April 22, 2023
Alina (0:00:28):
Namaste. After a gap of two weeks, here we are back to continue Evenings with Sraddhalu. Namaste, Sraddhalu.
Sraddhalu (0:00:39):
Namaste. Happy to be with all of you.
Alina (0:00:43):
In the continuation of uh the theme, the types of learners, today we will explore the distinctions between the masculine and the feminine. As usual, you may post your questions in the chat box or you may send beforehand your questions at our email ID: integralstudies.in[at]gmail.com.
Sraddhalu (0:01:13):
As part of our larger discussion on education, we looked at various types of learners, types of human beings, psychological types, and so on, from the educational point of view. And today we will dwell on one particular distinction which is extremely important. In some ways it will be provocative because there is a tendency in the modern mind, or let's say, the modern fashion, fashionable trend, to blur out distinctions between men and women and to make it seem as if there is none and all these are merely constructs from, coming from social imposition, controls, and so on. But in fact according to our own understanding from scientific observations, there are fundamental biological distinctions even in the brain of the male and the female, not just in human beings but in all animals. There are other hormonal workings which are so different, and some of them are so different that if you were to swap one for the other, the species would not survive, the individual would not survive. Obviously, these have massive psychological ramifications and particularly from a learning point of view, which will be our, let’s say, eventual objective.
But to be able to understand that really well, we need to go deeper and understand the origin of this distinction, the basis for it, and then we will be able to better appreciate not only the biological distinctions, psychological distinctions, but also to what extent those distinctions are binding, to what extent they represent a starting point for something greater, and so on. So, last time we had discussed the 4 soul powers, and the 3 modes of nature, and how these 4 × 3 combine to make 12 variations, and upon these of course you can have innumerable other variations. But these two, the masculine and the feminine, are as if somehow independent of these, they as if represent something more fundamental at the very origin of creation.
So I will discuss this in three stages: First, the purely spiritual foundations. Second stage will be their reflection in the psychological workings and not specific to human beings but purely as psychological powers, qualities. And the third will be what happens when these are embedded in the biology. And so what we will first discuss now is completely independent of biology, has nothing to do with gender, though we will use the terms masculine and feminine, please in your mind at least free yourself from any association with the male and female. And we only call it ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, we could have called it something totally different, and we will also in passing, but we only call it that because we project from below upwards. And as if the male-female characteristics we try to abstract to their essential psychological, and that we project to something which is of a deeper principle. So the separation from the biology and the psychological principle is very important at the initial stage, and then later we will see how that plugs into the biology.
(0:05:02):
The initial stage of the spiritual and psychological tendencies, we will particularly particularly consider from the point of view of evolution and the learning and growth aspects, for generally speaking. First of all, we go all the way back to the top, the very top of creation, where one single indivisible consciousness must take two poises in order to be able to have a creation. If the One stays simply what it is, it is unknowable literally. When it chooses to know itself, naturally it, knowing itself, there is automatically two: it as it chooses to know; and it as it knows itself. Necessarily what it knows itself will be a limited knowing or can be drawn out unendingly, but what it is, the one who knows, is always complete.
So there are already here we see at the very origin of things as if two poises. This in the more explicit way of the way the consciousness begins to know itself, it knows itself as sheer existence, existence that is utterly conscious, consciousness that has not only knowledge but also power of itself, so Chit-Shakti, but consciousness that is blissful, so Sat-Chit-Ananda. In this already there is a duality from the sheer existence to the consciousness, the knowing of itself, but in the knowing is a dual power, it is a power not only to know but also to be, in knowing it can amplify what it knows, intensify, objectify, so that becomes the power, the creative energy, Chit-Shakti, but all this belongs in the domain of consciousness.
So we can say, the dual poise is one of existence and then the emergent consciousness. One way of looking at it. Or we could say: it is the subjective awareness, what it knows itself to be; and then what it draws out of itself to know as if objectively. So again, two poises. But I am going through many such representations because necessarily the Reality above is not reducible to just one mental idea. It is an intuitive experience and so when we mentalise it, it takes multiple aspects. So: emerging from within; projecting outward. Again the duality. All of these you will see reflect in us as human beings: when we are in deep thought, introspective mode, we turn within, ‘What is it? What is it I want to be? What is it I am? What is it I want to express? What is it I want to create?’, and it's as if you're turning in, to introspect, to dig inside, you find things and then you say, ‘Ah yes-this’, and ‘What is this?’, and you draw it out. And then it comes to a degree where it's on the brink of objectivization and then you say, ‘This now I will begin to express’, and then it as if turns and is pushed and projected outward.
Well, a similar movement takes place in the Divine Consciousness: all is known and then yet certain things are drawn out, and as they are drawn out, there is a turning to objectify as if to itself. But that becomes a duality. Or we can say, the consciousness itself of the Sacchidananda has this aspect of knowledge and then power, power to be, to actualise what it knows. Although it knows, it's not yet actualised until it enables it by empowering. Or we could look at the energy itself, that creative energy, and you can't say, that doesn't have energy, both have energy, both are energy. And we can say, the distinction is the conceiving energy and then the manifesting energy.
So when you begin to think in these terms, you find the dual poise and then you need to find a word to capture this but to capture all these, let's say, pairs of dualities or rather this one experience and then that one experience, multifaceted, so in Sanskrit, the natural vocabulary is ‘Purusha’ and ‘Prakriti’ or ‘Ishwara’ and ‘Shakti’, the Lord and the energy of the Lord. But Purusha is the poise in which all is held, does not take a dynamic movement, it is still, stable, complete in itself. Prakriti, the vocabulary, the Sanskrit word is: ‘Pra’ is projecting out, placing forward. ‘kriti’ is forming, creating, ‘kara’, the same root as ‘hand’, or ‘karma’ the same root, the action, the poise of being, and then you may say, the poise of becoming in English vocabulary, or we will say in a different vocabulary, Soul and Nature. So, these become the more accessible terms which philosophies will use.
(0:10:28):
I am bringing these terms last because necessarily these terms are deeply imbued with all kinds of associations, and expectations, and philosophical distinctions according to various schools, according to our individual mental associations and understandings. So, initially I have described the feel of the experience and then now we will give it a vocabulary for convenience, but know that we are speaking of something much more deep than just this very superficial idea. In, this was my, the first time I realised how this can even be uh completely differently understood was when we were talking in some context in a interfaith discussion, the, some, a rabbi who was there, he heard me say something like ‘Purusha is the static poise and Prakriti or Nature is the dynamic poise, this is passive and that is active’, and he said, ‘That's interesting, in the Kabbalah, it is completely the reverse, we say, it is the Purusha poise’, in the vocabulary, ‘which is active, which has the Will and the Prakriti, Nature, is passive to the Will’. Right?
So if you speak of passivity and activity, you can completely switch the roles. And they are not wrong. And this is not wrong. We are actually speaking exactly the same things, the problem becomes of vocabulary. So yes, there is a passivity of Nature to the active conceptual power of soul, Nature is passive to what the soul conceives and chooses to execute and she executes passively. But on the other hand, He conceives and She flows. So both were right, it's just we understood those words differently or highlighted them differently. So I'm pointing this out because it's very easy to slip into misunderstanding if you latch onto the words, so use the word as pointer to the underlying sense of the experience of these two poises of a single consciousness.
In fact, if we go deeper into the yoga tradition, in the Bhagavad Gita, Sri Krishna describes six gradations of relationships between these two poises of consciousness, of soul and nature. There is in fact also a poise where the soul chooses to become passive to the play of nature, although the soul conceives of the play, then it becomes passive in the play, and nature entertains, seduces, uh hypnotises the soul until it forgets who he is and feels itself a formation of Nature.
That's where we are today. We feel as if we are formed of the body, we are formed after our thoughts. ‘If I stop thinking, if my body ceases to exist, ‘I’ will cease to be exist.’ That's that lowest poise. And then various stages in which the soul awakens to the relationship and then realises that, oh-yes, what it chooses, nature modifies, if it loses interest in the play in a particular way, then nature adapts the play to match what is his interest, and so he can choose. And so there are stages until eventually he becomes master of nature. But then he lifts nature until the nature and the soul are united as a single consciousness taking two poises, liberated in their divinity. So that is the highest station. But then there are all these different relationships in the play possible in the actual unfolding in cosmos.
