Woman and The Kabbalah

WOMAN AND THE KABBALAH

12 April 2012

The kabbalist Karen Berg recently visited Mallorca.  Prior to her arrival, some of her thoughts on women and the Kabbalah were made available to the public.  It was in response to this literature that I was questioned by some of my students.  Doubts arose in relation to the concepts presented and attributed to Kabbalah.

Without claiming to judge the work of Mrs. Berg with whom I agree in many respects, I refer to a few terms that stand out in the presentation of her work, according to the links annexed at the end of this article.

To be coherent with my teaching of so many years, in particular I wish to clarify some concepts, especially those relating to the feminine spiritual path.  My perspective here differs from Karen Berg’s perhaps more popular approach.

Those who for the first time address themselves to a spiritual subject, listen avidly for instructions and revelations offered by a teacher, and take it for absolute truth.  My intention in this writing is to present my divergence, allowing the reader the possibility of another perspective.

Kabbalah offers a cosmic diagram of Creation.  It embraces everything, from the ordinary human being to the universe.  It existed since antediluvian times.  Judaism was only one of the currents that preserved some teachings from this refined spiritual and cultural era, with its own interpretations, of course.

In the Egyptian tangent, the same teaching acquired other tonalities, as it did in other parts of the world, including what is today the Three Americas.  Parting from a principle of Oneness, each one stressed more, or less, the principle of duality inherent in matter, adapting it to its understanding and its socio-cultural needs.  Today we “mysteriously” have numerous religions and esoteric traditions, without many noticing that it was, is, and will always be a Unity.  For the human being it is the experience of a totality inconceivable for the mind, the return to a state of pure indissoluble spirit within that totality.

Duality only exists in matter and in the mind that deals with it, in our world, in our gender, in the matter of perceiving and interacting with the world and everything related with the physical.  Neither soul nor spirit possesses polarity until reaching the material plane.  This is an especially important point in approaching any understanding of the spiritual world.

The soul is not under the control of personal will.  It is not the soul that “attains its purpose”; in truth it is the personality that reaches the perennial promise of the soul.

Just as has occurred with the human experience of the divine, or the Absolute, occurs here.  It is interpreted.  It is brought to the level of our understanding.  In this way, abstraction is personified, projecting the known onto the unknown.  We attribute physical characteristics to immaterial concepts.  In words that everyone understands, the salesmen serve themselves of emotions, sexuality and gender to explain what the soul is.  At the level of soul there is no polarity.

There is no greater obstacle than crystallized belief.  What is the “purification” that a soul that is already pure reaches?  What goes for “twin souls” if not more of the same eternal romanticism?

For many, Kabbalah is a religion with laws and obligations.  It becomes religion the moment it interprets and imposes rules.  This is not what it is meant to be.  It is a philosophy that parts from a symbol, the diagram of the “sephirot” (spheres or worlds) and the levels of manifestation that form a living hologram.  That which is transcendent is to be lived.  Any discussion, as any rule, forces us to remain in the periphery.

The study of the Kabbalah by Jewish intelligentsia, as well as the detailed analysis of laws and sayings within so many religions, can never reach the experience of the multidimensional portal that leads to unity.  Unfortunately, few interest themselves with experience and many with information.  Therefore, the priests who have always liked doing business create an epic that involves recipes, sex, and of course personal importance.

Hebrew mysticism constructed a powerful elitist empire over the Kabbalah, claiming it for itself.  Instead of a cosmic system such as this being allowed to correct cultural divergences, it tends to happen that the cultural divergences adjust the system to suit its convenience.  As with religion, so too Kabbalah – it became Jewish.

In spite of yielding domestic and sexual power to women, Judaism relegated women to a level of second-class citizen, but cunningly offered her compensations.  It elevated her role to sublime and holy Motherhood (poor infertile women!) and focussed upon sexuality as an implicit commandment to procure a meeting with the One God.  Woman to give pleasure and birth, men to command over the world.   In the end, and outside the vein of orthodoxy, women usually lead through manipulation of  the men.

Much of what I expose here refers directly to Judaism.  Woman is treated with disguised condescension.  Mrs. Berg tells us that the Kabbalah says that to be in harmony with cosmic laws, a man should listen to his partner.  In this version, for example, woman seems to occupy an important place, but if we look more closely, we see it is the same as ever.

In the ancient Egyptian tradition of the Tree of Life, as the Kabbalah is also called, no distinction was made between men and women.  Neither was it supposed that women did not need to work on themselves.  In the Hebrew tradition, woman appears in an elevated position for men – as mother, sexual partner, confident, and counsellor.  No Kabbalah says so.  The kabbalah does not offer beliefs: it only states processes and cosmic dynamics.

