FEMININE SPIRITUALITY
Hathor/Isis - detail at an Egyptian temple
6 November 2011
The core of the human being is the faculty of being conscious in the vast, formless backdrop of Creation. As Consciousness, we need the body and its network to reverberate with the rhythms, order and perpetual transformations that constitute Life. The experiences of the physical world allow us to discover what life is and the nature of ourselves as source. In truth we are no-thing, and through striving to become something, we re-emerge into the Nothingness from which we parted, only now with the indelible and precious talent of creating and becoming. And we do it over and over again, not for the sake of what we create but for the joy of learning to create and collaborate in an order that transcends us. We become greater and greater life-giving suns.
Spiritually, it is about what we are in this never-ending becoming, and not what we do. It does not matter much what we appear to be or what we believe in, but what we feel and emit as sentient beings. The concept we have of spirituality as being something perfect, ascetic, controlled and conditional is not spiritual; it is anti-life. On the other hand, the concept we have of life is not really alive, natural, or spiritual.
Spirituality arises out of wholeness of body, mind and spirit. It is experience, direct and intimate, without the filters that force, censor, or interpret it. It is both self-evident and self-explanatory. Most of what passes for spiritual experience is imaginary, responding to forms of disguised libido or intellectual conceptions of a controlled, antiseptic life. Living affects all our bodies and faculties; there is no better example of the spiritual experience than ordinary life, with its choices and its effects, its needs, and its very precious lessons.
In antiquity, students spent years in a temple or monastery, drilling disciplines that would control impulses, while teaching discernment and discrimination so as to develop holistic perception and understanding. Then they were asked to spend a number of years simply living in the world, without the need to apply deliberate effort, already honed in sensitivity and correspondence. Only when they had integrated the teaching in every day mundane life, could spirituality be acknowledged. It is the divine right of a human being to develop his/her faculties and express spontaneity and joy through body, mind and emotion. Whereas men might teach principles, embodying them in life through example has been the unique task of the women.
To live life with awakened faculties means to discover spiritual forces at work all the time, the hand of an absolute infinite source and dynamic of perfection. Those who argue against this have simply not developed their perception, relying instead on the presumption of intellect.
The spiritual principle is not paternalistic; it stems from the mother who allows the person to explore and learn, knowing in that way that woman knows, that eventually it will see and know. The nature of the father is to provide the form or seed, plant and direct it, and then await the fruits of that orientation. The nature of the mother is to emanate its being-quality without external conditions. She is the empty space in which the flower and the fruit will blossom.
In their effort to lead the world, men have forged a conception of spirituality as something orderly, chaste, filled with effort, and rather dull. Today, spiritual practices are unequivocally male, systematically arrowed towards one aim: silence and stillness. Instead, a woman lives in effervescent nothingness; her nature is movement itself. This does not mean that she may not benefit or even attain through the male approach; it simply means that she is often frustrated, stunted and condemned by the very practices that seek to steer her.
Woman is the natural spiritual instrument for the simple reason that she is the receptive, absorptive vehicle that receives and engenders life, physical and non-physical. Is there any greater miracle? The experience of attracting a soul into our body and carrying it for nine months, the feeling of birthing it and tending to it as it matures… Is there any greater spiritual achievement? Every woman does this also with ideas and feelings, happenings and possibilities, even if she never gives physical birth.
The constitution that enables this divine creative ability equips us with the physical, mental and emotional structure necessary for it. This means that woman is essentially neutral and responds to the rhythms of life rather than the meanings imposed on it. If we remember from the archetype series about women appearing in the blog (26 August), we embrace both light and dark.
Several women ask just how the three dark aspects of woman can be a positive attribute. To understand this we need to experience the intimate proximity of spirit within, that force that enfolds in order to uplift, that which understands not with reason but with heart, and acts according to what is just and necessary. If, among other things, woman is a witch, a natural medium, and a hag whose madness reflects the deepest resonances of the creative urge, it is because she is built to resonate with both the chaos and order of the universe.
Woman’s way is through living, relating, acting. As in remote times, she would need to be previously trained in discernment so that her acts, choices, impressions and emanations are the natural result of life dynamics and not the selfish, manipulative effect of unrecognized emotional and psychic need. Ideally it would be a woman’s task to lead her man and her family inwardly, as it would be the task of man to conquer, shape, and protect life outwardly.
Unfortunately, we have come to fear and regard life as evil. Just about everything that is natural is held to be sinful. False virtue opposes feared sinfulness. Rigidity, predictability, and control, contrast sharply with spontaneous natural ethics, correctness and good.
If woman’s perception is restored, in other words if sensitivity as a whole is restored to the race, then spirituality would be a matter of living life consciously. However, as it stands now, “conscious” often implies mental effort as bodiless awareness. Once whole awareness and consciousness is regained, then woman is the optimum vehicle for perception and guidance, just as she was in the remote past, in the time of the Priestess-Mother of the race.
And then, spirituality is not seen as an “extra” to life. We do not need to have a problem or suffer lack, be in a crisis, or be ill, to seek and experience spirituality. Like with Amma, a woman’s embrace in purity is enough.
