Life Is Within You – In Gita Verse 8.16 From the highest planet in the material world down to the lowest, all are places of misery wherein repeated birth and death take place. But one who attains to My abode, O son of Kuntī, never takes birth again.
Few things need to be understood that if it is a universal requirement then even Krishna also has to take birth. So the one who is a self-realized person will take the birth but as a consciousness, playfulness, as a role to perform. So he will not take birth to suffer.
Krishna is not talking about our physical life and death. What he is saying – Religion is a science to achieve life. Life is beyond death. Birth dies; life, never. To achieve this life you have to do something. Birth is given to you. Your parents have done something: they have loved each other, they have melted into each other, and out of their life force, melting into each other, a new phenomenon, a new seed – you – was born. But you have not done anything for it: it is a gift. Remember, birth is a gift. That’s why all cultures pay so much respect to parents – birth is a gift, and you cannot repay it. The debt cannot be repaid. What can you do to repay it? Life has been given to you, but you have not done anything for it.
Religion can give you a new birth, a rebirth. You can be reborn, but this birth will happen through some alchemical change within you. Just as the first birth happened through two life forces meeting outside you – they created an opportunity for you to enter, to be born: a deep alchemy – now a similar thing has to be done within you. Your parents, your mother and your father, met. Two forces, feminine and masculine, were meeting to create an opportunity for some new entity to be born. Two opposite forces were meeting, two polarities were meeting. And whenever two polarities meet, something new is born, a new synthesis is achieved. A similar thing has to happen within you.
You also have two polarities within you, the feminine and the masculine. Let me explain it a little in detail. Your body is born out of two polarities: cells from your mother and cells from your father – they create your body. You have both types of cells – those which came from your mother and those which came from your father. Your body consists of two polarities, feminine and masculine. You are both, everyone is both. Whether you are man or woman makes no difference. If you are a man you have a woman within you: your mother is there. If you are a woman you have a man within you: your father is there. They can again meet within you. And the whole of Yoga, the whole of Tantra, the alchemy, the whole process of religion, is how to create an orgasm, a deep intercourse between polarities within you. When they meet within you, a new type of being is born, a new life becomes alive.
One type of orgasm is possible between your body and the body of the polar-opposite sex; it can happen only for a single moment because you meet only on the periphery. The peripheries meet and then they separate. Another type, a deeper type of orgasm, can happen within. But then you meet at the center and there is no need to separate again. Sexual ecstasy can only be momentary; spiritual ecstasy can be eternal. Once attained, you need not lose it. Really, once attained, it is difficult to lose it, impossible to lose it. It becomes such an integration the fragments disappear completely.
That’s why when someone asked Buddha, “Who are you? A deva, a heavenly being?” he said, “No.” And the questioner went on asking if he was this or that. Then the questioner became desperate, because Buddha went on saying no. Then finally he asked, “At least you must say that you are male. You must say yes.” Buddha said, “No.” “Then are you a female?” the man asked desperately. Buddha said, “No.” – Because a new unity had come into being which was neither male nor female.
When your inner man and inner woman meet, you are neither: you transcend sex. That’s the meaning of the oldest Indian image of Shiva as Ardhanarishvara – half man, half woman. That is the symbol of the inner meeting. Shiva is neither: half man, half woman – both and neither. He transcends sex.
Remember, unless you transcend sex, you cannot transcend duality. This is a deep psychological problem – and not only psychological, but ontological also. If you remain a man or a woman, how can you conceive the oneness of existence? You cannot. Being a man, you cannot conceive yourself as one with the woman. Being a woman, you cannot conceive yourself as one with the man. A duality persists.
Sex is the basic duality. And we have been arguing and discussing for centuries how to attain the nondual. But we go on discussing it as if it is some intellectual matter: “How to attain the nondual?” It is not an intellectual matter; it is ontological, existential. You can attain the nondual only when the duality within you disappears. It is not a question of meditating on the nondual and thinking, “I am brahman.” Nothing will come out of it; you are simply deluding yourself unless the basic duality of sex disappears within you, unless you come to the moment where you cannot say who you are – man or woman.
This happens only when your inner man and woman melt so much that they dissolve into each other and all the boundaries are lost, all the distinctions are lost, and they are one. When your inner orgasm, the spiritual ecstasy happens, you are neither. Only when you are neither is life born.
Life always comes out of oneness. And the life Osho talks about, or Jesus talks about and Buddha talks about, is the life which will happen when inside you – within you – again a communion, a melting, happens, and the two sexualities within you dissolve.
Krishna says – Birth and death – again a duality. They will disappear when you are neither male nor female. When you have a consciousness which goes beyond both, birth and death disappear, matter and mind disappear, this world and that world disappear, heaven and hell disappear. All dualities disappear when the basic duality within you disappears, because all dualities are simply echoing and re-echoing the basic division within you.
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