[Continuing the earlier series om Reincarnation and Karma]
Sex a specific form of duality: The individualized soul has its beginning and source in the infinite, formless, sexless, and indivisible being of God, who is beyond all forms of duality or evolution. With the beginning of the individualized soul, there is the beginning of duality and evolution, though the specific form of duality consisting in the distinction and attraction based upon sex makes its appearance at a later stage of evolution. Duality exists as soon as there is subject and object – a center of consciousness, however dim, and its environment. Sex, on the other hand, is a specific kind of bodily attraction that presupposes differentiation of forms, a specific kind of entanglement of the psyche with the forms, and specific expressions of life and energy.
Sex in subhuman forms: In the mineral kingdom there are no sexual distinctions. In the kingdom of plants and trees, the bodily differentiations of sex, with specialized biological functions, have come into existence. Plants and trees do not generate sexual consciousness, since the development of consciousness in plants and trees is rudimentary and its expressions are not influenced by these bodily differentiations. Contact between the male and the female in plants and trees is (due to their being fixed in the ground) not direct but only indirect, through the intermediate agency of winds, bees, and so forth. Therefore, from the standpoint of the evolution of forms, sexual differentiation may be said to have begun to emerge even at the level of plants and trees; but from the point of view of their own consciousness, they cannot be said to have any sexual distinctions because their consciousness of duality is not in any way colored by sex.
-Discourses 7th Ed., p319