Talk given by Rev. Master Talk at second CREST seminar,
on 19th December 2006, at Bangalore, India
One thing I would like to say, first of all to start with, the concept of Shiva and Shakti, where finally you see Shiva as a corpse and Shakti dancing on him—shava [corpse]. Shiva has become shava. You don’t find this anywhere else. It only shows that roles can be reversed. Powerful, without power, is a corpse. Powerless, with power, can be terrifying. So like the goddess who is also Lakshmi, who is also Kali—one benevolent, the giver of wealth; the other form, the giver of all knowledge as Saraswati, Kali the terrible, devouring, red tongue lolling out, garland of skulls, all weapons in her hands. So what form we adopt depends on you.
My concern is through history, women have used not love but sex. Hinduism makes a difference between love and sex. In the occidental, shall we say, ethos, psyche, love is sex. That is why you find that couples have to go around and prove to each other that they love each other, by going to bed immediately. This is not the intention of the Creator. The purpose of sex is to create, procreate. It is an instrument to fulfil the original demand of nature that races shall multiply. We don’t need a God to say go forth and multiply. That is as if we are ignorant. If Adam and Eve could do what they had to do without the aid of God, I mean, what on earth do we need a God to tell us what we should do? We don’t. God has been brought too much into the picture and diminishing His value, rather than in ennobling humanity.
If I may be permitted to say something about Mary, the mother of Jesus—I have said this for so many years. I don’t know if anybody has listened to it, or if they resented it so much that they have forgotten it or preferred to forget it. The entire, shall we say, denigration of the female, the terrible oppression cast upon women, the way they have been exploited mercilessly, economically, in every way, I attribute this to the virgin birth. Why on earth could not Jesus have been born a normal human being, through the normal agency of love between a man and a woman? Now, I am no theologian. There may be some profound dogmatic reason for this teaching. But it has made sex dirty in the eyes of the occidental Christian population. As June rightly pointed out, this dichotomy in the Catholic religion especially. You must be a virgin, but you must also have a lot of children. How on earth do we manage it? Artificial insemination? But there is no pleasant attribute to artificial insemination. Excuse me, this is my personal view, and I have held to it for too long, because I was inducted into Christianity in school. You all had the benefit or, should I say, the disadvantage of being born in it. I had the advantage of being taught it. Though I have thought about it, without having to revere what I am learning about it.
I revere knowledge, but not for some humbug of a reason, you see, that sex is dirty, virgin could not mean un-virginated, and Jesus could not be born in the right way. As Babuji said, a very profound, often misunderstood saying: God was not a fool to make two sexes if one would have been enough. My Master did not have to be born to a virgin, nor Lalaji Maharaj. Perhaps that is why, in some way, they are more human and more have the attributes of femininity than these gods of the West. My Master said, accept your Guru as mother. What is the best way to look at your Master, and associate with him? As a mother, because a mother is love personified. He doesn’t love; he is love. What June said of Babuji Maharaj, he is love, I say of all people, if they can be love, instead of loving… In loving you have this dichotomy, whatever they were saying about Islam. When he says, I am God, it is humble. It sounds ridiculous at first; rather arrogant too. But in another way, if you look at it, to say what I am, it cannot be arrogance. As Babuji said, if you are a doctor of science and you say, “I am a doctor of science,” you are not arrogant. You are being factual, truthful. But if you are only a Bachelor of Science and you say you have a doctoral degree, well, you are a liar and arrogant.
So you see, feminism must thrive on love. Both have sex. It is not only women who have sex. Men have also sex. And it is not only men who are tempted. Females too are tempted, more often, I think, than men. Men only respond. Men are, I think, wired to some sort of responsive system—a flutter of the eye, a dropped handkerchief. And in the modern world—you know, I saw a movie on volcanoes, where a girl lands on some island to study volcanoes. And she is at the table for lunch, straight from the airport. She meets a man and he says, “What are you doing this evening? Why don’t you have dinner with me?” And in the evening they are in bed together. You see, there is no demand and supply business here. There is no, shall we say, response to an invisible, almost impalpable, feeling. Today there is no feeling in sex. It is only erotic. And as Dorit or June, I don’t know who said it, at the age of twelve girls want to entice. You know, even one textile mill in India, a governmental agency, they changed their mills to Entyce. They produce Entyce fabrics, as if we have no sufficient sources of enticement, without the government having to add its share!
So life has become all wrong. Religion has tainted it. Psychology has tainted it—psychology by saying the erotic impulse, the Id, and all this nonsense of Freud, if I may name him, because he is no longer alive. We have not used the wisdom of the heart in study, only the intellect and the head, which is a very dangerous instrument by any means. Men use power; they use power like toys. And they use toys as power. Atomic energy in the hands of a scientist is a toy. The great Einstein did meditate upon whether he should publish his writings about atomic science, bomb. And for a long time he is supposed to have debated within himself whether it was right to do so. Foolishly he decided that science demanded it. And human wisdom must decide how to use it. This is like giving a cobra to a child and saying the child will decide how to use it. Einstein was eminently foolish. His science corrupted his intelligence, his wisdom. His heart failed him. And today we are paying the consequences. Women only use what they have, men use what they create. Perhaps both are wrong.