About femininity and energy.  I believe Mrs. Berg refers to the Shekinah.  This alludes to primordial energy.  In the Jewish tradition as in the Oriental, it points to the female sexual dynamic (as concentric pulsation) that catalyzes the kundalini – the awakening of energy and the creative spirit.  You will remember that although men have recourse to their “yin” part, they do not possess the feminine faculty or dynamic.  This force can be destructive as it can be creative.  I agree that woman is not, nor should she pretend to be a “victim”.

Another term that creates misunderstanding is love.  This is not a feeling in the Kabbalah nor in any other tradition.  It is pure Intelligence-Consciousness as cohesive expression by the parts of Creation.  It is the attraction of life for life, of light for light.  It is not synonymous to attachment or emotion.  It has nothing to do with personal relationship.

Following in the vein of human relations and the adaptation that has been done of the Kabbalah to suit them, I must repeat again that each soul does NOT possess masculine and feminine aspects.  It exists as a unit beyond the sum of parts.   It goes through active (+) and receptive (-) processes, through the experience of forces and faculties that forge character and prepare men as well as women for the spiritual journey of initiation.  The soul transcends every notion of gender.   Motion or activity arises from the contact with worlds of manifestation, the different experiences through which every human being traverses.

The error in supposing that woman has a male equivalent and man has a feminine one forces a division of roles and obligations that are social rather than spiritual.  This belief brings enormous problems to our society.

In this system woman is apparently, by divine mandate, the companion of men (understand “servant”).  The fact that the role is called a “mission” is meant to elevate it to the plane of the divine.  This label may have served the women of the past, or some of the present, but not so the women of the present.

The “mission” of women today, if we can call the obligation we feel such, is to infuse through our individual and collective expression as women, the genuine feminine quality into our planet, in such a way as to radically alter the expressive modality of humanity.  Inner Woman knows that we are different from men.  We know that our power has nothing to do with him, if he approves or likes it, or if it is useful for him in his world.  We accept the responsibility of leading humanity now, in our way, which is different.  We affirm WHAT WE ARE by being, even without due recognition.

We do not want to serve men, but rather serve all of humanity. We do not want to compete with or struggle, be better or worse, but develop our own path, our systems, and our creativity FOR ALL, side by side in true equality.  As in the Kabbalistic Beginning.

Links in Spanish only:

http://karenberginmallorca.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/el-poder-de-una-mujer/

http://karenberginmallorca.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/almas-gemelas-y-reencarnacion/

Girlie Pacts & Being a Woman

GIRLIE PACTS AND BEING A WOMAN

5 April 2012

I have said it many times, publicly or privately: woman is her own worst enemy. This is not to be taken myopically, or as judgement or generalization. There are exceptions and we would hope that each time more of them.

There are women who catalogue female acquaintances into friends and best friends. Friendship to me is the highest human value and I especially treasure friendship between women, but girlie pacts, unfortunately, always reveal ulterior motives. In grade school and in high school, girlfriends dress alike and become extensions of ourselves serving a pack-mentality, but when we grow up, friendship should acquire another deeper meaning.

As children and even later on, girlfriends give us the courage to be ourselves.  Unfortunately, most never grow past the adolescent stage of huddling together for meaning and strength.  They continue to mimic life in an effort to couch its basic challenges. The common denominator tends to be self-protection.

The world demands a lot more from a woman today.  It begs that she mature mentally and emotionally in order to rise to her function of extended world motherhood.  Ideally girlfriends should become colleagues, women who receive, respond to, and face the world at large, rather than women who seek to exploit it, get personal satisfaction, and focus attention on themselves.  For this women are called to dare to see, live and manifest truth.

I want a woman friend to stand by me and also to tell me that I look awful when I do, or that a dress doesn’t suit me. Most of all I want her to help me reveal myself to myself, to tell me that which a best friend might not dare say, believing she protects me.  I want my woman friend to be the woman that I cannot be at that moment – unselfishly, brutally honest and supportive of what is fair and just – even if it is uncomfortable or inconvenient, or if I get angry with her.  I value the fact that she is more faithful to the true meaning of friendship than she is to her own self image and fears, and worse of all to my own.  I want her to lift me to her level rather than lower herself to mine when I am being untrue. To me that is love.  A true woman friend risks standing alone at all times, as I too risk it when I see her betraying the innermost truth of herself.

I would like to see women stand up for womanhood itself and not align behind girlie pacts.  I would like to see a woman stand whole on her own, not cling to special groups, as in school days when we defined our worth by choosing (or being chosen as) best friends or “very best” friends.  It is not women’s friendship and support that is in question, it is her selectivity, an inherent snobbishness that breeds cattiness and a poor sense of loyalty.  A woman trusts another woman in levels and under strict conditions.  The truth is that left in packs she never learns to trust in real friendship.

