What is "feminine energy"?

[Avi]

[..] female energy is "passive" while male is "active". [..] In answer to your first question, feminine energy is creative energy in its perhaps purest form, as manifested in this density.

This is how I think of it as well.

I also would like to comment on the word "passive". Sometimes, this word is used as to mean, "nothing is happening, the passive party isn't doing anything". IMO, in reference to the feminine energy, it rather has to do with being in tune with the world around and letting things ripen on their terms. This is directly connected to the meaning of creation as letting something new, separate from the creator, to manifest and appear. The creator's role as a DOer is still pivotal, however.

Similarly, in common parlance we often equate "active" with doing things. In reference to male energy, however, active would emphasize the direction of the force, the exertion of will to achieve a goal.

Both ways, both principles are used to get things done, just in different ways, and both have their time and place.

fwiw

One of the greatest mistakes throughout history I think has been equating "passive" i.e. "female", with weak.

indeed!

I really like your observation on the terms passive and active.

As I experience it, the term passive when discussing energy, refers to something like a broody silent stillness.

Like a pond that has not been disturbed.

Ever waiting to absorb, to receive, to be "acted upon".

Silence, tends to produce a power of its own, doesn't it?

This strikes me as feminine energy, that void which can emanate from listening with every fibre of our being.

It is a "pull" whereas the opposite is a "push".

LOL, stupid words, they never quite hit the mark.

So there IS passive in the sense of pathetic, then there is passive in the sense of in tune as you say, poised, yet still; calm, yet alert. Simply put, aware, receiving impressions of life all around.

I also think both passive and active have both positive and negative applications. For instance, the "busyness" which can be distraction as a negative application of being "active" versus the will which directs, as you say.

Tension also appears to have something to do with how one is defined from the other.

When tensions collapse I think it is no longer possible to be anything but negative and passive, not in a good way, more like being blown by the wind in every which way.

 

[Oxajil]

Here is a related bit from Bringers of the Dawn (bolds by me, but I really find the whole text interesting):

The planet is looking for a balance in the self. Since the self is a
composite of all things, it is a harmonic that balances all of your
extraterrestrial selves, multidimensional selves, and male and female
selves.

You are incredibly whole beings, which you are beginning to realize.
Allow yourself to blossom and come into this completeness. No one
hinders you but yourself. If you allow this completion, there are vistas
awaiting you that are beyond your imagination. You are discovering that
you need your emotional body and that you need both your femininity and
your masculinity. You need all that you have been gifted with in order
to survive and understand what is unfolding upon the planet. Please
realize the severity of the times that you are living in. As we spend
time with each of you, you in turn will be tested and then taken to
teach many others when the time comes.

Through feeling, you can discover much more, for you are seeking to
resolve something and make something whole within yourself. To show
yourself how unwhole you are, you have created a situation of tremendous
separation that appears to be outside of yourself. It looks as if your
drama has to do with a powerful man against a powerful woman. Which one
is going to be the victim? Who is right and who is wrong? What is this
internal drama actually saying? What is this outside mirror that images
what is going on inside of you?

As you access multidimensionality, you must merge male and female. You
will not stop at the separation or fight between men and women that has
been going on for thousands of years. Who is creating the separation
between men and women' It is the creator gods, who have set up this
paradigm for you and instigated these frequencies from other points of
view. The separation story has served them well because of the havoc it
has created.

The male vibrations came into power in recent times some five thousand
years ago. In order to slowly recognize who they were, they completely
and totally disassociated themselves from anything that was formerly in
power: the matriarchal movement and females. Females operate
traditionally through the realms of intuition and feeling. Males have
also been carriers of intuition and feeling a multitude of times, but in
this recent separation they did not carry feelings with them. There was
a huge schism, and the males and females on the planet came into great
conflict. Why did this occur? It was a setup. It was set up by the
creator gods who took over the planet and raided the reality-feeding,
keeping themselves alive and functioning, and nourishing themselves off
emotional turmoil.

This planet has been subjected to all kinds of plans and activities
orchestrated to create greater and greater emotional turmoil. The more
people involved in these activities, the more potential for emotional
turmoil there has been. The creator gods instigated these activities and
set you up to work against each other. In order to bust this paradigm,
as you all are on assignment to do, you must change many of the
separating structures that have been set up. Whatever the separation may
be between man and woman, black and white, or Oriental and Caucasian-you
must change it.

You came onto the planet purposely to insert yourselves as members of
the Family of Light in situations that are archetypal. As we have said,
you are doing this so that you can understand the masses and transmute
energy for them by being able to transmute it within yourself. Once you
make a healing or joining, you take it on and heal not only yourself,
you heal the species and the mass psyche.

Remove yourselves from your personal drama and realize that it is all
symbolic. See yourself as a female entity looking for identity, and
notice how a male identity constantly seems to oppose you. You must
discover how you can bring these identities together inside yourself.
When this joining occurs inside you, it will automatically proceed
outside you. As you have journeyed upon this planet, part of what you
have come to heal is male dominion over the female. You don't need to
take what you are doing personally or carry it as a personal burden as
if it is just yours. It is not just yours; it is universal.

Each of you carries energies to resolve within your collective
experience. As members of the Family of Light, you each have your
reincarnational goodies-your "stuff"-in areas that most impersonate you
and that you find to be stimulating. That is why you are all different.
As members of the Family of Light, you need to branch out or fan out to
get the hang of being human. You need to cover the full spectrum of
experience so that you can comprehend from a cellular level how much
needs to be transmuted, how deep the sense of powerlessness runs, and
how lost the energy of the Goddess is from the consciousness of the species.

Remember, you are creatures who have been locked in development *by
*frequency, and your task is to bring human beings to the place where
they can be poised to consciously accelerate human evolution. When you
are locked in evolution by frequency and DNA manipulation, there is only
a certain kind of frequency that can broadcast. There is fighting with
the self, and things seem to be more separated. As you become more
complete, you do not separate things in such a way: you see that all
things are part of the experience. Sometimes you become so lost in the
experience of being human that you forget what you are here to do.

As members of the Family of Light, you have come here to transmute for
the species. As soon as you get less attached to the drarnas, you will
not feel so caught up and victimized by them. You will understand that
this is a collective of energy you are dealing with. So, collectively,
if you can come to the realization inside yourselves, you can broadcast
a new vibration for women and men to harmonize with.

Everv time you feel as if you have made headway, you have. Do not
discount the steps you have taken. You discredit yourself when you look
at your behavior and judge yourself or others as bad. Look for what you
get out of everything.

The conflict that is going on is actually between the male and female
inside of you. You have not figured out how to merge your male and
female parts, and there are millions of others with the same conflict.
Be kind and generous to yourself. As you build cooperation between your
male and female counterparts within yourselves, you will be able to find
the cooperation to work with one another on the planet and the
cooperation to work with the beings who come from space who are all
yourselves.

You all need to become sovereign. As you change, you need to have a
space around you within which you can operate without feeling obligated
to someone else. At the same time, you cannot make demands on someone
else without allowing them the same right. You are redefining in many
ways the whole concept of relationship and cooperation. Relationship is
cooperation. It is agreed cooperation of frequency, or
frequencymodulation blending. Many of your old ways of relating are
becoming very irritating because you are discovering a freedom
frequency. Your assignment is to pull that freedom frequency onto the
planet. Of course, you will pull it into your own life and family and
relationships first. Ideally, you will learn how to be free while still
being involved in an intricate number of relationships, relatings, and
relayings of life.

Unfortunately, on this planet, relationships connote ownership. When a
man and woman get married, the woman's father traditionally has the role
of giving her away. In other words, a male figure must hand her over.
There is an incredible expectancy within relationships about another's
behavior. Get clear about what your idea of relationship is, and this
will facilitate things in the long run. Just as there is no ownership
with parenthood, there is no ownership in a relationship. You relate to
one another as you relate energies back and forth. Ideally, there is
communication with all of this relaying and relating.

