I thought I waxed very intellectual on Graham’s The Brilliance Within on the theme of gender and beat myself up afterwards for doing so.
But the truth of the matter is that the subject is very important to me and clears the way for a new and necessary revision of the context in which men and women relate to each other. And so I’d like to continue that discussion, if you’d permit me.
What I’m trying to do here is to get clearer and clearer about the subject of gender so that we take away the artificial barriers that men have erected to keep women intimidated and subjugated.
To do that I’d like to go back to first principles and reconstruct the picture, one step at a time. And I hope you forgive me needing to be conceptual to do so but I can’t see how it can be avoided.
The purpose of life is to know our true identity as the Divine. That’s the purpose of life for you and me.
The purpose of God creating life is that God should meet God. God, being all there is, would have a very difficult task meeting itself.
So God created an illusory world of temporary existence and us finger puppets whose task it was to uncover their true identity as God. If God is all there is, how could any of us not be God? If we were not God, then God would not be all there is.
Sages over the ages have invented a gender way of discussing what happened next and so I need to now outfit God the still Void with masculinity and God the active Creator of the illusory world with femininity. But neither is actually masculine or feminine. That construction is simply an informative metaphor.
To create this world, “God the Father” sequestered a part of himself, which sages have called “God the Mother.” Both the Father and Mother are equally God and share all of God’s attributes. But the Father does not move and the Mother does.
He is the Source of creation; the world is created from him (it could not be otherwise). But she is the creator, preserver and transformer of that world. As Lao Tzu put the matter:
“Nameless indeed is the source of creation.
But things have a mother and she has a name.” (1)
He is the clay; she is the sculptor. Both are equally the planner, the motivator, the estimator, etc. because both are One.
If you consider the human act of procreation, you’ll see that it very much resembles how the Father implanted the soul (the seed) in the womb of the Mother (this world) and how the soul grows in the womb unto realization of the Father and is then “born” (Self-realized).
Why is human procreation metaphorically parallel to Self-realization? Because the purpose of life is to know ourselves as God and knowing is an act of discrimination and realization. These metaphors assist us in discriminating and realizing.
The Father and Mother then, in collaboration, with him as the silent partner, created a race of beings, their children, each comprised of a soul, the Father part, encased in matter, mater, the Mother part. These souls were tasked with realizing their true identity in a moment of enlightenment, at which point God met God.
The gender distinction was maintained in the fact that each soul was born and immediately divided into two, which we call twin flames. This initial division again reflects the division between Father God and Mother God. The realization of the oneness of twin flames is a stage in the realization of the Oneness of God. The soul, first divided and later reunited, is a stand-in for God.
One twin flame usually plays the feminine role and one usually plays the masculine, but not always. What was fundamental about twin flames is that they perennially sought each other and their ultimate destiny was to merge.
Just as Father and Mother are One and merge, so twin flames are also one and merge.
Any one soul plays a feminine role in one life and a masculine role in another. This is designed, I think, to provide the spectrum of experience that awakens memories of the One.
What constitutes gender at various dimensional levels differs. At the Third-Dimensional level, the two genders have different apparatuses, serving different functions. The female bears children; the males do not. The female often but not always suckles the young.
In past ages, they were assigned roles. The father goes out and brings in the bacon. The mother prepares it. He works. She raises the children. On and on the division of labor went, flowing out from this first biological differentiation of equipment.
But even one dimension higher, in the Fourth Dimension or Astral Plane, some features of gender disappear. Neither a man nor a woman has genitalia, which people discover to their chagrin. So already the means of making love and impregnation disappear.
On higher levels, people can shapeshift and assume whatever gender appearance they wish. Children are not born in the same biological way as on the Third Dimension. In fact there are no marriages in heaven, but there is also no childbirth as we know it. The higher we go, the less there is of what we consider gender. So gender is definitely temporary and less and less prominent as we return more and more to the Source.
All along the soul has never had gender. The soul is not male or female. It is God and God does not have gender.
The function of gender at the level of the transcendent is to represent the existence of God in two modes: the still and the active, the silent and the sonic. It embeds the distinction of difference in us and prepares us for knowing the Mother, whom alone we can know, which then prepares us for knowing the Father by “un-knowing.”
Along the way, a milestone is our becoming androgynous or balanced. Another milestone is us merging with our twin flame. These are all waymarkers on the road to the realization of God as our true identity, on the road back to unity or oneness, on the road back to God meeting God.
What’s the point in saying all this?
Well, I want us to see that none of these distinctions is permanent, none is fixed in stone, and none need ever bind us. None provides a basis or an excuse for subjugation and yet intimidation and subjugation are all around us in our world.
The refusal of education to young girls, forced marriage, forced sterilization, economic inequality, honor killings, dowry deaths, on and on the list goes of acts of persecution against women, most of it designed to keep them subservient to men.
There is no reason, save the limited biological function of child-bearing laid down in the Third Dimension by Mother/Father God, for assigning all of some functions to women and all of other functions to men.
There’s no basis or excuse for subjugation in the temporary Third-Dimensional fact of gender differentiation and there was never intended to be any. Life was never intended to be the way it is in some countries today.
Men will never bear children, at least in foreseeable future. That’s true. But that biological specialization can be allowed for and accommodated.
It provides no grounds for an assumption of male superiority. It’s no basis for the view that women are somehow handmaidens to men. It’s no basis for taking away from women their absolute right of self-determination, free will or choice.
In the world we’re entering, women will have the absolute right of self-determination, free will or choice. There’s no excuse any longer for denying it to them here, as men have done for millennia.
In those areas where they’re biologically committed, allowance should be made for the impact on the fulness of their lives. This impact should be compensated for in all ways.
The fact that they go through the pain and inconvenience of child-bearing should be recognized, supported and catered to. Rather than removing women from the stream of compensation, they should be paid for bearing children, recognizing it as a task as surely as any other productive task is.
The tendency of men to arrogate power to themselves has no future. The practice of subjugating women through violence and intimidation has no basis in the Divine Plan or design of life.
The existence of gender is not a basis for exploitation or an acceptable excuse to exploit. The existence of gender is to provide us with experience and fan the desire to merge with one another, and ultimately with God.
All of us have been men in some lives and women in others to experience the different sides of ourselves and inquire more deeply into who we actually are. We work against the Divine Plan and design for life when we try to gain power over another. We plunge ourselves more and more deeply into ignorance and darkness, moving farther and farther away from the purpose of life.
This is an Age of Light, of forgiveness, love and trust. It’s an age of empowerment, equality and opportunity. And it’s an age of letting go of what has not worked.
Arrogance, disempowerment, and subjugation have not worked in the past, do not work in the present and will never work in the future. Equality, empowerment and acceptance are, as far as I can see, the only way to build a world that works for everyone.
Footnotes
(1) Lao Tzu, The Way of Life. The Tao Te Ching. trans. R.B. Blakney. New York, etc.: Avon, 1975, 53.