So essential relationship though, always, Soul leads Nature. Without Soul, Nature cannot exist. Without Nature, you could say, Soul is unmanifest, not incomplete, unmanifest. So these are the dependencies between the two: always soul leads, nature follows, because nature is power of soul expressing its free choice. Remember we are not talking about men and women. Set that aside. We are just talking of a spiritual principle of consciousness. So Soul leads Nature, Purusha leads Prakriti, always. And the consciousness within is essentially one, taking two different poises, different qualities, different action, different relationships.
(0:15:00):
And so if we have to reduce all this into two keywords, and I will set aside the Sanskrit vocabulary, but two keywords in the English language which would capture as if the essence of this and the essence of that as poises, I would use the words: ‘stability’, and ‘flow’. And in the play between the two, the quality caught in these two, which distinguishes one from the other, you will see how this is also represented in various traditions at various ways. One of the most common symbols in which this duality is represented is in the Shiva Linga in the Indian tradition. It is not a phallic symbol, that is a western Freudian imposition, it has nothing to do with that. It is the creative power in its Purusha aspect as static power and then in its Prakriti aspect as dynamic power. And the joining of these two and their relationship is represented.
Now again we will use words to draw as if what we have tried to describe as an intuitive experience to draw out elements of it in a more mental form. So what is the nature of the Purusha, the qualities associated with it? You see, it stands by itself, it is stable, it needs nothing, it is complete in itself, ‘it’ is simply. How would you represent that in a symbol? But it's not just that. It has also a sense of direction and purpose and focus before it becomes. So how do you represent that, sheer existence but with direction, with purpose, with a focal point and yet complete?
And then the second movement- as it flows, there is the flowing of what the purpose was and the flowing flows freely. So you see the Shiva Linga is this cylindrical as if dome-like cylindrical structure which holds the Shiva aspect, the Purusha aspect, and then the flow from it emerges, flows out, literally like the water is flowing from a hill, the Ganga flowing down from the head of Shiva or from the mountain surrounding all around and flowing around as a fluid, liquid, but flowing in all directions from this centre, and yet the flow is not chaotic, it represents, it expresses that which is held. And so in the Shiva Linga you have this base which is surrounding, and then from there it pours out, it pours out to become the whole creation. So the poise of the Shiva Linga with the Shiva as well as the Shakti surrounding is a very significant and pretty accurate representation of this duality.
You could remove the surrounding waters, just have this bare, empty, unexpressed. You could have the waters flowing, remove the centre and the waters are, well, without centre, chaotic, flowing. What leads? Which direction? Nothing is set. The two united make for the union of Shiva and Shakti, which makes for the completeness and the manifestation. And then that pours out streaming and unfolds in space and time. That's the way the whole thing is symbolised in this. So, all this is supposed to give you the spiritual foundations of this duality.
Now, why should this duality represent itself in the human beings with two genders at all? So, that question we will fully appreciate a little later, but first now we see how this duality streams in qualities of consciousness and the way this pairing becomes almost unavoidable throughout creation. And then we see that the soul naturally finds this aspect or that aspect of the experience more interesting or a specialisation in the whole scope of its free play. And so, that’s where we will see the almost inevitability of this double aspect which in the biology becomes the two genders. But the double aspect in itself, free of the gender, is psychological qualities or emphasis of psychology on one or the other. So, at all levels of manifestation, you will find this play.
(0:19:33):
Sri Aurobindo makes reference to this that in the soul's experience there is somewhere a need to have a vehicle which aligns to more of this aspect or that aspect or it may choose to align more with this or that. I am going to read from that text, it’s actually quite fascinating, it’s part of his description in the, among the last writings where he is describing the supramental transformation, it's part of that series which is called the “Supramental Manifestation upon Earth”, there he is discussing the divine body, and as part of that discussion he says, “the sex principle” which is this distinction of two genders, it's not about sexuality but the sex principle:
“But all recognition of the sex principle, as apart from the gross physical indulgence of the sex impulse, could not be excluded from a divine life upon earth; …” So in “a divine life upon earth”, that principle of the masculine and feminine is, would be there as a gender. “… it is there in life, plays a large part and has to be dealt with, it cannot simply be ignored, merely suppressed or held down or put away out of sight. In the first place, it is in one of its aspects a cosmic and even a divine principle: it takes the spiritual form of the Ishwara and the Shakti and without it there could be no world-creation or manifestation of the world-principle of Purusha and Prakriti which are both necessary for the creation, necessary too in their association and interchange for the play of its psychological working and in their manifestation as soul and Nature fundamental to the whole process of the Lila.”
Now this is the part which is quite fascinating. So we have already discussed this aspect, Ishvara-Shakti, even uh in the “world-creation” you need the dual poise and the manifesting of the Parusha and Prakriti, both necessary for creation, you cannot have one existing without the other, we have seen that. But “necessary too in their association and interchange for the play of its psychological working”. In the cosmos, the “psychological working” needs this interchange between these two principles, and “their manifestation as soul and Nature” is “fundamental to the whole process of the Lila”.
So we will take a few examples of how this happens, but for now: “In the divine life itself an incarnation or at least in some form a presence of the two powers or their initiating influence through their embodiments or representatives would be indispensable for making the new creation possible.” Interesting. So, it is as if, since these two principles have a play and if we see it in nature, we will take examples of it, then at some point the principle also needs to find a means of embodying, finding a body for itself and expressing itself as a conscious principle to manifest in a divine play. Isn't it?
If each of the gods as conscious powers, cosmic creative powers, would want to manifest in a body and experience this and even participate as an individualised form, well, why not these principles which are also conscious powers? So, “an incarnation or at least in some form a presence of the two powers or their initiating influence through their embodiments” having body or through their “representatives”. So, you as an individual could say, ‘Ha-yes, I would like to incarnate or manifest this particular aspect, express this more intensely, more completely, and then perhaps change later’.
So your embodiment could be able to choose to align to one or other, incarnate one or other, just as you may choose to say, ‘I will incarnate my poetic consciousness’, ‘I will incarnate my scientific side’, ‘I will incarnate my adventurous side’. So, why not? So if you look at it in this way, because these are such powerful essential cosmic principles, yes, there will also be embodiments, incarnations, for which nature interestingly has been preparing for a very-very-very long time to create bodies which are specialised in their alignment to this or that aspect. That's where we find the gender and the biology. We will come to that later, but right now I am just setting the base for this understanding.
And Nature has actually tried to look at Purusha-Prakriti, ‘Ah-yes, I must capture’, and of course she is going from below, building with forms and pieces, joining them in an imitation of consciousness, so it is a bit of a caricature, everything is symbolic though. Everything is symbolic! The biological distinctions are symbolic. Of course, they may have a functional aspect, but they are all symbolic. And it is there that we may get the Freudian perversion of seeing the phallus in the Shiva Linga. It has nothing to do with that. But the symbolism in the biological form itself and the specialisation of the forms, which we will look at later, is a result of nature attempting to capture certain characteristics, psychological principles of each of these specialisations of consciousness. So, there's more to this text, but at this point I will skip it, it’s not relevant for our discussion. Those of you who are interested can look at it separately.
(0:25:44):
So, I come back to our discussion of this duality. When we now look down, top-down across the worlds, we see this, these two poises embodied naturally in the subtler worlds. So we have the gods, and for those of you who are familiar with the Vedic deities you have the masculine and the feminine deities, isn't it? Or as it is in the Puranas represented, it’s much more humanised, they take on human forms. A similar thing takes place in the Greek mythology where you have the masculine and the feminine gods and goddesses, but there they have already become so humanised that a lot of deeper knowledge is lost.
Now the Indian tradition, we still retain in the, although a lot of distortions have come from the Veda to the Puranic phase, you still retain one idea that for every masculine deity there is a feminine deity and there is a partnership between the two. That's interesting. So it's as if one represents this aspect, the other represents that aspect of the same consciousness. Among the Greek gods that pairing is not so obvious unless you go to very ancient texts and there you might find certain things or you may even find sometimes that the same deity is more masculine or more feminine, taking different roles, and so on.