The male vibrations give their power away just as much as the females.
They give it away to a government that says, "Here, go jeopardize your
life. Go take a stand and shoot for us. If your body gets chopped up, we
will take care of you in a hospital and give you a bit of money. What
the heck; go for it," and the males just obey. The chain of obeying and
giving the power of the individual away is then complete.

You are opening your feeling centers. Men tend to have greater blocks in
their feeling centers than women do. Energy in the male has been stuck,
because it has moved from the first chakra to the second chakra and
stopped. The feeling center in the male vibration has not been
activated. This is part of the experiment that has gone on for the last
four or five thousand years. The female energy, which feels and brings
life onto the planet and represents creativity, moved into a submissive
state in order for the male vibration to have its opportunity, without
feeling, to run the world.

We want you to get the big picture. We are looking at movements of
consciousness. The female, who carried the magic and the intuitive,
agreed to give these up-female meaning not just female physical beings
but /consciousnesses /who were female. Many of the native cultures that
lived with Earth and knew about life were very feminine. Remember, the
female literally brings life onto the planet, for life comes out of the
female body. The female therefore carries feelings, because you can't
bring life onto the planet and not feel-unless you participate in the
patriarchal movement that creates drugs to numb you from feeling. When
you can't feel life, you don't value life. When you feel life and
participate in the creation and deliverance of life, you value life much
more because you know about it.

The patriarchal movement over the last five thousand years has removed
itself from the birthing process so that it could carry out its
experimentations involving war and the continual annihilation of people.
The energy was purposely blocked in the male. As we mentioned, the male
energy is very stuck. We are not pointing fingers. However, we are
saving, in general, that the energy of the male species on the planet is
very stuck in the second chakra or within the penis. Females, you are
stuck in your throats because you agreed four or five thousand years ago
to be silent about the magic and intuition of what you represented and
knew as one part of the twin flame. The thin flame is the male and
female existing in one body, whether you are physically male or female.

The patriarchal society has been run by the male aspect of the self,
which you all have been. You have all experimented with consciousness
and taught yourselves about what works best, preparing for this time
when the flames will be lit together in your body. At this time, the
twin flame is not sought as a partner outside of the self but is
understood to be the integration of the male and female selves and the
ripeness of all that self has done. After you have integrated the male
and female within yourself and activated your own twin flame, then, when
you seek a partner, you will seek someone complete, not someone to fill
the need that you have not acknowledged or that you have not filled for
yourself.

During these times of change, women are going to need to open their
throats and give themselves permission to speak out. Now is the time.
And men, your challenge in understanding women and other men is to feel,
and to let feeling enter your expression of sexuality in your
relationships. Many men now, are having a very difficult time with
women. Women are driving men crazy. It is true.

What we are suggesting for the male vibration-and also for the female
who operates in the male aspect of herself-is that you move into feeling
in your sharing of sexuality. Move into the emotionality of things,
rather than just the sexuality and stimulation of the body. There is an
emotional stimulation that needs emotional commitment and emotional
trust. Electromagneticallv, this emotional stimulation will open a
frequency within you. This frequency that sexuality represents is a
reminder of your godhood. .

The male shut down his feeling center in order to experience stewardship
upon this planet. He was able to carry on war and to kill and dominate
the planet because he had shut down his feeling center. The female
agreed to have her speaking center shut down so that the male would have
the opportunity to experience being in charge of this system.

All of this is now coming to a point of stabilization or equalization.
The female began to open her throat about thirty years ago, making the
opportunity to speak fashionable. The problem is that many females ended
up shutting down their feeling centers as they opened their speech
centers. They began to become very much like males. A balance is needed.
Now the female is finding the need to awaken the feminine principle
inside herself. She is in a female body and has mastered the use of the
male vibration within herself. She has gone out into the world, and she
feels powerful. She can walk the streets without a veil on her face, and
she can decide whether she wants to be married. She is her own property.
She is responsible in this country for her own decisions. She is
beginning to soften and to awaken the portion of herself that nurtures
her and brings her life. As she makes herself whole with her male and
her female portions and allows herself to experience the evolved DNA,
she broadcasts this frequency. This frequency will become very prevalent
upon the planet.

It is inevitable that men will open their feeling centers. That is the
next step men must go through to establish a balance with the female.
This will happen very quickly for men. It will not be a thirty-year
process because men at this time are moving as a populace into
confusion. Men are realizing that they don't like what is occurring, and
they are questioning authority.

At some point, the frequencies will become predominant. Then, for
example, a person may be experimenting on an animal in a laboratory when
their feeling center is suddenly and radically opened. The person feels
the pain that the animal is feeling, and what they have been doing
becomes abhorrent. They turn around and walk away from the laboratory
and never go back because they are so shaken. This is what is coming for
the male vibration.

We have said that the male vibration will transform in a very short
period of time. We will not tell you why or how because some of you will
consider it to be entirely too ominous. However, we will say that, as
the waves continue to come, there will be a unilateral rising of
consciousness within the population. At a certain point, when men are in
the deepest struggle of mastering feeling, the feeling center will be
activated. This will either occur gently, or it will be blown wide open.

Women at the same time will be hit, infused, and enveloped with the
opening of the heart chakra so that they can have compassion while they
watch their men feel. We are speaking of mass events that will trigger
people through waves of light.

Female energy, that which feels and connects life to life, is being
awakened in everyone. Women must redefine their ideas of femaleness and
strength. They must find what it is to be strong as females, just as men
must discover what it is to be vulnerable as males. What is the
endearing aspect of the male when he is vulnerable? What is the
endearing aspect of the female when she is in self-empowerment-when she
is a feminine version of empowerment and not a masculine version?

Women have had a hard shell around their energy fields; they have been
protecting themselves. Now they are going to develop true emotional
strength. That hard outer shell will diffuse, and the light body will
radiate from the heart. The goddesses and the gods are agreeing and
working with this energy. It is so decreed that this is how the drama
will unfold.

The old stories have been buried and covered that recount the magic
of the female, the creator, the one able to bring birth, the one
holding the mystery of blood-the life force-and the one able to put
that life force back into Earth. Where are the stories of the
Goddess-she who loves and feels and nurtures? The male species used
to have Goddess energy inside, too, and felt the need for the Goddess.

In order to better control the planet during the last several thousand
years, all of the myths have been given to you by extra terrestrials.
They have seeded all of your religious institutions. We have said you
are an experiment. At times, the experiment has been uplifting and
loving, but in recent times it has moved into incredible decay. You, as
members of the Family of Light, have come to raid this planet and pull
light back onto it so that the nonsense of separation and war never need
be believed again. Man and woman are meant to complement each other, not
oppose each other.

Remember, feeling is emotion. Emotion is the key to getting off this
planet; it is the key to figuring out the multidimensional self, healing
it, and becoming one. It is also the key to lovingly activating Earth as
a Living Library, returning a valuable area of existence from
extinction. With men and patriarchal society in charge of this planet
for the last several thousand years, and women taking a position
underground-not even in the back seat-separation has been the theme and
emotion has been pushed aside, given a bad name, and frowned upon. You
have been automatons, performing roles that were given to you to keep
you separated.

You do not have a pantheon of powerful female creator images. You have
nothing on which to pattern a positive image of the empowered feminine.
So men are striving to be male and women are striving to be empowered
through a male vibration because you do not have a clear vision of the
empowered female. /You must create it. /Begin to recognize the wealth of
energy in the female version of self, which is intuition, receptivity,
creativity, compassion, and nourishment. You are discovering that there
is a wealth of identity in an essence that has been discredited for
along time. If you are female, of course, you are a living form of that
essence. Men must discover their form of the Goddess within themselves
where the Goddess meets the god in them.

