Today, as societies become modern, cultures are becoming ‘body cultures.’ The body has become dominant, and we spend much time and energy on gender identification and we neglect other, more important aspects of life. As we evolve, other aspects should become more significant but that is not happening. The body has become more important than anything else. It is all about the body.
I would like to see people looking at themselves as human beings, and not just as men or women. It is only at certain moments in your life that you need to be a man or a woman to play a certain role. Sexuality is just a small part of you. If people look at life the way it is, sexuality would have only a small place in your life. It wouldn’t be so important. That’s how it is in every creature. Animals are not thinking about it all the time. When it is there in them, it is there. They do not constantly think who is male, who is female. It is only human beings who are stuck with it.
What you call as a man or a woman is just a question of a small physiological difference to serve a certain natural process. You don’t have to carry your sex on your sleeve all the time. If you identify yourself with a few limited body parts, you naturally get treated that way. Why have we attached so much significance to the body? No body part is worth giving that kind of importance to. If any part has to get that kind of significance, maybe the brain would qualify, not the genitals. So it is not necessary to play the role of a man or a woman, 24 hours a day. There are certain situations where you play the role. The rest of the time, you are neither man nor woman. If you do not transcend your obsession with gender, you will never be free.
The problem is essentially rooted in investing too much in the physicality of life. You think the physical body is the ultimate boundary. The moment boundaries of your physicality become the ultimate boundaries of life, you do not even experience your breath; you do not experience the very basis of what is keeping you alive.
In societies that were spiritually evolved, being of a certain gender was no problem because your gender is essentially about the physical. Spirituality is not about right and wrong or about God and heaven. Spirituality does not mean you have to believe or have a philosophy or something else. The whole dimension of spirituality is to grow beyond the physical. If your experience of life transcends limitations of physicality, then we say you are spiritual. If something beyond the physical becomes a living reality within you, then you can handle your physical dimension with extreme ease.
As long as one experiences oneself as a physical body, the bondage is simply inescapable. There can be freedom only when people begin to experience themselves as something more than the physical body. The whole spiritual process and the whole of yogic science are just about this – to help you experience the Self beyond the limitations of your physical body. That is where freedom is. It is not by becoming sexually free that someone will become free. If you become free from your gender, only then you are truly free.
~By S.J. Vasudev