Whereas women are capable of sacrifice and dedication, inspiration and hard work, we tend to look after our own interests first and foremost.  This is not just because we are built to give and preserve life, it is because of a deep selfishness and competition inbred into us by a paranoid social system of conflict and competition, reinforced by habit and convenience.

We do not like women who play games with us, whom we see all too transparently.  Neither do we like women who reveal us when we are being fearful, hateful, and egotistical.  We can see through one another’s falsehood, but not through our own.  We prefer to point an accusing finger elsewhere and pretend that it has nothing to do with us.  Girlfriends huddle together; women show us how we can go beyond appearances into the realm of the Real.

The enmity that is most cruel and far reaching doesn’t have to do with what we do.  The behaviour that ostracises and judges some and selects others, the kind that is a safeguard, is adolescent.  It is not about the female animal specie.  We are speaking of humanity, of the Human.

The female gender is capable of intuiting meanings, going behind them and getting to the core of a matter.  We have a tremendous capacity to understand the illogical and the incomprehensible. And we are the supporters of reality in every way.

I was sent the following link (http://thedailylove.com/in-praise-of-women-magnificent-spacious-fiery/) a few days ago as an example of a contrasting perspective.  It offers a pronounced aspect of the North American female mentality in one way, but fundamentally underscores much of the attitude that girlfriends have everywhere.

The writer claims to be tired of hearing that “women are our own worst enemies” and calls her piece, “In Praise of Women: Magnificent, Spacious & Fiery”.  It might have been more appropriate if she had called it “In Praise of My Girlfriends”, and limited it to secondary school relationships.

She begins by asserting that everybody “plants landmines” and makes enemies in their youth, but this has nothing to do with gender.  She gives witness to what she calls “the force of pure Goddess positivity” and cites a few examples.  Her opening caption in bold capitals: “women simply adore women”.

The first argument sets the tone. “Women shake their cosmic pom poms”, she says.  Cosmic what?  For those of you who are not familiar with this term, it is straight out of American High School cheerleading.  Having been educated in the USA I can give witness myself to the painful, cutthroat competition that exists there among women.  It is a moment when boys have not yet come into power and women dominate in every way.  In one of her famous asides, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in a TED interview, reminded us of the imagined horror of extending that kind of female dominance into government.

(http://www.ted.com/talks/madeleine_albright_on_being_a_woman_and_a_diplomat.html). Ms. Albright is a far better witness than the author or myself.

The girlfriends that the author of the article refers to in her praises, as she herself says, concern themselves with haircuts and with their ass. They help one another “look” good.  Sisterhood gives them confidence based on “feeling-good” because they “look-good”.  This is sad but too true to deny in most women’s circles.  Actually, it is a practice that persists deep into the third age in more affluent societies.  I fail to see how this instils in one another the kind of self-confidence the world needs.

The fact that women cry with one another, the second argument offered by the author, merely illustrates the kind of projection that takes place. Friendship is based on animal warmth, emotional gratification, and mental kinship.  It feeds off the return from self-indulgent desires and justifications.  Rightly or wrongly it makes no difference. The confidence gained here is based on the illusion they desperately feed.  This does not boost the kind of self-awareness our times calls for.

Best friends tend to defend one another fiercely, and although this in itself is a virtue, what is being defended with this mentality is the need to be right.  Self-projection, not truth, is at the core. When the blind stubbornly lead the blind in the name of friendship, we need to ask ourselves what kind of friendship that is.

Women fight for and resist as often as they serve and dedicate themselves to a cause.  What is doubtful is the attitude or purpose of the action.  Service, such as that of cooking and nursing mentioned by the author, is the most direct way to influence another.  Although we, as women, feel genuinely moved towards these caretaking positions, we also know all about human vulnerability and play upon it.  Women are perfectly capable of taking each and every virtue and twisting it.  We know this all too well and it is the major reason we do not trust one another.

Girlfriends of the type alluded to here, stick by one another through thick and thin.  When they get older they behave like in the series “Sex in the City”, and gradually turn into “Desperate Housewives”.  Their attention remains at the level of haircuts and asses.  In other words, survival and simulation in an endless blame-game where there is always a prey and a winner.  When there is a victim, it is always oneself. This does not boost the kind of discernment that life calls for from women.

Yes, I do agree with the author that woman is capable of caring enough to see beyond appearances, but the divine feminine is a lot more than seeing once in a while; it requires unselfish action and motivation beyond offering a massage.

Instead of the idealized picture of teenage togetherness presented by our author, and so many women worldwide who defend their comfort and privileges as the supposedly weaker sex, we would do well to begin breaking the barriers that are so obviously erected between groups of gown women everywhere.

