Paramahamsa Nithyananda Explains What it Means to be Beyond Gender
“Swamiji, your image seems to shift between male and female. Why?”
This is a frequently asked question to Nithyananda, as many experience him as the divine feminine, and many others as Sadashiva, the male component. During the entire religious persecution, when Nithyananda declared that he is physically incapable of sexual acts, he was put on a media trial regarding his gender and sexuality. On undergoing an impotency test, they found that while they couldn’t label him as incapable of sexual acts (as kissing and hugging are also considered sexual acts), they could say with ease that he had vascular impotence. His hormone levels were that of a 6 year old boy. His testosterone levels were so low, that it didn’t give rise to even a need for sexual acts. Nithyananda has explained this several times in his satsangs and discourses.
Firstly, an enlightened being cannot be constrained into one body. Forget about constraining them into one gender. In Vedic tradition, we call enlightened beings as transcendental gender, not transgender – Transcendental gender. Neither male nor female, nor gay or lesbian or transgender. It’s a separate kind of body, we call it ‘Divya Sarira’. This body reflects what the onlooker wants to see. If they want to relate with a female form, it will simply reflect that. The way one wants to perceive, they will be perceiving it that way. So it is, even in language, words.
Sanskrit gives enlightened beings an exemption from all the grammar rules. The Sanskrit grammarian \ says that enlightened beings express something which can never be expressed through words. So, they are exempted from all grammar rules. In the same way, an enlightened being cannot be constrained even to one body. Expressing through just one body is a struggle for such a being, because he feels himself in all things and beings.
You can never constrain him to one gender, whether psychologically or physiologically. Actually, the enlightenment itself is a physiological, psychological mutation.
When a person becomes enlightened, they are neither male or female. They always live beyond the body. Enlightened man is beyond sex, but the people who are trying to go beyond sex can also become enlightened. Going beyond sex happens as a byproduct, side effect of enlightenment. That cannot be a technique or method of enlightenment. Enlightenment means something more than suppressing yourself. It needs meditation, it means transforming your consciousness.
“I can say – three things happened to me permanently after enlightenment. First thing, the inner chattering is not there. Pure Space.
The second thing – the idea, the boundary, the bar that something ends here and here starts the world – that body of consciousness is not there. Whenever I have to handle the body, my body moves. But when I relax, again that idea is not there, that boundary feeling doesn’t exist.
Third thing, even though my body is a male body, the identity male or female has disappeared. The psychological identity that I am male or I am female, that doesn’t exist, it is not there.”
“I have to carry one body. That is why I am carrying the male body. Otherwise the consciousness, I don’t feel I am male or female. I’m only feeling I’m beyond both.”