Sign Up for Our Bi-Weekly Email

Expand your perspective with thought-provoking insights, quotes, and videos hand-picked by our editors—along with the occasional update about the world of EnlightenNext.

Privacy statement

Your email address is kept confidential, and will never be published, sold or given away without your explicit consent. Thank you for joining our mailing list!

 

letters

 

Science or No Science

Wonderful issue of What Is Enlightenment?. I thought the Vimala Thakar two-section piece ["Two Conversations with an Extraordinary Woman," Fall/Winter 1996] was the jewel of the issue. The contrast between her responses (to a woman and her questions and a man and his) was in itself a most exquisite teaching. I also loved the Elizabeth Debold interview ["Dancing on the Edge"]—an excellent choice—and Daniel Roumanoff's piece ["A Tragic Passion"] on Anandamayi Ma. Of course I personally agree with Arnaud Desjardins's view of her ["The Embodiment of Transcendence"], but Daniel's perspective will really make some people work—excellent!

In reading the letters (which I thoroughly enjoy), I also noticed the editor's reply to the one about a scientific languaging of eternal truths. Despite the profound commitment of What Is Enlightenment? to deep inquiry of Reality, I personally feel that that is going too far out. I think that What Is Enlightenment? is one of the most powerful spiritual journals in print today—in fact, if one excludes exclusively Buddhist publications, perhaps the most powerful. One of the reasons, I believe, is because of your focus on the contextual field in which we—you and I and others—find ourselves working and acting. Reality has many facets, albeit all Truth, and I think that to try to mesh or weave all the facets together weakens the whole thing.

Anyway, I've put my two cents in! And I'll still read the damn thing word for word as soon as it arrives, science or no science!
lee lozowick
Prescott, Arizona

Blowing the Whistle


The issue on "Women, Enlightenment and the Divine Mother" [Fall/Winter 1996] is superb. And congratulations for jumping into an important but extremely delicate topic. The new age and spiritual movements in this country like to pride themselves on being leading edge, open minded, and avoiding the herd mentality of the conventional world—and yet, by and large, they can be just as slavishly mired in their own herd mentality, mindlessly parroting platitudes that are, for the most part, simply wrong. And woe to those who blow the whistle.

I believe the preponderance of evidence clearly supports your conclusion that, although there are many wonderful exceptions, women do indeed have a difficult time moving from conventional and personal relationships to post-conventional and transpersonal orientations—a more difficult time, that is, opening to a genuinely spiritual domain. Should further evidence continue to bear this out, the only possible response is to honestly acknowledge it and then develop ways to deal with it in a sane and fair fashion. But those who do not even acknowledge the problem are doomed to remain stuck in it.

It appears that both men and women have both strengths and weaknesses when it comes to spiritual and moral development, and a fair and impartial approach to this issue would take all of those strengths—and weaknesses—into account, for both males and females. If men, on balance, have an easier time making it into post-conventional and transpersonal modes, they also tend to go to extremes and deny and alienate the personal and relational modes, and this alienation can, in its own way, be just as problematic and "anti-spiritual" as the female reluctance to surrender the personal.

Where men tend to emphasize agency and autonomy, women tend to emphasize communion and relationship. But both of those modes have, not just a normal and healthy expression, but a pathological expression as well. Men tend to overemphasize their autonomy and their "independence," sometimes so much that they dramatically fear relationship and commitment of any sort—they can get caught in pathological agency (and "hyper-independence"), and this can cripple their willingness to engage in true spiritual relationship with a spiritual teacher or master ("I ain't bowing down to nobody!").

Women, on the other hand, tend to stress relationship and fear autonomy, so much so that they will often completely sacrifice their own needs and their mature self simply to keep a relationship going, no matter how sick the relationship might actually be (every woman knows exactly what this means). In other words, women get caught in pathological communion, just as men get caught in pathological agency. (If you want a really whacko relationship, just put those two together.)

I think that you tended to focus on the female pathology—where she remains so mired in personal communion that she cannot let go of that and open to the transpersonal—but you didn't give quite enough attention to the corresponding male pathology—where he is so hyper-independent that he won't even enter into the spiritual process to begin with!

Of course, most of the males that come to satsang with Andrew Cohen have to some degree overcome this pathological reluctance, or they wouldn't be there in the first place! So you don't tend to see as much of the male pathology, and you only see what is left, namely, the female reluctance to surrender the personal. And that indeed is a very real problem. This is why, of the men and women that you do see, the men make the most progress (the men caught in their pathological agency just don't show up in the first place, so you see relatively fewer of those).