Sacrifice is one thing and doing what is natural is something else.  Offering is very different from trading. A woman needs to know the difference.

To be witnessed by a woman is sublime; to be protected by girlfriends is adolescent and selfish, totally inadequate to what the world now needs from women.  The time of the Rockettes is over and that of true friendship has arrived.

 

The Mirror: an Exercise

THE MIRROR: an Exercise

29 March 2012

A woman’s heart is a magical gadget.  When she sees through it, she knows.  It is her unique spiritual instrument that renders her capable of seeing and feeling jointly. To attain to this special quality of feminine intelligence she must go through and beyond her emotions, but the key is her wanting to.  The gadget doesn’t function without it.

Spirituality is all about subjectivity, layers and layers of it.  But for a woman it involves the refinement of emotion as well.  When we see we know, and we know when we see.  But we won’t know or see until we want to, and the journey into truth is lonely.  Many of us would rather not know.  We fear the aloneness of that space from where feelings unveil the truth. No one can do it for us.  No one can tread our path for us.  We see when we are ready to know and we are ready to stand-alone.  A woman comes of age only when she is ready to see and know beyond her self interests.

Seeing is never neutral.  We experience through our sense of sight, and see what we are predisposed to see.  We also colour the object of our observation.  It is as commonplace as dreaming awake.   We are never certain of what is true.  The way we are and think and feel, as well as our entire history, determines the influences that condition what we see.  This is why to see we need to unlearn. It is incredibly scary for woman who already lives in constant uncertainty. The present moment is an infinitesimal space where nothing can exist except perception, but a woman fills it with thoughts about the feelings and sensations she is constantly receiving.  Like life herself, a woman is in perpetual movement.

Life is constant flowing play of light, colour, shape, texture, resonance, qualities and rhythms, infinite frequencies in multiple layers of becoming.  It has no meaning but what we give it. Ultimately our life is a screen upon which we set the dials and call our own show, have fun with it (or not) for as long as we wish, and when tired, bored, satiated or frustrated beyond limits… it is ripe for change when we are ripe to change.  It all happens inside. When we change, changes happen.

Life moves women in one direction, men in another, both doing apparently the same things.  Our thinking machine constantly labels everything in a frantic attempt to construct meaning: men label things and events, women label feelings and sensation.  The former is addressed to the outside world, the latter to the inner.  One appears definite, the other diffuse and subjective.  We never see things the same way.

Seeing is connected to every sense and to the whole body experience. Emotionally, women colour things with personal meaning, often seeing beauty, or its opposite, where another might not.  We also see with our spirit.  It all happens inside and goes beyond our ordinary emotions while serving ourselves of feeling.  At the level of the heart a man dives into an abyss of meaninglessness to find a wholly different kind of significance, whereas at the same level, a woman rises into greater meaningfulness and her emotions become the portal for greater sight.

Infinite subjectivity is in nowhere more pronounced than in the feminine constitution.  We can hardly distinguish our emotions from our senses or thoughts, or the feelings, senses and thoughts of whomever and whatever is around us.  Hiding behind the crystallization of beliefs only worsens the sense of disconnected frustration that characterizes us.  We don’t know what we are.  We don’t know what is.  But we feel it.  We know what we feel.

To anyone who wants to see, and especially to women everywhere, I recommend the process that I myself went though.  It happened while I lived in India and had plenty of time, but it can be done anywhere at anytime and at any pace that suits your lifestyle.  All it requires is willpower and commitment, the very same that we employ to get what we want and manifest what we believe in.

I was in my early thirties.  It was a period of intense search for me, knowing that I knew but not yet knowing what I did or would know.  My intuition was of the vague, diffuse type of yearning so common to women with spiritual inclinations.  Having read lots of books on philosophy and mysticism, attended all sorts of schools and spiritual circles, and belonging to a particular group that fostered experimentation, I was still nowhere near to knowing where I was going. I decided that I wanted to see Reality for myself.  Directly.

I’d sit for hours in front of a flower, a tree, a plant, a stone, searching for both the form and the experience of the object.  I had just read what has now become a classic, Elizabeth Haich’s “Initiation”, so I imitated and invented my own exercises.  I poured all my willpower into it.  With a steady gaze, the different objects of my attention seemed to dissolve and spread, give off sparks of light and blend to reveal a psychedelic wonder.  Beautiful, interesting, fascinating but …  I remained apart, a spectator.  Uninvolved.  Whereas in a similar experience a man might reach ecstasy, my feminine emotional nature was not in it.

A woman who is uninvolved in her feelings becomes dry, bored and stagnant; she does not derive nor offer any pleasure, incapable of reverberating with the flow she incorporates.  Meditative practices of seeing just weren’t enough for me.  The feeling ingredient is missing.  Today I understand how the dissatisfaction arose in me; rather than being a fault or a lack, it responds to my own structure as a woman and its basic need for reciprocity.