So we see there literally a masculine deity and a feminine deity. Whenever there is action to be performed on earth, the masculine sends as emissary the feminine deity. Interesting. And there you see this play of the dual aspects but still, psychological, spiritual principle, remember, don't reduce it to human genders! In further down other levels, higher mental, higher vital, and so on, you will find archangelic, angelic entities. Similarly, when you will find in the western tradition, when they speak of archangels and angels, you will find sometimes masculine, feminine, or they are just blurred and they don't have a clear gender, which is often the case in fact, because they do not have organs on all those planes, they do not need organs, you can of course change your body shape, put on any kind of organ or shape, but it's a artificial imposition, the consciousness itself does not need that.
So you will see in European mystical Christian art, the archangels are painted as almost feminine-male, so it's as if they are capturing this aspect but not quite clear. Interesting. In the, even in their representation the biological organs are not seen to distinguish male or female, where the artists have a mystical perception this is most common. We have also in the Indian tradition other beings of the vital worlds, Apsaras and Gandharvas, again female and male, and again in their interplay there is this relationship. In, among the lower vital beings, you will find as they approach the material domain closer, they tend to have more distinctly organs, otherwise again it’s just quality of consciousness, more feminine, more masculine.
I am going to highlight this because finally you have to look at human beings in terms of this, not so much the organs, but the masculine-feminine quality of consciousness and then understand: how the mind works, masculine or feminine; how the life-energies flow, masculine or feminine; how the body itself has formed in its flow and in its specialisations, irrespective of the specifics of organs. Because these things are going to last, the organs may or may not, these things will last, and these things are more essentially true. So qualitative difference is what we are going to focus upon.
So, what are these psychological qualities and what is their interplay? First we will look at it in a more objective play in the cosmos. You will see there is a dual poise everywhere. Wherever something is happening, there has to be a dual poise. If there are not two in contact, in pressure, in collision, in stress, nothing is created. It is the stress of two principles, two forces, and the stress-building intensifying leads to the creation of a third or something new, a new principle emergent. Very simply you want to light a fire, you take a stone and strike it against another stone. Right? One stone has to stay fixed, the other has to move. Of course, in the domain of relativity, you could move both. But still, end of the day, relative to each other, each feels either itself moving and the other static or itself static and the other moving. So, the dual poise is inherent in any such interaction.
(0:30:46):
In electricity for example, when electricity flows, there are two things: voltage and current. What is the difference? Voltage is a stress, I will use our deeper vocabulary, in the ether, as ‘stress’ in the ether, creates a separation in the tension. But current does not flow necessarily unless the circuit is closed. So voltage is that stress, it is the static aspect, it holds, it can stay unendingly, doing no work, losing nothing. You can hold a voltage just like that, unendingly, indefinitely in a capacitor. That's what happens. Now you close the circuit, and the voltage immediately causes current to flow, and current can only flow, current cannot be static. Voltage cannot flow, voltage is only static. Interesting. And if you do not have current, the voltage is unmanifest. But you cannot have current without voltage. Interesting! You see how fundamental this is. You just have to go deep enough and you'll find ‘Ha! this dual poise is there’. And when the two are there, then you have the electricity, you have the heat, the light, the, the computer, the mobile phone runs. Otherwise, nothing.
In the biology, you have something which is static and something which is dynamic. Well, the bone and the muscle! Without the bone you could not hold the muscle, the muscle would just collapse as a lump. Isn't it? But without the muscle the bone could not move, could not express itself. One is rigid, unmoving; the other is moving, not rigid at all. Interesting. And combination of these all over the body make for the ability of us to be able to move and express ourselves physically.
Look around you again in nature. You see a river flowing. When you see a river is flowing, against what? There has to be a bank, there has to be the earth against which the river flows. Without earth, no river. Without river, earth is dry, no life.
You have a flame, it gives off heat and light. Without the flame, there is no heat and light. But without the heat and light, the flame, it’s just a beautiful painting, it does nothing, it cannot express itself.
Or, the classic example which I have always used to draw the analogy of relationship between Purusha and Prakriti is this canvas and the painting. The canvas is the foundation upon which the painter flows with the brush, the colours flow, let's say. If the canvas moves with the brush as the brush paints and the canvas moves with it, nothing is created. Canvas has to be steady so that brush can move against it. If canvas is loose, as the brush moves you will get a distortion. But the more solid, the more rigid, the more permanent, immovable the canvas, the more violent can be the strokes of the colours, the more complex and rich and the more detailed. If the canvas is not sufficiently tight, taut, you try to paint fine details, they will not hold.
Or, take another example, you take a sculptor chipping away on stone. If you take soft stone, it's easy to chip but you can't make precision, you cannot make fine lines, fine hair, you cannot make it, because it's too rigid, because it's too soft. But if you take the hardest stone, you take the granite for example, very hard to chip but precisely because of that you can make very precise fine lines, and it will hold, it won't break up, it won't crumble.
(0:35:06):
So the harder the resistance, the more fine, the more rich, the more diverse the play that is possible. Interesting. Think about it. On the other hand, if there is not that rich play of light, of colour, of form, then the rigidity is bare, blank. I stand before a canvas, infinite potential, as if all possible paintings are existent at the same time in it. What do you see? None of them. Or, you see all of them, but none is expressed, none is manifest. In order to bring forward something, it has to be a rock-solid, stable, static. And then the full violence of an entire universe exploding can be supported by it. So the canvas painting becomes another good analogy of this, and the whole universe, you think in terms of a canvas and a painting.
But I said this is true of all operations of Nature, for the existence itself of the universe, but also in all creative processes. Wherever two things combine to create a third, to give birth to something new, you'll find the same law of operation. I'm taking some very accessible examples:
Hydrogen and oxygen giving birth to water. Water is neither hydrogen nor oxygen, it's not a gas at all! Right? And what is fascinating about this, and the reason I'm taking this as an example: Hydrogen is everywhere in the universe, there is nowhere in the universe that you don't have hydrogen, even in empty space there is hydrogen, maybe greatly spread out but there are hydrogen molecules. Literally it's as if they appear out of nowhere. Why? Because hydrogen is the most basic thing, one proton, one electron, is all you need! And what does the sun do? The sun puts out these gigantic bursts of solar wind. Which is what? Protons at high speed. And then the sun is also generating electricity, it's also throwing out electrons. So, eventually, anywhere you are in the universe, eventually you will find these protons and it will attract an electron and the two will combine and there will be hydrogen. Or literally they emerge out of the underlying substratum of what they call ‘vacuum energy’. Literally hydrogen is being produced simultaneously everywhere in space.
And then the other thing, oxygen, which is fascinating. Anywhere you go, on the moon, any planet, everything is oxidised already. So, we don't really know where it came from, but it's there. And when there is an oxidised, let's say, iron oxidised, so you have rust as substance on the moon. When the solar wind comes and hits, you have the proton, hydrogen atom, electron, electricity, because of static charge and it literally eats up the oxygen, separates it and forms water. And I'm taking this example because, that's, this means everywhere in the universe that there is hydrogen which is everywhere, and there is oxygen which is anywhere there's any planet, the two will combine, there will be water. But it needs a combination of these two, you cannot have water otherwise, you cannot have life otherwise, the, you will now use masculine-feminine principle combining to create life. Okay. Which one is masculine, feminine? You could say, it could be either, but think about the role they play and it's obvious which you will call what.
I will take another example for this electric charge: So the hydrogen atom itself we saw is a proton-electron combining. It's a masculine-feminine principle because they are opposite charges. Electricity is electron and, well, negative charge and positive charge combining or joining. Isn't it? Or, separating. Which would you call ‘positive’? Which would you call ‘negative’? It could be arbitrary, any I could call ‘masculine’, any I could call ‘feminine’, doesn't matter, until you observe carefully how it actually happens in Nature. Notice, one of these flows, the other does not flow. So, when you have many atoms together in a molecular structure, it's piece of iron, you take a piece of metal,I have a coin here, take a piece of metal, it's shining, because there is the surface electrons of all the atoms, and they cause a field which reflects light, that's why metals are shiny. They are conductors. Conductors tend to be shiny for this reason, because of the free flow of electrons. What's happening is when two atoms come together, they share an electron which jumps across them and which holds them together. At least that's the model we have in current physics. The electrons are flowing, the protons are stuck, they are stable, they become the basis for the electrons to flow around. Interesting.
