Balancing Masculine & Feminine Ideals of Awakening
What do we most deeply desire?
Relate to the following exploration of this question not as an assertion about what is true, but as an invitation to inquire directly into your own experience. Investigate the truth of the answer to this question for yourself.
We desire both freedom and connection; we want autonomy and intimacy. My teacher Douglas Brooks, and the Tantric tradition he represents, Rajanaka, which evolved from the Sri. Vidya traditions within Hindu Tantra, describes these as the masculine (liberation) and feminine (intimacy) ideals of the spiritual path.
These desires are in tension with one another. This tension is not a problem to solve; it’s a paradox to manage. Most contemplative paths attempt to simply solve this problem in a particular way: by renouncing worldly life and desires. This represents the first option of the yogic traditions: nivritti, to turn away from. The second path is pravritti yoga, to turn towards. This second choice is the orientation of Tantra.
Historically, this first move, to turn away from the world, is what created an ascetical orientation towards spirituality that we find across time and place. This is what we find in the early yogic traditions, the shramana movement, out of which the early Budhist teachings and Classical Yoga emerged. In these traditions desire is a problem to be solved and the answer is renunciation. The body is something to be rejected or transcended. The emphasis is completely on the masculine ideals of liberation and transcendence. While one could say that these traditions still value intimacy in the form of a spiritual community, these practitioners gave up sexuality and romantic relationships in addition to nearly complete rejection of the senses. Art and creativity is not centered in these spiritual paths the way that we find in traditions like Zen or Tantra, that invite greater engagement with life. Historically, these communities were traditionally exclusively male, or they created a system in which women were subservient to men.
Men should renounce their sexuality, and should often be separated from celibate female monastics, because men can not control their sexual desires in the presence of the opposite sex. Women, the old story goes, will tempt and distract men from their destiny, in this case, liberation. This points to the archetypal fear of man that we see depicted in myths across cultures: that woman has the power to make man conscious of his vulnerability. This above all is what man hates most: the feeling of being out of control.
On the one hand, man is drawn towards the wildness of the feminine because it is The Divine Feminine, The Shakti, in all of us that turns us on. Psychotherapist and relationship expert Esther Perrell says that men talk all the time about things that women do that turn them on, but women almost never talk about things men do that turn them on. Why is that? It’s because woman is the turn on.
In nondual Hindu Tantra, the creative power of the universe, The Great Goddess, The Maha Shakti, is feminine. Woman is that which gives birth; she is the source of creation. It is the union of this dynamic power with intelligence or consciousness, the archetypal masculine personified as Shiva, that animates this play of consciousness, the divine play, or lila, that is the universe taking form through and as us. In Goddesses: Mysteries of The Divine Feminine, comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell reveals that though there are notable exceptions, including Tibet, most cultures tend to map the feminine as dynamism and creativity and the masculine as space and stillness, as we find in Nondual Tantric Hindu traditions such as Kashmir Shaivism and Sri Vidya.
From an evolutionary (hetero normative) lens, man is possessed by a primal desire to be turned on by that wildness of a woman. Yet it is this same quality of a woman that has the capacity to remind him of his vulnerability, that he is not in control of his emotions. Men have been conditioned to believe that to not be in control of your emotions, to feel vulnerable, is a form of weakness, which is, after all, the greatest archetypal fear of men: to be perceived as weak. From this fear springs forth the efforts to regulate men’s sexuality and to control women through patriarchy. The residue of this impulse pervades spiritual traditions and even some modern, secular adaptations of these traditions. This distorts and disorients our bodies, hearts and minds in numerous ways.
Mythology and Tantric iconography also invite us investigate the ways in which each of us embodies these particular qualities, the light and shadows of our unconscious, that the Tantras map through the lens of masculine and feminine. Many women embody more archetypal masculine qualities or shadows, and the reverse is true. The tensions exist between all of these forces inside all of us, regardless of how you identify your gender or sexual orientation. Ultimately, the value of these masculine and feminine archetypes is about understanding energies and drives within all of us, regarding of how we identify our biological sex or gender.
The emphasis on celibacy creates a huge shadow centered on sexuality. The way to cut through desire is ultimately by turning towards it. Renunciation is a very skillful means and a necessary phase of the path, but it’s not appropriate for householders. Nor is it ultimately appropriate in the long run for many monastics, based on the numbers of ostensibly celibate men who act out their repressed desires and create immense harm to both women and young boys. Unfortunately, cases of abuse are abundant across this models of spiritual traditions, from the Catholic Church to Dharma communities.
These male dominated paths focus on how to master desire. I use the word master because if you look at yogic traditions traditionally they represent the typical male orientation within all of us. This is the impulse to develop mastery or control, through means both coercive and subtle, conscious and unconscious. Metaphorically, it views spiritual awakening as a mountain to summit (mastery), rather than as a process of descent (surrender). We see these orientations to spirituality across time and place which suggest they are archetypal. We find that male dominated ascetic communities attempted to control their desires through mastery of the body and sublimation of desire. The goal was union with the divine, but based on a rejection of the body and an attempt to transcend its limitations.
The dominant cultures of most of the great religions focus on the masculine ideals of liberation and transcendence. There is something very deep in the human psyche that reaches for transcendence. However, we’re also social primates by design; we’re wired for connection.
Tantra represents the rise of The Divine Feminine not only in that women assumed more prominent roles within institutions and the teachings, but also that archetypal feminine values began to balance archetypal masculine ones: embodiment in addition to transcendence, intimacy along with freedom, devotion as well as equanimity.
Like all things in the universe, human beings gravitate towards equilibrium. The journey towards wholeness is a movement towards balance. Yet the Tantric view of awakening is distinct from the Jungian ideal: as a journey towards wholeness. A Tantric view of awakening is being shattered, consciousness contracting to its center point (the bindu) only to explode through the other end. To even use words like a center point implies there is something solid or fixed, which is misleading. Like the universe, consciousness is a fundamentally dynamic process. It is the default mode of dualistic perception and through conceptual designation that we have this habit of creating seperation, as if, for example, “the universe” and consciousness” were separate or independent. All of reality is interdependent; the ego is the misperception that we are sepearate.
Cutting through this sense of separation lies at the heart of any nondual path. This is the basic, life changing truth to which plant medicines such as Ayahuasca and Soma can wake us up.
Reflect on what it means to practice yoga and meditation as a householder. Excellent questions to contemplate and on which to journal include:
What are my deepest desires?
In what ways are spiritual practice and plant medicines bringing me into deeper engagement with life?
In what ways are spiritual practice and plant medicines pulling me away from relationships, commitments, responsibilities?