By SWAMI CHAITANYA KEERTI
The Times of India
March 3, 2001
A few months ago there was the Millennium World Peace Summit in New York. Nobel Peace laureate from Northern Ireland Betty Williams, Mahatma Gandhi’s grand-daughter Ela Gandhi, eminent primatologist Jane Goodall and Vashti Mckenzie from the African Methodist Episcopal Church attended a special session which was presided over by Mrs Indu Jain.
Betty Williams is reported to have said: “War is essentially man’s work. Now move over. Women will ensure peace.” Stressing that practising non-violence is not for the faint-hearted, she said it required exemplary courage. It is really true that most of the wars, almost all the wars, have been fought by men. The world is always busy in wars because we have been appreciating male qualities and condemning feminine qualities in people. Anyone who is disinterested in fighting is labelled as effeminate. And if a boy starts weeping we ask him: Why are you crying like a girl? Be a man!
This philosophy of condemning feminine qualities is the root cause of all wars in the world and it provokes aggressiveness and barbarianism in men. Our history books are full of appreciation of the “heroic” deeds of Alexander the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte and other such men of violence. We want our male children to become brave heroes like them or at least imbibe some of their qualities.
This appreciation of aggressive male qualities has been more dominant in the West. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche condemned Gautama the Buddha because of his feminine grace and beauty. His idea of a real man was to be strong and to be made of steel. Buddha was the most compassionate and cultured of men, the most graceful man this world has ever known. But his compassion, grace and beauty are essentially feminine qualities that have been adored and worshipped in the East. Nietzsche condemned Buddha’s teachings also. He said that he could not appreciate his teachings as they were harmful to the humanity. He warned that if people believed in Buddha’s teachings, the whole world would turn feminine. Nietzsche appreciated the warrior, the military man, who is always ready to kill or to be killed. The sound and the rhythm of an army marching to the war zone was real music to his ears. It is this philosophy that gave birth to Hitler.
Nietzsche was a real genius but if we follow his philosophy we will have more world wars and no peace. If we want peace in the world, we will have to nurture feminine qualities to bring about a balance in the world. Osho says: It is true that all great qualities are feminine – love, compassion, sympathy, kindness. All these qualities have a flavour of the feminine. We have been giving too much emphasis to the head and ignoring the heart. We are living an utterly miserable life because we have got hung up in our heads and have bypassed our hearts. The head has dried our poetry of emotions, the sentiments, the smiles, the tears, the laughter, and made our life so boring. Friendship has disappeared from the world because our head calculates too much. The head is miserly and calculative. This is the head that has created such monstrous concrete jungles that man has no time to look at the sky and dance with the clouds and rejoice in the rains. The heart wants to sing, but the head thinks about society and worries about what others will say about us. The head has made us much too serious in the name of sanity.
We need some amount of “feminine” insanity of love and emotions to bring some balance to our miserable life. This feminine madness is far better than Nietzsche’s male madness.
Mrs Indu Jain rightly stated at the World Peace Summit that she would like to invoke the all-pervading feminine power – the very embodiment of non-violence – to be here with us. Give women a chance, and non-violence will effortlessly be the religion of the new millennium. The new millennium should have a totally new vision and values of life, in which women give a significant contribution of their feminine qualities to men, and use their feminine power for peace. Let the head and heart unite in meditation and create a new BEING in the world. Says Osho in A Sudden Clash of Thunder: “God is more a mother than a father. God is more like a womb than anything else. Out of God we are born, and back into God we dissolve. He is our birth and He is our death. He is like the ocean: He `waves’ us, we become His waves; He absorbs us – we disappear. He is compassion, love. All His qualities are feminine.”