EWS #160 Masculine & Feminine – III + Q&A

May 6, 2023

Alina (0:00:34):
Namaste. Welcome back to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu. Namaste Sraddhalu!

Sraddhalu (0:00:46):
Namaste. Happy to be with all of you.

Alina (0:00:52):

Today we will continue our exploration on the distinctions between the feminine and the masculine, Part III, which we covered in the last sessions. Today we will particularly focus on the aspect of male and female formations created by Nature, and we will invite Sraddhalu to revive our memory and resume this topic, and of course as usual you may send your questions on our chat box or you may send beforehand the questions at our email id integralstudies.in[at]gmail.com. We are happy to listen to more about this subject.

Sraddhalu (0:01:48):
Yes, it's a very important subject because it touches so many, so many different distinctions, and a question which is at present of great importance generally in the educational sphere but also for the future of humanity. In one of the talks that the Mother gave in Japan she made this point that the future spiritual, let’s say, evolutionary step in the superman will be born of a woman and therefore the place and importance for a woman to be able to incarnate spiritually what is required is far more important. Isn't it? And much-much more important perhaps even on a general level of humanity, she made this observation that as long as half of humanity is in chains, you cannot expect the full potential of human evolution to be realised. And she worked for that, she made sure that those chains were broken. And as we saw last time from one of Sri Aurobindo's observations, it does take a few generations for the full potential to unfold, and we are seeing the benefits today, and something quite remarkable is taking place all over the world, many changes are taking place quite remarkably. And we will touch upon some of these in our discussion today.

Recall, all this started as part of a general discussion for education and the distinction between boys and girls particularly, but then we broadened the whole discussion to the two aspects of consciousness, masculine and feminine, as poises of a single consciousness. We saw the spiritual principles, the way it articulates in the mental and even vital ranges to some extent, and as it approaches the physical, there is a more rigid distinction of form of the qualities which represent the masculine and feminine. And we saw how Nature, looking up from below, has tried to create two different vehicles optimised for a masculine or a feminine incarnation or at least for the soul to have an experience which is more aligned to the masculine qualities being developed or feminine qualities being developed.

In fact we see both qualities exist in all of us, men and women equally. But in the biology, nature as if highlights, amplifies, subdues, certain combinations or qualities in order to create these distinctive vessels. And we saw last time how we can really appreciate this only when we see the truth top-down and not bottom-up as is conventionally done in evolutionary biology or modern psychology.

Last time we also saw some very important things including the certain distinctions between men and women which make for advantages to both and sometimes quite significant advantages even for a spiritual point of view; we saw how the missing factor or the complementing factor of what is missing in each one of us is easier to be filled by the women because the missing factor is more on the psycho-spiritual domain, whereas for men the complementing missing aspect is much more on the vital-physical and that takes more effort. So there are certain natural biases and advantages to each of these for specific, I will say, poises even in a spiritual journey.

(0:05:46):

So in the ascetic spirituality, there was a greater advantage for men because already a certain abstraction from the physical and vital levels, and so, for a, for a practice that wants to break out of the world and discard the physical and vital, there was a natural advantage there. But when we speak of a spiritual realisation where you want to manifest a higher consciousness or a higher potential, women have the natural advantage. And if you recognise that the whole of evolution today is turning towards this affirmative spirituality, even in traditions which are principally ascetic, you will find the affirmative angle somehow sneaking in from behind or the entire movement just dies out because nobody is interested in joining something which is purely ascetic.

So it's coming in different ways, but the affirmative side even when denied, you will see the critical role that women can play. So all this is to set a background for certain things. I also spoke last time of the natural affinity and what happens when there is the joining of the masculine-feminine generally in women and men or it could be also irrespective of that, just these two qualities coming together. So today we will amplify a little bit on this and look at some more distinctions. I had skipped a few points last time, saying that I was afraid that it might get too controversial or misunderstood, and there was a request from a few people not to skip that, so I will still try to weave that in today, even if that makes for a slight overlap from last time's discussions and then we will take up some of the questions which have been pending.

So remember, when the soul chooses to incarnate and as it develops its line of, or range of experiences through the incarnations, it will find itself naturally aligning to either a more masculine characteristic of consciousness or a more feminine characteristic, aligning to become more and more optimised as a vehicle for the Divine, uh, Ishwara, or the Divine Shakti aspect, simply from an affinity. And of course the soul would want to become as complete as possible, and yet in that completeness there will be a certain affinity and which may trace back to the very poise of the initial release of the soul into manifestation where it may say, ‘Oh, this is the line that, that release corresponds to’.

So when that happens, you will find that the choice of incarnation the soul makes, sometimes uses this, switches between the two genders, in order to develop certain characteristics, better unify them and integrate them better, for its spiritual potential, precisely because Nature offers you this distinctive advantage. And on the other hand, Nature also, although she built these distinct vehicles, in recent times, has as if decided that now the distinction and the separation of these distinctions is no more needed. And there is actually an effort, a push from Nature itself to allow each, the male and the female, not being bound to the masculine and feminine, but actually develop the fullness of qualities in each one, although the vessels have their distinctive characteristics.

So today I will be discussing a little bit, I will be using the term ‘male’ and ‘female’ much more distinctly, but, you must recognise, it is only in the sense that Nature has created these biases. And we are still recognising in each male and female we want to develop the full spectrum of the, what we would call masculine-feminine aspects of experience and qualities, and to be able to be a transparent vehicle whether the Divine chooses to manifest through you the Ishwara aspect or the Shakti aspect or a woven blend of both simultaneously or alternating between these for different stages of the work, you should be able to be a transparent vehicle irrespective. And yet as it works through the vehicle and particularly approaches the more material part of the vehicle, there will be certain advantages and benefits of having this or that male or female basis.

(0:10:13):

And that's what we are going to touch upon today a little bit. But keep in mind, none of this binds us to those, the biology is only a starting point, and we can develop, as we've been repeating, we should develop all the faculties and aspects, irrespective. Equally when we manifest, whatever the bias the biology may give, it has to be maximised to the full potential of what is possible for the Divine fulfilment, irrespective. So having said all this, now, well, let us look at the distinctions as they work with a little more detail.

I wanted particularly to touch upon the body distinction, the emotional distinction, the mental distinctions and then even physical mind, emotional mind, intellectual mind. I already spoke of the intuitive mind last time, so I will skip that. But I would highly recommend for those of you who may have come to this talk having missed the first two, please go through them, without that you will not be able to fully appreciate the context as well as the importance of what we are discussing now.

So looking at the body type, there is something quite interesting. I already said that the female body has more nerve endings. So women feel biologically, physically, sensorially, much more, and emotionally much more. It's a given. But there's one more thing which is distinctive and which has spiritual implications also at least for the Integral Yoga. The woman's body tissue is naturally softer, more elastic, more plastic. Think about it. Why? Now you could give bottom-up reasons. You can say, ‘Ah, but woman has to give birth, so the body has to be more plastic, more adaptable. And as I mentioned last time, Nature could have done it, has done it differently for so many species. It's not about that.

Recall the, the way I abstracted it to the masculine and feminine as the stability and firmness, one-pointedness, focus, and for the feminine qualities being the fluid flow, encompassing, embracing, uh, widening, diversifying. Uh, so the plasticity is inherent in the feminine characteristic. That's the, rather Nature's attempt to capture that Shakti aspect in the vehicle is the deeper basis for it. So other biological reasons one can give, it can go the other way equally. And there are species where the two are different.

As an example, for example, you will see with human beings, generally speaking for a given age, for a given heredity, let's say, a brother and a sister, the man will be taller, more heavy, more muscular than the woman, generally speaking. And it’s, it’s obvious. Why? If you observe all the species in nature, this is not true in all species. In fact, there are, if species level, almost as many species where the female is larger and stronger than the male. In fact, there are more species where the female is stronger and larger. Interesting. But what is also more interesting, if you go deeper into this observation at species level, much of this tends to happen for species which are of a lower grade of individualisation.