By the same token, the view of the masculine is distorted. You do not
have an example of an empowered, /feeling /male. Society has deemed
feeling males "soft" and lacking in masculinity. Men are beginning to
look at their emotions and say, "Hey, I /feel/ this," and know that they
are still men. So men and women are both creating role models for
empowered, integrated versions of masculine and feminine. These models
are coming, and they are coming quickly. The time for separation is
finished.

As we mentioned, it is not /outside /yourself that you are looking for a
twin flame partner. You are looking for the integration of the female
and male essence within yourself. They make one whole. Whole people are
looking to connect with other whole people in relationships that are
based on trust, desire, and choice. The relationships are not based on
"I need you in my life to complete me and validate me." You become
complete in yourself and operate with someone else who is complete in
themself and offers a whole new territory to explore.

When you marry that twin flame inside yourself, you are recognizing the
intuitive, Goddess, life-bringing, sensitive portion of yourself as well
as the portion of yourself that is powerful, rational, and intellectual.
One that is very much of the Earth plane and the other is very much of
the spiritual plane. When you merge these energies together in yourself,
it will be imperative that you find someone who has the same qualities.
You will not fit with someone who is not integrated and whole.

You will automatically draw whole people to yourself, and it will be
effortless. You will be able to plug into one another out of desire and
recognition, not out of need. You will achieve something that you never
recognized as a possibility in any relationship before, and you will
give relationship a very new personality, a new boundary, and a new
definition. You will become your own role models for this new type of
relationship. Many of you will find that the marriage institution is
meaning less. It will not fit and house what you know or how- you want
to live.

As all of you are on the path of integrating the polarities within
yourselves, difficult issues are going to come Lip over and over again.
Welcome the difficult times, for they can be your greatest teacher. Stay
focused on your own growth, your own path, and your own self, and not on
what others are doing. Call on your own internal masculine and feminine
and set up a dialogue between them so they can begin to work in
partnership and harmony. Give yourself a lot of love and encouragement.
Make an appointment with yourself and say, "I love you, self. You are a
wonderful self. You are A-Number-One, the best self."

When you give yourself the dignity of your own love, as if you were
royalty receiving the accolades of the people, everything changes.
Strength and integration become yours because you believe in and love
who you are. When you believe in and love yourself, everything starts to
go your way. The most difficult thing for most of you is making the
commitment to believe you deserve love. No one else has to love you. You
are not here to go around gathering love from other people to convince
yourself that you are worth it.

You are here to master a very difficult task in a system that is dark
and gives very little input, stimulation, or information about the true
story. You are here to do the impossible. By committing to love yourself
and making this commitment the number-one step from which you operate
every day, everything falls into place. You become whole and complete.
Then you are ready for a bonded relationship with another who is
complete, and that relationship can take you into unexplored realms.

The last bit doesn't have to mean a romantic relationship, I think it also could mean a network or a group of people who are working towards becoming whole.
I must say, reading that bit about telling yourself that you love yourself and shouldn't go collect that love from others in order to feel worthy, made me quite teary...

 

[daco]

Maybe this book has an answer to this question and particularly womens question.
_http://www.theabsolute.net/ottow/sexcharh.html

It is from author which is generally viewed as misogynistic and antisemitic in academic circles.I must admit that this book is not for everyone this author is among couple of others who are totally misunderstood.For example Nazis use Nietzsche for their propaganda.

I found that Rudolf Steiner mention this book in one of his lectures and he says I quote
"Otto Weininger was a man with great potential which, however, he was unable to develop because the full weight of materialism rested heavily on his soul.He was of the opinion that the individual human being can be seen neither as entirely masculine nor feminine but rather that the masculine is mixed together with the feminine and vice versa. This embryo of an idea dawned in the soul of Weininger but was stultified by the prevailing materialism. Thus Weininger imagined there to be a mixing and material interaction of the masculine and feminine principles such that in every man a hidden woman and in every woman a hidden man is to be found. But out of this, some strange conclusions came to him. Weininger said for example that the woman possesses no ego, individuality, character, or personality, no freedom and so on. As his theory was concerned only with a purely material, quantitative mixing of male and female properties, it followed that the man possesses all of these things. These, however came to nothing in him because of his other male qualities. Thus if we enter into this logically we soon discover a theory which destroys itself. Yet as we shall see, there is some truth in it."

I partly agree with him.

From the Gurdjieff point of view I would quoted Bar Kochba from topic Boyhood with Gurdjieff - Fritz Peters.

"Gurdjieff also makes some strange remarks about women which surprised me. Ex: "He said that the nature of women was such that self development in his sense of the phrase was something that they could not achieve...he said, 'Woman is from ground, and only hope for her to arise to another stage of development - to go to Heaven as you say - is WITH man.'

Soo after I read Weininger book I come to the same conclusion,Gurdjieff talks about same thing like Weininger too, the only differences is that Weininger goes to the end soo to speak.
Weininger said that women are sexual and that man is not only sexual and most important thing he said in his book is that women must get rid of sexuality in them and this is one of the things I agree with him and this is what we all can learn by Weininger.
What we can see is that women have kids for example, they are not aware of the what G called "the horror of the situation". I dont agree with Weininger is some things, he said that women are all about sexuality that women are pure sexuality I dont agree with that, I think that man need women and women need man for their spiritual quest.
Weininger book is rly hard to grasp if you are a women, but what he says is rly true but horrified in some point of view.
There is couple of books that stunned me like In search of miraculous or early Cs material but Weininger book, that was horrified experience.I dont regret it, but it helps me to partly understand differences between male and female.

Now I would quote Heimdallr from the same topic Boyhood with Gurdjieff - Fritz Peters

"My thinking here is that Gurdjieff is referring to women generally having a working emotional center. G's work was focused on awakening man's sleeping emotional center. He also noted that no true work can begin until that occurs. So, I don't think G is "putting down" women here, to the contrary. In fact, later in his life, he formed an all-women's group, The Rope. It's also entirely possible that G's views on women changed over time and later in life he grew more open to idea of woman being able to progress without the aid of a man, especially since it seemed The Rope was a collection of some of G's most advanced students. "

I dont agree with conclusion you make.G has highly developed instinctive center and when he said something like that he rly means that.If someone wants to partly understand G view on women, than Weininger books is a must read.



I remember that Jessie Dwight wrote the following poem about Gurdjieff (this is from wikipedia):
"He call himself, deluded man, The Tiger of The Turkestan. And greater he than God or Devil Eschewing good and preaching evil. His followers whom he does glut on Are for him naught but wool and mutton, And still they come and sit agape With Tiger's rage and Tiger's rape. Why not, they say, The man's a god; We have it on the sacred word. His book will set the world on fire. He says so - can God be a liar? But what is woman, says Gurdjieff, Just nothing but man's handkerchief. I need a new one every day, Let others for the washing pay."
I want to share something, this is from wikipedia too
"Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Otto Weininger, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Socrates, Gautama Buddha, Plato, Aristotle and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel are alleged to be misogynists."
Even Buddha.
That feminist movement is not about Women's Liberation and never was.I m truly sad when I read that they are called "misogynists".Keep in mind that in some time in future even Gurdjieff would be view as misogynists.

My two cents.

 

[Denis]

Weininger said that women are sexual and that man is not only sexual and most important thing he said in his book is that women must get rid of sexuality in them and this is one of the things I agree with him and this is what we all can learn by Weininger.

I don't understand this Weininger quote that you've put in bold letters. Why "women must get rid of sexuality in them?" What's wrong with sexuality? Can you explain this to me?

 

[Hildegarda]

Weininger said that women are sexual and that man is not only sexual and most important thing he said in his book is that women must get rid of sexuality in them and this is one of the things I agree with him and this is what we all can learn by Weininger.