So, which is Purusha? Which is Prakriti? In their role, in their relation, it becomes obvious. Think about it.
(0:40:10):
Similarly, we could say ‘hot air’, ‘cold air’, wherever there is heat and cold. So, hot air will rise, cold air will fall. Immediately it creates a wind flow. But you need both. If all is evenly cold or hot, no wind, no rain. Hot air rises, cold air drops, causing wind. When the two collide causing rain, giving birth. Which would you call ‘masculine’, ‘feminine’? Well, you can see how the principle works. Cold settles. Hot activates, rises. So, you know which you would call what. So, sometimes it seems arbitrary in an operation, but the point is, there is a double principle always. And if not for the combination of the two principles, there is no real creation. The positive and negative charges will create the spark, which will launch the rain, release it.
So, all of this really comes back again to the essential qualities which I spoke of as stability and flow, static–dynamic. And the greater the stability, it’s the greater the potential for the flow, and so we find a very interesting complementarity between them. Both are needed, both should be there in the right proportion and in the right relation, and then anything can be created. So, all this was still to describe things on a psychological cosmic level of operation, we are still not mapping it specifically to gender or human biology, and so on. Into this one could do many more examples of how this works, and especially in the subtler worlds these things become much more objectified, you can literally uh invoke or amplify certain qualities as in dream state when you create things.
But now we will bring this whole discussion to their encasement in the material and particularly the biological vehicles. So, the biological form which we then call ‘gender’. Because of the nature of the physical matter, rigidity, persistence in its stability in form, binding in form, the result is that these psychological qualities as they enter or even their spiritual origins, as they enter into the biology, they tend to become rigid, they tend to get fixed, they tend to be reduced and limited, and into them then the biology also infuses certain exaggerated tendencies and forms we may call them ‘instincts’ or ‘drives’. And then one more thing which is very specific to the biology because of the rigidity, any change has to go slow and has to be rhythmic through rhythms, through stages, so automatically these qualities also undergo stages and timing in their unfoldment.
Now all this that I have described is purely at the level of principle of encasement in biology of any spiritual or psychological powers or principles, anything. Now we come to the human beings and the encasement that we experience not only as souls incarnating but also bringing with us a certain template, let's say, a model of personality of mind and vital body, as soon as you plug into the biology, all these things begin to grip you: rigidity, limiting of capacities, binding into instincts and drives, unfolding through stages and at specific timings.
You look at the human being, the stages of our unfoldment of psychological capacities or spiritual potential. We are as if limited by the body. Until the brain grows sufficiently complex, you cannot even incarnate the full potential of your mind. So it's as if your mind's capacity, especially when it's a more mature soul and a mature personality, is as if sticking out of the biology, it cannot fully incarnate, it's out there, you can access it, you have access to your higher intelligence by, so to say, stepping out of the biology, you step back into the biology and hmm it's numbing, dulling, darkening, but your mind is here.
And the same with your life-force, you have the full vitality, but the body cannot bear it, if you were to infuse it, it would be too much, too intense. And the same with the soul, if the soul is very mature, very strong, very developed, it's as if half-out, half-in, because the biology is too small, too limiting, to fit, almost. Isn't it? So, where is our real life? It's much more outside than inside. And this is what you see in very young children. They live half-out, half-in, and therefore their imaginary world is so vivid, as vivid as if you were daydreaming but literally stepping out of the body in your subtle-body, except you are bound in the gross body and yet you are half-out. So sometimes they see things, beings or sense things and then interpret them through reflection of images.
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But increasingly as the body begins to grow, the sensations and experiences which are very specific and narrow to the biology senses and functions, they tend to, so to say, attract, pull and plug in, the body literally pulls you and binds you into this. And so there comes this point where you suddenly begin to lose all that access, it recedes. And it's a necessary stage for you to fully embody, grip into, literally it's like if you have clothes, you put your arm inside your sleeves, you put your head through the collar, and then you are now fully embodied, fitting into the body. And the body has, so to say, caught up to the extent that it can, naturally it has reduced you to its incapacity or capacity, and there we are.
But what is it you are embodying? What is the biological vehicle supporting or not, or distorting? So thankfully Nature did not make vehicles which are monotone. She deliberately tried to bias these vehicles to become better receptacles for the masculine principle or the feminine principle. And this is important because their specialisation is necessary for the completeness and for the creativity. It does not mean you as a consciousness are bound to one specialisation. You are conscious, you are free, soul is free. Soul may choose in this incarnation to highlight this aspect or that aspect or even during the incarnation choose to highlight one and develop the other, integrate both, change between them. And again this has nothing to do with genderism and transgender. We are talking of something totally different. We do not mix-in those ideas now. So there are phases in life where you take the poise which is expressing more the masculine aspect and then there are phases where you express more the feminine aspect.
I remember, it was very interesting for me, I look back at that period when I was with my teacher, and he was in the body, till the age of 25, my teacher M.P. Pandit, especially after I had completed my formal education in the School which must have been age 21 or something, those four years that I had with him, with less than four, were something so extraordinary.
I remember, I had just completed my education, and of course there were those plans, ‘Oh I would like to do this and that in the Ashram community’, and suddenly all that I had hoped for, I wanted to teach in the school, and suddenly the teachers who had asked me to teach they backed out, for no reason. They said, ‘Oh we don't want to get involved in politics’. So there was something happening behind the scenes. And just ‘plop’, it was cut off, and I was left with a blank. And so, I said, everybody has a one and a half, we have a one and a half month vacation, and I said, ‘I don't need a vacation, I'm going to start work straight away’.
Normally students sit for one and a half months doing nothing in their vacation time and then join the Ashram with the next scholar year, which is kind of silly. I said, ‘Well, I am, I am already a part of the Ashram, I don't need to go through a vacation for that’. So, I said, ‘I will just join’. And I went to the person who was giving the work, Ravindra-ji, and he gave me some work, which I came home, I just accepted, and I came home and gave this slip to my teacher, and he looked at it and he said, ‘No’.
He said, ‘This will harm spiritually’, the particular work that he had given, because of the things that involved interaction with certain things. So, I said, ‘Okay, what should I do?’. He said, ‘No, don't. You tell him that you're not yet ready and that you will look at it later’. And then later Jayantilal on his own approached and asked for me to be taken to the archives and I went in a very different direction.
But at that moment, my teacher asked me, ‘What do you want to do?’. There was a choice: should I accept Jayantilal's offer or somebody else's? And I had a choice. I could have exercised, and I chose consciously to let go all my personal preferences, to bare myself and I said, ‘Whatever you choose!’, literally as if to the Mother. From that point on began a period of one and a half years which was intensely deep spiritual where he was literally infusing and pouring experiences day to day. I have shared some of these at times before.
But I remember that state I was in was this, and I could describe it in terms of the psychological qualities we are discussing, totally feminine and utterly receptive, whatever he chose, I was there to be moulded. And much later after he left his body, I had completely switched the role and began to take charge and make my own decisions and lead my life, and so on. It switched between two different modes, let's say. Again, it has nothing to do with biology and gender. We are talking of psychological qualities and emphasis. But to be able to hold that poise and to be in that state of total receptivity, it led to such some extraordinary experiences with him.
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I remember towards the end, it was a month or two before he passed away, I was sitting near his feet, we just like this and just in a state of some immersion, and the consciousness had gone so far in identifying with him, even physically I was experiencing something, and then there was a mosquito that sat on his foot and it was just near to me, so I reached out and as I would when I see a mosquito sit, I go with a single finger, ‘pup’! I don't do whack, I don't do scratch, just quiet, minimum. So I looked at his foot, mosquito, I reached out and I did ‘pup’! And at the moment when my finger touched, I felt as if I had touched my own body. And that was a degree of the identification and consciousness that I felt with him.
And all this I can appreciate now in retrospect and see what it means in terms of consciousness and what the potential, the spiritual potential, implied and all that, and this is simply to say that this is the poise which would be normally called ‘feminine’, which is the natural relationship of Nature to Soul, of Shakti to Ishwara, represented in essential quality now here. So that's why I am using this term ‘feminine’. Again nothing to do with male or female. We are talking of consciousness quality.
