married has not come to your house to be your mother, she wants to be your wife, a lover. But the Upanishadic blessing, almost five thousand or six thousand years old, gives an insight to the modern psychology. A woman, whatsoever she is, is basically a mother.
A father is an invented institution, it is not natural. And soon the father may become out of date.
Once the science of genetics develops, the more scientific, more clinical, more hygienic way will be that fathers donate sperm to the hospital, and the medical experts choose the right living sperm that can be injected into the woman. Every man should not be allowed to be a father. Because of this accidental fatherhood, the earth is full of blind people, lame people, crazy people, mad people, retarded people… It cannot be left accidental.
The sperm may have come from somebody else; you have to be generous in favor of the children so they will not be blind, will not suffer their lives as cripples. And moreover,
you will be able to ask the medical expert for the kind of child that you want.
The basic sperm shows all the qualities that will manifest later on. If you want a scientist it can be seen that this person is going to become one –or a great poet, or an engineer, or a doctor, or just a vagabond. So the accidental birth can disappear and a planned birth can take its place. It will just take a little time for stupid human minds to get accustomed to the new idea.
But the mother will remain indispensable. They have tried experiments: they have given children all the facilities, medication, all the food… every perfection from different
branches of science, but strangely the children go on shrinking and will die within three months. Then they discovered that the mother’s body and her warmth is an absolute necessity for life to grow. That warmth in this vast cold universe is absolutely necessary in the beginning, otherwise the child will feel abandoned. He will shrink and die.
There is no need for man to feel inferior to woman. The whole idea arises because you take man and woman as two species. They belong to one humanity, and they both have complementary qualities. They both need each other, and only when they are together are they whole…
Life should be taken with ease. Differences are not contradictions. They can help each other and immensely enhance each other. The woman who loves you can enhance your creativity, can inspire you to heights you have never dreamed of. And she asks nothing.
She simply wants your love, which is her basic right.
Most of the things that make men and women different are conditional. Differences should be maintained because they make men and women attractive to each other, but
they should not be used as condemnation. I would like both to become an organic whole, remaining at the same time absolutely free because love never creates bondage, it gives
freedom. Then we can create a better world. Half of the world has been denied its contribution and that half, the women, had an immense capacity to contribute to the world. It would have made it a beautiful paradise.
So I don’t ask that they should be equal, that they should wear the same clothes, that they should behave like men, or use vulgar language because the man uses it.
The woman should search into her own soul for her own potential and develop it, and she will have a beautiful future.
Man and woman are neither equal nor unequal, they are unique. And the meeting of two unique beings brings something miraculous into existence.”
Wow! such a small excerpt which provides a wonderful insight to an entirely different perspective. If you come to think of it, women are made so different than a male; both physically and physiologically but somehow there is a battle of sexes than peaceful cohabitation…..more so in the contemporary India.
We are a deep rooted culture with a definite bias towards the sexes……but it is time to contemplate how we retain our feminity and achieve our freedom…
being an indian woman 