Weininger may have said that, but we don't have to learn it from him because it doesn't appear to be his original thought. It has been around from before Adam and Eve, and underlies every patriarchal culture, religion, or set of ideas. Men are more advanced then women who are not much different from animals. Therefore, women somehow hold power over men and are responsible for seducing men into not being as perfect as they could be. If only woman fixed herself, humanity would be saved. Which is why a woman must cover her face, eat separately or not eat at all, and this is why it's her own fault -- her skirts is too short; and her husband would never beat her if she were nice to him and made sure his beer is cold.

What we can see is that women have kids for example, they are not aware of the what G called "the horror of the situation".

Every time a woman has a kid, a man has a kid too. Isn't it so? So what about the men, the fathers of those kids? Are THEY aware of the horror of the situation? Or do you think that the women are the responsible ones regardless?

Weininger book is rly hard to grasp if you are a women, but what he says is rly true but horrified in some point of view.

I admit that this book doesn't appear to be a kind that women as a group would a priori find enjoyable. But upon scanning the link you provided, it doesn't look particularly horrifying either. As a blast from the past, it looks run-of-the-mill.

I would be curious to hear whether you have factual evidence that confirms that what he says is "really true".

You might want to keep in mind that even if he uses factual observations as a basis for his conclusions, he is observing his contemporaries, and coloring his observations with personal prospective. The way men and women behave is very much influenced by society's standards of the time, as well as their upbringing, rights and opportunities.

You might want to imagine real modern women, someone who actually exists. Perhaps even the members of this forum: accomplished and competent women, students, PhDs, doctors, lawyers; women with a solid grasp of modern technology; women who may be physically stronger and better physically trained than an average man; women who are mothers of families and equal partners to their spouses. Imagine Laura, as an ultimate. Imagine standing in front of her and quoting Weininger to her, choice quotes such as:

t is to be remembered that even in the case of drawing and painting women have now had opportunities for at least two centuries. Every one knows how many girls learn to draw and sketch, and it cannot be said that there has not yet been time for results were results possible. As there are so few female painters with the smallest importance in the history of art, it must be that there is something in the nature of things against it. As a matter of fact, the painting and etching of women is no more than a sort of elegant, luxurious handiwork.

Whilst woman has no consciousness of genius, except as manifested in one particular person, who imposes his personality on her, man has a deep capacity for realising it, a capacity which Carlyle, in his still little understood book on "Hero-Worship," has described so fully and permanently. In "Hero-Worship," moreover, the idea is definitely insisted on that genius is linked with manhood, that it represents an ideal masculinity in the highest form. Woman has no direct consciousness of it; she borrows a kind of imperfect consciousness from man. Woman, in short, has an unconscious life, man a conscious life, and the genius the most conscious life.

The female, moreover, is completely occupied and content with sexual matters, whilst men are interested in much else, in war and sport, in social affairs and feasting, in philosophy and science, in business and politics, in religion and art.

Jacob Burckhardt, speaking of the Renaissance, says: "The greatest possible praise which could be given to the Italian women-celebrities of the time was to say that they were like men in brains and disposition!

"

The male lives consciously, the female lives unconsciously.

and ask yourself: does it actually make sense, does it have any reality in it? Seriously?

 

[Mountain Crown]

I haven't read the book, but these quotes read like a Monty Python parody. It's hard to believe the author was serious.

 

[davey72]

Very interesting take. could this be why the masculine based religions rule today?

EDIT: meant for this to be a quote from "BLUELAMP" to which this was said

I think there's a description where the cosmos at its center has the femine giving/birthing aspect (service to others) and also the male taking into one's self aspect (service to self). The service to self aspect, if you stay on that path would at some point get recycled back to primordial matter (1st density) for a retry.

 

[Aithin Tusa Fein]

I have read the posts on this topic and have been trying to process the information to discover what feminine energy is. Although, I cannot say that I am any closer to discovering what it is exactly, but I may have made a possible connection that may aid in the discovery.

After pondering for a while over the question of what feminine energy is, the image, or possibly the essence, of water persistently stuck with me. So, I began to question myself on the qualities of water. A few of the points I came up with are: water is essential for organic life (at least most of it to my knowledge anyway), water is receptive, that is you can throw a stone into it, however, it is most certainty not weak and it can move stones and erode mountains.

As it has already been mentioned, that some perceive feminine as weak. Perhaps that perception is because feminine was redefined at some point to mean submissive.

If the feminine principle includes passivity and receptivity could they be a key elements in intuition. Can you force intuition? Is intuition an action by which you do, or is it something you are receptive to?

Is submission receptive, or passive?

Or, is submission an act?

Is action the same or opposite from receptive/passive?

Is the masculine principle the active principal?

 

[Psalehesost]

Some thoughts going into side issues:

Female energy, that which feels and connects life to life, is being
awakened in everyone. Women must redefine their ideas of femaleness and
strength. They must find what it is to be strong as females, just as men
must discover what it is to be vulnerable as males. What is the
endearing aspect of the male when he is vulnerable? What is the
endearing aspect of the female when she is in self-empowerment-when she
is a feminine version of empowerment and not a masculine version?

In relation to relationships, that reminds me of the knightly ideal described in the quotes and discussion here and on.

You are here to master a very difficult task in a system that is dark
and gives very little input, stimulation, or information about the true
story. You are here to do the impossible. By committing to love yourself
and making this commitment the number-one step from which you operate
every day, everything falls into place. You become whole and complete.
Then you are ready for a bonded relationship with another who is
complete, and that relationship can take you into unexplored realms.

The last bit doesn't have to mean a romantic relationship, I think it also could mean a network or a group of people who are working towards becoming whole.
I must say, reading that bit about telling yourself that you love yourself and shouldn't go collect that love from others in order to feel worthy, made me quite teary...

There is also the question of Polar Opposites, which Ailén once addressed well here. As described, such have to work to deprogram themselves and become whole in themselves in order to work together; before that point, they are not ready and cannot even recognize each other, even though on some level their souls are connected. So the opening up of the possibility for such a relationship is another thing that "can take you into unexplored realms" that could become possible.

Something which contrasts a bit with the full excerpt you posted when applied to this is that such relationships in a sense would be based on need rather than desire; but not the need of a false personality to "feel whole". Having become whole in themselves, and achieved what they can independently, the need for them to work together to realize their full potential arises - and in this way, while at the same time whole in themselves, they are as halves of a unified being.

[..] female energy is "passive" while male is "active". [..] In answer to your first question, feminine energy is creative energy in its perhaps purest form, as manifested in this density.

This is how I think of it as well.

I also would like to comment on the word "passive". Sometimes, this word is used as to mean, "nothing is happening, the passive party isn't doing anything". IMO, in reference to the feminine energy, it rather has to do with being in tune with the world around and letting things ripen on their terms. This is directly connected to the meaning of creation as letting something new, separate from the creator, to manifest and appear. The creator's role as a DOer is still pivotal, however.

Similarly, in common parlance we often equate "active" with doing things. In reference to male energy, however, active would emphasize the direction of the force, the exertion of will to achieve a goal.

Both ways, both principles are used to get things done, just in different ways, and both have their time and place.

fwiw

This made me think quite a bit - based on this, it seems both "sides" are quite active in me, and the focus tends to shift back and forth. This has lead to conflicting viewpoints (each "focus" having been narrow) at different times, going back and forth and so being relatively stuck because of opposition in approaches used.

My "rational" mind tends to think of waiting and "letting things ripen" as allowing things to fall into entropic decay and failing to make efforts. Context is important, though, and I see I've been wrong in seeing this as absolute at those times.

At other times, the "intuitive" mind naturally takes the approach, when directing things, of being more passive in some situation - and this has often been right, judging by its fruits - but not always.

The problem is the fragmentation of my mind; if joined together so that I'd have a whole picture at all times, I'd choose the best for each occasion in a greater understanding.

This is significant. Work to do.