So let's say with certain birds and fish, and so on, when it comes to a greater mentalisation, greater individualisation, Nature somehow begins to shift the base, the balance slightly. And the male is larger, stronger and the female, proportionally but harmoniously, shorter, less muscular, less heavy. Now here's the interesting thing, I said, Nature has decided to change something, and this has been happening. Mother has declared this, I think, in 1960 that Nature has finally decided to collaborate and hasten the transition to the new species and the new consciousness, until then she (Nature) was telling always: But why are you in a hurry? There is infinity of, eternity of time, why are you in a hurry? I want to enjoy each step and make the maximum of exploration of possibilities. And the Mother said: I was trying to convince Mother Nature, “No, you have to speed up, and there is not time for this”. In 1960 she announced that Mother Nature has agreed to collaborate, and then she gave a message where she said, addressing it to Mother Nature saying, “then there is no end to the wonders of your collaboration”.

(0:15:00):

Now two things have happened. First is on the biology level and for the human beings as well as on species level of plants, animals and others. There has been a hastening, an acceleration, an opening of new possibilities, changes radical which were as if unimaginable and at a pace which is too rapid purely from an evolutionary perspective.

Now about the men and women I am going to touch upon this. Remember, I mentioned I think it was last time or the time before, I think it was the time before, I said that uh, Mother had spoken of the change in the human body, as one of the two signs for the action of the Supermind directly in the physical consciousness. The other was weather patterns. So in the body, she said, the difference between the genders would become less and less. And there is an interesting passage where she describes the prototype of the superman that she saw and she points to the chest and says, these things are not there and it was almost an archetypal form. And then she says also that it was in gymnasts and people who work on their body consciousness that you will see this distinction becoming less first.

Now there's something very interesting I want to share, and I have, perhaps, shared this but way back two or three years ago. In the Ashram, we have a database of what is called the ‘Medical Checkup Records’ going back to the nineteen, late 40’s, I think, or, when the Ashram Physical Education Department was formally established, and I think it was nineteen, before 1950, ‘47, ‘48, something like that. And from that point on, as part of the physical routine and discipline, every year, every student, and every participant in the physical programme goes through what is called a ‘Medical Checkup’.

So we have these very old files, a file with your name on it. So, in mine, for example, it starts from the age of 3 or 4, and with each, there are 3 columns, 1 column for each year, and then so many measurements. Everything from height, weight, vital capacity, blood pressure, and various other basic checks. Now all this data was put online, on the computer, in what is, in my opinion, the world's largest database of this kind of data. So starting from age 3, or, I think, it is 5 they start, up to, well, the rest of your life as long as you are part of the physical education programme. So we have had people up to 95 who have been part of it. So age 5 to 95, from let's say 1950 to today, so nearly 70, more than 70 years– it's the world's largest database of this kind.

Now, what is more interesting is the actual basis for this data, which is the food we eat, has been almost exactly the same over these 70 years, at least for those who eat in the Dining Room and what is the children's kitchen called Corner House, food is almost exactly the same. And the physical education programmes that all these people go through for specific age groups has been exactly the same. Practically nothing has changed. Maybe a few things, sword fighting was dropped out at some stage, and I think, judo perhaps more recently has been dropped, but pretty much everything else as a comprehensive programme is the same.

So that makes for a fascinating database. Nothing has changed in terms of food quality. If anything, after the 1970s, we would say, the quality of food generally all over India dropped because of what was called the ‘Green Revolution’, they speeded up the growth of plants and they have less nutrition. So you have to eat more to get the same nutrition. And this was done all over the world in a very damaging way. But other than that, you will see pretty much everything is the same, and the Indian food typically is the same, we don't have too much of packaged foods.

Now why is all this important? Because we find something dramatic. If you map the age group of boys and girls, put it on a chart, so I point it with, for you, let's say, you start from age 5 to, onwards, so boys have a certain growth rate, you're growing, and then suddenly there's a shooting up and stabilising at a certain age. Girls have a certain growth rate, and sudden shooting up, slightly different age, and then stabilising at a different age. Now, if you look at the two and map them on the same chart for the age groups, you will see boys are taller, and as you go up, both are growing, but boys remain taller. And as you grow, they follow the same curve. Now if you map this decade-wise, and now you show the same rise across decades, what is fascinating is, across the decades, the average height of the girls is rising, approaching the average height of the boys, and as they grow, the gap becomes less and less. Fascinating!

So let's say across 70 years now the gap of the average height, given any height for a given age, whatever it was, the girls have become taller and there's a matching almost approaching. I don't know if it will actually reach an exact point but it'll come really close at least that's the way it's heading now, there's no sign of it reducing. And this is showing you something fascinating. With all the food and activities being exactly the same, there is no reason for this, and seen across 70 years it is consistent. It's not like it's spurted suddenly and then stabilised or again separated. It's a straight line and narrowing.

(0:20:44):

So let's say, just take the average age of all boys, girls, after they have completed their growth.

1950’s, what’s the average boy, average girl.

1960, average boy, average girl.

1970, average boy, girl.
And narrow, narrow, narrow. And it's a straight line practically. So something is happening that in the very biological basis, and it's nothing to do with hormones and changes or even poisoning of hormones in the food and water. Nature has as if said, ‘Okay, I'm going to push’, and she is making a shift. This is purely a working of Nature. And around that time, 1960 onwards, Mother said this. So our database shows just like that, because we, mapped it on decades. So we see this 10 years later, it has happened. This is fascinating.

So what you see is, somewhere along the way Nature has decided ‘Okay, so far I maintained a kind of a specialisation and distinction, now I'm going to let each grow to their full potential with perhaps heavy overlaps including biological changes’. So I have spoken before of so many changes taking place because of hormonal mixtures and all. Yes, that also is there, but there is something else happening, which may also use these hormonal mixes for that purpose. And behind it all is the active operation of the supramental force working right now, influencing all of us, not directly because we are too dull to it, we are not enough sensitised, even, not even having the psychic sufficiently conscious of that influence. But to the extent that we choose consciously to open to the action of the spiritual force, indirectly, through two levels of reduction its action is there as a sustained pressure, on circumstances, but also on individuals. And to the extent you are open, that pressure and that influence is that much more, let's say, more direct, relatively, and therefore more rapid in result.

And so things are happening. A lot is happening. From our point of view, 70 years, ha, that's a whole lifetime for many; for Nature, that's really-really fast, and so things have really accelerated. So whatever I'm describing now will be biologically based, but also you must understand things are changing, and nature is doing something on both kinds of bodies. So I come back to the characteristic:

In women the tissue is softer, more elastic, more plastic, more conscious because of the infusion of the nerves.

Perhaps, men, at least those who work on their body consciousness will begin to catch up, the same way as women's height is catching up, men also will begin to catch up in the tissue softness.

I will say this again as a personal experience because I went through the training programme of the Ashram physical education programme, I, because I was eating raw food from age 12 to 22, it was one of those things which I stubbornly believed in and so I did it, I did have a massive problems, because there was malnutrition, I was not eating enough or sufficient nutrition was not going in, and the result was an imbalance and so the body was weaker than others, need not have been had I perhaps got a balanced diet. Nevertheless, at the age of about 22 I ended that, I switched to normal food, and so on.

But during that period there was a special attention being given to the body and so I was actually actively working on body consciousness. Subsequent to that, even with the food change, that did not go away to a great extent. And I remember around the age of 27, 28, I had met some people who had actually come in contact with the Ashram for the first time, and these were young ladies, and they touched my skin and said, ‘My God, your skin is soft like a baby's’, and it was a fact, and I was conscious of it, because I knew there has been a work going on. And then around that, soon after, after age 30 on, I don't know if it was biological, hormonal, or it was because I was traveling extensively, I do feel from a spiritual point of view it was because of extensive travel, I lost something of the physical consciousness because of extreme tiredness, tight schedules, not enough sleep, imbalance of jet lag, and not enough time to gather and densify or intensify the consciousness. The result was it became more coarse.

(0:25:27):

And I found during periods when I was not doing that, I could again begin to recover. When I was doing that, again it was tending to disperse. So I will, I will definitely say, it was the result of the work done, and what I want to convey to you as an example from this is that: Something extraordinary is possible in the physical consciousness, if you work upon it irrespective of your gender. I do believe that if a woman did that consciously, the benefit would be much greater because the starting point is already with greater awareness and greater plasticity. So the point though is: does not matter what your starting point of the vessel is, you can build and you should build the full potential. And I share this just as one example.

But the implications of this: When you start now especially linking the physical consciousness with the inner or higher states, and this would be a necessary part of the Integral Yoga because you want to, well, incarnate the psychic and the spiritual ranges of consciousness, you want to incarnate, that means, your body itself as a tissue should become so conscious, not just as a body consciousness, not just as a mentalised consciousness, but infused with the psychic presence that it can feel with the psychic, and the psychicisation or the psychic influence in the body should be able to literally lift and carry it, and the body respond to the psychic as it chooses freely.

