S: What are the male and female elements?
K: The male is generally aggressive, violent, dominating, and the female is quiet;
it is taken for submissiveness and then exploited by man. But submissiveness is
really gentleness which gradually conquers the other.
When the female and the male are in complete harmony, the quality of both
changes; it is no longer male or female, but something totally different. The male
and female as the positive and negative are dualistic because of their very nature.
Whereas the complete balance, the harmony of the two has a different quality.
It is like the quality of the earth in which everything lives, but is not of it. I
have noticed this operating very often. When the whole mind withdraws from the
physical environment, it is as though the mind is very far away—far away not in
space and time, but in a state which nothing can touch. This state is not an
abstraction nor a withdrawal, but an inward, absolute non-being. When this
perfect harmony takes place, because there is no conflict, it has its own vitality. It
does not destroy the other. So conflict is not only in the outer but also in the
inner. And when this conflict completely comes to an end, there is a mutation
which is not touched by time.
P: The alchemist called this the birth of Kumāra, of the magical child—he who
never grows old, he who is completely innocent.
K: It is very interesting, but alchemy has become synonymous with so much
phony magic.
P: But the alchemists, the Masters who were known as rasa-siddhas—the
holders of the essence—maintained that what they described they had seen with
their own eyes, what they recorded was not from hearsay nor from the dictation
of a teacher. There is another factor of interest. A great deal of attention was paid
in alchemy to the instrument, the vessel. The science of metallurgy developed out
of this. One of the vessels or yantras was known as the garbha-yantra, the womb
vessel. It is a key word in alchemy. Is there such a thing as preparing the womb
of the mind?
K: The moment you use the word ‘preparation’, it means a process in which time
is involved.
P: The alchemists were also conscious that at the point of mutation, at the point
of the fixation of mercury, and at the birth of the timeless, time was not involved.
K: Do not use the word ‘preparation’. Let us put it this way. Is there a necessary
state, a necessary background, a necessary vessel which can contain this? I
should say not, because when they found the boy Krishnamurti, the people who
were supposedly clairvoyant for the time being saw that he had no quality of
selfishness and, therefore, was worthy of being the vessel. And I think that that
has remained right through.