I experienced a huge gap of uncertainty, and therefore anguish, between the world and me.  As a woman, the impressions and interpretations from the outside world always alter me and make me doubt to such an extent that I reformulate my own perception and sensitivities.   Constantly.  This brings up a tremendous insecurity which rather than psychological is quasi physical.  The desire to see and know a relation, as well as myself as subject, only grows.

What I describe in the following paragraphs was my own adaptation of the basic technique of seeing in the mirror.  I have since made it a standard practice in my trainings for both men and women.  Most women are very frightened by the practice at first.  The revelation of our own projections and fear are sometimes overwhelming.  I warn the reader who might be sensitive to this, and urge those who can harness the courage to plod through and reach the luminous goal of Self.

I changed the direction of the observation to suit my need and embarked on a particular journey with a mirror.  In a passionate move of inquiry, I separated myself from the reflection and asked it to reveal itself to me.  I stressed the element of feeling and the knowing that comes from the particular quality of feminine sensitivity.

I became aware that looking was one thing, but “seeing” was another that depended on going beyond my own expectations.  I determined that I would not stop until I “saw”… her, myself.  This time my questioning gaze was centred on my experience within, just as it is when we truly want to know someone and we focus on feeling.

My sittings lasted a steady thirty to forty-five minutes.  At first all kind of faces appeared.  Each of them illustrated some belief or old impression.  Emotions swelled and shifted preceding or following what I thought I saw.  A pirate with scars, a pock faced monster, an old black witch.  I responded to these ugly things as if they were myself, with shock and doubt, fear and anger.  My nose seemed to grow, my circles darken, and my face became deformed. I was a man, I was a woman, dark, old, young.  Never beautiful.  Basically I projected all sort of distorted forms and gloomy feelings upon the face in the mirror and identified with all of them.  The parallel with daily life was astounding.

At first I deemed them true, then (like in daily life as well) I desperately tried to repair them.  I would concentrate on the eyebrow, the nose, and on improvements that makeup might provide.  Exhausted from the bouts of blind belief and obsessive fixing, eventually I lapsed into spaces of reverie where my mind just stopped.

It was then that, reflected on the mirror behind a nebulous blob – my eyes were rather strained by now – a light brought my attention back.  Initially, upon focussing, the light would fade and the process of judgment and condescension, self-pity, guilt and eventual boredom again arose.  In time, the light emerged again, and again for longer flickers when I was not-there.  One day I saw what was behind the light.

She was beautiful and moved my heart to tears, but didn’t last long.  My excitement at this discovery again tensed me. I managed to recapture her as I learned to still my thinking mind, neutralize my emotions, and coordinate this with a space of expectant nothingness.  In truth it was a lot simpler: like entering a space of faith and presence, and just staying there. What developed the natural state of Knowing.

Discovering her was discovering a space of heart.  She simply appeared when I was not who I thought I was, but just simply allowed myself to be.  She arose before me like an angel, coming only when there was space for her.  I loved her and forgot often that she was a reflexion on the mirror.  I can say I fell in love with her.

The process took a while.  In the thirty years since this happening, not only have I seen and know who sees through me, but when I look out onto the world through her eyes, everything acquires a tint of truth and justice, sometimes painful but real.

I invite each of you to look for and find your angel.  Mystics say that this is God, but you will know it as the Self.

Real spirituality is total unlearning.  For a woman it means the removal of all labels and immersion into the ocean of enfolding sentient feeling awareness.

Note:  There are innumerable variations for meditating with a mirror stemming from the traditional to the contemporary. It is important to understand that I refer here to the Feminine Spiritual Path.

Bi-Lingual Meditation

Bilingual meditation for The Inner Woman

The Feminine Solution

THE FEMININE SOLUTION

22 March 2012.

Creative thinking occurs in one of two ways: by juggling known elements into new configurations, or by leaping into an unknown space that mysteriously reveals unprecedented possibilities.  The first kind involves a calculated risk; the second traces a journey into wholly uncertain territory.  Both versions require the ability to open windows of perception, visualize, feel, and project oneself into the future while embracing the past.  The end result is influenced greatly by the kind of feeling – whether it is mentally, bodily, or emotional flavoured. Thus, the quality of our perception determines not only the colouring of our participation, but the impact it has socially and in perpetuity. Intellectual creativity that blends utility and aesthetics affords an emotional satisfaction that mirrors social feedback.  Individual, personal joy and fulfilment, the kind sought through feminine emotional depth but curtailed by the social majority, is the prime requirement for the wholly creative leap.