And this becomes the basis then for a still higher range and the intuitive consciousness and ranges beyond then beginning to infuse now and take up the substance and begin to work in it. That working can be also quite extraordinary. Literally, if you read some of the experiences of some of the disciples with Sri Aurobindo in the early days, literally streams of light, force, flowing into the body consciousness, of course, initially it’s in the subtle-physical, from there if you have maintained that work in the physical body, it infuses into the gross physical also, and you can feel literally the force working at a tissue level.

And in some of those descriptions, I read them saying, it was as if it was working in the cells, you could almost begin to feel the cells as part of the action. It's quite intense in the sense that it's not something which is part of your normal life and suddenly you find, when you begin to find this happening, you say, ‘Wow, this is something very precious and valuable’. But when this happens, without even reaching this point, just an infusion of a deeper or higher consciousness in the physical, the body itself should eventually become conscious and aspiring to the Divine, familiar with the Divine Presence and be able to give itself, as your mind and heart can give themselves. And in so opening it can receive directly the influence of the higher, eventually even the supramental, but through stages, doesn't matter when. For that purpose, a tissue which is already conscious, which is already plastic, which is already soft and malleable, is more receptive potentially and there the woman has an advantage.

And we saw this when the time came, because of certain reasons which we have discussed in other talks, I won't repeat, it was necessary for either Sri Aurobindo or the Mother to leave the body and go on the other side to form a bridge to bring down the supramental consciousness upon the earth. Well, the Mother said, Sri Aurobindo should stay and she would leave. And Sri Aurobindo said, “No, your body is better suited for the transformation”, and so he chose to leave. As an aside, for those who believe in astrology and palmistry and of course there is a principle and a basis,– Sri Aurobindo’s line was shorter, the Mother’s, sorry,  Sri Aurobindo's line was longer, the Mother’s shorter, and Mother comments on this, she said, “Well, when he chose to leave it was, well, he chose”, and she stayed, chose to stay, didn't matter what the line was, but because her body was more capable, more ready for the transformation, they made this choice.

And why was it more ready? Because of that advantage. Now again I am pointing to this, because it is something very valuable. And for those of you who have that advantage, do make the most of it, if this is your goal, if you want to make your body conscious and receptive and a vehicle for a direct action of the spiritual force in the physical consciousness also and the physical transformation. Doesn't matter how much you can do in this lifetime. What you do will stay with you as an inherent capacity in the consciousness that you will carry and infuse into the next body that you take and make it, lift it to a level which you could not do just like that, starting afresh then. So don't worry, you won't lose it if you work on this in this way. But there's an advantage as I said for women, but there's, like I said, also for men, it can be equally an advantage if you begin early and the earlier you begin the better.

(1:30:53):

And I mentioned this last time, it does not matter when you begin, you will have a result. Just maybe it takes longer if you start later. So this body type and softness of the body has actually huge implications when it comes to this work of awakening, spiritualising, psychicising the body consciousness and awakening it to the divinisation process.

So this is one example I'm showing of the difference. In men, the tissue is not as soft because the characteristic of the masculine, the stability, makes for also the body type to be more rigid but also tending to be more strong. Now if you observe this difference, there are other interesting things you can see: In India, for example, if you go around and see a house construction, at least in the older days, now there are more machines, when everything was done by human beings, you would see families, men and women and sometimes the children. So a woman has a baby, she is on site for her work, she'll hang a sari from the tree, and the baby is, that's the cradle for the baby, she is there nourishing him when needed and then she goes to work. So today you don't see that, that was a period of abject poverty, things have changed. But still, when you see the men and women working, you will see the work they do is different.

If you just come to a site at a random time, you'll see women working almost all the time, men sitting around talking. Oh, they work less? Mmhhmm, no, there is a difference in the work. If you observe carefully what happens, when there is a work that requires a huge ah, power, let's say muscular strength, the men are brought there and they do it. When there is a work which requires sustained effort, sustained stress, it's the women who take that.

The male muscle is unable to maintain that degree of sustained effort as women's muscle is able to spontaneously without any special training. Of course, if you train, both can get both. But women's muscle cannot take that very heavy load where the limits are pushed, where literally the muscle might tear. Men's muscles are better designed for that. So you see this difference in the biology itself and it corresponds again to that stability and fluidity, characteristics of the masculine-feminine.

But even in the design of the muscle and the strength, you find these very interesting starting point, differences of starting point. And these have implications. They have implications in the way in a child the instinct rises. So, if you observe children playing, the things which the boys will do and the things which the girls will do will tend to differentiate because of this qualitative distinction of the muscular characteristic, of the nervous characteristics, of the tissue sensitivities, of the perception of the senses, and the heart opening, mind opening, and you will find automatically the characteristics make for different interests, different patterns of interest, pace of development, form of development, parts of development at different ages. It's inevitable.

And it's important for us from an educational point of view to observe, and then provide for what they need first, and then provide for what they don't naturally have and help them grow and complement into those aspects which are not instinctively, naturally taken up. Thankfully we have this advantage, today Nature has said, ‘Okay! I want to do this’. So we have the push of Nature. And yet, there is as inertia of a few centuries, may be more than a few million years, of the gender-specific biases nature had, and so you need to nudge a little bit, broad a little bit, and give, let's say, the complementing kind of training in the way appropriate for the interest of the masculine or feminine consciousness.

(0:35:07):

So I give this example, I think, in the two talks which were webcast from my training programmes on, for teachers, it's one of many training programmes, and it's a selection from the training, out of, I think, 18 hours of content, this must be a bit, I think, 6 hours, or so.  So one of the examples I've given there is, when I was working with children who, with construction kits, because, well, that was there, we were asked to use it for them, I said, ‘okay’, I took it as a challenge.

Boys obviously caught on because pictures were of cranes and cars and machines and you make construction kits of what is called ‘Meccano Kit’, and the girls looked at those pictures and they didn't gel, some did, and you could see, because there was already, those faculties were already active, but bulk of them did not. And I still told them, ‘Okay’, I give them certain simple drawings to take up. They would do up to a point, the moment they hit the limits where they could no more visualise the 2D-to-3D transition, they would lose interest because it was just too strenuous.

There I shifted their attention. I said, ‘Look, we are going to make a beautiful garden and a house and put human beings and flower’. So now they had to follow from their mind but with 3D visualisation, but on a topic which matched the heart's turn. And then I would start doing with them, make something and show them, ‘Ah-yes’, and then they would make some other part, and then together we would build, well, that whole scenery. And that hooked the mind, hooked the heart. And although the faculty was, had some resistance, it came forward, and by the time they completed the year, many of them had pushed the boundary more than anything they could have through any other activity in all of the school education.

And I do believe that those who were able to make that kind of a shift, that shift stays with them for life. So it doesn’t take much, you just have to find the right way to direct the attention and interest, and you will find these things happen. So this is just to take it to the culmination describing the body type. The same distinctions exist also at an emotional level, and again remember, they are starting points.

So the tendency of the emotions at a lower level, at a higher level, and then as if the emotions open to the mind: these are broadly three grades. Observe. You will notice, uh, spontaneously, when women, even girls, talk, the things they share about, when boys talk, the things they share, they talk about, it has, they belong to different levels. And for women, automatically the empathic content being natural, the conversations tend to be of an empathic character. From there, if you leave it at that, it will just stay there and become enriched but bound. You shift from there to a higher grade of empathy. Widen out of the individual and open it to plants, animals, and then even to other age groups which seem beyond your range of recognition.

It can be done in many ways through drama, through direct-contact experience, through cinema, various ways. And then through that bring it to the brink where the empathy shifts into the thought content, so emotion-thought bridge, vital mind, mental vital, these would be the ranges. And then bring into the domain where through empathy you perceive the thought and the thought values. And that would be the natural entry point to awaken and enter the thought-empathy and then enter therefore through that the thought-experience, without losing the bridge of the emotion and build the continuity.

And then having got to that, you can build there rapidly and build an interest there using again examples which would resonate with the heart but then demand attention of the mind, and you will build very quickly, so to say, the house of the mind, with specific faculties, and so on, but with the benefit of continuity with the heart. But if then you can help them to stay there, begin to live there more, then you will find the freedom from the emotions or the freedom from the lower tendencies of emotions without losing the continuum.