At the same time, this does mean that, on balance, of those who do in fact develop to the post-conventional and transpersonal and genuinely spiritual modes, a greater percentage will tend to be male. This is one of the urgent and thorny issues that needs to be directly addressed in spiritual circles, and I congratulate you for starting this important debate. At the same time, it is worth keeping in mind both the strengths and weaknesses of both men and women, so that each gender can, as it were, help the other over its weaknesses and limitations. The spiritual path is ideally traversed by a man and a woman holding hands and walking together into that great Emptiness.
Ken Wilber
Boulder, Colorado

Women Respond

Thank you, thank you for the recent issue of What Is Enlightenment? ["Women, Enlightenment and the Divine Mother," Fall/Winter 1996]. To see verification of what I have been observing in myself, to have my "process" reflected back at me, provides another opportunity and a longer look. This process I have been seeing in myself is the one which includes being hurt, defensive and emotional when certain traits are pointed out to me (either by others or through observation—usually both). When I hear myself speak with a tone of voice which I know to be unkind or having a hidden agenda, the part that "knows" this is gone in a moment or two. So then I ask others to tell me, to verify—and when they do—then comes the hurt and emotional upheaval and a longer look. It may take thirty minutes or twenty-four hours for this process to run and while it is running my full attention is there—amazed and horrified, full of remorse and feeling for myself—especially as the process moves from some initial issue/manifestation to finding myself in the gap with nowhere to stand, the sense of something crumbling and the feeling of being cleaned. Then comes a taste of being nobody, giving up, understanding, ease.

Finally in my life I feel a sincere interest in the process. Special thanks to Andrew Cohen for the clear description of the "human condition" in the last paragraph of his article "Liberation without a Face Is Total Revolution," and for the call to nobodyness.
Chandrika Taylor
Little Rock, Arkansas

I recently received my first issue of What Is Enlightenment? as a gift from a friend. What a joy to read articles from serious students addressing with vulnerability and honesty the central issues of our day.

I wish to address some of the issues broached in Hal Blacker's introduction, "Towards the Spiritual Liberation of Women" [Fall/Winter 1996]. I believe that women are neither more nor less spiritual than men. They are different. Women's willingness to give of themselves to others and dissolve the boundaries between themselves and others is a result of cultural training, not of spirituality. Women are trained to be servants, whose job in the culture is to serve men, their children and the culture. The men's selfishness, competitiveness, aggression and intellectual tendencies are also the result of cultural training.

There is a confusion between the image of being spiritual—selflessness, giving, serving—and the actual function of being spiritual. When one directly knows the spirit that enlivens all things, the service comes out of a heartfelt reverence for that force. It is not personal. It does not emerge from the motivation of being acceptable to the culture one lives in. It is a dissolution of the boundaries between self and Self, a direct realization that the energy within all "things" is the same energy; it does not come from a loss of psychological boundaries.

When human beings know what they actually need, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual needs become straight, honest and directly fulfilled. This eliminates all substituted forms of expression: Porsches, addictions, dominance over others, codependency, etc. For a woman to genuinely focus on herself and find out what she needs exposes her to the internal accusation of being selfish (the absolute worst thing you can call a woman). When you strip off the extra baggage and recognize and fulfill essential needs, you end up with clear and flexible psychological boundaries. These boundaries result in a person being caring, loving, skillful, and yet able to care for oneself as well. There is a balance.

I have watched both men and women accomplish this and emerge loving and self-empowered beings. The way to this is distinct for the sexes. Balance is achieved by cultivating what you are lacking rather than amplifying what you have. Then, reaching for the higher spiritual levels, you have a solid foundation to stand on.

Thank you for publishing this wonderful magazine.
Elizabeth Ann Brandon
Ft. Collins, Colorado

The last issue of What Is Enlightenment? [Fall/Winter 1996] is about the Divine Mother (supposedly) and on the cover asks the question, "Do women have the inside track on spirituality?" This sets up the reader to perceive the whole matter as a competitive thing. That's a difficult perspective through which to come up with a viewpoint on women's spirituality—you're bound to fail because (of course) spirituality has no sex and (of course) male teachers are not referred to as teaching masculine spirituality.