Behind most creative thinking today is the desperate hope on the part of humanity to return to the profiteering way of life of the past.  Somehow it is affirmed that the economy is going to recover and everyone can again make millions selling more and more things to more and more people motivated by the greed and desire to possess more and more, all in little boxes and categories separated by hierarchical concepts devoid of natural feeling flow.  Genuine creative thinking cannot have an agenda.

The world thinking machine is moved by masculine intellect, largely identified with the first type of creativity.  It echoes the survival mentality of definition and imposition: things must be controllable and sustainable. Improvement is limited to enhancing the past.  The feminine variety is non-linear, improvising, unpredictable, and fuelled by the living pulse of emotional involvement.  Ask any corporate executive, including a woman who succeeds within the system, and they will tell you that it is anathema to the first.

The characteristic of the feminine mind is that it is in constant movement and connected to different levels of perception and possibility.  Its corporeal experience of feelings and ideas makes it suitable for implementing life-altering solutions; in fact it does this all the time.  Consider the natural abilities of a woman to multi-task in simultaneous dimensions of being.  She is perfectly capable of concurrently running a business while changing diapers, settling a dispute between eight-year olds, cooking a gourmet dinner for six, answering the telephone, and planning for the most efficient disposal of waste from the day after.  She looks after the aesthetic aspects of her life as she does the functional elements, with coordinating and projective ability.  She does this under stress of urgency, practicality, and expediency, but most of all she does this under the influence of great emotional variables from her environment.  Her capacity to sustain concomitant windows of perception, and energize and expedite them is astounding.

The most remarkable is that she can do all this at home, in the midst of the chaos of family life.  She may wish she had more time, space and help, as her male partner does.  She may seek for greater control and think that she doesn’t do as good a job as she would like but she is appropriate, ingenious and remarkably efficiency.  She has always been this way, even before our technological egalitarian era.  Instinctively, to her everything is family; everything is simultaneously and equally important.

Our corporate and legislative world follows a male, very orderly model of functioning.  It boxes and labels.  It defines spaces, tasks and areas of specialization with cool and distanced poise.  Competition, based on calculation, categorization, and absolute control is the obvious consequence of such regimentation.  It is evident that family and professional life do not mix.  In this scheme the individual cannot perform under simultaneous sensory stimuli from work and personal life, nor can he or she manage the emotional needs of human relationship, especially the hectic, ungovernable kind required with children.  Yet this defines our current lifestyle based on the segmented, sterilized concept of work vs. family, outer vs. inner need, intellectual vs. emotional fulfilment.

Time and again, from women I hear mention of the great problem emerging when trying to combine motherhood with professional realization.  Businesses concern themselves with time-off for maternity and regretfully see it as a necessary expenditure. Some even provide nurseries in the workplace.  Solutions are always oriented to adjusting temporarily to the needs of the woman while serving the interests of business, without it dawning on them that there is another way: adjusting the needs of business to serve the interests of Life.

Obligated to yield to the economic demands of our social structure, for lack of alternate life models, a woman falls into the trap of banishing or delaying maternity, disturbing in yet more ways her natural structure and sensitive inclination.  Something is wrong when motherhood and personal fulfilment are seen as interruptions to professional excellence, and unquestioned sovereignty is given to the business or financial model, stifling the humane impulse.  It is the prime catalyst for all our ills.

Never have so many people the world over been so deeply and globally enslaved by it, led into a precipice of total failure: unemployment, poverty, crime, and privation. All the while possessing creative possibilities.  The solution is right in front of their noses, at home.  With women.

Acutely sensing the need for some change, at the highest levels of government and administration the fashionable trend is to think creatively along the lines of feminine principles.  However, in spite all cosmetic efforts, the absence of feminine intelligence as an experience is notable in all angles of social leadership.  The pressure, fear, and obsession triggered by the artificiality and unnaturalness of the current model is such that a hint of the true flavour of the feminine model appears as a harbinger of further chaos and loss of emotional control.  The system pays little credence to women’s real contributions.  Like woman herself, the genuine feminine principles are an inconvenient truth; they interfere with and interrupt the ongoing dream of absolute power and control.

Technological solutions offer no relief.  Everything has to change. Answers to the problems that confront our world today can only emerge when the female mind is in full swing and her creative urge is able to manifest.  And when men are able to embrace it as an intelligent viable method.

I am all for babies and children in the workplace and for a whole lot less formality, but this presuppose another problem:  restructuring the education we provide for our children and for our future.  Today’s freedom and children’s right to unfettered expression is a direct result of the regimentation of previous generations, but subjecting adults to the undisciplined whim of children is as ineffectual a solution as hairy hippies were to antiseptic formality.  Parents need to exemplify new parameters based on a balance between inner and outer awareness, activity, and responsibility, based on self-knowledge, mastery, and depth of experience.  The development of children and of our society depends on it, rather than on formulas and beliefs.

