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  sass : integral feminist philosopher
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preamble

sass said May 20, 2006, 4:59 AM:
 

To begin, I think, I have to start by explaning a little of my own fascination: the  journey of my question.

About ten years ago now, when my eyes were opening to a spiritual dimension in life, hitherto unseen, good fortune brought  Joseph Campbell to me.  I was utterly beguiled and reaffirmed by my meeting with his work : an affective visceral experience of “Ah yes, this!”. 

For those not so familiar his work is a comparative study of mythology. His most well known work charts the hero’s journey and this journey is, symbolically, a spiritual one.  In myth it is the symbolic story of a hero who hears the call and sets out into the unknown. The hero can never know what is on the other side when s/he sets out, such is its nature . The adenture is to live life in pursuit of awakening to awareness of themself and things as they are and to return from the journey with gift bearing hands.

The journey is the motif and experience of the question “who am I?”, “what is it to human?”…. “what’s it all about?”. The adventure is the unfurling blossom of the question.  And Campbell says, it is we who are that hero and that journey is this, our life, if we wake to it.

With Joseph as my inspiration and guide I set forth, question in heart, to explore the path : to look at myth and life and myself and see how we all figure together.  Campbell (and others) broke down the boundaries between religion and myth : as they share the same poetic impulse to  symbolically represent the mystical experience which is beyond language. The more I looked at myth (and its other bedfellows philosophy and psychoanalysis)  the more I realised that there were emergent figures for men – divine mirrors on the horizon of transpersonal development – like Buddha and Christ. Yet female figures were not so clear, my transpersonal mirror was … well, a bit muddy and distorted.

The figures of hero and heroine, god and goddess are symbols that have been in part cast by our cultural conceptions of man and woman, masculine and feminine and continue to generate them.  This has made me wonder about my journey , about how these divine faces relate to my practice, my being in the world….

And you? How do you relate to the male and female faces of the divine?  Do they relate to your spiritual practice? How do they translate into energies of practice?
Who are your favourite mystics, or enlightened figures? Who lights your path?

Coming soon : Integral Theory and ……. 

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  Sean : change agent
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Re: preamble

Sean said May 22, 2006, 10:14 AM:
 

These are indeed important questions that I cannot pretend to know or have many answers too.  This is especially true when I am often uncertain about how to define what is masculine and feminine and how far to take those terms into our everyday lives.  Even in an abstract sense I know how they are used and what they are applied to and often, for time's sake, rely on them but when questioned or tested I am often left with a sense that I don't trust the masculine and feminine distinctions, at least, not fully.  

One thing I have often wondered about in my own experience is that nearly all of my heroes and inspirations within the realm of literature, philosophy, and spirituality have been men.  This wasn't a conscious choice but I now feel that a possible reason why this is so is because in our culture we are still trying to turn the tide, so to speak, because I know the feminine face is there.  Of course, I mean this only as an everyday example of men and women and not necessarily the masculine and feminine principles. 

I guess I mean to say that my vision of female figures was muddy too, that is, my transpersonal mirror on the feminine figure was distorted as well.  

I definitely feel that this issue is incredibly important to explore and that we have only just begun to reclaim a true understanding and right relationship to it.   

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  sass : integral feminist philosopher
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Re: preamble

sass said May 24, 2006, 10:08 PM:
 

I'm really glad to hear your thoughts on this sean. 

I agree, while male and female dont pose such big problems  (although having said that i should note that I just finished a ten thousand word chapter on the topic of what is Woman? for my thesis :) the concepts masculine and feminine are more tricky. the more i look into them the less happy i am with them. I don't trust them either, because I think they drag around a lot of (unexamined) cultural baggage. Though, of course, i too use them unproblematically in conversation! But in a more considered context, I tend to prefer the terms Ken Wilber uses somewhat interchangeably with feminine and masculine modes of being: communal and agentic .

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Re: preamble

Jay Andrew Allen [no longer around] said May 29, 2006, 6:22 PM:
 

As a n Integral Pagan, Goddess worshipper, and bisexual man, I am uber-intrigued. Count me in.

