Worldview Community Blog

Imagine you were one of those folks utterly dedicated to their quest to fully awaken to the dimension of Spirit. You spend years searching the world (both out there and within yourself) for clues as to how to achieve that. You meditate, you contemplate, you chant, you visualise the light, you work through your shadow, you practice various forms of yoga, you sit under every Bodhi tree you can find. Eventually, you awaken! Your ego-identity is transcended and you become the uncorrupted embodiment of Spirit, manifest in human form. You have had a spiritual experience.

Pretty soon, people begin to notice your radiance. They are inspired by your wisdom and moved by your presence. They ask you how you did it, and you do your best to tell them. You use parables and stories, metaphors and koans. Your followers listen carefully, write down your words as “gospel”, and begin talking about you with some reverence. They tell their friends about you, and are careful to ensure that your instructions are followed to the letter. Now we have a religion.

Religion then is institutionalised spirituality. It is an effort to pass down through time the wisdom of the awakened ones.

Religion in itself then is not a bad thing, only bad religion is a bad thing. Bad religion is what happens when people confuse the institution with the spiritual message. The original message that seeks to guide followers towards a direct spiritual experience gets corrupted to serve the institution itself, which is linked to the vested interests of those who run it. Some degree of corruption is virtually inevitable in all religions, and some seem clearly more vulnerable than others. Just the same, at the heart of every religion, there sits a spiritual baby in the dirty bathwater of human foolishness.

The great benefit of established religions is that they carry a tried and proven lineage of spiritual transformation. Every tradition has a long line of awakened souls (saints, lamas, etc) to vouch for the authenticity of their methods. The phenomenon of “transmission” (where practitioners are positively influenced merely by being in the presence of an enlightened one) is real and valuable. As well, over time, substantial bodies of work emerge to support a given spiritual tradition, offering further value to devotees.

The downside is that you can drown in dogma and one’s spiritual aspirations can potentially be hijacked by unscrupulous teachers. Next thing you know you are being groomed by a sexual predator or urged to strap on a bomb belt as part of your liberation. In western Judeo-Christian countries, our passions are activated when we read of the Inquisition, or the power-hungry antics of past Popes, or the ongoing sexual abuse scandal presently rattling the church to its foundations. Modern minds are inclined to want to completely dismantle the church, curse the Koran and judge the Jews because of past and present sins. That would be a mistake.

While post-modern minds usually reject the dogma of any spiritual tradition, the fact is that the vast majority of the people on this planet need dogma to help them live a good and decent life. For those people, the traditional religions offer practical guidance of immeasurable value, enabling the vast majority of people everywhere to maintain sufficient moral decency to sustain their given society. Most Muslims are peaceful people. Most Christians are tolerant and forgiving. Most Jews love their God. If we dismantle the religions, we deny those good-hearted folk the guidance they need on their path to the higher realms of consciousness.

Ken Wilber calls the traditions the “great conveyor belt” of spiritual transformation. At different stages of our development, we find value in different kinds of spiritual instruction. Sometimes we need to learn the “one true way”. Later we may study multiple traditions and cherry pick value from each. Still later we might abandon external sources and go find a Bodhi tree. So, a willingness to accept the need for different strokes for different folks may ultimately serve the highest good.

Does anyone have a view on this question? In general terms, what is it that makes men and women different from each other? (aside from biology! Why do men appear to come from a different planet than women, and vice-versa? And what is about some couples where they seem to have this gap nicely bridged?

Gender differences is one of those topics that is still taboo in chunks of our culture, likely to result in men and women alike being tarred and feathered as being sexist. The reason is because the beginning of any discussion about gender differences is presumed to end with some silly assertion that all women belong in the kitchen, barefooted and ready for sex, or that all men are bastards and rapists. Here I want to move beyond that. It is vitally important that we explore and discuss gender if we are to begin working together to address the chronic ailments of our society.

Gender is multi-faceted affair… biology, gender identity, social gender roles, and ultimately as a spiritual orientation. Any meaningful conversation about gender differences needs to touch base with all those aspects.

Biology is the most obvious, including not only genitals and the shape of your chest but also all the hormones and other physiological variances. Biology still matters… only women can bear and suckle children. Only men have the levels of testosterone needed for the dirty jobs, like warfare driving a jackhammer.

Where all the contention comes from is the idea that biology determines your role in the home and in society. With the advent of technology, the physical prowess of men, once highly valued, has now been largely neutralised. A 60kg women can drive a 30 ton excavator, pull a trigger and push a big red button. Women now have at their fingertips the same destructive power once reserved for men. Men can operate a washing machine and fire up the vacuum cleaner.

While higher levels of testosterone are still an advantage in the competitive world of business and governance, many women have pushed through and, in some cases, occupy seats at the highest levels. Many women I speak to are not entirely content in the rough and tumble world of business, and quietly yearn to not have to bother with such things. Hormonal research suggests there may be a biological force at work in such yearnings. So biology plays a role in orienting us to what we do in life, but is by no means a solid little box into which we must try and fit ourselves. We need to move beyond that argument if we are to touch into the essence of our gender.