The same way for the boys, for those who have a problem with empathy, you will begin to, through thought, through observation:

‘Ha notice these ants how they are going!’

‘Notice how they communicate!’

‘Notice how they build!’

‘If you were an ant, what would it look like to carry a grain of sand? How big is it compared to you?’

So you allow an empathy, but the mind turning to empathy, and then from there the heart activates. Fascinating!

(0:40:16):

All the faculties are waiting to be awakened. It's just you have to create those links. And then, so the, now the ant looks at the human, ‘This human is running, he is walking, I don't know where his foot will come, how do I avoid him and not get crushed?’ So you create the scenarios. Again it can be done depending on age group, through drama, through cinema, through just this identification, even through, which I would often do because I have only one period in a week with the children, then I would just describe how it works, what the ants do, but the, in the narration bring them through identification in the empathic experience.

There is a case of a child that I was made aware of who looked at ants and he would go and crush them, saw any insect, he would kill. Not out of malice, just wu-wo-hu  that's how it is! Interesting, something to do. So I suggested to the mother to narrate stories of the ants' life, and through the empathy, it was a boy, so through the empathy get to that. And very quickly he got it.

And the, in the story I gave examples, the ant will say, ‘Oh, this boy, he is going to look after me, oh, that boy, he is going to crush me I need to run away, and I like this one who helps me and who gives me food’. And then just a few days later, this boy comes from the garden with a story of how he helped an ant and observed some insect and helped them. Just like that it flipped his reality, the empathic element had been awakened. It was still mind-to-vital, but still the bridge being made once, it’s going to stay for life. And this was done early on, I think, age 5 or so.

So this is just to show that whatever your natural starting point of a range of interests, so first you have to observe, and as we saw last time in the case of Sushma, you might have girls who already have those faculties awakened, boys who already have those empathic faculties awakened, well then give them the necessary support, help them to amplify and develop.  But first observe, what do they need, what do they lack, what are the natural tendencies of their mind, heart on these levels. And then nudge, nudge, nudge, activity, hook, fun, interaction, and grow.

As we grow up, this same distinction takes on a different form. So again, if I had to look at from a woman's, girl's point of view, as she grows up, you will see in late teenage when they often start feeling an attraction for the other sex, the first grade of attraction, which again a lot depends on the education, but what you see typically in cinema as shown as normal, is women are attracted to men who are hunks, physicality, the physical-muscular characteristic, and so on. And there is a natural affinity because the instinct is looking for strength. But of what grade? Of the grade you live at. A more refined consciousness would look at the hunk and say, 'Hhae, too superficial, that's nice, but what's real inside?’. And then it finds, ‘Ha this boy has a quiet power, a deep sense of stability, stillness, confidence, he's not shaken, affected’. And this more refined girl would find that more attractive. Another who has now grown into a power of intellect will find a boy who has that kind of ability or characteristic more attractive.

So you find in these relationships also the natural affinities as they grow, they tend to find the complementing characteristics attractive, and vice versa from the men to the women. What is interesting is, if at that moment you find a way to turn the attention to the higher or deeper range and not allow a, instinctive indulgence on the lower levels, they grow very rapidly into those higher ranges and appreciate those ranges quickly. If you allow indulgence on the first point of contact which is basically just one level which has just woken up, they get very quickly sucked and then bound into that and further evolution tends to get blocked.

Now all of this is going to be very important when you look at education but also as adults the same principle. If you allow an indulgence in that attraction at the level at which it is forming, you have pretty much lost the opportunity for it to grow further.

Even biologically, it is interesting to see how it works in boys, for example. From the point where, let us say, they feel a strong sexual attraction to the opposite sex, if they start indulging in it, one of the side effects of that will be increase in testosterone, the increased testosterone signals the bones to start hardening, and the moment the bones harden the growth is stopped.

(0:45:21):

So a premature indulgence actually stunts the biological growth. But that's just a one part of it. It stunts the further higher gradations of range of the vital energy and the higher ranges of mind. Remember what we have discussed, please do watch the series number 24 to, number 17 to 24, we have discussed the sexuality in depth. But the same substance which is used for sexual procreation is the same substance that is used for uh, amplifying the brain power. It’s the same substance that nourishes the growth of the brain.

So at that age you allow indulgence, your higher mental growth, not just emotional, even mental potential and intellectual potential and IQ are all very likely going to be stunted, just as the biology got stunted. All this needs to be said to the children.

What you see today happening is the very opposite. You are seeing in the United States now going back almost 25 years ago, I had read how they would distribute condoms to 9-year-old children. It was an invitation to start having sexual experiences at that age, before the biology is ready, and naturally the full stunting that takes place thereafter. Literally an entire generation has lost the potential for the higher range, and only those who found that either too crude or too coarse and somehow survived the wrong nudge may be taking advantage of what comes later or family support which prevented it.

But if you look at especially children where there is not enough family support or they come from broken families, they go home to  an empty house because the parent is working, mm, you have probably lost their higher ranges. Unfortunately all of this seems to be done by certain interests with an intent to keep humanity dulled, intellectually deficient, emotionally immature, so that human beings are easier to control. And there's a whole book I believe it was called the Dumbing Down of American Education or something like that, Dumbing Down of America, which analysed this, from the 60’s, 70’s already the trends had started to dumb down the education.

And if you see then what happened subsequently in all the higher universities, you had people from India and China going there because there were not enough Americans available who were interested or ready for that higher education because they had been affected, damaged in an early stage. So those numbers were dropping, China and India were filling in, except now these tendencies are beginning to creep into India and China also. But this is to show you how the emotional development also, how it finds natural resonances at various stages, if you withhold, although there is an attraction, you withhold this and say, ‘No, hang on, you are not ready for it’.

You feel, it doesn't matter, direct your energies higher, it rises to the next, and the next, and the next, and it's only when the full individualisation has been completed that you can enter into a healthy relationship without losing it. But subsequently again the same thing will happen, what I just discussed, according to the level at which you live you recognise or are attracted to that grade of values in the other and you build relationships based on that.

So I'm looking at this emotional, vital range. Next, we come to the more mental characteristic. The difference you will see again standing out quite starkly. In the natural response, let’s say, a boy or a girl, man or woman, the first natural instinctive response for the woman will be empathic, for the man would be objective. The result would be, if there is somebody who is in, who is doing something wrong, the empathic side would tend to be more benevolent and indulgent, whereas the objective side would tend to appear to be harsh or critical or judgmental. Now you could start blaming each other saying, ‘You are too judgmental’, ‘No you are too soft’. Understand why, understand the basis of this difference and recognise the truth of that, and then find the correct balance. So if you have consciously worked upon yourself to develop the complementing side, irrespective of which it is that you were missing, you will immediately recognise what it is in the other and then find a way and know how to communicate.

(0:50:06):

And especially when you have to communicate, you recognise that these are different values that you are communicating across, you should know how to be able to shift to their, other person's value system and create the bridge. To be able to do that, you must have the bridge internally within yourself. When you have it within you, you can catch, identify there, and then lead in them, like, so to say, forming the bridge, convey in a way that they say, ‘Ah-yes, now it makes sense’.

Now there are many ways one could do it. Let's say, you had to convince somebody who is judgmental and objective, rational, without empathic ability, you would simply say, ‘Well, imagine what it would be like if you had’ and you describe that person's conditions. And the fellow if he can lean-in a little bit into the empathic, he will say, ‘Yes-yes okay, I understand but still’. It all depends how much you're able. And then there are ways to draw further.

Or on the other side, someone who's only empathic who say, ‘Yes but if you notice, the person after 20 attempts has still not done it, is he really trying even? It's not enough to say that he is feeling bad, is he trying to change? If he has not made an effort to change. If he made an effort and failed, we can still wait. If he does not make an effort, you have to know this person needs to be dropped. So there are ways to communicate. But if you can build in yourself the bridge, you are then able to see this in others, you can see which is the level at which they are operating, perceiving, communicating and find ways to help that.

This needs to be done consciously in each one of us irrespective of our age. Ideally we would do this through the educational phase while in school, college, university, irrespective. It's not being done. Nowhere in the educational system, anywhere that I'm aware of at least, is this being done deliberately and consciously. It may happen incidentally through other kinds of activities, but it's not being done consciously.

