ENLIGHTENMENT HAS REMAINED BASICALLY A MASCULINE INTEREST.

And of course when it is a masculine interest, love has to be denied; love is an unnecessary distraction. So all the religions have been against love. My effort here is multi-dimensional. I am trying to do many things here. NOW IS THE TIME for love to find a way towards enlightenment so that women can also be Buddhas. It has not happened in the past. You see Jesus and Mohammed and Mahavira and Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu and Zarathustra, but they are all men. AND UNLESS WOMEN START BECOMING ENLIGHTENED, HUMANITY WILL REMAIN LOPSIDED -- the balance will not be there. And unless women become enlightened, they cannot be really free -- because enlightenment is the ultimate in freedom. The freedom of women cannot come through stupid movements like Women's Liberation. It can only come through a totally different approach: WOMEN SHOULD LEARN HOW TO BECOME ENLIGHTENED. If we can create a few women Buddhas in the world, the woman will be freed from all chains and fetters. And there is no difficulty at all. In fact nobody has bothered about it, nobody has thought about it. WOMAN WAS NEVER TAKEN INTO CONSIDERATION, she has been ignored. She has never been given the same status as man; she was thought to be just secondary. But because of this the whole of humanity has suffered. ENLIGHTENMENT IS EVERYBODY'S BIRTHRIGHT. Man can easily make an approach through meditation but the woman can more easily make an approach through love. LOVE IS GOING TO BE HER MEDITATION. To be loving, totally loving, unconditionally loving -that is going to be her path towards light, towards godliness. And out of love the woman will have a new birth. She will become a child of light, a child of moonlight. Your name is significant. AND YOU CAN SEE THAT THOUSANDS OF WOMEN ARE GATHERING AROUND ME. It has never happened before. It has always been a male-dominated quest. FOR YEARS EVEN BUDDHA DENIED ENTRY TO WOMEN, he was against it. He was afraid, and I can understand his fear. His whole method was male-oriented, and he was afraid that if women were allowed to become initiates, sannyasins, then the males would find ways to be distracted. They might start falling in love and the whole method would be disturbed, the whole process would be disturbed. MAHAVIRA, another enlightened man of the same category as Buddha, who established Jainism, SAID THAT WOMEN CAN BE ENLIGHTENED ONLY WHEN THEY ARE BORN AGAIN AS MEN. In this life when they are women all that they can do is to work to be born as men, only then is enlightenment possible -- not through the body of a woman. First they have to attain the body of a man. And I can understand what he means by it. His method is such that there is no space, no place, for love in it. MARY MAGDALENE LOVED JESUS more than any of his disciples did BUT SHE WAS NOT ACCEPTED AS AN APOSTLE; those twelve fools became apostles! And they all escaped when Jesus was crucified. He was taken down from the cross by three women and all the apostles escaped. But still those three women are not respected. EVEN JESUS DID NOT SHOW ANY RESPECT TO WOMEN, even to his mother he did not show much respect. ONCE HIS MOTHER CAME TO SEE HIM when he was talking to a crowd. The people said 'Your mother is waiting outside to see you,' and he said, 'Tell that woman that nobody is my father and nobody is my mother.' Tell that woman... This is ugly, but this has been the approach of all the male-oriented methodologies. MY EFFORT IS TO CREATE A PATH FOR WOMEN ALSO -- because unless they are free religiously they will not be free in other ways. RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IS THE CENTRAL CORE OF ALL OTHER FREEDOMS. And even in this century there are religions that don't allow women in their temples, they don't allow women to be priests; no woman can be a pope. This is ugly, unnecessarily violent. It is something of the rotten past, still a hangover of the past. It has to be completely finished.

As meditation can lead to enlightenment, love can lead to enlightenment. They are different paths but they reach the same peak. OSHO I Am Not As Thunk As You Drink I Am a darshan diary, Ch #12 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium