The Subjugation of the Feminine
We have to recognize the subjugation of the feminine,
the oppression of all that which does not fit into the frame of current consciousness, our academia, our politics, our religious leadership. We have to recognize how difficult it has become to address the whole of our human existence and inquire into its meaning, wisdom and beauty.
“Neither conscious gynophobic malice nor unconscious assumption of privilege can completely account for the cohesiveness and resiliency of philosophy against the intervention of women thinkers. Feminist philosophers have documented a masculine identification in philosophy that goes er than discrimination which might be redressed in affirmative action programs, er than biases which might be cured in an effort to consider women as well as men when choosing texts…. If civilization is male in its very constitutive structures, there is no medium for women’s thought but men’s thoughts; revised, corrected, but still categories, methods, arguments borrowed from men. Feminist theory itself must be expressed in the terms of ‘philosophies of man,’ as Marxist feminists criticize liberal feminists, radical feminists draw on the existentialism of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty to criticize Marxist feminists, continental feminists turn to Heideggger to criticize Anglo-American empiricism, poststructuralist feminists turn to Derrida and Lacan to criticize radical feminism…. If it is possible to say that abstract forms of logical argument have provided continuity in philosophy, it may also be possible to say that what holds together a search of wisdom on these questions is the very refusal of abstracted argument and an insistence on constantly returning to painful experiences which provide reference and which provoke and energize passionate thought. At the end of the twentieth century there is a great need for such thinking, which is practical and theoretical, engaged and general…. The tradition of male philosophers has failed to produce an understanding of divinity, self, value, reality, knowledge viable in the late twentieth century. As long as women’s thought is defined in opposition or resistance to this failed thought, as what is not logical, not authoritative, not rational, no redress of that failure is possible.” (Andrea Nye, 1989, 64)
In the reflection and the awareness of the feminine, we become conscious of our human being. In that consciousness we learn to recognize our longing, our desire to merge and become one with the transcendental. The awakening to the feminine goes hand in hand with the recognition of our erotic nature, for in awakening to the feminine, we become aware of our innate longing. It is this longing, which makes us believe that we are separate from the source of being, exiled from the celestial planes, punished by God. It is this longing upon which the Sufi teaching is based; and this longing to merge and become annihilated; this longing for truth, is based on love. As the Qu’ran puts it, “I was a hidden treasure that longed to be known.”
“God reveals Herself most completely and perfect in the human being, made in the image of the name Allah, the name that comprehends every possible name, every reality, every ontological possibility. Hence witnessing Allah in the human being must be the most perfect form of witnessing. However, one can then ask if witnessing Allah is more perfect in the form of men or in the form of women. Ibn al-Arabi answers with the latter, especially since women ‘were made lovable’ to the Prophet. He could not have been made to love something other than Allah, since nothing other than the Real is truly worthy to love. ‘There is no beloved but God’ is the theme found throughout Sufi literature, though rarely expressed in these particular words. Rumi provides the most detailed and accessible explanation of the fact that all love is in fact directed only toward Allah.” (Sachiko Murata, 1992, 86)
Regrettably, many authoritative people in the religious and spiritual field have not undertaken the efforts of contemplating the mysteries, as revealed by our prophets and put in perspective by our mystics and saints. Relying on second hand knowledge and borrowed insights, they give themselves all sorts of lofty titles, and we, in our ignorance, tend to follow them. All this happens in the name of faith, the surrender to God and the realization of one’s self:
“There has been a reversal of human values, a spiritual breakdown, which has brought into play forces beyond the material and the human. The present crisis has been prepared by the whole system of science, philosophy and religion. The only way of recovery is to rediscover the perennial philosophy, the traditional wisdom, which is found in all ancient religions and especially in the great religions of the world. But those religions have in turn become fossilized and have each to be renewed, not only in themselves but also in relation to one another.” (Bede Griffiths, 1988, 13)
Indeed, this is the task of our time, for without a reversal of our contemporary human values, we will be met by a future in which we would rather not live. This reversal will only come about with the integration of the feminine and the acknowledgment of our ego which, in relation to the transcendental, is our humanity. This reversal will include our erotic nature and the passion experienced and associated with it; the passion which we have been investing in consumerism, productivity, competition and pornography in favor of being authentic, transparent, straightforward, honest, sincere, and, alas, compassionate.
In the course of this process, we may recognize the man’s tendency to promise too many things too quickly, which he then cannot hold, thus jeopardizing his constitutional self for wanting to be respected. We may recognize the woman’s propensity to be carried away by those man made promises, in her need to be cherished. It is hard to believe that the man would have the power to break a woman’s heart, especially if we attribute equal responsibility to both of them. We all want to be respected in our humanity and cherished for who we are. No gender is attached to our aspiration to awaken to our true nature, which infuses our being with meaning, wisdom and love. No gender is attached to the feeling of joy nor the experience of sorrow; no gender is attributed to such concepts as truth, justice, politeness and peace.
“It is my strongest hope that, as the male once rescued consciousness from the chthonic matriarchate, the female might today help rescue consciousness and her brother from patriarchate…. We need today to develop intuition and alert passive awareness…. But until males stop killing themselves (and others) in order to be strong and silent; until females stop encouraging just that behavior as evidence of a ‘true man’; until chauvinists settle their accounts with their own masculinity and stop defensively exploiting their sisters; until angry feminists stop, on the one hand, reactivating chthonic ‘female only’ matriarchal obsessions and, on the other, trying to co-op patriarchal obnoxiousness; until feminist intellectuals stop asking what it means to be truly female and start asking instead what it means to be neither male nor female but whole and human then the patriarchy, the mental-ego, which has served its necessary, useful, but intermediate function, and which, for that, we have much to be thankful, will nevertheless soon prove quite literally, to be the death of us all.” (Ken Wilber, 1984, 194)
While we can and have to question and redefine the ascribed gender roles, we cannot change our sex - our biological constitution. We can, however, explore and learn from it.
“There are, generally speaking, very strong differences between the male and the female value spheres—that is, both in sex and gender. Men tend toward hyper individuality, stressing autonomy, rights, justice, and agency, and women tend toward a more relational awareness, with emphasis on communion, care, responsibility, and relationship.” (Ken Wilber, 1996, 23)
Gaining some insight about our sex and gender related differences may help us to identify more clearly the aspirations and traits we share with each other, the depth of our human nature and the reality of our spiritual oneness. On a plane practical level, acknowledging our gender-related differences helps us to relate to each other by valuing them instead of agonizing over them; which generally results in further separation, rather than the transcendence of our gender-related differences.
Learning to embrace the other—our femininity as a male and our masculinity as a female—seldom happens solely through our spiritual practice, but more often in the context of a romantic relationship. It is here that we may witness that, as Tannen writes, “a protective gesture from a man reinforces the traditional alignment by which men protect women. But a protective gesture from a woman suggests a different scenario: one in which women protect children. That’s why many men resist women’s efforts to reciprocate protectiveness—it can make them feel that they are being framed as children.” (Deborah Tannen, 1990, 34)
“Where it gets less simple, is in groups such as Robert Bly’s ‘Wild Man’ workshops and other groups that still urge men to identify with dominator archetypes such as the warrior and the kind, while at the same time often talking about equal partnership between women and men and a more generally just equitable society… But although it is touted as new, the script for men offered by some of these groups is actually not all that different from the old macho script except that it is dressed in New Age clothes. As in the old macho all-male peer groups, once again male identity is defined in negative terms, as not being like a woman. As in the old macho script of contempt for the ‘feminine,’ Bly berates his followers for being ‘too soft’ or ‘too feminine’ and thus, ‘unmanly’ expressing horror at being ‘controlled’ by women, from whom, according to him, men must at all costs be independent. To this end, men must even distance themselves from their own mothers, lest they be contaminated, in Bly’s words, by ‘too much feminine energy.’ ( Riane Eisler, 1994, 125)
In a time when female infants were buried alive and the average woman had no social standing on her own, Mohammad was apparently neither intimidated to marry a woman who was fifteen year his senior nor did he resist being comforted by her when he was in utter distress and felt most vulnerable, as when the angel Gabriel pressed his chest and commanded: “Recite, recite in the name of God.” Islam, the religion whose messenger is Mohammad, is the revelation of a joint effort, which is why women are equally included on the Sufi path, albeit still struggling to be equally accepted.