Gender identity is how we feel about our gender within our biological skin. While most folks feel themselves clearly as men and women in a body that matches, many are not so aligned. In every gay and lesbian relationship, one partner holds a masculine polarity while the other holds the feminine pole, even though both are of the same biological gender. And of course there are those folk who feel themselves compelled to undergo sex change operations in order to bring their biology in-line with their inner gender identity.

Gender is ultimately a spiritual question, which makes it not so much about male and female as about masculine and feminine principles. In this view, the feminine is the descent of Divine Love into the world of form (Agape), while the masculine is the ascent of consciousness from the world of form back into union with the Divine Source (Eros).

So the Earth itself and the entire physical cosmos is the feminine expression of Divine consciousness manifest as form. Our raw sensory experiences moment-to-moment are feminine in nature. How this moment feels is the basic expression of the feminine principle.

How we interpret how this moment feels is where the masculine begins. Interpretations, both conscious and unconscious, cluster together to form the ego… the inner conception of me as a human being in this world. The ego is essentially masculine. Every mental conception of anything in the world is also masculine, including philosophy, mathematics, engineering and all the academic domains.

The feminine principle is unconditionally accepting of everything she encounters, and unconditionally loving towards all of it. She perceives the world as a whole, and is attuned to the flow of energy. She lives in the present moment, spontaneously expressing the feeling tones of the moment. She creates effortlessly. Her gift to the world is the spontaneous embodiment of beauty, love and joy.

The masculine principle breaks the whole down into parts through the reasoning mind. It discriminates between all the possibilities of existence to choose his path towards freedom and peace. He exercises discipline to disentangle himself from that which does not serve his ultimate purpose of reunion with the Divine. He lives in the flow of time, focused on the future consequences of his choices while trying to free himself from the karmic consequences of the past. He creates with great effort. His gift to the world are life conditions conducive to wellbeing and freedom.

I use the pronouns “he” and “she” loosely… remember, every living person has both the masculine and feminine principles alive and active within them. The feminine principle is supported by the in-breath, the masculine by the out-breath. It’s not so much about men and women… it’s about the way both men and women embody these cosmic principles. Any person of either gender who operates at the extreme of either principle is nearly always profoundly dysfunctional… we all need BOTH to be decent, functioning human beings.

The characteristics then of people who embody these principles at the extremes are clear enough. Starting with the feminine, in whose very nature is the capacity to embody the Divine in the world of form…

• spontaneous displays of beauty and radiance
• inclined to celebrate the pleasures of embodiment
• perceives the whole of the moment all at once
• inclined to be caring and loving to all creation
• natural access to intuition (knowing without reason)
• inclined to trust feelings over reason

Meanwhile the masculine principle seeks to transcend the world of form in the quest to reunite with the Source…

• prefers to witness the world without getting too involved
• seeks resolution of worldly chaos in search of inner peace
• uses reason to “dismantle” the moment in search of a “solution”
• inclined towards rights and justice for all creation
• focused on constructing generalized wisdom (knowing with reason)
• inclined to trust reason over feelings

Sound like any men or women you know?

Feminism was the process of women claiming for themselves the masculine principle. From the 1960’s onwards, women became empowered in the world to witness with equanimity, make rational distinctions, fight for rights and justice and develop a wisdom of her own. Some 50 years after the rise of feminism, the men’s movement is about opening to feelings and intuition, bringing love and care into their behaviours, and developing trust for feelings. In other words, integrating the feminine principle into their masculine world.

So these days, many women are oriented to the masculine principles, while many men orient to their feminine side. In my experience, while this is powerful and necessary, it does not make for an attractive intimate partner. Women are often left wanting with sensitive new-age guys who lack equanimity, drive or purpose. Men are not so attracted to tough, assertive women who lack trust, tenderness and receptivity. This is the reason that relationships are so unstable these days… we are in the midst of a period of polarity reversal, where men and women alike swing back and forth trying to figure out who they really are and what they really want.

The ultimate peace in the war of the gender worlds is when both men and women can utilise both the masculine and feminine principles consciously, as required by the context of the moment. So women want men who can be tender, unconditionally accepting and loving in some moments, but then assertive, purposeful and rational in the next. Men want the same thing from their women, in running the household, in making life decisions, and especially in love making.

Sex is at its best when one person is unconditionally receptive and the other is profoundly penetrating to the soul level. If two poles with the same charge come together, either both receptive or both assertive, nothing much happens. The sexual dynamic is dry and floppy. It’s like electricity… you need a positive and negative polarity of you want to get the big charge happening.

What is happiness anyway? Is it really different for everyone, or is there some common denominator for all forms of happiness? And why does it seem so elusive? I know a handful of people who appear happy most of the time, but most folk I know are more miserable than not. Is happiness something that can last, or is it just a fleeting thing that comes and goes like clouds on a windy day?