How do you give up the male identity?

Someone was chastising me the other day that in order to attain the siddhi of the gopis one had to give up the puruṣābhimāna and think of oneself as a beautiful gopi maiden expert in the arts and dressed in the remnants of Radharani’s own wardrobe, with flowers in her hair, and so on.

He is pleased by our prema for Him in one of the five rasas. But it requires a change in identity, from thinking you are this material body, to knowing that you are His lover, young friend, servant or parent. If you want to be His lover, you have to identify as a young and very attractive woman, expert in all the arts, witty, expert in word jugglery and thus equipped in all ways to bring Him pleasure. You cannot approach him, thinking you are an old man, and that the material illusory form of your partner is Radha. You cannot enter madhurya at all with a male form or identity.

A beautiful picture indeed. And it seems so easy. Just like that, puruṣābhimāna disappears. Now what makes anyone think that this is so easy?

I have been going through the Third Pada of Yoga Sūtra rather thoroughly of late as my work for Swami Veda. I am on Sūtra 3.50 where, after having listed a progression of siddhis or vibhūtis, Patañjali finally names the big prize of kaivalya. This is where the knowledge of discrimination of spirit from matter results in tremendous spiritual power and omniscience. But when one lets go even of this knowledge, then the seed of all bondage is destroyed and the soul attains kaivalya, or “ultimate isolation” or “going solo,” as Swami Veda puts it. Then there is no puruṣābhimāna because the puruṣa is pure consciousness through negating any contact with prakṛti.

Though we call the system of the Yoga Sūtra aṣṭāṅga-yoga, having eight limbs, with samādhi only being the last of these, in fact there is a whole array of stages within samādhi, which are explained from a couple of different points of view in the first, third and fourth padas. The Yoga view is that the puruṣa is the witness and everything he experiences, even to the very perception that he is different from prakṛti is a manifestation of prakṛti’s hold over him. So to let go of even this knowledge means total separation from matter. What is left then? The puruṣa is situated in his own true being. What is that? We don’t really know. Patanjali is not forthcoming. It seems to me to be very close to total self annihilation.

But the fact that Patanjali says nothing on the subject is the reason that the yoga system, abridged or adulterated or not, is adaptable to other Indian systems of yoga, including bhakti-yoga.

Now when one recognizes that there are eleven or twelve different levels within samādhi, I have to ask my friend, do you really think it is so easy for a man to give up puruṣābhimāna? It is easier to think of one’s self as a nothing, a monad floating eternally like a baby in the amniotic fluid of the universal womb, than it is for a man to get to the bottom of what it means to be a male, to understand what womanhood is, and then to give up the former for the latter in a way that is genuine and absolute.

Gaudiya Vaishnavas have tried many ways, and it is not surprising that transvestism and trans-sexuality play a historical role. There is a process of changing gender that modern surgical technology has mastered, and .some men do undertake it in what seems to most people like a tremendously daring and radical fashion. But Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati and other levelheaded individuals saw that a religion that caters to such a peripheral element in human society could hardly point the way forward for humanity as a whole.

No one has really discussed the process of giving up male identity in the way that the Yoga Sutra does. Jiva Goswami writes about the levels of smarana, up to samādhi, but the actual process, in minute detail, of how the puruṣābhimāna disappears is not described. It is assumed that you want to become a gopi and that by meditating on yourself as such you will like it more and more until that is what you naturally identify yourself as that. Just as Yoga says one must be situated in one's own svarūpa, so do Gaudiya Vaishnavas, intimating that the natural self is feminine and that purification of the ego can only be done by adopting the ideal feminine nature.

But as to what that process is, other than a gradual diminution of the one and and adoption of the other, how it actually happens step-by-step, is nowhere described. A trans person could probably describe in more detail the process, and they start from a sense of opposite gender identity and still have to undergo various transformations.

The yoga system, which is allied to the knowledge system of sankhya, is mostly concerned with the nature of the material world as composed of an array of elements – buddhi, undifferentiated matter, matter set into motion by the disequilibrium of the gunas, ahankara, the five great elements, the senses and the sense objects, the mind. These are each seen in relation to one another and in each case one is given meditations in which these are broken down and separated.

Yogis are not interested in anything to do with human psychology that relates to rasa, by which I mean human interactions with life in the world. The difference is that of mechanistic psychology to depth psychologies and psychoanalysis.

So what are the interim steps that proceed from being attracted to Krishna’s Vrindavan lila, thinking of Krishna dancing with the gopis in the rasa dance, seeing the bhakti of the gopis, ramyā kācid upāsanā vraja-vadhū-vargeṇa yā kalpitā, and saying “I want that” and actually wanting it to the point of (to exaggerate) wanting a sex-change operation? And what is the point of a sex-change operation if one is still mentally more of a man than a woman? And why not dress like a woman, and dance like a woman, and feel like a woman, and even be attracted to men, in a way of seeing Krishna reflected in them?

It is very easy to say, as often is, that this is not a material gender change, but where do we see the mental gender change without thinking, “Is this latent homosexuality? What else can it mean?” The male mind rebels. And it will rebel even as long as one takes on masculine roles. It was this problem that led me on my course of investigation that led through a number of different paths and led me to where I am today, by way of reinterpretation in accordance with modern psychological findings.

Let us say that as good and faithful followers of our school of devotion, we accept the literalness of the Goswamis' intentions and of all those who were inspired by Radha and Krishna’s loves to imagine a world of beauty, love and play, a Neverneverland of permanent escape into Love. And that the secret to entering this world is to imagine yourself a young girl in love with a beautiful prince. Or, as a manjari, to idolize the most beautiful girl in the world and to love the ways she loves the most handsome flute-playing hero.

The process is one of identification, sādhāraṇīkaraṇa. But how can a man, a sannyasi, who accepts the male power roles, who separates himself from woman out of fear of sexuality, truly identify with that of which he has only minimal experience? Is it a refuge for those who harbor the love that dare not speak its name? Perhaps this whole process does require the same kind of absolute bifurcation with the world that Patanjali and the other serious yogis taught, and as was followed by the great exemplar tyagis of the Vaishnava schools.

We are in the rather strange situation in the current Vaishnava world of having male tyagis teaching women what it means to be a gopi, while women remain marginalized. And this manifests in the rather strange idea that Radha and Krishna have nothing at all to do with love in this world.

Is it possible, or necessary, to look at this business of gender identity in a way that confronts these kinds of questions directly?