 

[ana]

Then I also think we need to take into account that words can be used to symbollically decribe several levels of knowings, so maybe the word feminine has not a definitive and literal interpretation, that's why the C's for example use it under inverted commas avoiding to give a literal meaning to the word and using it just as a way to communicate an objective truth wich is to be understood internally as a direct experiential Knowledge.

The jesus Mysteries by Freke and Gandy gives examples of how allegories used by the gnostics were to be received, they explain that those representations are to be understood as having symbolic meaning wich vary according to the level of knowledge attained by the initiate himself and should not be taken literally, since they are symbols of invisible ideas and not objects of worship in themselves.

 

[Aithin Tusa Fein]

Then I also think we need to take into account that words can be used to symbollically decribe several levels of knowings, so maybe the word feminine has not a definitive and literal interpretation, that's why the C's for example use it under inverted commas avoiding to give a literal meaning to the word and using it just as a way to communicate an objective truth wich is to be understood internally as a direct experiential Knowledge.

The jesus Mysteries by Freke and Gandy gives examples of how allegories used by the gnostics were to be received, they explain that those representations are to be understood as having symbolic meaning wich vary according to the level of knowledge attained by the initiate himself and should not be taken literally, since they are symbols of invisible ideas and not objects of worship in themselves.

Like in Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

 

[ana]

Like in Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

I think it's a good example.

 

[beetlemaniac]

Adding a little more to the topic, especially with regards to the symbolic nature of the feminine and masculine, I stumbled upon this interview in search of a better explanation of feminine energy, especially of the dark feminine. Robert Romanyshyn gives what I think are really vivid images as a link to the state of the feminine in past and current "Western" culture. He displays convincingly how we have treated the feminine and what that subjugation and suppression of the feminine manifested in our so-called 'cultural dream.' There is also stuff about technology which I found to be very fascinating indeed.

Sorry, my bolding of the text may be very haphazard and I encourage the reader to read the full text instead.

_http://www.cgjungpage.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=683&Itemid=40

Robert Romanyshyn On Technology as Symptom & Dream

A Conversation with Dolores E. Brien
Part One

Robert Romanyshyn's book Technology as Symptom and Dream is an original, pioneer work in the interpretation of modern technology from a psychological perspective and from within a cultural and historical context. Although published ten years ago, its message is, if anything, more relevant and urgent today. Our warmest thanks to the author for his generous and enthusiastic willingness to discuss his ideas with us as we launch this new section of the Jung Page.

Dolores Brien, Editor, Psychology and Technology, CGJungPage.org

Dolores: At the heart of your work is the idea that psychological life is not an interior reality divorced from the cultural-historical world. This idea will seem startling to many people who assume that psychology is purely about the personal, about what goes on in one's interior, private life. Can you elaborate on this point?

Robert: You are correct in pointing out that a central idea in my work is that the world--natural, cultural, and historical--is the landscape of psychological life, and that this idea is a radical challenge to the notion that psychology is about the personal which is private and interior. It is the theme which is explored from various perspectives between my first book, Psychological Life: From Science to Metaphor (1982), and my second one, Technology as Symptom and Dream (1989), as well as in some two dozen chapters and articles between these two books.

Dolores: Why is it so central in your work?

Robert: It is central because I am a phenomenologist. As a phenomenologist, I start with the notion that soul reveals and conceals itself in and through the landscapes of experience we build individually and collectively. A person says whom he or she is, for example, in the clothes that are worn, in the books that are read, in the ways in which the house is furnished and made into some kind of home. Well, the same is true on a collective level. The church architecture of an age, for example, tells us how that period manages the relations between the human and the divine. A fourteenth century Gothic church sets in stone the psychological spirit of the age in a way which is radically different from a Renaissance church.

My approach to depth psychology is shaped, therefore, by phenomenology's critique of the Cartesian metaphysics which underlies modernity and the appearance of an ego-consciousness which regards itself as separate from not only the world but also from the body.

Dolores: Can you say something briefly about Cartesian metaphysics?

Robert: In the seventeenth century Descartes laid the philosophical groundwork for a change in consciousness which began approximately in the fifteenth century with the artistic invention of linear perspective drawing. Linear perspective drawing is a technique for representing three dimensional space on a two dimensional plane which imagines the self to be a spectator behind a window who takes the world's measure with the eye and with the eye alone. Keeping an eye upon the world , the spectator now makes sense of the world as a spectacle for observation, measurement, and calculation. Quantity now eclipses quality as the world becomes increasingly mapped by the equations of mathematics.

Moreover, compared with other senses like touch, taste, or smell, the eye favors distance over intimacy. The spectator behind the window, therefore, begins to lose touch with the world and is increasingly unmoved by it. In fact, the body's sensuous entanglements with the world become an obstacle to this vision which favors neutrality and detachment. Thus the animate body, like the natural world which now matters only as a spectacle, now matters only as a specimen. For the spectator on the other side of the window, this specimen body is well on its way to becoming an anatomical object on the dissecting table.

Perhaps this is enough to suggest that the technique of linear perpsective drawing inaugurated a change in human consciousness which separated the eye of distant vision from the matter of the world and the body. In any case, the details of this story are given in the second chapter of my book, and in subsequent chapters I show how the invention of linear perspective drawing became a cultural convention, a habit of mind which eclipsed the Christian, medieval world, organized as a sacred cosmology, and gave birth to the modern scientific world, organized as a secular universe. Descartes' philosophy, belongs to this tale. In a sense, he transformed a technique into an epistemology. The spectator with an eye upon the world became the mind separate from matter. The spectator behind the window became the interior, private, subjective space of the rational mind.

Dolores: Does phenomenology deny the subjective? Isn't there a real sense in which we are private, and have an interior life?

Robert: It does not deny the subjective, and there is a sense in which we are private and do have an interior life. Phenomenology only challenges the identification of the subjective with an interior space that is literalized as a real place which is split off from the objective, public space of the material world. In other words, it challenges the Cartesian assumption that we are first thinking beings whose ego- minds have no relation to nature, including the body.

The ego is not a ghost in a machine. The mind is not located up in our heads, somewhere between our eyes, ultimately to be identified with and reduced to the brain. We need the brain to think, just as we need eyes to see. But there is more to seeing than what meets the eyeballs, just as one's thought can not be reduced to the condition which makes that thought possible. The mind, for a phenomenologist is flesh, and flesh is the embodied mind in the world.

Let me try to summarize these points with an amusing image from the poet E.E. Cummings. He says that since you and I have lips for kissing and to sing with, he who knows only the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you. Well, in this example the syntax of lips would tell us that they are mucous membranes, and then one might go on to describe a kiss as pressure contact between two pair of mucous membranes. If your lover were to kiss you with that attitude, the relation would be in some danger.

Dolores: Are you saying that your reflections on culture and history are for the sake of restoring soul to the world, and that this work has become necessary because of cultural-historical events which took place five hundred years ago?

Robert: Yes, I am. But I would make one small correction here. I would say that this reading of culture and history is not about restoring soul to the world. Soul is never without world, world is never without soul. To put this another way, soul and mind are a part of nature and not apart from it. Soul and world mirror each other. Scientific-technological consciousness pretends that this relation of mirroring does not exist. In the name of objectivity it breaks this reciprocity between soul and world.

What happened in the fifteenth century was that we broke the mirror, withdrew from our immediate presence to the world, and became an observer looking at it from a distance. We exchanged the immediacy of the world as a mirror which reflects, deepens, and re-figures who we are for a window behind which we became spectators of the world.

In my first book I dealt with the breaking of the mirror and in the second with the creation of the window. Both events have led to the interiorization of the soul which still haunts Jung's psychology, and to a much greater degree Freud's psychology.

Dolores: You refer to technology as a shared cultural dream. What are some of the consequences of this dream?