And then there was an unfolding of phase where something else had to be taken up and then eventually these two to be integrated, in relation to the Divine you open and you receive but then in terms of execution you have to take a poise. So it is very interesting, this poise is described in the Bhakti tradition in a certain way that the Bhakti tradition says, all human souls are female and God is the only male. And they use the vocabulary of ‘Purusha’ and ‘Prakriti’. But it's not about biology, gender, female. It's about this feminine poise of opening to receive and serve the Lord, manifest the Lord, execute his whim and fancy, his Will. That's the relationship of the, Nature to the Lord.
You have a similar idea even in the mystical Christianity where they will say that when people choose to become nuns in the church then Christ is the husband and they are wives of Christ. So symbolically these things are held. But because they are identified with gender, then a lot of other confusions could follow. There are also certain Upanishads which use the same vocabulary: there is only one male, all else is expressing female.
So it is speaking of one, one Ishwara, one Lord, and then Nature, all is Nature in relation to the Lord. So if we are careful not to confuse with the gender, catch the psychological principle, you will find something quite fascinating. Within all of us, both poises exist. In relation to the Divine we hold this poise, in relation to what we are, in relation to our soul even, it is a certain poise. Our soul itself in relation to the Divine is a certain poise. In relation to our work, in relation to different things, different situations, the psychological poise changes and it's a blend of these two, constantly a play.
You have an idea, you want to translate it and execute it. In that poise of ideation, you take the masculine poise. When you now translate it, it is the feminine creative poise, where you flow now to execute, to become what you feel yourself to be, and you flow in that movement. And then everything goes fine as long as you are fully attuned, you have forgotten yourself, you are the becoming naturally, effortlessly, until something pops up, something hurdles, some problem, and there is a bump, you pause, there is no flow, the flow is broken. What do you do next? You step back. Realign to the vision. And now in relation to this changed circumstance, you flow again, around it, through it, breaking it, whatever form it may be in relation to that barrier.
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So we oscillate between these two poises within us, the masculine and the feminine, if you had to use that, soul or nature poise, visioning and executing of vision. Isn't it? All the time. If that be the case, then obviously there would be times where we might find ourselves enjoying one aspect more than the other. Or lives where we may develop one aspect more than the other.
And at that point if our vehicle is so formed as to support that line of experience, that would be helpful. Or if it was not, then the very fact that we make a repeated choice of one of these poises over the other would tend to mould the vehicle and shape it to express that poise more, which then would be transmitted in the genetics into the progeny. Think about it. Isn't it? So you could have actually a whole lineage in a family which highlights one aspect or which is the gift that nature gives us because of the two genders, she makes these vessels such that in one gender this aspect is more naturally, effortlessly tending to be highlighted, in the other that aspect or that consciousness tends to be effortlessly more highlighted. And then she uses the linkage between the two genders to create a new birth, a new form of the species. So she is as if looking up there at that play of the creative consciousness and replicating it in a bit of a caricature and yet in the process creating specialised moulds.
And it is to this specialisation that we will now spend a little time in exploration to understand both its limitations as well as its strengths. And to what extent are we really bound by the biological and even psychological specialisations? To what extent are we free? And to what extent can we utilise this even for, in our soul’s growth and then eventually in our way of learning or in our ability to assist others to learn in helping them grow?
There are books you will find today which highlight these differences primarily on a biological basis. Most of those emerge from a very reductionist viewpoint, which is largely Freudian and the reductionist Western model of psychology, which is biology based that all thought, emotion are a product of biology. That being the starting point for much of this material, being the nature of the physical sciences, so, they will always say, ‘Go back to the brain’, finally.
Brain is one interesting thing. It of course has physical distinctions, but the psychological distinctions are far more flexible than the physical distinctions. even which part of the brain is used for what function tends to be a fluid flow or can shift easily. So, they have a big problem matching the psychology with the biology, but still. And then you have these very interesting books titled provocatively Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, treating literally as two different species of psychological types, and tending to exaggerate necessarily because that's how you sell, but that's how you make a point.
And so we will look at some of these tendencies of, you will, you may just say, that it is a kind of a, the word skips me, uh-ha, you may just say, ‘It's a social habit’ or ‘A bias’, and so on, but it is useful to highlight to the brink of exaggeration perhaps, to make the point and then recognise that Nature is always building every possibility in between.
So what we have is a cluster of psychological characteristics and leaning towards them tends to be the masculine and another cluster of psychological qualities and leaning towards them tends to be feminine, and there are large overlaps also in, in some of their functions, and in the overlap there is still a tilt this way or that way. And then in the way Nature embodies these necessarily, we saw we have both, the two factors are, but one tends to be reduced one dominates, or in another somewhat the other tends to be reduced one dominates.
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So, you will say, ‘This one is, is a very masculine man’, ‘a very feminine man, a woman’, or here it happens ‘a very feminine man’, ‘a very masculine woman’. Still one of them dominates. And then there are very few people in whom you will find these integrated so well that you cannot really say, just this or that, and yet they would prefer to highlight one aspect or another but tend to be able to flow quite easily between both facets, but the biology would tend to give a certain aspect.
And at that point it is interesting, they begin to resemble the angelic types. On the face you will see a certain softness which is feminine and yet a certain firmness which you would call ‘masculine’. But they are not contradictory, they complement each other in an aesthetic beauty which is almost spiritual or idealistic in some kind. Or in the body, the same thing, and you will see this in the gymnasts.
You remember I had spoken many sessions ago of two characteristics that the Mother spoke of regarding the supramental working in matter. So she was asked specifically: What would be the signs that the Supermind is working in matter? And she said two things: First was change in weather patterns. And the second thing, I think, in that discussion I forgot to mention this, the second was change in the human biology, and she said, the tendency of the human biology would be that the distinctions between the male and female form would tend to become less and less and this would be seen first among the gymnasts and those who work to develop the body consciousness.
So I have spoken of the weather patterns, you can view that discussion: the weather would become more temperate, the extremes of heat would become cooler, the extremes of cold would become warmer. So we see both things happening, confusing the scientists very much, they don't know if it's global warming or cooling, so they just say ‘Climate change’. But even that is not the way they think it is.
Setting aside that we come to the biology, this tendency. And it's part of the working of the supramental consciousness in the human biology, very indirectly, reflection of reflection of reflection, but still nudging nudging nudging. And perhaps there's a lot of junk that's coming in through the heavy mixture of hormones we are dumping into the waters, into our food, and in, through the plastic which has very large quantity of hormone mimics which are oestrogen mimics. So you take a plastic water bottle, leave it in the sun, it leaches plastic which is oestrogen mimic, you drink the water and it's like drinking oestrogen. So it really messes up the hormonal balance in human beings and especially in children, in adults, the body sometimes cannot manage it, you get illnesses, all kinds of things.
So there's a huge amount of that confusion also. In the lakes in the United States, which is less polluted than India, the hormones through the wastewater from the city, after it has been purified and processed, the hormones are not gone. The hormones from the wastewater going into the pure lake as plain water is messing up the fish hormone to a degree that male fish have female organs, female fish have male organs and messing up totally the biological balance. Now you could say: This is causing a change? Yes, of course. But also the supramental consciousness being what it is, uses anything to assist a process. But what it does, what It does, is smooth, without distortions. The distortions may come from the hormones, but it may pick out of that distortion a component which it uses for something more smooth.
So, let's set aside that aspect of the distortions from chemical and other causes and look at the human body. As you work on the body consciousness, and the body consciousness now opens to an influence or is more receptive to a higher influence, the shape of that influence is to make it more archetypal, less exaggerated in form of the masculine or feminine and yet holding a particular, as a container, a certain ability to hold those qualities. And so, you will see among the Olympic gymnasts a strong masculine aspect and yet the body's person is totally feminine. Or a male gymnast, you will see the strong masculine and yet the suppleness of the feminine. In a female similarly.
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So you see something quite extraordinary happening today. It's happening slowly but in those in whom there is some working of the body consciousness, it's happening. So, this, all this is to set a background that yes, we will take examples which show certain extremes, but don't bind yourself to the extreme, recognise it's a psychological quality and the biology is a container which is meant to support and not intended to limit. It is at best a starting point, at worst a starting point out of which you can build anything. Maybe it takes longer, maybe it's harder, but eventually you can. You are free in consciousness.
