Speaking about the fundamental differences between male and female, Sadhguru discusses the elemental tendencies of one’s physical and mental body, explaining the significance behind this complementary engineering, and the possibility for one’s perception to rise beyond the physical nature.

Q: Namaskaram, Sadhguru. My question is, in terms of the five elements and how they function in the human system, what is the difference in body and mind between males and females?

Sadhguru: This need not be true for every individual, but generally, the female is leaning more towards water while the male is leaning more towards earth. This gives a female a certain level of flexibility, both in body and mind. Leaning towards the earth gives the male a certain sense of firmness and assertion, a certain rigidity, which also gives a certain strength of manifestation.

A lot of women think they are intuitive. It is not necessarily true with every woman, but by nature, because the experiential dimension of the female is a little higher than the logical, they may be a little less logical. As I said, this is not true with every individual. The general tendency is that a woman wants to experience life, while a man wants to understand life. It is a big difference, the way they approach it. This is mainly because of the tilt of the female towards water and the male towards earth. The other elements play differently in each individual.

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Body and Brain

There is no such thing as body and mind, there is just body, body and body! There is a physical body, there is a mental body and there is an energy body. There is no such thing as mind, as such. That is a European invention. Generally, the thought process that is happening is considered as mind. The thought process is just one aspect of the mental body. There is much more happening right across the system.

By modern definition, what you are referring to as mind is just a certain amount of memory and intelligence. If you look at the nature of your body, every cell in your body has more memory – a trillion times more memory – than you carry in your conscious mind. And we always measure one’s intelligence in terms of the complexity of activity that one can perform. If one can do only simple things, we say, “He is a simpleton.” If one can do many complex things, then we say, “He is an intelligent person.” If you go by this definition, every cell in your body, every molecule of DNA in the system is performing more complex functions than your thought process can ever imagine.
So both in terms of memory and the complexity of activity, which is referred to as intelligence, every cell in your body is far more than your entire brain put together. The only thing is, it is functioning on an automatic mode – you are not conscious of it. With the mental activity, as we refer to the psychological space, you can be reasonably conscious of it. But you are generally not conscious of the mental body that you carry.

Both men and women can train themselves, or can become capable or competent of what the other is competent of, in the mental space. That is, a woman, by training, can very much become competent of whatever thought a man is competent of, or a man can become competent of whatever intuitiveness a woman may be competent of. But that will need a certain amount of training. By nature, they would tend to lean this way because in one, the earth element is strong, while in the other, the water element is strong or dominant.

Complementary Elements

This disposition of elements in male and female is the way it is essentially to fulfill certain basic responsibilities of being male and female. These responsibilities can be argued about today in the modern world because we have created an artificial world of our own. Our cities, our homes, our dwelling places, our working places are all of our making. Here, the gender differences are leveled out.

But if you lived in the wild, then you would see that these dispositions were naturally necessary. Above all, we exist because a woman that we call our mother bore us. This means that generating the next generation of people is the responsibility of the female body. Because of that, it is made in a certain way, and water is an important element for the reproductive purpose.

The way these two dimensions of the human species are engineered elementally is complementary to each other till a certain age. After that, they reorganize themselves to become their own. After that, people may try to make their emotions paramount and still try to continue that, more out of habit and emotional insecurity. Otherwise, the rapport between these two dimensions – of leaning towards water and leaning towards earth on the elemental level – is only to a certain point.

How quickly one works out of it also depends on how much akash one develops within themselves. Once one’s perception rises beyond the physical nature, then suddenly there is no male, there is no female. There is just a human form, which can be made competent in many different ways. Competence is not just of doing things, competence is of perception. Competence is as a life, not as a person – that one’s life can become more competent than another life to be alive. To be more alive than everything else around you, this means you know life in larger dollops than others.

Aspiring to Transcend

Every human being is capable of this. It is just that socially, people are unfortunately conditioned to believe that they should continue with the same things that they have been doing all their life, otherwise you are a cop-out. Because of this very judgmental and stigmatizing society and out of their own emotional and psychological insecurities, they continue doing the same things. Otherwise, this aspiration of wanting to transcend is there in every human being. If they give themselves a little bit of time away from their office, from their family, from their friends, from social media, from their phones and computers, everyone will know that they need to transcend their present limitations, there is no question about it. They do not need a teaching, they do not need someone goading them all the time. Every human being will know if they just give themselves some time.

Editor’s Note: Excerpted from Sadhguru’s discourse at the Isha Hatha Yoga School’s 21-week Hatha Yoga Teacher Training program. The program offers an unparalleled opportunity to acquire a profound understanding of the yogic system and the proficiency to teach Hatha Yoga. The next 21-week session begins on July 16 to Dec 11, 2019. For more information, visit www.ishahathayoga.com or mail info@ishahatayoga.com