On J. Krishnamurti: Man and woman are two ends of duality — inseparable opposites

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

A religious man must be both masculine and feminine

~ J. Krishnamurti

Acharya Prashant (AP): You could read it either way that — he must be both feminine and masculine, or he must be neither masculine nor feminine. You know what masculinity stands for in popular parlance, as a psychological state, as a physical state. You know what masculinity stands for, and you also know what femininity stands for. Whenever you are associated with one of the two, that is your hell.

To be associated with both masculinity and femininity is to be able to see both together, and hence to be able to see that both are just one. That both sustain each other. That fact is, none of them can stand in isolation.

A woman is not always a woman. A woman becomes a woman, the moment she thinks of a man. A woman becomes a woman when a man crosses her. Otherwise, she is not a woman. She is just consciousness, free of identity. A man too is simply his attentiveness. But the moment a woman crosses him, he becomes a man. Are you getting it?

But if he can see the man and the woman together, if he can see the entire process, if he can see that here was somebody, standing in his vacant emptiness, and then a woman crosses him, and simultaneously the man in him wakes up, and the woman comes in existence, then he is able to stand separately from both man and woman and look at them.

“Oh! This is what happened.” The man was born, and parallelly a woman was born. Or a woman was born, and parallelly a man was born. Are you getting it?

Both man and woman are just objects of witnessing. It’s just that one object appears as a material object, and the other is just a mental object. When a woman passes by, the woman is a material object. And the man that is born simultaneously, is in the mind, thus a mental object. But both are born, and both are simultaneously born. In the presence of a woman, the man becomes a man. In the presence of a man, the woman becomes even more womanly.