So, whatever we may be told, biologically, including illnesses, remember it all represents a starting point, consciousness is greater than biology, can override, reshape, recast entirely. If the body is conscious, if it is flexible, more easily, if body is less conscious, more rigid, it takes longer and more difficult, but it can be done.
So with that background, let's look at differences. Perhaps the most significant difference in the biology structure itself is in the brain. [Because] everywhere else you can say, ‘Ha-yes is similar, you have the same muscle structure, bone structure, your muscles are softer, mine are harder, mine are stronger, you are softer, weaker, perhaps’. But so that's not so rigid.
Biological organs we ignore because they are not central to what we are discussing. In the brain is where you see the biggest difference. So you have the left brain and the right brain. And between them there is a linking point, linking cluster, which links and transfers signals from one side to the other. This structure is larger in female, dramatically larger, smaller in men. Obviously, from a purely mechanical circuit point of view, it means there is greater communication between left and right brain in women, more rich, more spread out, literally every part of the brain can somehow link to the other half of the brain with minimum effort. In men it is narrow. So, this part does not have direct access, some parts have direct access across, other parts have to go through and get through translators. But in the men, the smaller part has richer number of connections.
So, Nature always compensates. Having made it smaller, it's as if certain powers of the left brain and a right brain are as if separated, exaggerated in separation, but although separated when they communicate, the communication can be much more detailed though narrow specific object-oriented. In women, it is larger with less connections overall, so you have a broad band-connection, very complex, rich interactions but spread out, flowing, not focused.
Practically what this means, because the left brain is the analytic side and the right brain is a synthetic side, the left brain is the outwardly turned, the right brain is more intuitively turned, practically it means, in women the intuitive access of work between the two is stronger but the result also is the rational aspect can get overwhelmed by the emotional aspect.
In men, because of this narrowing, the rational aspect can maintain its separation from the emotions easily, almost effortlessly. When it chooses to link, it can of course have a rich connection, but through a narrow passage, so it maintains its identity and separateness. In practice, to the extent you are embodied and identified with the body, in a man the thought will feel as if floating separate from emotions, or at least he can pull out his thoughts from emotions, you still need to do that, otherwise we can easily wallow in emotions. You having done that, and which is easier to do because of this separation, you can maintain this even when emotions are distressed. So I am extremely upset about this, but I can hold my cool in the thought and persist in holding this. And you'll see the man who's angry, still doing his work, restraining. But in a woman, the two things will tend to collide and flow more easily.
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Again, remember, we're talking generally so don't blame me for sounding too cliched, that's the word I was looking for. It may sound cliched, but recognise this principle behind and then you can see each one has their own variation and then you can work upon it and create separations, you can work upon it as a male and create blendings and join, all that is possible. But this is our natural effortless starting point, with no effort this is where you are.
And in a woman, there will tend to be this collision, emotions will overwhelm until the mind loses its objectivity, or, the rational mind will be sucked into the emotions and made to justify an emotion of the moment, and ten minutes later when the emotions have changed, the same mind would be used to justify this completely opposite state. And if you confront the person saying ‘You just told me this, now you tell me this’, ‘That's how I feel’. And the justification is ‘My feeling, what it is, is justified’.
You'll see this often happen in conflicts between men and women, and sometimes they are not conscious. This can happen with men also, but it tends to happen more easily in the female-brain-structure biology. Remember, brain is only reducing along grooves what is much more fluid psychology in the subtle body. You step out of the brain in dream-state, and you have full freedom of the subtle body's actual development.
So men stepping out will find a very different experience of the relationship between emotions and mind, but it will be what you are in your current evolutionary state, the degree to which you have integrated or not, the state or level at which you primarily tend to live in your current evolutionary development, and so on.
But the moment you come back into the body, sloopp, the separation in the male; in the female, this blending, or whatever form it takes. There are specific faculties which are activated in the male brain more easily because of certain hormonal, let’s say, triggers, and specific faculties in the female brain which are activated because of different hormonal triggers.
I give an example, and I found this very interesting because I was watching a documentary of a woman who had, well, gender dysphoria, she was convinced she was a male in a female body. We will be discussing all that later on. But, so while she was convinced about this, they made her undergo this, not what is happening today, today the whole thing is a very fashionable mess, this is going back 25 years before this fashion started, it was not a ‘trans’-fashion, it was the real thing, she describes how she was undergoing these hormonal injections of testosterone. And then she said, as the weeks progressed she found that where earlier she would cry freely when distressed emotionally, now she found as if the tears would not flow. She wants to cry, inside she is crying, but the tears don't flow. And that was the transition into the male activation of the brain and certain things had begun to change.
And this is something very interesting which often men have difficulty understanding when women cry easily, the tears just flow, ‘ffloop’, because there is a flowing character psychologically, men say, ‘Oh my God, then you must be in really distress’. Because for men to cry is an extreme. But men have a different experience which is quite fascinating, and I have understood it because of the experience more conscious, being more conscious in the subtle body, literally you experience tears flowing and they are tears in the subtle body, but the biology doesn't have tears.
To the extent you are half-separate from the gross physical body, you may experience the flow of tears, but in the biology it's blocked, it's not going through. And it needs as if a strong push and then finally the thing breaks and a few tears may shed, half a tear, one tear, and that still takes a huge pressure on the other side to get to that point. And that's why the men think when a woman cries, it must be a, there must be a huge pressure, they know it may not be, it may just be a thing, and she cries, she feels relieved, she is free of it. For men it's not relief, it's a very different experience. I'm giving this as an example to show you how the whole machinery works because of biology.
But there are other faculties which kick in, faculties which are specific to the reasoning mind, which are tied to the hormones. And so as those hormones kick in, the thought process begins to shift and tilt into what is more characteristically male. So this woman who was going through that process finds her thought process shifting, her emotions shifting, separations and things taking place, and faculties kicking in.
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Now here's the interesting thing. If you take a map, let's say you have a picture, you have a text even, and you're going to read this. Okay, I'm going to take a more interesting text. We have a text here. Somebody shows it across the table so that it is upside down to me. For you now upside down. Can you read what it says? Or you have a map. You are navigating in the old days with a paper map. Your road is straight in front of you. In your map you are pointing north, but you might be driving south. So the male brain can just rotate in the head effortlessly, ‘Okay, we are going south’. But out there we are going the other way. But in the mind the image is rotated. No problem!
Female brain has a huge problem in rotation. She will have to turn the map around to match it with the direction of the road and then the text becomes upside down, it is very confusing, switching between this and that. It’s a problem!
There is another faculty to this: three-dimensional visualisation. So, unfortunately here I don't have a good example, but if you take a engineering drawing, where a complex piece of metal part, let's say an engine part, piston, let's say, has been drawn from the front, from the side, from the top. The three flat drawings. In your mind you have to construct a three-dimensional shape. Men can do it. It's difficult for both. Men can do it easily, comparatively. Women have a very very very very hard time, left to themselves without training. Again, we are speaking of biases which are built-in into the brain priorities. And this is the reason why if you go into the engineering field, you get many more men than women, unless you go into software, then it's a different thing. If you go into mechanical engineering, men have a field day because it's easier to do that function.
Now, if women had defined the field, they would have drawn pictures in a different way, but there's no other way to do it in those days to hold that kind of precision. Today because you do 3D visualisations and you can rotate on the screen, it becomes somewhat easier. Still, rotating in the head is a precursor to rotating on the screen. How do you fit one piece? Now in your mind you have, let's say, a complex piece, and you have another complex piece, and there's a hollow here, will this fit into that? How do you rotate it to fit into that? The male brain can do the rotation and fit easily, the female brain cannot.
Now the female brain has other advantages which male brain cannot, I will come to that also. So you see here a vehicle optimised for what? For the masculine functions or qualities and at the loss of some other faculties. Now in the female brain, you find one interesting characteristic which is that it can operate in two or three directions at the same time.