Robert: Because we are living these events as a continuing dream, we forget that linear perspective vision and the scientific-technological mind set which it makes possible is a perspective. We take this idea of a mind divorced from nature literally, as the truth of what is and has always been. We become prisoners of our own creations, prisoners in our own dreams. A key consequence is that behind the logic and rationality of science, there lies this largely unconscious vision of the mind in flight from matter, and as an additional consequence in flight from mortality and death.

Dolores: What do you mean when you say that technology is a symptom?

Robert: It refers to what is abandoned and left in the shadows of this flight by mind from nature and the body. On one hand what is left behind is the notion of nature as animate. As a spectacle for our observation and exploitation, nature, including animals, becomes inanimate. We wind up, then, with an interiorized soul without a world, and an in-animate world, a world without soul.

On the other hand, the body, scoured of its passions, becomes an anatomical object, a mechanism, a thing. Phenomenology reminds us that this is not the body as we live it. The lived body is an erotic relation with the world. The eye of anatomy located in the skull is not the painter's eye which embraces and is embraced by what it sees. This lived body, this animate flesh, this ensouled body is abandoned.

Dolores: In the chapter "The Abandoned Body and its Shadows," you give a kind of cultural history of this abandoned body from the witch in the fifteenth century to the anorexic today. All of them are feminine images. Who are these figures and why are all of them feminine?

Robert: The spectator mind behind the window which keeps an eye upon the world, which takes the world's measure from a safe distance, is a masculine form of consciousness characterized by power over nature as its chief value. And the nature which is dominated is associated with the wild, unruly feminine which needs to be tamed. All of these figures are the shadows which haunt the spectator mind which has taken leave of its senses.

In the sixteenth century Francis Bacon captured this spilt of the masculine mind of science and feminine nature when he said that the task of the new science was to put nature on the rack and torture from her secrets. The abandoned body is the return of this tortured nature, the return in symptomatic form of the split off feminine. These feminine figures from witch to anorexic are the images of soul who haunt the dream of reason, the body as passion which refuses to stay repressed by the ego-mind. They are the bastard daughters of Descartes, the return of animate matter, mater, mother earth, the living feminine which re-appears in the therapy rooms of Freud and Jung.

Dolores: Are you making a connection between the fifteenth century rise of technology and the birth of the therapy room in the late nineteenth century?

Robert: Absolutely! Whatever else it might be, or whatever else it has become, depth psychology in its origins is about the animation of the dispassionate mind, the restoration of soul to mind. The hysteric, who belongs with the witch, the anorexic, and others to a sisterhood of sufferers, carries for the masculine mind what it has forgotten, repressed, marginalized, or otherwise mistreated. When she crosses the threshold of the therapy room, she brings a radical challenge to a mind which equates reason with power, domination, control, and which splits thinking and feeling, mind and heart.

Dolores: But it seems that the therapy room has not been so successful in attending to this historical dimension of the symptom. Hasn't it remained primarily focused on the individual, the personal psyche, to the exclusion of this dimension?

Robert: Yes! But it is important to make a distinction here between Freud and Jung, the two giants of depth psychology. Jung remained much closer to the cultural and historical aspects of the psyche and her symptoms. Jung's psychology is not about the ego; it's about the soul. Furthermore, it is about the soul not only in its cultural and historical dimensions, but also about its cosmological dimensions. Jung, I believe, understood that the soul belongs to a sacred cosmology which was lost when soul was eclipsed by a mind which took flight from matter.

But I am drifting away from the question here. So just let me say that this is the focus of the book which I am currently writing. I am trying to show in this book how phenomenology and Jung's psychology converge toward an alchemical style of consciousness which re animates mind and situates it within nature and the cosmos. The book also shows how quantum physics shares a fundamental truth with alchemy. Both of them implicate the knower with the known. The observer is part of the equation.

Dolores: Can you say more about the therapy room, about this historical connection between it and scientific-technological consciousness?

Robert: The irony of the therapy room is that it is the place where the soul returns in symptomatic form to engage the mind which has been split off from nature. It is ironic because it is also the place which has largely maintained the fantasy of the psyche as something which is interior, private, personal, and apart from nature. The very same cultural-historical conditions which have made the soul a symptom, maintain it in the guise of treatment. Those early hysterics, whom I see as the shipwrecked survivors of this cultural dream of technological vision, are treated as neurotics whose repressions are intrapsychic. In this respect, psychotherapy is always in danger of serving the status quo, of adjusting the individual to the existing social, political, and economic norms. Think of managed care as an example.

Dolores: So we have not heard the appeals of the soul. Is that what you are saying?

Robert: Yes, that and a little more! The ante has been raised so to speak. The early hysteric lived a miserable existence, but as far as I know no one died of hysteria. It wasn't fatal. Today, however, the sister of the hysteric is the anorexic, and that is fatal. She is the ironic, symptomatic reminder of how we have transformed the human activity of eating, with its rituals of communion and community, into a technical function which obsesses about calories. She is also the denied, forgotten sister of the astronaut, the undernourished feminine left behind by the astronautic mind in its departure from the earth and matter.

My point is that while we stay in the therapy room to deal with our private neuroses, the world is daily becoming an increasingly dangerous place. We can't afford much longer to believe that our suffering has to do only with our families, with our personal histories, with Mom and Dad, and forget that they also concern the soul's cries about the world we have built.

Dolores: In Technology as Symptom and Dream you dealt with space flight and nuclear weapons. What about the more recent developments in technology, like cyberspace and the internet? Do these technologies signal another shift in psychological life?

Robert: When I wrote the technology book ten years ago, my focus was on space flight and the potential for nuclear disaster for a very good reason. We were in the middle of the most expensive arms buildup in history, and we were wiring the planet for destruction. At the time I was working in therapy with many adolescents and young adults, and I saw in their dreams a real sense of despair about the future, a kind of hopeless resignation. I also had two teenage sons, and so my work had an immediate and deeply personal motive.

There was for me a connection between these two technologies. We could wire the planet for destruction to the degree that we were increasingly capable of leaving it for the stars. I felt it was necessary to get at the fantasy material at the root of these events, to understand these events from the perspective of the soul and not just the rational mind. These events were not just facts subject to rational interpretation. They were also images with a symbolic depth, and I was looking for the collective psychological patterns and themes they revealed and concealed.

Dolores: Why is it so important to attend to the symbolic depths of events?

Robert: To the extent that we ignore these depths, we get trapped on the surface of events. Then they become literal facts and we treat them like destinies which already determine our fate. Or we react and become politically reactive in opposition to them. We protest the buildup of nuclear weapons, and we tremble with rage at the stupidity of our politicians who justify the enormous expenditure of resources on weapons and Star Wars defenses by labeling the other as the "Evil Empire." But we don't get to the dream behind all this, and we don't stop long enough to ask what the collective soul wants in all this. We walk around in a collective sleep while thinking we are awake. It is a terribly dangerous situation.

But have I strayed too far from your question?

Dolores: No. But let's talk a bit about these newer technologies. What is their symbolic content?

Robert: A few years ago I published an article in Psychological Perspectives entitled "The Dream Body in Cyberspace." I took the same symptomatic approach to this technology which I had used in the technology book. What is the collective dream expressed in this technology? What does it reveal and conceal about the collective life of the soul?

If you enter cyber-reality, which I have done, you realize that phenomenologically the experience is a lot like being awake while dreaming. It is a curious place where dream and wakefulness blend and are confused. I tried to describe this experience in that article, and I suggested that cyberspace might be the soul's way of reclaiming and returning us to the legitimate reality of the dream but now with a waking awareness of it.

Dolores: Cyberspace as a waking dream? Can you say more about what you mean?

Robert: An historical analogy might help here. In the Homeric world of ancient Greece human consciousness was organized more or less as a mythic way of experiencing the world. With Plato and the subsequent development of western consciousness, mythic ways of knowing and being are replaced by rational and empirical styles of consciousness. The latter pretends to an objectivity which the former supposedly lacks. But rational and scientific modes of consciousness also have a mythic depth to them. Jung and Von Franz are especially good at making this point, and I increasingly lean on both of them in my work.

