Monday, March 1, 2010

The Identity Crisis - Homosexuality

Homosexuality is a justly case of identity crisis. It is not just a gender crisis but a more subtle situation. They identify themselves not their body but they identify themselves with their mind. Entrap inside a male body, they think, the mind dictates a female identity, same as in the case of lesbians. Lesbians think they are masculine male entrap in a female body.

Every body identifies themselves as the tags as mark of their location, race or religion. One thinks I am black or brown, Chinese or Americans, catholic or Muslim, fat or skinny, tall or short, and male or female. These are the bodily levels we set note on our identity.

Just because a person is in male body doesn’t mean that the person is male; and just because a person or soul is in a female body doesn’t mean that the person is female. This is because the person is not the material body, you are not the body, I am not this body. At death you will all leave this suit of clothes behind, these bodily designations.

The gross material body is made up of the elements earth, water, fire etc., can be compared to the jacket and shirt and the subtle material mind, material desires etc., can be compared to the undershirt or underwear. In fact you are all these, you are not the jacket or the under shirt. You are covered by a gross material body and a subtle material body. You are the living entity, the life force situated within these gross and physical casings. The identity crisis exists for a person who is not aware of this fact.

Individuals in men’s bodies but who want to enjoy as women should appreciate the fact that they are not women trapped in men’s bodies rather they are living entities covered by their desire to enjoy as women, but their “female” desire is encased in a male’s body. In other words, they are actually identifying themselves to be the subtle body, the mind and desires. A person can realize that the mind is not the self. Homosexuals, for example, can separate themselves from the tendency to enjoy as women as something apart from themselves; in the same way that they can experience their body as apart from themselves.

Through meditation, a person says, “my body”, as if the body is their possession, “My mind” which point to the fact that the mind is also a possession of the person. I have a body and I have a mind – but I am neither the body nor the mind.

A person can watch images going through his mind in the same way he watches television. One can act as a witness to the activities of the mind or he may dream and say, “Oh, I had a terrible nightmare”, but as soon as the dream is gone, you still exist, as the witness viewing your dream. So you are not the mind.

Desires are continually changing. A desire to enjoy in a certain way may exist but then it goes away but the living entity stays. The living entity, who is aware of that desire, continues to exist. The homosexual should be aware that desires are changing day to day, moment to moment. The person is the one aware of these ever-changing desires, feelings and thoughts. Homosexuals can choose his ever changing desires, he can just watch and be the spectator of the streams of his desires, he can rid those perverted desires or thoughts and experience how hard to control them or he can give in to them. This shows that the person aware to make choices is apart from these flows of desires and they are not the mind’s desires or the mind itself.

Homosexuals somehow experience that their gross body is something foreign; they have the wrong kind of body on. Their subtle body, the mind does not match their gross body.
This is all due to their desires and activities in their past life, such desires and activities caused them to transmigrate to gross body which does not match up with their subtle body.

In this lifetime, we had already experienced transmigrating from on kind of body to another. The soul transmigrates from a baby body to a boyhood body, and then migrates into a young man’s body. A person who used to live in a young body now lived in a middle-aged body. And the person who used to live in a middle-aged body now lives in an old body. We see this process around us, person dropping one body, then leaving that body and taking a new one.
It is not the same body – the body of an old man is not just an old version of the same body he had as a youth. All the cells have changed, the bones have changed, the whole body is different. This is a scientific fact. The body is made up of cells which are constantly being replaced. The body is constantly changing.

“As the embodied soul continually passes, in this body,
from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes
into another body at death. The self-realized soul is not
bewildered by such a change.”
(Bhagavad-gita 2:13)

In the same way that there is continuity throughout the gradual changes of the present body, there is continuity in the life of the conditioned soul. The desires that a person cultivates during the lifetime of the present gross body do not die when the body dies. They remain with the living being and act as a link or connection with the next body. The bridge between one type of body and the next is the mentality of the living being – the subtle body or mind.

To be continued.



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