When
it comes right down to it, the world still struggles with balancing male and
female energies. I spent 21
credits of my college education trying to get to the bottom of the issue by
taking Women’s Studies classes. A
fact that met with much derision by those who thought learning something about
women was a waste of time. We
have been treated as if we were men with some parts missing and others added. But there are things that are different between the sexes!
There is a deep cost to our self-expression when we act as if we
don’t need to know. I am not
about to suddenly, on a Sunday, go off on a feminist rant in honor of
Mother’s Day, but I would like to honor the Divine Feminine or what is
sometimes known as “The Valley Spirit” according to the Tao te Ching.
We
live in a world that thinks figuring things out from a masculine perspective
is sufficient. This means that
everything must first be rational. Nothing
else is of value. It also leads
to thinking that has whatever is masculine treated with a priority over that
which is feminine. The results of
this include the fact that scientific testing of medications is often only on
men, and is viewed as a sufficient test, without regard to the differences in
our physiology particularly the endocrine system, or the fact that children
may have differing needs, and are not just small adult males.
We all know there are differences.
And we may not necessarily know why those differences are treated so
oddly sometimes. Why is it that
women and children are sometimes treated in a way that is more indicative of
their relationship to a man, than as a distinct individual? There are ancient roots for some of this, and the roots live
in race consciousness. Some of
the ideas found their way into the Bible.
When we view these ideas, it is important to look and see if underlying
an idea is Love or fear. Some of
this comes from the misinterpretation of ancient iconography by
anthropologists who lived unquestioningly by patriarchal standards and ideals. We are still awakening to how these leftovers from thousands
of years of patriarchy have affected every aspect of our lives.
Briefly, let us just say this: not
every feminine icon that has been dug up is a fertility symbol.
Not everything that a woman is has something to do with her being
dominated by a man in some way. This
may sound like something coming from seventies feminism, but let me tell you a
brief story to illustrate how the collective consciousness is changed.
Around
150 years ago a large group of women met at Akron, Ohio to discuss women’s
suffrage, the right for women to vote. Among
the women in attendance were friends and associates of the likes of Elizabeth
Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Most people, by now, have heard of at least one of these
women. Also in attendance,
sitting in the back of the room was a tall, stately black woman, a former
slave. After sitting through
many, many speeches she approached the stage, she met with a few stares, to
say the least, she was six feet tall and quite commanding in her dignity, and
she said something really amazing when she got to the podium.
Have
you ever been sitting around while your family or friends discussed you or
your life like you weren’t even there?
It must have felt something like that for her, to be sitting in this
assemblage of white middle class women and a few men, who were discussing
whether or not women should be given the right to vote, and how they might go
about accomplishing it. No
mention was made of votes for women of any other color.
The usual arguments were being made by a man that women were delicate
flowers that required special treatment and respect. Sojourner Truth, a former slave, now a preacher, mounted the
stage and said with a Dutch accent:
"Dat
man ober dar say dat womin needs to be helped over carriages, and lifted ober
ditches and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody eber helps me into
carriages, or ober mud puddles, or bigs me any best place. And ain't I a
woman? Look at me Looka at me arm. I have ploughes and planted and gathered
into barns, and no mand could head me! And ain't I a woman." She concluded her argument, saying "And how came
Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and the woman who bore him.
Man, where was your part?" (Anti-Slavery Bugle, June, 1851)
We
forget how shortsighted we are. Who
wants to be reminded that they were looking only so far?
We think we are taking in all there is to take in, when sometimes the
most generous thing we can do is say that we are doing the best that we can.
In the 1850’s it was hard enough to imagine middle class white women
voting, it took 70 more years before women’s suffrage was US law. It took 50 years after that before civil rights law passed,
and it took the likes of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and Frederick
Douglass to begin speaking that idea into to existence.
Sojourner Truth also spoke the very thing that has always frightened
men when she asked “Man,
where was your part?" Until very
recently, a man might not be able to see their “part.”