Now it seems to me that the singular and radical importance of Freud's and Jung's discovery of the unconscious was and is the possibility of moving us out of mythic consciousness, including its rational and empirical styles, to a kind of consciousness which knows that it is in a myth, or dream, or perspective, even when it does not know the myth, or dream, or perspective it is within. I call this style of consciousness metaphorical consciousness, and I describe it as a reflexive mythical consciousness, that is a consciousness which is always aware of its perspectival character.

Dolores: So the technology of cyberspace is another shift in human consciousness, a shift from mythic to metaphorical awareness? What is a metaphoric style of consciousness?

Robert: In mythic consciousness, one lives in an animate world without any doubt or question. The world is alive and we participate in that cycle of vitality in a kind of unreflective fashion. Now the rational mind of scientific-technological consciousness has disturbed that way of being in the world. The rational mind begins with doubt. Metaphoric consciousness returns us to the animate world. But having left the mythic world, we cannot return to it as we once were, naive and unreflective. Now we have to live in an animate world with the recognition that its animation is in relation to a consciousness which knows it is animated. It is no longer the case that the world is animated. Now it is the case that the world is animated in relation to and as a relation with a consciousness that recognizes the world's animation. This a subtle but important difference with major consequences.

Dolores: What are some of those consequences?

Robert: Well, one major consequence is that consciousness now becomes a radically ethical issue. In metaphoric consciousness we have to take responsibility for how we participate in continuing the work of creation. A metaphor, by its very nature, implicates the knower in what is known. What a metaphor envisions reflects who envisions it and how that one is.

If, for example, you ask me what I think of aging, and I say to you that old age is the evening of life, I tell you as much about who and how I am as I do about what aging is. And on a collective level, if we say that energy and matter are interchangeable, that e=mc squared, then we are helping to bring that world into being, with all its consequences including nuclear weapons.

You see, metaphoric consciousness does not let us off the hook. We cannot say that e=mc squared is a fact of nature simply waiting to be discovered, and that, therefore, the bomb has nothing to do with us.

Dolores: So metaphoric consciousness makes us partners in the creation of reality, and challenges us to take responsibility for it.

Robert: Yes! and if this sounds too philosophical, then consider that quantum physics brings up the same challenge. It clearly indicates that consciousness is inherent in nature, and that the consciousness of the observer participates in shaping what is observed. Quantum physics presents consciousness as an ethical issue.

Dolores: What, then, are we helping to create with the technology of cyberspace. And are we doing it responsibly?

Robert: Well, before I answer this question, let me make one other point about the ethical dimension of a metaphoric style of consciousness. When I said earlier that a metaphoric style of consciousness means that we are partners in the continuing act of creation, I was thinking of Jung's Answer to Job. That is a terribly important book where Jung makes it clear that we assist God in becoming conscious. That is our ethical responsibility.

I think Jung was dealing here with the theological dimension of this issue which I am describing epistemologically, and which quantum physics describes from the point of view of nature. And what these convergences suggest is that our epistemologies have a sacred character to them, that in studying nature we are revealing the hidden face of the divine. Being responsible partners in the on going work of creation, we make God more aware of him/herself! I wonder sometimes if God, including his/her shadow, is in cyberspace.

Dolores: Can you say more about that?

Robert: No, not really. It's just a wild thought at the moment. But I can say that cyber-reality is that kind of consciousness which asks us not only to be aware that we are always dreaming, even while awake, dreaming as it were with eyes wide open, but also challenges us to take responsibility for what our dreams create. And I think it is terribly important that we take this opportunity, because we missed an opportunity earlier with the origins of Freud's and Jung's work.

Dolores: How did we miss an opportunity then?

Robert: The origins of their work challenged us to become more ethical by being responsive to the callings of the soul, by allowing our conscious minds to be addressed by the larger and deeper wisdom of the soul and its dreams. But, in turning that opportunity into a method of treatment for the individual person to which we attached our theories of pathology and development, we missed the chance to become more ethical human beings by becoming more receptive and responsive to something which is larger than our own ego-minds. The dream is a nightly humiliation of the ego-mind, a humbling of it. But we seem not to have learned that lesson The technology of cyber-reality might be another occasion.

Dolores: But what about the dangers and the risks of failing again?

Robert: If you look at the way in which cyberspace and the internet are going, there is good reason to fear that we will fail again. And the dangers in this failure are enormous. The major danger in these technologies is the eclipse of the body. In this respect both of them continue the flight from matter which lies at the origins of modern technology. The danger is that as we sit at our computers we will suffer "terminal identity."

I borrow this fine phrase from the title of Scott Bukatman's book. For me it has a double meaning. On one hand, our sense of self will become digital, as we float in the empty seas of electronic energy and lose touch with each other even as we are in contact. Recently I saw an article about cell phones which makes this point. It was in the L.A. Times, written by Anne Taylor Fleming. She says that even while we are more connected via our cell phones, we are more alone. I believe she is right. On the other hand, our terminal identity might be the penultimate act in the Cartesian drama of mind over matter, the penultimate triumph of reason over the body and its animal passions. But then who or what will be there typing away at the computer? Eventually no one, because in the final act we will have downloaded our minds into a computer.

Dolores: Isn't that a rather grim and pessimistic scenario? And must it come to that?

Robert: Yes, it is grim and even nightmarish. But we need to face up to this possibility. Right now it haunts our pathologies. It is at the core of our depressions, for example. Collectively we know something is terribly awry. We know we have lost and are continuing to lose something that is vital to our being fully human, a kind of birthright of the soul. And that makes us terribly sad, as it should.

Dolores: In the last chapter of your book, you said depression is a legitimate and sane response to the technological deprivation of the soul. Can you say more about that?

Robert: Depression slows us down. It's the soul's way of saying "Stop!Take account of what you are doing, where you are going." I saw this in many of my patient's dreams throughout the eighties, especially in the dreams of adolescents and young people.

I think that at the core of much of that depression was a hunger for grownups to take some responsibility for the terror, for them to admit that things were getting out of control. The depression of these young people was a plea to stop the manic pursuit of pleasure in a materialist culture addicted to increasing levels of consumption. The soul does not want to shop until it drops. It hungers for a sense of belonging, for a sense of spirit, and for the presence of beauty. It is not nourished on the meretricious substitutes provided by designer clothes.

Dolores: But to stay with one's depression is difficult.

Robert: Yes, it is! Staying with depression would force us to face up to the deep core of a collective sorrow over how much we have squandered in pursuit of the dream of building a technologically engineered Utopia. Think of it: in the midst of material plenty, we are spiritually starving. The soul, both individually and collectively, slowly dies of a broken heart in this ruptured place where the material world, the world of nature, no longer in-spires us and spirit no longer matters.

Dolores: A broken heart in this place where spirit and matter are torn apart. Is this your image of our technological culture?

Robert: In many ways it is. I remember reading a book long ago by the architect Louis Kahn in which he said that the sun realizes its beauty when it lights up a room. That is for me a wonderful image of how spirit matters, and it seems to me that in saying this Kahn understood that building is for the sake of dwelling in a way which is responsive to the natural order.

This sentiment is the opposite of a technological attitude which focuses first and perhaps only on function, utility, technique. The French author Albert Camus wrote that those who lack character need a method. It is a pithy way of expressing the core of technological consciousness. We are addicted to our methods and techniques, as much as we are addicted to our drugs. Methods and techniques divorced from context and content; the quick fix, the simple solution, the next program funded by a bureaucratic mentality which has no vision. "Just say No!" Forest Gump sits on a bench muttering his moronic slogans, "Gumpisms," about life and chocolates. And sitting beside him, if we dare to look, are "Natural Born Killers." Gump gets the academy award and Oliver Stone is vilified.

