By Sadhguru – Founder, Isha Foundation

Today, as societies become modern, cultures are becoming completely “body cultures.” The body has become the most dominant part. As we evolve, other aspects should become more significant but unfortunately, the body has become more important than anything else. It is all about the body. The way society is structuring itself and the way we are shaping the minds of our children is that if you look at a man or woman, you have to look at them as something which is of some pleasure to you. Society is going to extremes with this.

I would like to see people looking at themselves as human beings, not 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 fall into its rightful place — a small place in your life. It wouldn’t be so big. That’s how it should be. 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. Otherwise 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 the street 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 one body part? No body part is worth giving that kind of importance to. If any part has to get that kind of significance, maybe the brains 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 neither have to be a man nor a woman. If you stay as a man or a woman, you will never be free.

The problem is essentially rooted in investing too much in the physicality of life. You think this physical body is the ultimate boundary. The moment the 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.

Wherever societies were spiritually oriented, being a man or a woman was no problem because you being a man or a woman is essentially physical. Spirituality is not about right or wrong or about God or 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 the limitations of physicality, then we say you are spiritual. If something beyond the physical becomes a living reality within you, you can handle your physical 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 is just about this — whether you are a man or a woman, 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 sexes, only then you are free.

[Ranked amongst the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and bestselling author. Sadhguru has been conferred the “Padma Vibhushan,” India’s highest annual civilian award, by the Government of India in 2017, for exceptional and distinguished service.]