Androgyny

 

 

Polarities meet. That's what I was talking about yesterday -- about what scientists call androgeny. Each man is both man and woman but you become identified with only one part of your being. You think you are a man but there is also a woman inside you, waiting to be recognised, received, accepted. And you go on denying it. You say, 'I am a man.' You will remain lopsided. If you are a woman there is also a man waiting within you, and you go on denying the man. Then you will never be one whole, you will always remain split.

 

There is a point of awareness, understanding, vision, where your man and woman inside meet and mingle and disappear into each other. That's what William Blake has called 'the inner marriage' when you have become both, androgynous, man and woman both. In India we have the perfect symbol for it -- ARDHANARISHWAR. There are statues of Shiva in which half of his body is man and half of his body is woman. He is both the lover and the beloved, the yin and yang. He is androgynous.

 

This same kind of meeting with the opposites goes on happening in many directions and many dimensions. Foolishness and wisdom are your two polarities. If you are wise and you deny your foolishness you are not fully wise, because a part of you has not yet been absorbed. A part of you is hanging around you; it has not yet become an integral part of you. If you are a fool and you think that you are a fool then your wise man inside you has been denied, suppressed. A wise man is both and yet neither. He transcends both so you can say he is neither, but because the dualities have disappeared in him and have come to become a new synthesis, you can call him both too.

 

-Osho, “Zen: The Path of Paradox, Vol 1, #2”