So one of the things which is quite fascinating from a male point of view, you will see often when women meet in a light banter, you will find them talking at the same time. And if a man is sitting there, he gets very confused, ‘Are they even listening to each other?’. You try to listen to one, and someone else is talking, you are switching between. And in the woman's head, you are listening and following. Of course, it's superficial light talk, it's not detailed, serious, so it doesn't demand much. But you are listening and following, maybe two or three conversations at the same time. By extension, you could be doing some work, which involves full attention and still listening at the same time and maybe conversing at the same time, which for the male brain becomes extremely difficult. It tends to switch, you have to go back and forth to get to that same level of, and it's effortless for both.
Now if you think about it, go deep into the principle behind, what do you see here, the flow of the Prakriti which is multifaceted and the focal point of the Purusha, one-pointed focus, objective purpose, visualising, conceptualising, may be in complex, and then Prakriti flowing into multifaceted execution, fulfilling.
And these are the two characteristic patterns that nature has highlighted and activated as if as a starting point. You don't have to do anything, this is your starting point. Now from an evolutionary point of view, there are certain benefits to this, because there are natural partnerships possible, natural benefits to each of the roles, etc. But it's not for that. It's to create vehicles for these two clusters of qualities and for the souls which want to develop that or align to that, Nature is giving a vehicle here, incarnate in this vehicle, and you'll find all your powers and faculties oriented to this kind of experience. That's the idea, from Nature's point of view. And because there's a complementarity up there, there's a natural complementarity down here. Right?
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It's a consequence of that from what nature is trying to meet it. It's not that nature created two genders to try to make them complementary. That's an incidental result of the fact that they were complementary up there. At least this is the deeper truth. Superficially, you could say, ‘Yes, of course’. But what this means is, there is a natural complementarity between these two poises even while it is a limiting poise for each.
So, I want to come to this aspect a little later perhaps, so we will skip this for now, but just keep this in mind. I want to dwell a little more on other differences.
In the male, the, or in the female in relation to the male, the nervous system has more fine nerve endings. So let's say a skin patch, take the back of your hand, draw 1 centimetre square, count the number of nerve endings. In a female, there are many more than in the male, dramatically many more. Which means if you touch the skin, on the male skin and on the female skin, on the male skin the sensation let's say is a certain quantity, in the female skin the same touch will be far richer, far more complex with many more nuances, simply because there are more nerve endings.
Just as an analogy, if you have to do that, touch the lip which is for all men and women has more nerve endings. Touch the lip and touch the back of the hand. Notice the sensation difference. In women, the sensation here would be much closer to that. But this is true all over the body. Now one of the implications of this is not only that the women will feel more any touch, any contact, but also in the consciousness they feel more embodied in the body, more plugged-in because the sensations of the body are more rich, the consciousness is drawn into the body.
It's a very interesting observation Sri Aurobindo makes. I'm a little hesitant about sharing some of this because they seem so stereotyped that people could accuse you of being sexist. But you have to understand that the, these things are biologically rooted and therefore also have psychological implications.
So he says in one of the conversations in one of the talks, I’ll get you the, let me see if I have the exact text here. There are a few things. This is one. Ok, I have not copied this out. So, he says something like this, the woman tends to be much more physically, much more connected to life and she tends to bring the man into connection with life and this is part of Nature's purpose. Now if you just read it like that, you'll say, ‘Oh, he's 100 years old, sexist’. No! It's not! He's describing a very biologically rooted principle that in the body itself, the identification with the body is more natural, more effortless, more easy, more complete, more rich in the female body than in the male.
Now, again, if you look at it from a very superficial point of view, as they do in the biological evolution, they’ll say, ‘Yeah, men have to fight, so they cannot be too sensitive to injuries, they have to be impervious to injury, they should not feel pain so much’. Yeah, it’s okay, maybe! But again, I say, that is incidental. It's more the representation of the higher truth which makes for these.
So, yes, it does make a difference that in a battlefield, in crisis of life, you get a blow, the man feels less, woman feels more. Woman would therefore be much more vulnerable to the physical pain, but also at the same time because of the ability to manage the pain and the left and right brain free flow, she is also resilient to greater quantity of pain. This is another interesting thing. A woman may feel more, both pleasure and pain, but also the resilience to intensity of pain is far greater in a female than a male, generally speaking.
Of course, all of these, remember, are starting points. You can train yourself to develop exactly the qualities that you don't have, go beyond whatever your starting point is. That's going to be our goal in our education. But in order to be able to do that, you must understand: Why there is this distinction? Why some have an advantage in this over that? Observe this! But know that in terms of effort you can develop both. And I'll come to these examples later next time, perhaps because we're running out of time.
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When working with children, when I had to work with construction kits with boys and girls, boys got this very quickly and with women I had to work differently. I think I've mentioned this as an example in the last two videos which were put up the last two weeks. But I found a way to tap into it. And I found the girls who made the effort, initially there was a greater effort to make, and remember this is age 10, 11 children. The girls who made the effort, by the time they had crossed two or three months, they had actually developed the capacity almost equal to the boys in the ability of 3D visualisation. Some more, some less. And the difference was those who made the effort. Some had perhaps a tendency even, they had a comfort, they enjoyed it when they succeeded and so that grew. Others were resistant, they did not make the effort, they did not get the joy of it and they kind of half gave up. So, they did develop to some degree, but those who enjoyed it and pursued, got it to the same level as the boys.
Now this is to me extremely important because later on when they go into higher mathematics or physics or some of these more technical subjects, the differences are so stark, and we have to understand why. Because the male mind, male brain, remember, mind separate from emotion, allows for abstract thought more easily. In the female brain, the abstraction of thought is not so easy but the sensory thought is easy, remember being plugged-in into the body.
So if you give to the woman a practical question which requires a sensational application of logic, it will be very quick. The male may have a hard time. But if you give an abstract question, male will get it very quick, the woman will have a hard time, having not made the effort. Once they start making the effort, the woman can easily catch up and match that. Having matched it, she may still not enjoy it as much as he would, at first. But if she chooses to and chooses to enjoy, then there is no end to what she can develop and compare or even beat the male, if she chooses to make that effort and pursue that line as an enjoyable line. And this is what we see in history.
So, understand there are hurdles initially. There is like a bump you have to cross. Once you have crossed it, it becomes easier, but you might have more than a couple of bumps to cross to get to the same. And the same from the male side to the female, qualities, the things that men don't have naturally. If you start injecting oestrogen, they may have those qualities beginning to kick in at the detriment of other qualities. But on the other hand, if they consciously develop those qualities, they will go through that hurdle, that bump, that difficulty, but having crossed the difficulty, what they can develop will be as good, as rich, with certain limitations. And this is the interesting part.
Remember the nerves, endings nerves’ endings of the body, skin surface, are you going to grow as many nerve endings as a woman? Is that possible? So here's the radical answer I will give and there is I believe enough research to point to it except not enough research has been made to prove it in a more generic level, but my answer will be ‘Yes’, but it depends what age.
If during the growing years, the boys are made to focus on the sensations, on the sight, on the hearing, and focus on the richness and fine nuances of colours, for example, women see colours more richly than men, or at least the mind reduces in men the colours to a narrower range and a woman to more rich range, not reduced, let's say, but if the men are taught to observe, ‘Notice this difference’, ‘It looks the same, no, but observe’, ‘Observe there is a fine difference’, ‘Pay attention’, ‘Recognise this’, ‘Is it this?’, ‘Is it that?’, ‘Observe observe observe’, ‘Boring but observe’, and eventually you develop that faculty and ‘Now I can distinguish between uh fuchsia and teal, teal green and maybe three or four shades of greens’ which a male would not even bother remembering, but a woman would notice immediately, effortlessly. But the male now having trained can notice and recognise.
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In fact a male, farmer, can be trained to recognise, they say, I don't know, up to 200 shades of green and based on the shade recognise which plant is more healthy or less healthy or what kind of illnesses might be creeping in. Training! But you have to make the effort. Having made the effort, you can easily develop all those faculties and yet your container, remember, is still with the biology brain. Does that grow? I believe it does. Even if it does not, your consciousness is no more bound in the brain's limitation, it is free and can operate, use the brain's specialisation without losing its freedom.
So, coming back to the question: Will there be more nerve endings? If you pay attention, if you take care, if you work on the body consciousness, make your body more conscious, yes, as your body grows the nerve endings grow. After the age of 21 when the body is more or less fixed, this may not be so easy but it will still be true.