For us as adults, as practitioners of the Integral Yoga, well, observe in yourself, what are the gaps, what are the patches within you where the consciousness is not developed, which levels, and consciously learn to do it. How it would work is, it's a bit tricky too initially, if you feel yourself one way, very objectively is to feel, if you feel the gradations of consciousness, you will notice, ‘Uh, there is a patch here’, typically for most people here (shows the region around diaphragm just below the lungs), there is a gap. Below that is a certain emotional band, above that is a different emotional band, lower vital, higher vital, we will say, and there is a gap.

Similarly in the emotional band generally and then the head band, you'll find there's a gap. You need to actually shift between this state and this state. Notice that you can shift, ‘Hha’!

If you're here, then you can shift here, and stay here. You may feel uncomfortable. If you're here (pointing to head region), you can go still higher up. Or, if you live here, you can go here, and feel, and live in the emotional consciousness. You may feel uncomfortable, but.

And then by shifting between these, you will find there's a way you can form a bridge and a continuity.

And even when you observe somebody, you can empathetically perceive, shift to this, observe, and then find the band, find the gap, find the way to link, bridge and a continuum, so that this [does] not contradict that. Here is a harsh judgment, here is a soft weakness, but what's the truth? Or, for that you may go deeper behind, open to some deeper inner or higher range from which you perceive the same situation from an evolutionary point of view and say, ‘Ha, in this case, we have to decide like this, but in that case we can decide like that’.

So this needs to be consciously bridged. The emotional mind and the rational mind should not be opposing each other, they need to be taught to be harmonised. And even if you have to judge somebody, there can be a sympathetic judgment or a harsh, disconnected sense of judgment also.

Again, you will see in the same tendency because of the biological, emotional and mental distinctions in the shape and form between the two sexes, there will be a tendency where you are weak in a situation, you are unable to get what you want, you begin to manipulate, there is an emotional manipulation and there is a rational manipulation. And some people get very skilled at that because they find they cannot confront directly, they are not comfortable with aggression, the vital is weak, uh, so you cannot get into a head-on collision, you tend to manipulate, observe, become conscious, correct for it.

(0:55:02):

If you need to strengthen the vital, irrespective of gender, you need to strengthen the vital to be able to engage with others without feeling always on the back foot.  In that strengthening again what is the basis for that contact, more rational, more emotional, observe, build the bridges, build these capacities. Now I wish our education were complete enough to make people conscious of these levels, conscious of these kinds of engagement.

It's one thing that when you study psychology, you are again taught, ‘Oh, this is one type, that is one's type, this is a narcissistic behaviour, that is a’ uh-mm, I don’t know, ‘controlling behaviour’. To study it as patches, groups of behaviour patterns, and quite different to observe and introspect within you, and recognise all those tendencies are there within you, and notice which are more amplified, which you are more conscious, which you have learnt perhaps in childhood, which you have perhaps inherited by imitation, by infection from parents or others around you or sometimes biologically, to observe and become conscious.

I would want to create an educational framework where actually we would observe the way Sri Aurobindo describes the whole of the human psychology in The Synthesis of Yoga but now with these specific applications at various stages of your age group development. And then you would be able to say, ‘Look, right now you are feeling this, but wait, in another year or two, this faculty will awaken or that value system will kick in very strongly, don't stop short with this’.

And because there is no such reference, you will find children often when they get overwhelmed with strong emotions, they will take hasty decisions, ‘This is it’. So a girl age of 18 will say, ‘I have fallen in love with X, now I am going to stop my studies and go and marry him and we will live happily ever after’.

No, inevitably those marriages break.

Who will tell them? Who will explain?

‘No, but I am convinced, this is it, I have found my lifelong partner.’

We have seen many cases like that even in the Ashram School. But now this kind of thing tends to happen quite easily.

Now of course, they don't go into that extreme. But they will suddenly abandon the whole focus of energies which were set to the growth of individuality and formation of individuality and prematurely bond, losing the opportunity to complete their individuality. So, these things need to be communicated, and this happens ha, differently in the two genders. Observe and give them the right kind of support. The key though, for all, for both, is the gap between the rational and the emotional, which absolutely needs to be bridged.

There was, I think, last time a comment which had come, I hope it was from Radhika, who was very disappointed because she had completely misunderstood what I had said in the first talk. And she said, how she spent a great deal of effort trying to graduate in a STEM subject: And I want to point to this, the difficulty is coming precisely because you are still identifying emotionally first, and the STEM subjects demand a rational entry. And this was the mistake you made even in listening to that talk. You were not following the rational component of it, you were following the emotional component and had an emotional reaction.

So this is going to be a problem for many people because your first instinct is to stay in that part in you which is more naturally active and vice versa for those on the other side.

How do you do that? Consciously learn to make your emotions completely still and quiet. You may say ‘I am losing the juice of life, the fun is gone’. No, this is one kind of fun. There is a completely different kind of fun which will come from a reasoning power. And there is a completely different kind of fun which will come from a still deeper uh psychic influence and the spiritual opening into wideness, and so on.

Recognise the different kinds of joys and fun. And so consciously learn to make your emotions completely still and quiet. In that quietness you will now shift focus of attention. So there is an active exercise to bring the centre of awareness at the centre of the forehead and hold it there. So you will do this every day. Practices such as Tratak, holding at the center and observing, seeing from here, while your physical sight looks at a flame or a point on the wall, but you hold attention as if from here, from the center here, so that's the mind center, you hold this. And if for you the mind center is already easy, well shift a little higher and maybe even poise yourself just above head, where you can open to the intuition. But do these practices which force your consciousness to shift that level and then you will find all the STEM subjects will just open out, easily. You have the capacity.

(1:00:13)

But you have to activate it at its level, you cannot approach it through the emotional mind and expect to grasp the STEM subjects. It does not work. They require precisely this shift on the gradation at which you enter. So before you take up a STEM book, STEM by the way is Science, uh, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, or something like that. So these are the subjects which demand the rational part of the mind which you will see as you go into the advanced ranges, women tend to drop out, boys tend to excel for this reason.

And this is the way I am describing how you can correct it: Before you open the book, you shift yourself into this poise. Initially, it will be a struggle. Initially, you will tend to drop back. Just bring yourself right back. And then do these practices to stay.

As you are walking on the road, shift your centre here and hold this poise. You may find it strenuous at first, you may find it boring, you'll find it not enjoyable, ‘My emotions are gone, it feels empty’, don't worry, you'll never lose them. But you'll build the completeness of your personality. Hold this as you're walking, as you're doing something very mundane, hold that poise. You're watching a movie or a TV serial, well, hold this poise and observe from here, and you'll find automatically your value system changes. Rather than wallowing in the empathy of the emotional drama, you'll begin to observe objectively, critically, analyse, interpret, perceive layers behind.

Now you’ll see there is this whole range of TV series, category called ‘soap operas’. Do you know why they are called ‘soap operas’? Because they used to be broadcast in the United States at that time in the 60’s, 70’s, in the afternoons where the soap ads would be there because that's the time when the women would be watching maximalli. So all the soap ads would cluster there because women decide which soap to buy. So all those shows were associated with soap ads that became basis of soap operas.

And what is the characteristic? They all wallow in emotions. So situation comes, there is a tension, and of course they will have more women with those emotional tensions, and then the camera will focus on each face and each expression and nuances of expressions. For many men this becomes extremely boring. Why is it moving so slow? What's happening? Nothing is happening. But for the women, ‘Oh, I identify with this feeling, and then that one has a different feeling, and a different nuance of feeling, my God, what a rich experience’, in the emotional domain.

But because you enjoy this, you wallow in it, you never make the effort to cross over. And I'm going to say this even to those of you who are adults having reached a certain level of, when you say, ‘Ha, I have finished my education’: no, you have not. If you enjoy this, please do enjoy, not a problem, but then force yourself to cross over to that range where initially you will not enjoy, but you will then find a very different perception even if you watch the same soap operas or go for different content.

Men, typically in the same context, would say, ‘I will watch an adventure film’ and the thing which attracts them, the tension, the clash, the tension of the challenge, the breaking through of a resistance of a problem, resolution of it, etc., stimulate those faculties which are natural to that part of the mind.

If at that moment you suddenly have a romantic interlude, you will see boys typically, ‘Ah… what is this fellow doing? Ho, how stupid, he is about to throw away the whole thing just because of this girl who has been kidnapped, hmm… let her go’. You have lost, you don't have that empathic content. So at that point you're going to say, ‘Okay, what is this about?’, and you'll consciously shift, shift to the centre of your emotions, feel what the other fellow is feeling. And in identifying you'll begin to feel, ‘Ha, this one feels that, that one feels that’.

