“Purdah is a severe curtain of separation between the world of a man and a woman, between the community as a whole and the family which is its heart, between the street and the home, what is public and what is private, as well as brusquely separating society and the individual.” (Wikipedia)
13 November 2011
The first move towards the manifestation of the Feminine Principle in our world today involves women becoming aware of who and what we are. Through decades of struggle, we already know what we can do and achieve. We also know that it is not enough. Internally, women are the same as we have always been, perhaps even more confused for all the appearance of freedom.
We need to understand what curtails our authenticity, how the brakes came to be there, and why they are still there. We can no longer blame men or the male system that we ourselves support and in many ways deem necessary, although we could alter it. We must somehow recognize the conditioning that maintains inequality and incomprehension, while appearing as outer equality and dialogue. There exists an unacknowledged aspect to social programming that maintains women in all parts of the world in a condition of purdah. Its veils are much thicker than cloth.
Once we acknowledge how this heavy veil is the plight of every woman, a conscious, intelligent and deliberate disengagement is needed that will ease the programming that slowly, invisibly, and subliminally corrodes our every effort. In many places of the world there is no clothing or law demanding we remain subjugated, alone, confused and unrealized. So, where is the pressure coming from?
When I tried to pinpoint just how the imbedded programme works, like a phantom, it eluded me. I reviewed interminable lists of quotations, proverbs and sayings from both Spanish and Anglo Saxon cultures (in this blog, see the page “Sayings” or “Dichos”). Each culture was astoundingly different and yet similar in its conspiratorial putdown of women through the ages up to present day insinuations.
As insulting, witty, and often amusing as the quotes and proverbs proved to be they weren’t enough to account for the internalized anguish and plight of women everywhere. Until I realized that it has to do with the shadow beliefs that, slowly, slowly, form inside a woman’s psyche as a response to the expressed or implied attitudes of those around her. These are soaked in subtle impressions, behaviour, unexpressed accusations, guilting, micro-gestures, and all possibilities conveyed by each unique moment of experience.
Couple this with the impressionable structure of a woman, the fact that she energetically absorbs as well as enfolds her environment, no matter what she does or consciously believes, how verbal or well educated she is, whether she is a dramatically sensitive artist or a hardened intellectual, the indelible waves of subliminal programming are uniformly invasive.
There are two main factors that determine this indoctrination: the word as thought-forms, and the visual and emotional barrage of impression as feeling qualifiers.
Thoughts
Thoughts are things. They shape us and our feelings. We acquire them from the moment our brain is developed enough to understand language. We accumulate them. This basic stock becomes the personality model, leading to enlargement or resistance. Everything we become, hold ourselves to be, or manifest outwardly, stems from it.
Thoughts are not just the obvious kind. They congeal into irrational beliefs, so deeply rooted that we often cannot perceive their presence. Then they are no longer questioned, they become foundational, immovable pillars of our self-identity.
As spontaneous hoarders that we are, women tend to add on, rather than eradicate existing thoughts. The hope is that if we divert our minds into more convenient thoughts, the earlier ones might disappear. Positive affirmations reprogram only the superficial layer of the mind. The price we pay is the precious legacy of in-depth experience. Rather than learn the lessons of adversity and transformation, through this attractive technique we impose that which we want to see and believe. Neither do we grow through clever explanations that do not reach the depth and breadth where popular home grown belief festers.
The transformation of thoughts is a most difficult task as it entails the altering of subliminal emotional force. Lifting the veils of purdah brings up a tremendous amount of feeling that we need to deal with. More labels or objectives will not help.
And then we are faced with the more subtle part of indoctrination.
Visual & Psychological Imprinting
The strength of programming, as all market researchers know, bypasses the linear mind. It works through the senses and subliminally. It begins at birth with the quality of everything surrounding us, with varieties of colour, emotional resonance, the harmonies and dissonances of sound, and all sensation. It particularly affects the naturally receptive quality of the feminine structure, stripping or coating the nervous filaments of sensitivity, and determining defences. The kind of toys offered a child, the type, colour and texture of clothing it is given, the array of sensory and visual images that surround us… these all affect the tastes, temperament, and style that define personal identity.
Personal proximity is the greatest agent of indoctrination: those people who love us as much as those who do not, simply by the quality of energies they emanate without necessarily doing or saying anything. At home, in school, in trade or higher learning, in the big vast world we are besieged by impressions that motivate or inhibit us.
The glimpse of an onlooker can qualify an experience so subtly and piercingly, that it clouds our judgment and perception of what is happening – of what has already happened… to us. To a woman this is as lethal as stated expectation. It coerces her
through love or fear, reinforcing the urge to please or protect ourselves from another…needing to be recognized, or striving to exert power and influence in some way over our immediate world. Then we too reproduce and transfer the imprints to others automatically, submitting to the stereotyped descriptions of our gender without authenticity, trapped in biological and psychological dynamics.
Adding to the stack of impressions and trigger-happy reactions we already carry, energized by the hormones of our gender in due time, and reinforced by events surrounding us, gender consciousness develops into a personal style.
The programs coming from the timeless machine of society are received and their fate is sealed through a simple act in silence, in a pause in the conversation, by conspiratorial glances among the men or elders, and with condemnatory sighs from other women. They are conveyed through fingers pointed in menace, and the imposing violence of implied physical abuse. They come armed with fear, longing, and promises of unreality to quell the pain of an unknown self. In striving to be shaped, protected, wanted and loved, in yearning to create a space and time where we can be, women became all the things that go against our nature – hard, vindictive, jealous, competitive, demanding and aggressive.
What the pioneer feminists had not stressed enough is that thought-forms contain both thought and feeling. It is the second part that is trickiest, for it involves the unseen and grows unharnessed. If it is difficult to find authenticity as an individual human being; given her structure, it is so much more difficult to find it as a woman. The evasive and persistent pressure of a climate of domination and possessiveness lays its claim.
Until now.
The Way
Women’s learning process has been directed towards adaptability, appearance, servitude, pleasure, and reproduction. Each time we respond to any of these demands involuntarily, we serve the greater program. But, each time we respond consciously, willingly, and with our full presence, we contribute to the uplifting of every woman and every man.
Woman has been told over and over again in all societies that she is nothing without a man, that she is an appendage, a necessary irrelevance, a creature of whim and fancy. If she wants to be anything, or have any peace, she must comply or compete, or both. Each time the feelings of emptiness or insufficiency come up, it is a cue to be alert and acknowledge our essential presence and the fundamental energy we lend all creation. Without women, the world is not. Our power resides in knowing this and in the courage we take to stop, prevent, and directly influence activity in our world.
Woman has been demeaned for her feelings and intuitions, harassed for her illogical way of thinking, idealized into powerlessness. Each time we experience the effects of these affronts, we have a choice. For the first time ever, women can actually use the power of being to act and not just resist, subsist, manipulate or surrender. Embodying consciously the force we are, is a woman’s way. The world must and will adjust.
We carry the load of an unacknowledged heritage. As awesome as the task may seem, we are up to it when we discover that we are empowerment itself. Nobody needs to grant it. It is what we are and always have been.
I urge the reader to become aware of the many ways in which we as women stop ourselves from being, feeling, thinking, perceiving, recognizing, acknowledging, learning and contributing to life.