The connection women have to all of human life is obvious, we give
birth. We are mothers.
In
December of 1945 some Egyptian peasants found 1000 pages of ancient papyrus
manuscripts buried by the east bluff of the upper Nile valley. The texts were
translations from Greek originals into Coptic, which was the Hellenistic stage
of the ancient Egyptian language from 300 B.C. to 700 A.D. These manuscripts
have been called the Gospel of Phillip--as can be inferred from its entries
which have been numbered as follows: 51, 82, 98, & 101—and was completed
after 70 A.D. by Philip, who was called the Evangelist.
Phillip the Evangelist appears in the Book of Acts at Verses 6:1-6,
8:4-40, and 21:8 ff. There is no known previous citation of this text, which
is an elaborate and elegant series of reflections on Israel and the Messiah.
Only
truly important, and less-obvious, cross-references are given in this Gospel.
In place of the Greek form of his name, Jesus, the original Hebrew has been
used: “Yeshua,” meaning "Yahweh-Savior" (Ph 20) and "IøAm,"
which represents the divine self-naming:
There
in verse 30, Phillip writes” He says today in the Eucharist:’ Oh thou who
have mated the perfect Light with the Holy Spirit, mate also our Angels with
our Imagery!’”
Through the metaphorical
interpretation we use with the rest of the Bible we can look for what the
meaning of these verses from Phillip. Often
in spiritual texts marriage is a metaphor for the balancing of the Divine
Feminine with the Divine Masculine. If
we go back 2000 years, some of the same problems existed in society as do now.
2000 years ago, what is essential to all women was considered Divine,
but it was not generally thought that ordinary women could cultivate what was
best about herself if it had been lost to the man who essentially owned her.
This meant that only virgins and married women were considered worthy
in any way, and their worth was as chattel.
A woman who was a virgin could bring her father some material benefit
when he traded her off into marriage. And
for her part, a bride could bring certain wealth to her husband, in the dowry
that she brought to the marriage. Because
it was clear that children belonged to the women who bore them, men had to
find a way that something belonged to them.
To find a way to “own” what appeared to be the source of all life,
this seemed the ultimate kind of ownership.
Controlling who could mate with whom assured men of power and a complex
set of laws arose along with this idea. In
cultures where all men and women were free there was little ownership of
property, most things were shared in community, but these civilizations fell
to the influence of patriarchy, where all was owned by men. We have spent the
past 2000 years, and struggle still with what some men knew, and feared, that
all life is borne of the divine feminine.
The
Valley Spirit never dies.
It
is named the Mysterious Female.
And
the Doorway of the Mysterious Female
Is
the base from which sprang Heaven and Earth.
It
is there within us all the while;
Draw
upon it as you will, it never runs dry
Tao
Te Ching, Verse 6
This
is an interior view of life that has Lao Tzu recognizing that all life comes
from within. While in a material
sense women have an obvious interior nature, what is truly interior is common
to all humankind. Just as the Yin
and Yang symbols show the interdependence, the reliance that masculine and
feminine have on one another for their existence.
One part of life cannot exist, and be properly and fully expressed,
without the other. Most of the
time we live our lives in the modern world expressing masculine ideas such as
competition, aggression, struggle, emphasizing the life of the intellect over
the authority of the heart.
According
to Joseph Campbell:
People
say that what we’re seeking is a meaning for life.
I don’t think that is what we are really seeking.
I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so
that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
When
we focus on living life according to values that have been identified as
masculine to the detriment of those values that we have labeled as feminine,
we stunt our own growth. A Divine
life cannot be had where we disown some part of ourselves.
We have to seek out a balancing maturity, to recognize that we have
been seeing through a glass darkly and to adjust our point of view, knowing
the landscape will continue to change. It
is in and through our spiritual life that we can make these changes.
This requires some charity toward oneself.