Watch these operas with that intention to feel the nuances of emotions in each and recognise the distinctions between each. Most of them are made with a very skilled understanding of human psychology, and most of them have to be made by women because most men don't have that kind of very nuanced perception of emotions. But if you watch them in this way, you will actually develop that ability to recognise those poises. And then in life you will see people in those struggles, internal conflicts of emotions and choices to be, emotional choices to be made, and so on.

So I am pointing to these in order to show you how you can actually shift and complete the missing layers and integrate them. If done soon enough, early enough, you have benefits later. If not, do it now. But the intention will be always as those layers awaken and open up, you want to bring them into the overall turn of your aspiration and in the yoga.

(1:05:26):

Otherwise, very often what may happen is uhm, there is some deeper or higher opening in some part and then you say, ‘Oh, there is a gap here’. Of course, through the yoga process, those gaps will be filled much more rapidly, much more easily, and so on, but you would still want to do it, or you can leave them somehow stunted. And I've seen people who are so bound in their sense of completeness that they leave that stunted part as it is and they're proud of it, and always that leads to an imbalance in the yoga itself.

If that part has not been opened up, eventually it will be like an anchor pulling you back. The entire ship is moving forward but this, let's say, the emotional center is holding you back. It's unable to connect, and it's as if you had a series of experiences and then at some point, this anchor is holding you back, it's unable to engage and all the experiences stop, ‘I don't know what happened’. Well, what happened was a part was not engaging and that's the maximum you could go without that part uh, being included. So eventually that part will have to be opened and engaged and then all the experiences will begin to flow more integrated.

So in the scope of the Yoga also this is going to be essential.

Now all this was a bit to amplify on certain aspects which I had not touched, which I skipped last time out of little concern that it could be misunderstood. The rational aspect also, I will say, is not sufficiently developed both in men and women, with a few exceptions, and that needs to be really pushed in the boundary. You must be able to get to a degree of rationality which goes well beyond what is currently considered a well-developed mind.

You should actually be able to abstract the mind's powers to a degree where even abstract mathematics, abstract concepts of philosophy should be for your literally living objects and ideas, and you should be able to wield them like this. That's the zone where very few women get to. The Mother did by the way. She trained herself to that. It's not difficult. You must want it, that's all. And the men who do also are very few here. And those who do generally have that so developed, their emotional component is totally undeveloped, or they have a very strong vital but immature, uncontrolled, etc.

So just to give you a perspective of this, there are lots of questions, I am going to come to them shortly, I want to complete one more thing. So last time I had begun to discuss this aspect of the meeting of the masculine and feminine qualities irrespective of what the gender is in. It does not have to be romantic, as I said. It can be in an office space, boss and assistant, secretary, two team members who have distinctive characteristics, and even two programmers on a computer desk with a more masculine, more feminine, characteristic would become complementary in the way they work.

And it's interesting also because I've seen this and even experienced this. Depending on who I am interacting with, I was able to shift my poise to the more, well, let's say leadership aspect or the more follower aspect and be able to shift between the two without much difficulty because I had trained myself for that.

But most people don't. And it's more by compulsion of circumstances that you are forced to. And then suddenly you are thrown in a position of authority, you don't know how to deal with it, and you get into this unbalanced, exaggerated distortion of the assertive poise, or the reverse, you are pushed into a position where you have to now be a good follower, team player, and you struggle with your need to affirm your individuality, and so on.

But let's say, now we're looking at the situation where there's this meeting, and I discussed last time, I had just started this discussion that in that poise automatically because of the complementarity, it's like you can let go the things which you're not comfortable with because the other person takes care of it, and the other person lets go of the things they are not comfortable with because you're taking care of it. So often it is in a partnership of between men and women, you find this naturally happening. And I had given a few examples last time, I want to build on that a little bit and show how even here there's a danger as well as a potential.

What happens often in a marriage, and I see this especially in many of the older couples today, because they got married under different circumstances than today, uh, you will find the specialisations have become so extreme, they are almost opposite to each other. And there is a link point of course. They do have deep affection, love, they have got used to each other even though they are fed up with each other, but they are so used to it, they can't live without each other, and because there is this interdependence, each one is looking after a complementing role.

(1:10:21):

So I take an example of a couple that were quite aged, had both finally reached retirement, and then you could see the man had emotionally was very much stunted. He had whatever his, he was an engineer, capabilities in this range. The woman had a little bit of the engineering exposure, not too interested in that, but she was handling everything else which he could not, and it was almost like 80% of his life that she was handling, because bulk of it had to do with, well, life-practicality, interface with people, handling the diplomatic aspects, even in relations with people, and so on, and so it was interesting to see how.

And he said something very strange, he said, ‘I cannot accept if you die before me, I will be helpless, I wouldn't be able to live, I want to die before you’. And what was interesting is, from her side, it was not the same. She could manage without him, he could not manage without her. The dependence had become so complete. And I want to point to this because when you have this complementarity, it may seem very fine, but actually it becomes a trap, it becomes a prison when you are not both reasonably complete.

So there is a convenience, but the convenience now binds you until it becomes so extreme, so unbalanced, you never even have a chance to develop the missing aspects of your capacities. Because the other one is doing it so well, if you attempt, you are doing so many blunders, they get fed up, they take over or they don't even let you do it.

How will you ever get a chance to learn those things? Of course outside. Once you start doing outside the relationship, you start developing those skills and capacities that you cannot in the relationship, well, the relationship itself begins to tear. So this can happen in various ways, and I am giving this in a very general way, it can happen in a workspace, it can happen between two team members, anything.

So this interdependence, although with great benefit, is not enough unless first you make yourself as complete as possible, the other makes themselves as complete as possible, and then you work as a team. Then for the purpose of the team, you have your specialisations, but you can also overlap and take each other's roles as needed to some degree, maybe not with the same efficiency, but to some degree enough, or if there is a need to rearrange the teams, you can actually manage even that.

When you have that kind of reasonable completeness, then the partnership can be healthy. In the case where there is not that level of completeness, the partnership is a dependence and at the same time you are fed up because your operations are so different, you do not understand each other. Each says, ‘I don’t understand’, he says, ‘I don’t understand her’, she says, ‘I don’t understand him’, but they cannot do without each other, so there is actually love and hate. Now you won't say hate always, not in the case of that couple, it was not there, but there was, you would get fed up with each other, and then you kind of find your friend circles, he goes with the boys, she goes with the girls, and so on.

So I am pointing to this because this is essential now in the push that nature is making for the growth of the fullness of each one. You'll still operate within the overall, let's say, vessel of the male or the female temperament, but you'll build to a fullness, the other will build to a fullness, and whatever maximum you're able to, and then find a complementarity and partnership, it will be healthy.

Now you see this interestingly much more in Europe and the United States which have, so to say, been ahead of India in terms of the age of individualism and reason. Because of the colonial phase that India went through, these things got slightly delayed, and Sri Aurobindo points out how the individualism and reason that India has kind of shifted into was largely a European import at that point. I do find that, that has shifted, India is coming into its own characteristic way of individualism and reason, still finding it, but it’s, it's got a reasonably clear definition now, and we can see this happening in a different way now in India.

So it's as if initially there was an imitation, and then the part which was so to say undigested or indigestible was discarded, and the elements which were useful were taken and used as the trigger for building a more distinctive intrinsic characteristic of individualism and reason specific to India.

(1:15:02):

I don't know how it is with China, I have not had enough close contact, but I believe from little that I have seen, a similar process China has gone through and found its own sense of individualism and reason also. But what you see in Europe is this: literally both sexes have been forced to form to whatever degree, reasonable completeness, and then the partnerships forming. But now that there is reasonable completeness, the dependences are not so strong and if the affinities are superficial, they break easily.

So, I had seen statistics in the 1990’s that typically in the United States you had two to three marriages and often the third or fourth marriage would be stable because the basis of the first and second marriages were too superficial and shallow, you outgrew them very quickly. And eventually when you mature enough that you are, reached some kind of a real depth, then you build relationships which are more lasting.

One should not have to have to make so many mistakes. If this phase of early development could be properly done and reasonably initial instincts held back reasonably by understanding that there is more to come, then you allow the fullness to be completed.

