One of the blessings of naming “masculine” and “feminine” aspects of spirituality is that space is created to name afflictions, accept differentiation, and release hidden beauty. Out of this unrepressed spaciousness, new opportunity for inner harmony and unity can emerge.
Earlier:
One of the curses about dividing spirituality between the genders is confusion, as if spiritual qualities and dimensions are being shared out, in a manner which is far from authentic.
In human form we are all an exquisite harmony of male and female aspects. Yet in opening the differentiation of male and female, the wisdom of nonduality can get obscured in a rising of the energy of pain.
The gender split is a Pandora’s box that when opened can unleash both Satan and his Wife. It can feel, in terms of evolution, like one step forwards, three backwards.
When inquiring into the Mother Wound, it is paramount to stress that this is a wound of humanity. It’s shared by both men and women, with only subtle variation. Not only this, but it is shared by the male aspect and the female aspect within ourselves. We are all children of the mother, and the wound of that primal separation plays out in dark harmony between us all. Where there is too much creation, the perfect reaction will be an equal amount of destruction. This is how polarity plays out in the world of form.
Each movement within creation takes form through a perfect attunement of active and receptive or push and pull. For example, the movement of an arm through space has a certain speed which is a direct function of release and restraint.
If we hit our hand on the table with full force. We will get back a totally equivalent degree of pain in the body. If this pain is not allowed or received, then we are likely to do the same thing again, causing damage to the whole.
In the world of form, receptivity (the female aspect) is the container of creation, form and movement. Let us give some examples:
- In reproduction, the female aspect contains the male aspect (sperm). The incubation happens within the female body. Out of this, she births both male and female, herself and the father.
- In communication, there is an interchange of speaking and listening. Yet the whole conversation is “heard” by the unified listener of all parties (the receptive, female aspect).
- In physical movement, navigation depends on the space between, not the objects in the way. Receptivity (the female aspect) contains both objects and space.
- In vision: we can actively choose where to focus our eyes, yet that choice is itself dependent on the reception of the whole vista.
- In thought: our thinking can seem to be all powerful. Yet thought is utterly dependent both on the silence between thoughts and the witnessing of them. Both these factors are receptive.
- Manifestation depend on reception of need, environmental feed back and the allowance of inner compulsion. All these are aspects of the inner feminine.
- Transformation depends on the ability to let go, and the release of the holding of temporal form. Whether externally or internally, this mechanism of release depends on female aspect.
- The physical universe, (from the cellular level through to the birth and death of planets) is formed through a precise interplay of creation and destruction. The container of this interplay is the feminine aspect. The birth process is a strong physical example of this.
- In healing, we cannot heal anything (whether physical, mental or spiritual) without allowing the affliction to be there in the first place. Often this allowance is the lion’s share of the healing process.
- In the realization of the illusion of a separate body, we must fully allow physical sensation. Only through the allowance of physical sensations (changing in form and passing in time and perspective) do we realize (from the experiential gut) that the physical body is a non-absolute perspetive.
Allowance, acceptance, release, receptivity are critical to the world of form in moving into alignment and harmony with the wider whole. The very balance between active and receptive, creation and destruction, is contained within the female aspect. As such, the Mother Wound and its multi-layered impact is found at the causal layer of suffering.
Rejection or repression of the female aspect has the direct effect of ignorance, loss of vitality, illusion and suffering.
The bypassing, marginalization and derogation of the female, or the mother – whether socially, personally or internally – through an unconscious allegiance to “God the Father” as a causal source of authority – creates imbalance across human endeavor. It frustrates evolution, nourishes conflict, and brings humanity awkwardly to its knees as a misfit within natural harmony and universal law.
In New Age spirituality, this imbalance is found in the absolutist view of light as the end-point of definitions of source.
Although light can seem to be non-physical, it is actually still composed of physical elements: it has form. The individual photon is birthed from the darkness and to darkness it returns.
The metaphoric repression of this darkness (the great receiver and source), is a fundamental example of imbalance between male and female aspects of life. It is shocking that even in non-dual circles, darkness seems to be demonified in a manner which is reminiscent of the witch hunts of former generations.
Darkness is in actuality, unreflected light, but scientific knowledge is again way ahead of the evolution of our primitive, collective psychology.