Like Lilith is said to have left paradise long before Eve was to become Adam’s mate, so is the feminine a subverted reality in our monotheistic religious culture. Alluded to by Islamic Sufism within the poetry of Rumi, Hafiz, Khayyam, Saadi, Attar and Ibn Arabi, and incorporated in contemplative Christianity, in the form of Mary Magdalene, the feminine does not play a role in most of our lives. Leila Ahmed offers a historical perspective in the following:
“Zoroastrianis …was principally the religion of the Persians, who predominantly constituted the ruling, warrior, and priestly classes…. The issue of chastity and of resistance to marriage was the central conflict in the battle of wills between prosecuting Zoroastrian priests and each woman. Women as well as men were among the early Iranian Christian martyrs. Although the Christian church endorsed male dominance, the narratives of the female martyrs suggest that it nevertheless introduced ideas which opened new avenues of self-affirmation and independence to women and validated ways to resist the belief that women were defined by their biology and existed essentially to serve the function of reproduction. Thus, Christianity promulgated ideas that were fundamentally subversive of the Zoroastrian social order in two ways: it enabled women to claim spiritual and moral authority and affirm their own understanding of the moral order, in defiance of male priestly authority, and it undercut the notion on which Zoroastrian laws on women were grounded that reproduction was their primary function.” (Laila Ahmed, 1994, 34)
Sufism acknowledges the equality of the genders and values their relationship with each other as an essential aspect of the spiritual path. Sufism emphasizes the unity of spirit in a couple who wants to merge with on the physical plane. Because, without this unity in spirit, without valuing each other’s principles of faith, physical union will fall short of the sought after communion, inspired by the dialogue that proceeds our falling in love.
We may fall in love, because of the beauty that our eyes behold in the reflection of another or because we are told something that makes our heart sing and our spirit fly.
Such impressions, as elevating and inspiring they may be, are temporary in nature, for if we really want to know if we are made for each other, then we have to inquire into each other’s principles of faith. Faith being the objective contemplation of self, imagination is the subjective, the intentional contemplation of self in relationship. How do we imagine living with one another, as a people, as different nations and as a couple? The feminine is visionary, intuitive and co-creative; in short, religious. The masculine is rational, cognitive, monotheistic. This coming together of wisdom and logic, imagination and reason, spirit and being is the cause of the Native American’s vision quest: the experience of unity! Henry Corbin relates to this subject:
“When you create, it is not you who create, and that is why your creation is true. It is true because each creature has a twofold dimension: the Creator-creature typifies the coincidentia oppositorum. From the first, this coincidentia is present to Creation, because Creation is not ex nihilo but a theophany. As such, it is Imagination. The Creative Imagination is the theophanic Imagination, and the Creator is one with the imagining Creature because each Creative Imagination is a theophany, a recurrence of Creation. Psychology is indistinguishable from cosmology; the theophanic Imagination joins them into a psycho-cosmology.” (Henry Corbin, 1994, 34)
Faith, as such, is empty of substance, empty of content. Faith, the masculine, is the matrix; imagination, the feminine, its form, content and story. Faith is that which impregnates, imagination that which gives birth. Love is that which unites them both, for it is both their origin and source of being. Love is without past or future. Love is that which is uncreated, uncompounded and unconditioned, which is why we cannot directly approach it. Love is neither an object nor a feeling. Love is the witnessing of being alone, something which we can only experience, for there are no words to describe it. As the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas puts it:
"When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same…then you will enter the Garden of Eden.
Love takes away our self-articulated limitations and allows us to experience our true nature; it makes us aware of the reality of our own being: communication!
Behold, I do not know any more where to draw a line: who is me and who is I? I have to at least start somewhere. How else can I claim to be, how else can I claim you are? This very You is our I, but you are not us nor are we thou. Essentially, we are the same but different, and without that difference neither you nor I could say: “I am.”
You are thou and I am thee, we are not one, not two, not three, but different; is this so hard to understand?
You have no equal, no qualities, no nothing; you are not body, mind nor speech; you are neither this nor everything you are and that is why I am!
We do not contain thee, as we are only your container, nor have you a voice we will ever speak or an ear that will ever hear your silence because you are beyond form and emptiness, beyond the past and future. You are beyond the perception of our creation; you are the very being at the moment of climax: love!
But you have to cease to exist in order to be. Nothing, really nothing can be left of you, and even then “you still must travel a long journey before you reach the place you seek in your madness,” to quote my beloved friend and compassionate guide Jalal al Din Rumi:
The day is coming when these words of mine will testify against you:
I called you I, the water of Life but you turned a deaf ear.