-J- 

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  Lapdrey : Pilgrim of me in others
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Re: preamble debate on feminine/masculine

Lapdrey said Nov 28, 2006, 5:41 AM:
 

Hi, you all!

It seems to me perhaps not to be too late to give here my humble contribution for this interesting discussion' theme.

I see the  feminine / masculine human / divine faces (my first impulse was to write firstly  masculine - somehow denouncing of my predominant face - but I realized that in the very title here it is in another sequence, that today I think it's more likely to be the “right” one) I see it as, so to say, a Yin | Yang polarity process of growing in development everywhere in universe, on all levels of it.

Just like in nature (on the infinitely little and big levels), so on the three human levels of body, soul and spirit, we are less or more feminine or masculine as human diversifying chips of our individual physical/psychical/spiritual ADN identity.

Like in a diapason reverberation, by a mutational musical tuning up of body/soul/spirit along our lifetime, we women and men (like modulation creatures in process) we are infinitely multiple appearing expressions and faces of this indistinctive whole feminine | masculine human being we are all of us.

So, this is not so much a question of differences but mostly of balance and equilibrium that is the most basilar element in us.

Regarding what Sean noted about himself and his lack of feminine models in his life, with me things were a little different.

I passed, all along my maturing last years since my adolescence,  through quite different line paths for  the inner growing of my soul (Zen Buddhism, Sri Aurobindo 's Integral Yoga,  Rudolph Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom,  Portuguese colective Myths and, finally, but not as an excluding arriving  point, Christian Orthodoxy through hesicast prayer greek and russian masters and elders.

The fact is that only since my going through the ancient portuguese myths - like:

a) Rei Dom Pedro and Princess Dona Inês de Castro(King Peter and Princess Agnes) and their medieval tragical love, forerunner of a few later mythical lover's couples like Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, and others;

b) the portuguese Discovery Epopey, seen a myth quest of manking itself for its deepest spiritual mysteries, like our greatest national poets Camões and Pessoa so marvelously song in their chants;

c) Rei Dom Sebastião (King Sebastian), tragically desapeared in a battlefield in Ceute, in North Africa, and afterwards expected to return like a messianic herald of a glorious apocaliptic future for Portugal and the entire world, as a final sequence of the portuguese discovering quest in Renaissance times),

d) finally, the myth of Saudade, that specifically portuguese feeling, a longing for the future based in something from the past, in some ways alike to the greek nostalgia, but mythifyed in a feminine figure, as a constitutive element of every portuguese soul, feminine or masculine.

e) and a few other mythical elements that go through all along the portuguese nine hundred years old independent history as a nation;

So, recovering the line point of my thinking above, in me it was after the inner influence of such myths - the majority of them mostly marked by the feminine expressive power -, that the “goddess”, (so to say it in a more understandable way by everyone here) the feminine archetipical divine principal arose in my soul and got a progressively proeminent importance as the driving force in my inner way.

Once more I say: eache one of us is a different (but equally wonderful) tuning up of the feminine | masculine whole we are a human living expression of.

Finally, I want to thank Sarah for this so important discussion issue, assuring her of my strongest inner support for her thesis labors and difficulties.

~ Regards of peace and love ~

Lapdrey,
pilgrim of me in others,
pilgrim of the others in me

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  sass : integral feminist philosopher
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Re: preamble debate on feminine/masculine

sass said May 3, 2007, 5:03 PM:
 

hello all,

I just thought I would alert you to a discussion thread over in the Integral Institute pod on “The faces of the masculine and feminine”, a not unexpected congruence!

http://pods.zaadz.com/ii/discussions/view/128079#137434

sass

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  kcidybom : Manager - Bank of Cosmic Connection
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Re: preamble debate on feminine/masculine

kcidybom said May 5, 2007, 7:05 PM:
 

Thanks for the update.  I was beginning to think this pod had been abandoned.  I don't know what kind of dialog I can get going, and I've been too busy of late to write much, but it's hard to believe that this pod isn't overflowing with post and comments.  I'll write soon.  There aren't many subjects that are more interesting. 

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