So you see, the question of balance of power, the balance and the equality, all this is blah blah, in my opinion. What we have to do is to be natural. Women must use love, and the response to love is always gentle, kind, loving. When they use sex, then say, “Well, never had it better!” “By Jove, you know, you just have to land in Frankfurt and you find a million girls waiting.” I am using Frankfurt you know just because [inaudible] is seated before me. Any port. Should it be an available commodity at the drop of a hat? Or like in the romantic Middle Ages, should it be something a man had to work for, deserve, and then go on his knees, and in marriage consummate that love? I mean it is not good enough to be just a feminist or a female worker or things like that. They rely too much upon the aggressiveness of man and match it with an equal aggressiveness from the female. Men say, “Well, come on, let us have it out.” I often believe that these feminist movements, female equality and all this, have done more harm to the female than they ever expected. This is my sincere belief. When you demand equality, you never get it. If you bow—not subserviently, as Babuji has said about Sahaj Marg, we have service without servitude. We are nobody’s servants.
And you know, mastery does not mean that I am a master or Babuji was a master over others. His mastery consisted in being master of himself. Always in command of himself, always balanced. Always himself, in himself, by himself. He didn’t need anyone to remind him of culture. He wasn’t taught etiquette in French schools, or table manners in British institutions. But he was the perfect host because he was himself. When he didn’t know how to use a fork he looked at you and said, “Is this right?” And often, because he held it the wrong way, we were tempted to adore his innocent lack of knowledge, not his ignorance. It was innocence of how to use a thing. Unfortunately today we equate innocence with ignorance. “Oh, he doesn’t even know how to use a spoon.” When I first introduced Babuji to the spoon, he did what all children do. He took the spoon and put it this way. And of course, everything fell on his lap. He did the same thing with a pipe once, because his hookah was lost when we went to Switzerland. I bought a pipe and filled it. And he put it upside down and all the… You know, I had to take a few puffs to make the coals come alive, the tobacco. And he threw it away, he said, “Chi, nonsense!”
So you see, innocence is something different from ignorance, is different from stupidity. Today everything is stupid. “Oh, he is stupid. He doesn’t know how to button his trousers, or his jacket.” Babuji usually left one button on top, and started here, so that his coat was like this. Then somebody had to button it straight. Of course our own ego, the ego of his servitors, his associates, required that Babuji should not be blamed for being stupid—“He doesn’t know how to…” So we said, “You know, he is in constant remembrance. He is thinking of Lalaji.” The amount of myths that have been thrust upon that old man—innocent, loving, human—is nobody’s business. Anything he did which was not to our liking, not right according to our perception, we attributed to his contact with Lalaji. “Oh, he is lost!” It is a danger to humanity to mythify, mystify human innocence and attribute it to ignorance. Beware! That Babuji was neither for nor against sex, we all know. He was shy of it. He had nine children, which I did not know when I joined the Mission. Lalaji had nine children, too. Whether this was in emulation of his Master, I don’t know. Because had it been so, I should have had nine children. So, this is nature, you see. Emulation does not mean following the sexual patterns of behaviour of your guru. It does not mean you have to grow a beard. It does not mean you have to spit. Emulate him in his inner essence. When you light a candle from another candle, you don’t expect this candle to be the same shape as that candle. It is enough that it is a candle and it can produce light.
So men and women must emulate each other in their inner essence of being human, of having the capacity to love. Women must not entice, they must evoke. By loving, they must light a candle in the heart of the male, and make him love back, not go for the bed immediately. That is rape. Just because it is consensual it doesn’t make it right. Nor does it remove it from the category of rape. The way they go about it frantically nowadays in movies I see, each one disrobing the other with such frantic haste. I mean it is animal behaviour, excuse me. And they are, both women and men are animal in that moment, because there is no love. There is only de-tensioning the system, getting rid of a tension in your body, relieving your tension. I would hazard a statement that men and women are using each other as some sort of sexual toilet. I am using strong language knowingly and deliberately. Babuji said the same thing in many contexts. He said, “When you rush to the Master because you have done something wrong and you want to be cleaned, you are using the Master as a toilet, throwing your filth into him.” And he made that famous statement: a Guru is really a sweeper, a cleaner of gutters, because you go with all your filth to him. Is it really filth? Only if you think so. A child doesn’t think it is filthy when it makes what it has to do with its diapers and the mother lovingly cleans it. You put it lovingly on the table, you are whistling, you are singing, you are crooning away. Our women call it sandal paste; the baby doesn’t have excreta. It is sandalwood paste to the mother. To a neighbouring woman, of course—chi, chi, chi, chi, she will say—four letter words.
Innocence between a mother and a child is the only relationship that should continue throughout life between any man and any woman. The relationship of man and wife is for reasons of having children. But the true relation should be always that she is a mother. “She is a mother not only to my children but to me, too.” The Hindu blessing, the Vedic blessing when the couple are married says, “Live long, give him ten children and make him your eleventh.” Hinduism has profound respect for the female. She is worshipped as a wife, she is worshipped as a daughter, she is worshipped as a mother eternally. And the primary, fundamental role which makes a woman a woman is to be a mother. Any woman who cannot have a child is frustrated, her love is dammed up. There is no way of loving, you see. The only way a woman can really love is to give the child her love. That is the purest love, unsullied by any material concerns, untainted by a sexual desire or anything like that, pure maternal love, known in India as mamta.
So, I would suggest that people from the West should read a bit more about the Hindu culture, especially about women. And I am always fond of referring to one talk by Swami Vivekananda on the women of India, when he refers to prostitution in Kolkata. And he says, “Look not down upon these fallen sisters of ours, for if they were not there, you and you and you would be there.”