Of course, I know, why tell, just listen: you criticize my creative use of language as irrational and confusing because it does not go along with our linear way of thinking and the style of writing we have been accustomed to reading.
We eat dinner, watch TV and talk to our lover simultaneously, and that is how we have been taught to live fragmentarily! Again quoting Rumi:
“Unbelief has come in war, faith in peace,
Love strikes fire to both peace and war.
In the ocean of the heart Love opens its mouth
and like a whale swallows down the two worlds.
Love is a lion, without deception and trickery,
not a fox one moment and a leopard the next.
When Love provides replenishment upon
replenishment, the consciousness gains deliverance
from this dark and narrow body.” (Ibid.45)
We easily adhere to our faith if it is in our favor, but things look differently when, in the process of inquiring into our faith, we discover that the faith of our chosen partner is different from our own. This does not imply that we have to belong to the same faith in order to make a relationship work, but we have to be able to fully value the principles of our partner’s faith; otherwise, we will never fully entrust ourselves to him or her. Faith is the matrix, the source of our life; faith is that which makes you you and me. It remains our responsibility to inquire into our own faith before making a life commitment. This is where the reversal of our contemporary human values begins – the inquiry into our faith and the imagination of how we would like to live our life!
“It is said that in the other world, scrolls will fly, some into the right hands of the dead, some into their left hands. There will be angels, the throne, heaven and hell, the scales, the reckoning, and the book. None of this is clear until an analogy is given. Although these things have no equivalence in this world, they can be determined by analogy. The analogy of that world in this is as follows: At night, everyone goes to sleep shoemaker, king, judge, tailor and all the rest. Their thoughts fly away from them, and no thoughts remain for anyone. But then the morning breaks, like Israfil’s blast on the trumpet, and it gives life to the motes of their bodies. The thought of each one is like a scroll; flying and running it comes back to each. There are never any mistakes. The tailor’s thought returns to the tailor, the lawyer’s thought to the lawyer, the ironmonger’s thought to the ironmonger, the tyrant’s thought to the tyrant, and the just man’s thought to the just man. Does anyone go to bed a tailor and wake up a shoemaker? No, for that activity and occupation belong to him, and once again he occupies himself with it. So you should know that in the next world it is the same way. This is not impossible, for it happens in this world.
“If a person clings to this analogy and follows it to the end, he will witness all the states of that world in this world. She will catch the scent of them, and they will be revealed to her. He will come to know that everything is contained in God’s Power. You see many bones desiccated in the grave, but they are in comfort. Their owner sleeps happily and drunken, and is fully aware of that joy and intoxication. The analogy of this is to be found in this world of sensory objects: Two people are sleeping in a single bed. One sees himself in the midst of banquets, rose gardens, and paradise, while the other sees herself in the midst of serpents, the guardians of hell, and scorpions. If you investigate their situation, you will see neither the one nor the other. So why should it be strange that in the grave the parts of some people are in joy, happiness, and intoxication, while others are in pain, torment, and suffering, although you see neither the one nor the other? Human being’s existence is a jungle. Beware of their existence if you breathe the breath of the Spirit!” (William C. Chittick, 1983, 57)
The central affirmation of faith in Islamic Sufism is expressed as La' ila ha illah' la, there is no God but God. God is love, lover and beloved alike in Sufism. God is that which cannot may not be acknowledged as genuine by our learned scholars, for God is love; and love cannot be quantified or measured and hence is not considered necessary in our educational institutions. This veneration of love and inclusivity is the distinguishing criteria between the Western value of productivity and the Eastern understanding of religion.
“This veneration is accentuated in the overlapping realms of Saktism and Tantra that the devadisis and women of Tantric Buddhism inhabit. Perhapsthe scholarly characterizations of Tantric Buddhist yoginis as ‘lewd,’ ‘sluts,’ and ‘depraved and debauched’ betray a vestige of Victorian indignation not only at nonmarital sexual activity of women but also at the religious exaltation and worship of women. Theologian Hans Kung acknowledged that religious awe of women is so antithetical to Jewish and Christian values that is poses a major barrier to understanding:
‘It is especially hard for the Christian theologian to discuss… Shaktist Tantrism with its orientation toward female power or divinity… No one could fail to see that all the Tantric systems, and the Shaktist practices especially, are extraordinarily alien to Christians, more alien than anything we have met thus far in Buddhism or Hinduism.’” (Miranda Shaw, 1998, 76)
Tantra, alike Islamic Sufism, is inclusive, integrative and transformative, for it is neither in conflict with the feminine nor disvalues our erotic nature.