Now this is my personal experience, because of certain things which I had as an advantage, let's say, because of my teacher, because of certain things my mother had taught from childhood, I had a very highly developed body consciousness and I was working on it consciously to intensify the sensitivity and I could feel the growth, I could feel the growth of sensitivity of the nerves and I could see that other boys of my age were losing their sensitivity while I was not losing it, I was maintaining it as the body grew, to the detriment in certain areas, they had advantage in other areas. But I think in the long run, it's more useful to have a sensitive and richly developed body even if you have higher sensitivity to sensation or pain, it's not a problem. That can be managed by strengthening, in other ways.
And the same with colours. Where I found I could, I would pay attention, make that effort to push the boundaries, things were picked up quickly. And so I did that with various things.
Now, if you go through an education which is reasonably rich, you are let's say, painting, playing musical instruments, working in a, playing an instrument in an orchestral state where you have to align with other players of different instruments and listen to it all, some of this would happen automatically. You may not make an effort to push the boundary, but the work itself requires that boundary to be pushed.
And so this can be used. What means you use to expand is not important, but essentially you would have to push the boundaries of your limitations, whether male or female, it does not matter. Observe what are the things you have naturally strong, observe the ones which you have naturally weak, now push the boundaries. And with interest, with joy. If you can do it as a conscious effort, not merely as an incidental to learning an instrument or an activity, that has an advantage.
So even as you play an instrument, you may make the effort to push the boundary, you can go much faster. Now all this I bring to the level of the more adult males, females. Okay, your body is now, let's say, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years old. And now you begin to become conscious and start pushing the boundary of consciousness. Will the nerves grow? Yes. Slower, because your body is now growing more slowly. The growth hormones are not so strong, etc. But it will grow. Not only the nerves here will grow, the nerves inside your brain will grow. The faculties which were lying dormant, trapped, bound because of hormonal balances of biological bias of gender, etc., all can be reactivated and reawakened. Maybe slightly slower. The same thing in a teenager would happen much faster, at the age of 20 would happen less fast, at the age of in the 30s would happen less fast, 40s less fast. But it will still happen.
But if you have made your body conscious early on, then at any age, you can begin to push the boundary. So I have many more things to say about the gender and the relationship and the internal balance between these, which we will keep for next time, we will continue this topic to understand more precisely but also for this application which is for us as practitioners of the Integral Yoga.
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So I am going to end with this example of Vishwanath Lahiri who was the head of the engineering department in the Ashram who was very male, and I don’t mean masculine, male, ok? Very limited, very restricted in certain things, very narrow in the typical untrained, undeveloped male-type. So I don't expect higher refinement of those other faculties.
But within his type, at the age of around 80, he said… And he had all these fantastic engineering books, amazing things, and he knew each book and their content; you could ask him something, he’ll say, ‘Okay, here’ and he'll go into his library, pull out one particular book and he had read it and he knew what was where. At the age of 80, he went up to 95 or something, at the age of 90 or so, he could give you an appointment ‘Next week, we will meet on Thursday at 4.30 p.m.’, he won't have noted anywhere on a paper, he will remember on Thursday 4.30 p.m.
So, at the age of 80, he said, he felt as if he was beginning to lose his faculties, that they were beginning to degrade. And then he decided he didn't want it to degrade. So what did he do? He started learning computers. And learning computers at that point, and this was in the 1990s, ‘91, ‘92, ‘93, they just had this little very crude PC desktops, and he starts learning with reading manuals, he can barely see, his eyes has thick glasses and he is reading like this so close, bright light, late into the night, up to 11 at night he is reading, studying, trying out, and then 2, 3 weeks down he starts programming computers in his 80s.
And by that time the person who was teaching him said, ‘Yes, that's all I can do, I can't teach more, the rest you will have to figure your way out’. And he self-taught the rest of his way as much as he wanted. And he overcame that tendency which he was beginning to feel of a decline. Simply by pushing the boundary of consciousness, well, the biology gets pushed. So-yes, the nerve endings on your skin surface may take longer because it means rebuilding a lot of that tissue and that's slower at that age. But inside the head and the brain and more than the brain, the consciousness boundaries, no limit irrespective of age. But you must want to, you must enjoy, you must push the boundary and persist.
So this is going to be our, let's say, closing point. We have been given by Nature certain vessels, optimised let’s say, biased, specialised, to incarnate this aspect or that of the divine qualities of whether masculine, feminine, etc. Our souls, which are all potential, infinite potential, choose a line of development especially. This is important to understand, Sri Aurobindo says, at first the soul may switch genders, once it finds, ‘Yes, this is the line I want to develop’, it tends to stay with that line, switching only when needed to specialise or to develop the other aspect and make a more complete vehicle, but broadly it tends to retain that line.
And so having come to a certain stage in our evolution, we choose this vehicle and say ‘Okay, this is how I am going to experience this world and this is the specialised line of development but within that I want to develop all the faculties’. And Nature is helping you by giving you a vehicle which is plastic enough hopefully, that with this bias of a starting point you will develop fully your potential.
There is more which I want to discuss: What are the characteristics particularly, more distinctions between the male and the female? And now we're talking male-female, and not so much the psychological characteristics, but in what way it biases the characteristics? And in what way it distorts the nature of the ego distortions between the two and how it works? And you'll see some fascinating insights. You can think about it meanwhile, I'm sure you'll come to the same insights naturally. And then what happens when a male is alone or a female is alone? How do they work independently? How do they work jointly? What is the kind of complementarity that is possible?
All of this is quite fascinating to understand and appreciate, and all of this will have massive implications in our growth and learning as we are as adults or with children in their growth and learning. So I hope it will be a further stage of the very, I hope, fascinating and rich discussion.
There are some questions already and there are many more questions which have already come before. I am holding them all. Please do leave the questions On. Oh there is an interesting observation from Navjha: “Women have more rods and cones in their eyes”.
Yes. Not only true in the sight, so the eyesight sees colours more richly, but also in the hearing, but also in the smell. Women can smell far more nuanced, but up to a ripe old age, whereas men tend to lose smell far more quickly. The same with taste. The same with touch. All the senses are stronger in women. More rich, more complete because of more nerve endings. And literally that naturally tends to make you more identified with the body.
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And there are many women who will say, and I see this in the New Age material, they'll say, ‘Woman is body and we are embodied, we feel the body’, and etc., which for men is a bit, ‘Ah what does that mean? I don't really know what you mean by that? It seems a little weird, I'd rather be identified with my mind’. Yeah, because you don't feel the body with such richness and sensitivity. But you can.
And for women equally, you can learn to identify with the mind free of body and be able to shift between the two, and then if you can do both, wow, that's a rich experience. For men there is a disadvantage, you cannot amplify body sensation so easily, because it means biological change. So there are certain advantages we will see: what happens when a man is alone or a woman is alone and wants to develop fully the qualities, there are certain very interesting differences and advantages.
So, we will discuss all that next time. I hope this is, this was fascinating and interesting discussion. If you have questions along these lines, do please send. I will perhaps next time have more time for the discussions. But for now, again, become conscious of this:
Nature has given you a ready-made vehicle to help you in a certain line of development. Use the strengths that the vehicle gives you but do not limit to its limitations. You are first and foremost Divine Consciousness with full infinite potential, and as you grow in consciousness, your vehicle also you have to grow, expand and extend in its potential, to make yourself as complete as a conscious divine being, and as a divine being, a vehicle for everything the Divine chooses to pour through you, and whatever poise or aspect that is needed to be poured through, not bound by anything. But for developing that which we do not have, we start with what we have and use that as the strength to develop what we do not have.
So think about it, observe these things within yourself, observe these things in others, notice things, many of these things we have discussed, perhaps you will begin to observe, and put into practice, push the boundaries of your capacities or incapacities, and it's a fascinating experience and a fascinating journey.
So we'll pause here and take a moment to concentrate on this idea that within us is the Purusha and the Prakriti, their interplay within us is our growth in our evolution, their awakening within us is our awakening, and so in a sense they are growing in us, in this vehicle. Divine Mother grows in us. The Divine Lord is growing in us. We are just the vehicles, the individual embodiments of their play.
Namaste.