From
The Feminine Face of God by Marion Woodman,
"One
of the problems women have today is that they are not willing to find the
river in their own life and surrender to its current. they're not willing to
spend time, because they feel they are being selfish. They grow up trying to
please other people and they rarely ask themselves, Who am I?...They live in
terms of pleasing rather than in terms of being who they are."
I
don’t think that this is a problem for women alone. What man knows himself any better? This is NOT just a difficult time for women, men often have no
idea what is expected of them. Many
men have still not been taught as children how to take care of all of what it
means to be a human being either. As much as men may know how to assert power,
there is just as deep a chasm in the modern man’s ability to express feeling
without discomfort and embarrassment. And
often, men feel trapped in a role that requires that they partner with women
who are also unable to be authentic, and if either is attempting to learn to
be authentic, in the face of all ready not knowing what is required of them,
they too are required to make an effort to live authentically.
There is a lot of confusion. How
do we begin to live authentically?
Social
theorist Theodore Roszak maintains that all the popular interest in the
marvelous is the unfolding of an authentic spiritual quest, and a
transformation of human personality of evolutionary proportions is in
progress. "We stand in witness," he says, "to a planet-wide
mutation of mind which promises to liberate energies of will and resources of
vision long maturing in the depths of our identity."
This gives me great hope for who we are becoming.
Roszak says that if we continue with
“The
strenuous and foolish things that people in our time seek to do with history -
to multiply thermonuclear overkill endlessly, to raise up economics of
limitless growth, to build conglomerate empires that straddle the globe, to
turn the planet into one vast industrial artifact, to produce without limit,
to consume beyond all sane need . . . all this is what people use to fill the
emptiness inside them.
Unfinished
Animal
(When)
things move slower; they stabilize at a simpler level. But none of this is
experienced as a loss or a sacrifice. Instead, it is seen as a liberation from
waste and busywork, from excessive appetite and anxious competition that
allows one to get on with the essential business of life, which is to work out
one's salvation with diligence.
Person/Planet,
1978
As modern metaphysicians we don’t need to be saved from
our lives but from our short-sightedness.
We are a teaching that repeats from the Bible “Ask and it shall be
given,” but this does not mean that we need be greedy either.
Greed is a product of consciousness gone out of balance.
There is no need to stockpile when all ones needs are met.
This is the real power of a balancing of masculine and feminine.
That we can have faith that our needs will be met abundantly.
We are a faith that allows the laws of nature to operate without any
interference generated by fear. We
need only plant the seeds of what we want without any fear that planting an
acorn will result in anything other than a mighty Oak tree.
Ernest Holmes wrote in the Science of Mind published in 1926:
FEMININE
The
Universal Medium or Soul has been called the "Womb of Nature" and
"The Holy Mother," because It is receptive to the Spirit and is
impregnated with the Divine Ideas. It gives birth to the Ideas of the Spirit
and is, therefore, the Feminine Principle of Nature.
NEUTRAL
Soul
is neutral. Like the soil it will produce any or all kinds of plants. Having
no conscious mind of Its own, It receives all ideas and works them out into
form. We must always remember that the Creative Medium is neutral. If It could
choose, It could reject, and this is just what It cannot do. It is bound to
accept and act, just as the soil does when we plant cabbages in the ground. It
does not argue, but at once goes to work to produce cabbages. When we plant
potatoes it does the same thing. We may plant cabbages and potatoes with roses
and pansies; and we shall receive all four plants from the one neutral
creative medium which knows neither good nor bad, but is conscious only of its
ability to do.
It
is time when we can set aside our fears with a commitment that we will do so
until our fears no longer exist. It is now ours to choose what kinds of seeds shall we place
in consciousness. What Divine
ideas shall we nurture within ourselves?
We move into a time when all that we are is worthy of honor and the
freedom of expression that each and every being has as her birthright.
We move into a new time and a new realization of what it means to say
that there is a power for good in the universe that is greater than we are,
and we can use it.
Thank
you for being here today!
Emerson
Center for