“The word Tantra, which has become part of the English language, is in Buddhism a term referring to one’s individual spiritual growth, and only secondarily is it made to cover the literate which deals with this developmental process. The words used in the Tantra literature are symbols for the experiences that are being lived through as the process of growth and maturation unfolds. They are not so much labels for things as, for instance, the label ‘dog’ is, rather are they incentives to lead people to, and finally evoke within them, those experiences which those who have had them consider to be of vital importance and which they try to communicate by those peculiar verbal expressions which do not seem to stand literally for anything.” (H.V. Guenther, 1985, 4)
Similar to Sufism, which does not exclude our egoist, erotic nature, our sense of self and humanity, and which even acknowledges Iblis’ role without making him/her wrong, Tantra includes the many conflicting and often times paradoxical dimensions of being. Tantra, like Sufism, crosses the boundaries of reason and logic; which is why as much mischief and confusion are attached to both of these paths as clarity and insight are gained while walking them.
“The Buddhist Tantricism of Padma-Shambhava, like Hindu Tantricism, postulates, in harmony with these more ancient teachings underlying all Tantric Schools, that good and evil are inseparably one; that good cannot be conceived apart from evil; that there is neither good per se nor evil per se…. Tantricism, in its highest esoteric reaches, of which Europeans have but little knowledge, propounds, as do all philosophies, ancient and modern, based upon the occult sciences, that the ultimate truth (at least from the viewpoint of man) is neither this nor that, neither the Sangsara nor Nirvana, but at-one-ment, wherein there is transcendence over all opposites, over both good and evil.” (W. Y. Evens-Wentz 1982, 34)
The world, as I came to know it in my journey and study, is one of multiplicity, interdependence and imagination. It is a world based on wisdom and faith, aspiration and intention. I had no idea how central faith is to our life when I stumbled into the religious spiritual arena at the age of twenty-one. And I had no idea where my own faith was to take me and how predominant the question of faith would become for me.
Faith is all that has remained with me. I lost friends and community; I lost my religious belonging and spiritual kinship and even my place in the world. Had I known how alone I was to become in this journey, I may have never steered this direction. But, then again, I am very grateful for having been able to pursue this path. I have met with people who were so caught up in their religious studies that they had no time and space available to inquire into their motivation and the living presence by which their faith was sustained. Thankful for not being caught in their place, my heart felt very saddened to see them veiling their own light, their own spirit and own individual essence with all the knowledge, all the books and all the thoughts of other people they studied.
The acquisition of knowledge is valuable, but not for the prize of my wholeness of being. What good have I learned when I can splice a theological argument into innumerable pieces, but lack the ability to turn a person in need of support, comfort and love toward the faith, the living presence, that resides in his or her own heart?
“Al-Ghazzali ranks equally with Rumi, Rabia and Shabastari in his emphasis on the Sufi doctrine that life without true love is a farce, that love is the guiding star on the mystic way, and that love eventually leads one to the ultimate truth…. He contends that the truth of religion depends not on miracles, laws, or rites and rituals, but on the soul’s experience and communion.” (N. S. Fatemi, 1994, 4)
Our world is as troubled by the lack of education as it is by our inability to relate; our inability to communicate; our inability to turn inwards and be still; our inability to go beyond ourselves and render our being to love. As Rumi puts it:
“Look not at Time’s events, which come from the spheres and
make life so disagreeable!
Look not at this dearth of daily bread and means of livelihood!
Look not at this famine and fear and trembling!
Look at this: in spite of all the world’s bitterness,
you are passionately and shamelessly attached to it.” (Andrew Harvey 36)
It has become increasingly difficult, if not nearly impossible, to contemplate and address this issue called life, in its entirety, in our academic institutions; where we are supposedly prepared for and educated in to understand our role in the world. This understanding, however, is only possible if we are inspired to uncover our mission and genius, as inscribed in our heart; if we are encouraged to unearth our individual calling. For it is this calling that infuses our life with meaning and enables us to realize who we are.