Allowing Femininity to Flow

Never before in the history of humanity has a woman had the opportunities she has today, simply because technology has leveled the playing field. When physical strength was determining life, naturally masculinity would dominate. Now that technology has leveled things, whether you are a male or a female, your physical strength is no longer the deciding factor as to how far you can go. However, we still continue to magnify this simple biological difference that nature has created, to the extent that what should have been only one aspect of our life unfortunately has seeped into every aspect of our life. You do not have to be a man or a woman in every aspect of life. You can just function as a human being. But in today’s society, we have established these things in such a hardcore, straight-jacketed way that we think this is nature’s way. It is not. The segregation is purely social. We need to work ourselves out of this baggage. The most important thing that a woman should guard against is trying to become like a man. Because of this baggage that has existed for such a long time, a woman may think that everything masculine is superior. This whole idea of what is superior and what is inferior is very masculine. If you look at life, everything has a role to play. The reason why the ‘masculine’ has been more important than the ‘feminine’ till now is because during all these thousands of years of our existence as human beings, our core focus has been survival. Just going and getting food was such a hard task. Only in the last 50 years, our food got really organised. Now you can just go into the supermarket and buy whatever you want. Today, for the first time, humanity is at a point where we can relax our survival attitudes a little bit. If we relax our survival instincts, you will see, naturally the femininity becomes very significant. But unfortunately, modern societies are not relaxing their survival instinct; whether it is a car or a home or whatever, we are just raising the bar. Right now the whole world is ruled by economics. When money is the only important thing, masculinity becomes the most dominant part of our social structure. Unfortunately, we are moving in that direction. Femininity is being totally obliterated in many ways, especially in Western societies, and it is beginning to happen in India also. Masculine and feminine attributes should be looked at in terms of two qualities, not in terms of male and female because there are women who are more masculine than men, there are men who are more feminine than women. If the feminine has to really flourish, if it has to flow, we need to create a society where our values are more spread out to all aspects of life. When music, art, love, care, when all these things become as important as economics, then a woman has as much role or even more of a role in life than a man. A home, a social structure, a nation, or humanity as a whole is not complete unless the feminine also finds full expression. You must make this happen in your own lives, around you and in the society. Otherwise, we will live very incomplete, lopsided lives. Today, everybody is ambitious and wants to achieve success. But that is a very foolish way. There is a way to achieve success without being fired by ambition. If you are concerned about everything around you, you will naturally do your best; you will not hold back anything. That is a woman’s way of operating. That is the best way to operate in the world. When you operate out of personal ambition, you may do a lot of things, but not necessarily towards your own wellbeing or anybody’s wellbeing. Global warming for example is just a consequence of unbridled human activity. If we continue like this without any concern for what is around us, we will ultimately neither have a man nor a woman left. If femininity found a better expression on this planet, maybe our stock market would not hit great highs, but generally people would smile more, be a little more happy, a little more loving; life would be a little more beautiful. After all, it is in pursuit of human wellbeing that all activity is done. But that has been completely forgotten because the way of the masculine world is to go somewhere without much attention to what is here and now. The ‘feminine’ is not trying to go anywhere; the ‘feminine’ is happy where it is. If these two aspects are in balance, we will go somewhere but we will also enjoy where we are right now. That is what needs to happen in the world.