Now I am highlighting this much more for those of us who, whatever your age, looking into yourself you might say, ‘Yes, I have these gaps’, often gender-aligned or otherwise. And you say, ‘I need to complete it’, ‘I need to develop those things which I do not have or which I am unable to do’. What are those? Well, look at what it is that you are outsourcing to your partner, see those things which you don't like to do. Start doing them. But not as a chore, but observe how your partner does it with a certain joy and skill, and say, ‘I need to be able to feel that same joy and work with the same skill and do it with the same enthusiasm’ and find the way.

If you have already a reasonably healthy partnership with love and affection sufficiently and trust, then you can actually use that point to identify and kind of lean into that quality of consciousness and as if by identification assimilate that quality and say, ‘Ah–yes, this is what you feel, this is what you do’, and very quickly accelerate the completion of that thing which is missing in you.

And this would be the, let's say, yogic way of learning. In a sense this is what is happening in every class. Even with children, you identify with some quality of the consciousness of the teacher, catch that, and that's your transmission of insight, knowledge or even awakening of a faculty or power of consciousness. You observe someone, you are attracted, ‘Oh, my God, this is so fascinating’. Why? Because it's resonating with the faculty within you that's waiting to wake up, and observing, identifying, it's already beginning to awaken it. So the same thing you could do, especially if you have a reasonably healthy and secure trust,  trusting partnership, again, it need not be in a marriage, it need not be in a romantic relationship, it can even be in a work space and you can do the same and learn very quickly.

So consciously try to build this healthy completeness from which you can therefore build healthy interdependencies, whether it is as a lifetime partner or in a workspace in temporary partnerships, try to be as complete in your individuality as possible, and then only settle into long-term partnerships, marriages, etc., to the extent possible again. Sometimes you may continue that even after marriage, but again the goal should be to try to make yourself as complete as possible and nature has decided that which is the reason why automatically we, the idea seems to us right.

You go back 200 years, and if you told men and women ‘Oh, you must be complete’, ‘No, I don't want to, that's a woman's job’, she says, ‘That's a man's job’. Today it's different. You say, ‘Yes, of course, I don't want to be dependent, I want to be complete’ and then build the healthy partnership. And there you may share. But when needed, you are able to flow across and then still be distinct in your masculine-feminine characteristics.

So in the, in the west, as I said, there has been a greater advancement in this requirement to individualise in a large part because of the specific conditions, especially after the Second World War, during and after, when women were forced into the workspace because there was not enough, there were not enough people to do certain tasks. And then they excelled in certain things more than men, and so that became the norm, and so on. But the result also there because it was artificially, initially artificial, there were distortions.

(1:20:07):

And there were two distortions which I will point to. One was that women tried initially as part of the women's liberation model to assert themselves over men and become equal to or replace men in the way men were, and that masculinised them in a way which is kind of unhealthy. A lot of this happened you must understand because the initial movement of the femininity, the women's lib, was initiated by a woman who lived in India, she saw women having so much freedom in India, she went back and said, ‘Oh, here the women don't have it, they don't even have the right to vote’, and so a lot of these started with her, I think, Gloria Steinham, or something like that, I'm not sure of the name, but because of the model she saw in India, interestingly. So, but then the, those who followed her didn't have that as a reference, so they didn't know what was that healthy independence that a woman could have.

So it went through kind of an exaggeration into the other extreme where they would say, ‘We don't need men’. And so the result was, when a cluster of women come together and there is not enough of the masculine energy complementing, then the women have to get masculinised to be able to complete the energy content, container. And the result was a kind of a, unbalanced or distortion in the women's lib itself. That has swung, I believe, in more recently in another extreme where the tendency is almost to demonise  men and especially white men.

You will see even in cinema, all white men are bad guys and then the ones who are good are of colour or of different sexuality, and things like that. It's become such a stereotype, it's even quite irritating sometimes. But this kind of a distortion, is very influenced, is a strong influence on children, and one needs to be careful about how that communicates.

And it's important to clarify. The principle should be very simple. Each one should grow to be themselves as completely as possible. And what is yourself? This is the problem. And since we are entering a subjective age, the sense of ‘I am me, and what I choose to be’ is often stopping with a very superficial emotional sense of ‘I’ and typically it takes that form, ‘Oh, follow your heart’, ‘My heart feels like doing this’, ‘Today I feel this’, ‘Tomorrow I feel that’.

The emotional centre is deceptive and dangerous. And we need to convey that ‘This is not it’! The true centre is deeper behind where the emotions are completely still and quiet, and it is not an emotional centre. The soul is not emotion. The soul's bhakti is not an emotional devotion, it is something more essential. And to be able to access that, you must train yourself to become completely still and quiet in your emotions, in your thoughts, and then go as deep as you can, and find that true sense of what you feel aligns with the truth deep within. You can't say ‘I have reached it’. You can say ‘It aligns with what, what is deepest within me’. And again, there's a lot of vocabulary mixture because of ‘Follow your heart’.

Which heart? ‘Feel’! What do you feel? Well, which feel? There's a sensory feel, emotional feel, and then there is the psychic feel. Same words.

So I had this conversation somewhat recently with a lady who was, she had a list of communities she had been through, all so semi-spiritual, ‘new age’, I will say, they were not really spiritual, new-age communities of various kinds and traditions and, and very young, I think, she was 22 at that point, and she was following all kinds of practices, wearing all kinds of strange headgear because of she had read something that ‘this does that and protects you from rays’ and all that.

And then there was a conversation going on, and I said, ‘well’, and I think she made some comment, everybody says, ‘Follow your heart’. I said: ‘Yes but which heart?’. And I pointed out, ‘You have three hearts actually’. And they're all using the same word ‘Heart’. ‘Ho, I never thought of that!’ And, and then again the word ‘Feel’, we played with that. And then I said: ‘What you're really looking for?’. And suddenly she had no answer. She has been wandering.

But if you ask ‘What you are really looking for?’, ‘I am just following my heart’. ‘What you are looking for following your heart?’ She says, ‘That! Enlightenment!’. Finally, she came with that. I said, ‘What do you mean by enlightenment?’. Again a big blank. She had no idea. And yet deep inside it knew.

You see the soul knows, but the surface personality is so obsessed with itself, and it’s very attractive teachings of the new-age clutter, it had never gone deep enough to assess what those things meant. Of course she is still young. But still. And the result was this wandering and then the wandering as if an end in itself. And I had the sense that the soul was as if exhausting all these things. So I said, ‘Have you been to India?’, she said, ‘Not yet’.

(1:25:16):

I said: ‘Have you been? Have you heard of Auroville?’. ‘I've heard about it.’ And then there was a gap. And I said, ‘Ha-okay, you're keeping the best for the last’. And she didn't get it. I said: ‘Well, you're going to wander all over, and when you've exhausted everything, you'll come to the real thing, and you'll find it and you'll say, “Haa, this is what I was looking for”. So I left that as a seed. This is just as an aside, but to say that there's a huge confusion which comes from not recognising what is your true, true sense of ‘I’, and yet you have to follow that.

In the men, this distortion takes a different form, I give the example of the distortion for women. In men, it takes a different form, today again with the subjective age, and the huge din of the media, and the educational exaggeration of the outward turn, its financial and attaining hierarchical success, the competition to get to the top and just the winning of competition, overriding others, getting ahead of others, and that becomes an end in itself. And a lot of these align with some of the tendencies which are part of Nature's instincts and the masculine nature. ‘But for what?’, if you say. ‘You're competing for what?’ ‘Haa, for success!’ ‘And what does that success mean?’ Blank!

‘What will you feel when you reach success?’ ‘I'll feel on top of the world.’ ‘What will that be like?’ ‘And then what will you do?’ ‘Hhhaa!’, blank! That's a dangerous point! Now I've reached the top, what do I do next? I have nothing to do, I have no competition, where will I get the satisfaction of having defeated someone else? That means that's not the satisfaction I was seeking. So what are you seeking? The same blank, ‘I don't know’. And again for that you have to become very quiet, go behind, through all this clutter of struggle and chase for something: What are you really looking for? What will you feel when you reach it?