The extremes to which we subject ourselves in order to not face our humanity and embrace Nature – the feminine mind – are the cause of our present inability, both men and women, to deal with the spontaneous coexistence of physical, emotional and mental activity.  Life thrives and offers solutions where the door of personal intimacy, as the feminine brand of intelligence, stands open.  In the fullness of that most human of all experiences lays the self-knowledge that leads to self-discipline.  “Going with the flow” requires something entirely different from relaxed morals and acceptance of disorder. It requires the ability to ride the kind of rollercoaster that woman knows, moving within all conditions that life offers, in work as in love-life, and within caring management of children, with mastery that allows for constant improvisation.

I ask us women to come up with natural, resilient, and joyful solutions to our world’s problems.  I challenge government and business to redefine personal fulfilment and find healthy, fair expressions that do away with the causes as well as devastating effects of economic crisis and unemployment.  Women have been adapting for ages to ways of men.  It is time now for men to make place for the feminine mind and possibilities, learning to adapt, juggle, play, and tune into the supreme creative urge that Life Herself provides.

Please sell this to the big multi-nationals and see who has the courage to be fully, deliriously creative in the workplace as in a more intimate feeling world.

Generations

Generations: Women Past and Future

www.ErinRobbinsStudio.com

(Talk delivered at the International Woman’s Day Mallorca event)

“Woman is not what she appears to be, what she does, or what she thinks she is. Through the shape, depth, and resonance of her body and her emotional potential, she possesses the singular ability of affecting the world in ways that are fundamental but often invisible.  For this reason above all others it is difficult for her to value herself.  Nevertheless, without her influence the world could not be.  Directly or indirectly every generation is led by her.”

Posted:  15 March 2012

Every thirty years or so we go through a generational shift, like a changing-of-the-guard.  The force exerted by women alternates between radicalism in some form and a self-indulgent sense of privilege.  The generation that is coming into power now is as different from their mothers, as their mothers were different from their own.

After the First World War, one hundred years ago, women were struggling for equal voting rights with tactics that although sometimes aggressive were wholly female.  They persuaded, manipulated, took themselves out on marches to the humiliation of their husbands and families, breaking social class barriers, and working diligently together.  They plotted mischievously behind the scenes, inflicting veiled threats, defying public opinion and risking the rigid and ineffectual security of male dominance. Their daughters took an opposite stance.  Recklessly and rather sure of themselves, they projected a flippant brand of exhibitionism by becoming flappers, vedettes and transsexual rebels through the 20’s and 30’s in Europe and the U.S.  The clash between regimentation and anarchy led to severe value and the class confrontations that culminated in the Second World War.

War women were a heroic bunch of admirably stoic women with exemplary home and family priorities. They sacrificed all for their daughters, that they might have better lives through the 60’s and 70’s.  As a polar reaction to the family model of the 50’s, the children of these over-fastidious coiffed women inspired the consciousness expanding Flower Power movement that sought to numb the race to its deepest values.  Their children, in turn, deprived of mamma’s human warmth, grew up alone and bitter. They found refuge in a growing technological system.

The generation of the 80-90’s distanced themselves from the excesses of their parents with an air of intellectual materialism.  Theirs was the generation of Aids, synthetic merchandising, public relations, and the psychology boom.  They paid cult to the ugly, the blasphemous, and the outrageous, together with a fascination with technology, the internet, and corporate mergers.  Money, shock, power, success took precedence. Women became harder and harder.

Today, for all appearances we have achieved social equality with men in the age of “Desperate Housewives” and “Calendar Girls”, but as ever, Nature calls for balance.  To some degree this is happening through a return to health, organic life, and the legalized couple.  There is no more that materialism and the system can give us.  It is at this point where women, still yearning for something more, are needing a recognition that is hard to come by for being so subtle.  It will be our daughters, those who will assume leadership in the 2020’s, who will give it voice.

The women of the future sing a wholly different tune.  Already they refuse to sell themselves short, as mom did, in the illusion of expressive freedom. Instead of perpetuating competition with the men, these women in the making walk hand in hand with them, naturally and beyond the covertly manipulative sexual backdrop of the past.

Their pacificism has nothing quiet about it, and their interest transcends the personal. Their movement is a direct response to the global pulse, and it unites them in far deeper ways than anything we have had before.  Their consciousness addresses the future.  They form part of the “indignados” in the Spanish plazas and Wall Street networks, in Chilean student uprisings as in academic Egyptian circles, voices of an emerging humane democracy. They respect themselves and others. While their mothers pretend to not understand what I am conveying in my message to women, these young women lead the way before any of us begin to speak.