I agree with Andrew Cohen's definition of enlightenment given on page sixty-three ["Mother of the Universe"]—that enlightenment is freedom from identifying as any idea, whether high or low in the spectrum of perception—but also found it rather discouraging that he so easily questions Mother Meera's enlightenment and Anandamayi Ma's solely based on the stories of two men who were once related to them! Surely he can see where these men have clung to and identified with an idea and insisted that their teacher approve of that idea rather than transcend that perception. Andrew Harvey presents that it's Mother Meera's problem that she wasn't excited about his homosexuality. Why did he go to her, to start a love affair with another man or to transcend himself? If you criticize Mother Meera on her so-called "disapproval" of Harvey's homosexuality, why not express disapproval of his need to even have a sexual-emotional relationship?

This issue was an attempt to hear the "spiritual" from women, but you guys were really writing it and so casually, easily criticized women teachers without even letting them speak for themselves. We see Mother Meera and Anandamayi Ma through the doubts, needs and ideas of Daniel Roumanoff ["A Tragic Passion"], Georg Feuerstein ["The Divine Mother"] and Arnaud Desjardins ["The Embodiment of Transcendence"]; we get a glimpse into their ideas of these female teachers but the female teachers do not speak for themselves at all. So this issue could be called "The Token Women's Spirituality Issue" or "Let Me Tell You What to Think and Feel about Certain 'Woman' Teachers."

Let women speak for themselves!!
Karen Sack

Thank you so much for the excellent recent issue on "Women, Enlightenment and the Divine Mother"! I read it straight through, in order, from beginning to end, and it stimulated quite an opening in my usual ways of self-limitation.

The question to myself which arose within was this: Is your urge toward "surrender" and "self-eradication" coming from the Evolutionary Force of Life itself, gushing like a huge wave of energy to break down the walls and limits of the personal in order to express itself in the ever-expanding and unlimited TRUTH OF BEING? Or . . . is that urge to eradicate the "self" actually a denial by the personality of the Evolutionary Force of Life which is trying to manifest through this particular being in time and space? Is the personal ego thwarting that Evolutionary Force by saying, "Little me, I am so limited, so unworthy; I must take nothing for myself, but must only serve a larger cause"?

Then a demand came: "HEY YOU, WAKE UP! The Force of Life is in you! When you fail to take and use your share of energy on this earth, you are denying the Evolutionary Force of Life itself!"

I realized that the Unlimited will never express itself through denial of the personal, only through transcendence of it. It is very, very important—especially for women—to be in touch with our personal desires, and to experience the personal power to fulfill those desires. We must experience the ability to take what we want and need—directly and unapologetically, without subterfuge or manipulation. Otherwise, emotions of anger and frustration will arise (very likely unconscious) and we will act out of those emotions, causing suffering, all the while believing that we have chosen a "higher" path of selflessness. It became clear that the underlying motivation for many women's choice of "selfless service" is actually survival! Consciously or unconsciously we think, "If I demand nothing for myself, if I give everything . . . perhaps they will let me live!"

In other words, from the point of view of the ego, some aspects of "being enlightened" appear (conveniently) to be very similar to the requirements for being a "good woman"—which some of us have practiced our whole lives as a strategy for self-preservation and getting our personal needs met.

Given all this, it would seem that any spiritual path or teaching which emphasizes total "self-renunciation" holds many potential pitfalls for the "good women" of the world. In following such a path we must be committed to constant inquiry into our own deepest motivations. And perhaps—paradoxically—we must be prepared to balance our choice to be "nobody in particular" with a choice to honor the "particular somebody" which we are.
Kathleen Robinson
Boston, Massachusetts

How unfortunate for Hal Blacker to come from a family with such limitations ["Towards the Spiritual Liberation of Women," Fall/Winter 1996]. I am sorry he and his sister are enculturated in the way they have been, but he mustn't assume it applies to all womankind, for it surely does not. I come from a large family with many women. It is the women of the family who are able to look at the truth of a situation with cold hard exactness, not easily buying the claim of truth, but looking closely for the real artifact. The men of the family, as with most men of most families I have seen, are unable to let go of their own emotional attachments to opinion and quick to anger when challenged. In that way, they are far more limited by subjectivity than the women I know. Strong women run up against men who don't want them to seem pushy or angry, and so one has to avoid these people, or soften words for them as if they were children.
V.A.
via email

I was interested to read Hal Blacker's introduction to the Winter 1996 issue. It seems to me that he has confused the "Feminine Principle" with women. The cosmic Father and Mother Principles belong to both sexes, and we are here to balance the two—both between men and women, and within each of us individually—yet the Principles are above earthly gender. The Mother aspect will always be inward-pulling and tend toward the personal, even in the highest female cosmic avatar.