Dolores: Are you saying that depression is the other face of the technological dream of a perfectly engineered and managed care society?

Robert: Yes! Where is the wildness in perfection? Where is there a place for the odd and the strange, the peculiar and the different in a managed care society? The odd now becomes the outsider, and the strange one becomes the terrorist living next door.

You see, what I am saying is that depression might be the last refuge of difference in a society hell bent on engineered conformity. But depression terrifies us. It might even be un-American insofar as it goes against the values of efficiency, productivity, and happy, mindless cheerfulness. A few years ago I published an article defending our right to melancholy, which I now think is the better term. It appeared in Psychological Perspectives as "The Orphan and the Angel: In Defense of Melancholy."

Dolores: This seems an important point. Why have you switched to the term melancholy?

Robert: It is ten years now since I wrote the technology book, and in that time I have become increasingly convinced of the positive value of and necessity for depression. But I have also learned how necessary it is to free depression from its overly pathologized and medicalized stigma. I would say now that much of our depression, individually and collectively, exists because we do not allow ourselves to grieve.

Dolores: Why don't we allow ourselves to grieve, and what is the relation of grief and melancholy?

Robert: Grieving is dangerous because its presence attests to a love that has been lost. We grieve because we have dared to love, and we can love again because we have allowed ourselves to grieve. This is the central core of my new book, The Soul in Grief: Love, Death, and Transformation..

In this book I offer a poetics of the elemental forces of the grieving process, and I show how melancholy, which I describe as the result of grief endured, is the deep wisdom of the soul which recognizes that life is about loss, and that love tempered by grief allows one to cherish the ordinary, simple moments of everyday life, even as we know they are passing away.

Dolores: Doesn't your defense of grief and melancholy border on becoming anti-technology?

Robert: My symptomatic approach to culture and history is not anti-technology. We can't disinvent what we have created, nor should we even try or want to. Smashing the machines like some modern day Luddite won't allow us to hear what the soul of these visions and dreams is asking us to remember. It also won't allow us to acknowledge our part in making the world as it is.

What I am trying to do in my work is speak for and to the soul's perspective on technology. In the last chapter of Technology as Symptom and Dream, I hinted at how the loss of a spiritual sense in our lives saddens the soul, how a loss of the sacred sense of the world is a grievous matter. So grief is for me a path into the soul of technology. Without a soulful presence to technology, we become passive, or worse whiny victims of some plot or conspiracy. But I guess it is easier to believe in a conspiracy, because then we can make believe that someone is in charge, knows what is going on. But suppose no-one is in charge. Suppose none of our problems can be adequately addressed by willful political action, for example, without a significant transformation in our collective consciousness. That's scary. And it asks each of us to take charge, to become responsible by taking up in our own small daily acts the job of speaking up on behalf of the soul.

© Dolores E. Brien and Robert Romanyshyn 2000.

This is the end of the first part of this conversation. Check the Jung Page for the concluding part to be posted in late October.

Biographical Profile

Robert D. Romanyshyn, Ph.D. is a teacher, writer, and psychotherapist trained in phenomenology and depth psychology who applies his therapeutic experience to an analysis of contemporary cultural and historical issues. Since 1991 he has been a core faculty member in the Clinical and Depth Psychology programs at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, CA. His latest book to be published in October, The Soul in Grief: Love, Death and Transformation, is a poetics of the grieving process which explores the relations between personal grief and its cultural and collective dimensions. He is also working on two other books. Notes of A Witness is a reflection of his more than twenty-five years of experience as a psychotherapist. In the Shadows of the Reasonable Mind: Of Monsters, Angels, and other Anomalies of the Imaginal Life is an exploration of the problems of human consciousness in relation to nature. Drawing on the developments in physics, mathematics, and biology as well as on the ancient wisdom to be found in alchemy and gnosticism, this work offers a way of knowing and being which situates consciousness as part of the ecology of all creation.

Selected Bibliography

The Soul in Grief: Love, Death, and Transformation. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1999

Technology as Symptom & Dream. London, New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1989.

Psychological Life: From Science to Metaphor. Austin: University of Texas Press, Spring, 1982.

"The Despotic Eye and Its Shadow: Media Image in the Age of Literacy," in Modernity & The Hegemony of Vision, David Michael Levin (ed.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

"Technology and Homecoming: Wilderness as Landscape of Soul," in Jung in the Context of Southern Africa, Graham S. Saayman (ed.), Boston: SIGO, 1990.

"Psychology and the Attitude of Science," in Existential-Phenomenological Perspectives in Psychology, 2nd Ed., R. Valle and S. Halling (eds.), New York: Plenum, 1989.

"The Attitude of Science and the Crisis in Psychology," in Duquesne Studies in Phenomenological Psychology: Vol. I, A. Giorgi, et al. (eds.), Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1971.

"The Dream Body in Cyberspace", Psychological Perspectives, No. 29, 1994. Reprinted in Magical Blend, 45,58-64,1995.

"Galileo's Dream." A television pilot script on the history of science, written and produced December, 1984. Televised ICTN, October, 1985.

Towards the end of Part One of his conversation with Dolores Brien, Robert Romanyshyn spoke about depression as a necessary response to the technological deprivation of the soul. He continues with this theme in Part II with a discussion of his new book The Soul in Grief: Love, Death and Transformation .

His concept of "Metaphoric consciousness" also gave me pause and I still can't fully get my head around that. But it seems very promising. This article really made me wonder about that other world of symbols (sacred cosmology) which we simultaneously live in.

 

[Buddy]

I have read the posts on this topic and have been trying to process the information to discover what feminine energy is.

If you're looking to find feminine energy existing in a standalone or absolute kind of way, I wish you well but that may be a very difficult task.

Speaking generally, it seems to me than man has a peculiar fondness for unnecessarily stamping binary opposition patterns on anything and everything and forgetting that he has a point of view and that there is always a specific context and purpose connected with his subject. As a result, it's so easy to get confused.

My current understanding of Gurdjieff's esoteric cosmology is that there are only 3 fundamental forces from which all other forces are derived. All 3 of these forces are "active". Either one of the 3 can become active, passive or neutralizing but only at what, from our point of view, would be a convergence point in the phenomenal world. At a given convergence point, other energies and more phenomena may come into existence or interplay, thereby 'coloring' or 'flavoring' the energy when it is perceived.

That's the teaching as I understand it. From the point of view of my actual life experience, about all I can say is that the energy of my physical self and typical mode of exteriorizing is male, but my emotional self could easily be considered as feminine energy in this sense: having the perceived qualities of delicateness, tenderness, sensitivity and the need for only a "light touch" to feel anything that I am able to feel.

That's all I can attest to at the moment.

Although, I cannot say that I am any closer to discovering what it is exactly, but I may have made a possible connection that may aid in the discovery.

After pondering for a while over the question of what feminine energy is, the image, or possibly the essence, of water persistently stuck with me.

Interesting. I think of the emotions as "living waters" because "wave" and "flow" seems to describe my emotional activity well.

This post may not be very helpful, but I found your questions interesting and felt moved to add my reply on your thread. Thanks. :)

 

[reborn]

Aloha, All!

Although, I cannot say that I am any closer to discovering what it is exactly, but I may have made a possible connection that may aid in the discovery.

After pondering for a while over the question of what feminine energy is, the image, or possibly the essence, of water persistently stuck with me.

Interesting. I think of the emotions as "living waters" because "wave" and "flow" seems to describe my emotional activity well.

That seems to me to be an appropriate way to describe emotional activity. Also, in my experience having three natural homebirths, the contractions in labor feel like waves of various intensity. And one thing I discovered that helped during that time was to go along with each "wave", merging with it or, in a sense, yielding to it, being receptive to it, which seems to reflect certain aspects of that feminine energy within the greater context of the creative aspect.

fwiw :)
Renee