The impact of the feminine youth force has not yet been formed as to reveal the changed portrait of womanhood.  What we know is that they see transparently through the artifices of their mothers, obeying nonetheless the great lineage of overwhelming pioneering force that only woman can provide.  It is their unwritten and unwitting task to do away with the frivolities that have been preserved and embellished throughout time:  women’s envy, useless self indulgence, competition among themselves, ridiculous insistence on emotional and physical pseudo-needs, obsessive superficial sex, and the capricious urgency of immediate satisfaction.  We are speaking about the resistant children of the “acomodados” (the accommodated ones). If they appear to lose themselves in tweets and computer games, fashion or music trends – they are merely biding time.  Something far greater is cooking within them.

My message is for the women of today, the older generations that still pride ourselves in being liberal but continue to feed the fear and doubt, the dependence and fantasies we cling to, who rely so strongly on “doing” and “appearing”, on control and manipulation… Stand assured: our very cultural lack of sacredness will be an inspiration to our daughters, opening the way into the holy office of womanhood.

The imminent rediscovery that our body is a temple rather than grounds for strategic exploitation steadily reveals us women for what we are: creatures of unique emotional empowerment, whose minds reach far beyond technology, and who open a sacred passage towards an infinitely new world.

Woman will again become the sanctuary of life.  But this time she will speak, act and open the way.  She holds, as ever, the fibres of the world through virtue of the structure of her body, with the range of feelings she possesses, with the way her mind works, and with her unique and highly delicate mechanism of empowerment – the magic that she is, was, and always will be.

Celebrate Women

Celebrate Women

www.ErinRobbinsStudio.com

8 March 2012

Women everywhere are valued for their achievements.  Today we honour a mighty long list of courageous, innovative women who have preceded us. In this spirit we celebrate not only what we have attained, but we celebrate what is yet to be attained: the recognition of what we are.

In our materialistic world it is inevitable that people are valued for what they do or how they appear.  Seldom is importance granted to woman’s real value, that intrinsically subtle influence that she is, such as “being there” for others, giving others that force and space that enables them to realise themselves.  She knows how to “be there” so that you can be yourself.  What she doesn’t yet know is that the world – in every sense – would not exist without her.

In spite of the objections from worldly women who have risen to the top of their specialties, the way of success in the material world where execution and appearances count for so much, is not enough for us.  There is a huge gaping, painful space inside: a woman doesn’t know herself outside the meaning that another can reflect.

It is curious that upon the entrance to the ancient Temple at Delphi, symbol of universal knowledge, the words “Know Thyself” were engraved.  There, it was Woman who held the key to the secret knowing that does not come from thought, analysis, achievement or strategy, but from sensitivity and fine perception.

The world may value what a woman has achieved but it does not recognize what she is.  A woman may do, appear, behave and realize the same goals as men, she may be free to express herself, but she is not free to be recognized in her unique difference, in her special power.  Social equality deals with visible things; the quality of inner being deals with a mysterious chaotic force that is feminine and remains conveniently ignored.  Yet it is the strongest power there is.

Is it so strange then that we don’t know who or what we are, regardless of our successes?  We value our achievements as if they were ourselves.  Furthermore, and this is the tragic part, we see ourselves through the eyes of others and believe that we need that mirror to reflect us back to ourselves.  We don’t know how to recede from our dependence and read ourselves in the reflection that we provide.

We love ourselves in the degree that we experience being loved.  When that stops, we stop loving ourselves.  Then we do all we can to find someone who will make us love ourselves again. A woman can be recognized as an excellent professional and attain all the glory that a man might seek, but in her intimacy she wants to feel loved so that she can remember what she is. It all seems to happen outside.  Without the mirror she is lost.

Woman, for you, who are you?  It is never what another says or sees. When you know another person, you simply feel him or her. Do you know your own company?  Do you know what someone who loves you feels?  Feeling takes us beyond the seen into the realm of inner life.  It reveals and unfolds, it enables and withdraws… It is dangerous.

Just like forgiveness, self-recognition can never involve someone else. It has nothing to do with the men; it has nothing to do with the outside.  It has to do with us.  We need to put aside all the beliefs, stances, borrowed terminology and attitudes, and formulate our own based on our values, our genuine assertions, and our sensitivity.  We need to come out of the comfort zone.

This message today conveys the declaration of a new beginning.  Today we begin to cherish our own feeling faculties and sensitivities, and honour what we are for others. We take the courage to stand alone and whole to see beyond all reflection.

We celebrate the future.  In the inner vacuum of our yearning we bequeath our secret to our daughters, the tremendous power that resides in emptiness.  The Value of Woman lies in confidence of things unseen. That is where life begins.