I feel that Mr. Blacker begins with a glamour—that women's emphasis on the personal must necessarily be the result of false conditioning—and ends with a glamour—that at the highest spiritual level this will be removed. Despite his genuine goodwill, he wants the Feminine Principle to be like the Male!

Where Male and Female meet, there Light flows. Yet the two principles of the cosmos are different. Perhaps one way forward for mixed spiritual groups would be for the men to become themselves more personal, in the sense of viewing "spiritual" as inward rather than outwards. Many people who study spiritual things do so as an escape from the "inward, personal, spiritual": they are simply projecting outwards, this time on "spiritual" things rather than politics or science. Yet there's no real difference—the aim is to escape themselves rather than what it should be, to encounter themselves. The groups, rather than viewing the personal as a limitation, could see it as the way through. It is, after all, the female role to lead in spiritual matters.
Marilyn Warbis
Devon, U.K.

I wish to thank you wholeheartedly for your amazing issue on the spiritual liberation of women [Fall/Winter 1996]. In fact I cannot thank you enough; this is the most significant, profound and comprehensive presentation on the subject I have seen anywhere! It poignantly clarifies the core of what women need to face, to change and to transcend in order to become truly free. The interviews with Vimala Thakar ["Two Conversations with an Extraordinary Woman"] and Elizabeth Debold ["Dancing on the Edge"] especially shed light on areas of confusion that are usually only seen within a psychological context. To clearly experience the effect of these biological and cultural conditionings on our spiritual evolution and our relationship to the Unknown is truly extraordinary. Here the invisible wall that contains the women of our modern world is unmasked and laid bare.

In the interview with Elizabeth Debold, there is a subtle but significant point that needs to be carefully explored and understood, where she speaks about the principle that "you can't give up what you don't have." This point involves an area of life that I have been experiencing and noticing for some time as a challenge for those who are spiritually motivated. I feel it is the place where most spiritual seekers are suspended in midair between the spiritual and personal aspects of life. In an effort not to become ego-identified, many people try to transcend their personal experience. This is a denial of our power of choice, of the fact that we are choosing, and of our authentic expression of the One Self. It creates the very separation we are trying to free ourselves from.

Elizabeth states that you need to own the ego to transcend it, and the interviewer responds, "So it's a matter of seeing what you're actually up to." My point is that I have experienced and continue to observe in others that "owning or seeing" one's conditioning is not enough. Yes, we need to identify the ego and face it; however, this is only half of the issue. We each have a personal expression that is authentic, that is necessary to who we are in this life, even when Enlightened. When our desires are pure, Spirit takes action in the world through our choices. These are choices that we make personally. We act through the personal aspect of our nature—when this action comes from a pure motivation, what we want is also the highest good.

Regarding the Divine Mother, it simply makes sense that if one is containing one's experience of That which is beyond definition within the context of a clearly defined aspect of nature, there would necessarily need to be some imbalance and limitation in the manifestation of the Absolute Principle. It is crucial for women to consider that during our time, in the context of the patriarchal world paradigm, the "Mother" is still the only culturally acceptable model for powerful women. This ensures that women will not develop their own vitality, creativity and power, which would inevitably rock the boat of the patriarchal structures. These structures are designed to keep us all from our inner experience of the true Father Principle, which is our own authority for our own life. It is becoming imperative that we realize the difference between the Patriarchal Father and the true Father Principle, as well as the difference between the patriarchy's Female Model and the true Feminine Principle.

The Absolute
is beyond definition and form, and I feel that it is inappropriate to frame IT within any other context, including that of God or Goddess. This is the point of confusion for many who are still unconsciously relating to the Unknown within the polarities of the worlds of form, or as parental figures.

With much gratitude for the courage of those who investigate these areas so boldly; it is a service to us all.
Shastina FreeBear
Lake Shastina, California


[ continue ]

 
 

Subscribe to What Is Enlightenment? magazine today and get 40% off the cover price.

Subscribe Give a gift Renew
Subscribe
 

This article is from
Our Science Issue