And maybe if you become very quiet, you begin to feel something which is more aligned to the soul. And at that point sometimes people actually say, ‘You know, my dream from childhood was to do this’. So, ‘Why are you doing that?’. ‘Well, uh, that's how I earn my living, that's how I fulfill all these expectations, I live my comfortable life by the money I earn’. ‘What about that?’ ‘Yeah, that's my dream, I would really like.’ And you'll see the whole consciousness shifts when they speak about that thing which is their dream. And so I will simply say: ‘Start doing that, and maybe initially you still do your thing which gets you the money but start doing that in a small way, don't wait for later. And if you have something still deeper, what was that sense of deeper purpose? Alignment with the soul values, bring those alignments into your life. And at some point when you begin to do that, so many things which were attractive begin to change, and other things become attractive.’

So it's, it’s an actual active process in which of introspection in which both men and women using their characteristic tendencies will find their deeper sense of purpose, completeness and then even complementarity. So, for the purpose of this amplification of complementarity, I said, there has to be something though: What is this thing which unites?

It can be something very superficial. Or, ‘We are in the same office, and we have to finish this project’. Good enough. It lasts for the duration of the project. As soon as the project is over, it breaks. If you have something of longer term, well, you need something of deeper value because the project value won't last more than a few weeks. ‘Ha, we both love to go hiking and biking in the mountain.’ Okay, that's a common interest. And then what happens when you're not in the mountain? ‘Haa, we hate each other, and then we come together for mountain.’ Okay, you can see where the problem is.

So in this way, if you start observing what's the basis of that affinity, the deeper it can go, the more lasting the complementarity and the work that you will do. Otherwise, if there is not an inner point of unity, this very thing which seems complementary now becomes opposition and breaks eventually. And there can be several levels at which this complementarity can be felt. I don't think, we have enough time for that. But, to just touch upon this, if you look at it this way: Little children, their personality is not yet formed, their mind, emotions, are not yet formed, but the soul influences can be strong still, but they are turned outward by habit of modern education.

So what's the form it takes? Some kind of an idealisation of your own future. Observe how this takes form in the boys and girls, and especially when it comes into teenage, the first instinctive way, if you look deep enough and not just get attracted to the superficiality of it, is almost archetypal. It's an archetype. For the girl, it will be something like ‘My knight in shining armour’, that's the image from the fairy tale. The ‘knight’, what does he represent? Chivalry, heroism, courage, self-abnegation, strength, protection, force, one-pointed focus, power, purpose, achieving. And with that strength, ‘shining armour’. What is that ‘shining armour’? Purity of purpose, selfless, there for all, to serve all, to save the nation, to save society, fight for truth. See, it's not articulated, but that's the feel, that's ‘My knight of shining armour’. What will he do to her? He will come and sweep her off her feet, take her on his horse, and steal her. You want to be seized and captured by this protective force and then carried for the rest of your life in its protection in which you will then feel free to flow and be, and as you like.

(1:31:31):

There is a very interesting passage from one of Mother's plays. I'm going to read from that, unfortunately, it's a bit longish but a very interesting passage, let me see if I can find it. So it's a play that the Mother wrote between, in which there is a, it's called “Towards the Future”. There is a woman, a poet, clairvoyant, painter and a school friend. And there is a discussion between the poet and the woman. And in that discussion, they, they are speaking about women generally. And there is this very interesting passage I want to read out to you. She says, they are discussing something, and then she says: “To meditate on these things is a great joy to both of us. That would upset the ideas of many men, wouldn’t it? They are convinced that women cannot do anything except talk about clothes. On the whole, they are not entirely wrong. Most women are terribly frivolous, or at least they seem to be, for very often this lightness on the surface hides a heavy heart and veils an unfulfilled life. Poor creatures! I know so many of them who deserve to be pitied.”

This is the woman who says this. And the poet says: “You are right. Women really deserve to be pitied. Almost all of them lack the protection they need and are like frail craft with no harbour to shelter them from the storm. For most of them do not receive the education that would teach them to protect themselves.”

Now, remember, she has written this uh, nearly 120 years ago, and it was describing the society then, but the instinct is very precise in what it describes, so that's what I want you to catch. Then she answers, she says: “That is true. Besides, even in the strongest of women, there is a deep need for affection and protection, for an all-powerful strength … even in the strongest of women, there is a deep need for affection and protection, for an all-powerful strength that leans over her and enfolds her in comforting sweetness. This is what she seeks in love, and when she has the good fortune to find it, it gives her confidence in life and opens up for her the door to every hope. Without that, life for her is like a barren desert that burns and shrivels up the heart.”

And the poet says: “Oh, how well you say these things! You say them like one who has experienced them very deeply.” [short-laughing] “I shall make a note of them for my next book, which will deal with the education of women.” [laughing] The poet says! But this description is quite fascinating, because it captures a certain archetype which Nature has used for a very long time to create these bonds.

There is an equivalent archetype for the man, for him to be the ‘knight in shining armour’ for the woman. But what does he conceive of in the woman? And again, if you look at some of the fairy tales, you'll find that sensitivity and the beauty and this multifacetedness of skills and expression and the power to express, to realise, and, and so on, and it becomes almost as if a fascinating possibility. And so, the, you find the certain complementarity in-between the two and again the need which comes from that archetypal.

(1:35:22):

So the reason I'm pointing to this is because many of those of us who choose in the journey of life to not necessarily have the, more romantic aspect or the partnership of a marriage, and so on, and to children, and other responsibilities, these things may sometimes act within you as a need. And as was described here, sometimes it can also mean that if the woman does not find that, it can create that sense of a kind of a barrenness and emptiness or for the men similarly something missing and something lacking.

And what do you do then? From a spiritual point of view, remember, soul is infinite potential, Divine is infinite potential. These are the two things. So either from deep within you, from the inmost centre, that influence can flow out and fill the gap and may complete to whatever extent, or from above, a certain quality of descent which can fill the gap. Sometimes the contact with these may be through some external means, through some  familiar form of divinity, of idol, of worship, of space, of kind of work, contact with a certain group of people, various ways it can happen.

You see in the Ashram, the Mother did this sometimes where necessary, where helpful, that she allowed certain partnerships between men and women to form, to the extent possible not allowing them to degrade, but, so that this, precisely these needs would be supported and the amplifying character of the support beneficial for both.

And so, I leave it at that. If you consider what the archetypes and the way they work within you, then you look at what it is in terms of your source also either within or above and spiritually the quality that it represents. So very often you will see this happen: women will feel more drawn to Sri Aurobindo and the quality of his consciousness, and men will feel more drawn to the Mother and the quality of her consciousness, or equivalent in whatever tradition you might be in precisely for this reason. Because you find that nourishing quality which you lack or which is missing or which you yearn for in that form, male, female, but actually the Divine quality of the masculine and the feminine, which you can receive either through that form if that's the way you relate to or directly even without the need for that form.

But think about this, observe within yourself. And if you find that there is such a gap, such a lack, a need, something missing, this would be the most direct and perhaps the easiest way to find that completeness. And then perhaps sometimes circumstances bring within your circle friends, companions, collaborators, various kinds in whom certain elements might also get filled, and so on.

But unless you are complete in yourself, you will always find a dependence externally to be a cause for great suffering. When you are complete in yourself, then you can build healthy relationships without that dependence, then you can give more than you get. When you are dependent and lacking, you need more than you can give, or the giving-taking binds you and limits and eventually causes suffering or breaks.

So always the approach should be make yourself as complete as possible so that you may freely give whatever you need to, and in that giving there is a sharing, exchanging, and in the collective consciousness, the completeness that grows, and as what I described earlier, the amplification of these qualities when we work together as a group, as a team, as a collectivity, and everyone grows, everyone benefits in that larger lift, and we have as if a collective vessel even for the Divine manifestation, for the Divine incarnation in a collective consciousness.

So I think with this I will complete this theme of the masculine and feminine discussions. Next time I will take up the questions but also deal with aspects, several questions around the gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, etc., which is a thing in itself not really directly connected to, to what we have been discussing so far. And there are questions, I won't have time today, but I'm going to take them up next time, so do leave them in the chat box.

(1:40:14):

For now, I will ask you to hold this ideal, this sense of deeper potential within each one of us and the help that you can receive spiritually, either from the Divine Consciousness directly or from deep within you, from your own soul which can draw out and fill whatever needs and amplify and give you the necessary support. Make yourself as complete as possible and then all the partnerships will be complimenting and healthy. And they will happen, inevitably, because our goal is a collective realisation in any case. Isn't it?

Namaste.

Alina (1:41:25):

Namaste. Very grateful for such a beautiful session! Thank you!

Sraddhalu (1:41:31):

Yes. May the Divine Mother lead our steps in our journey together.