In the West we have fallen in love with the wisdom and the teachings that come from ancient global traditions that promise quiet, peace, harmony, and self investigation. When we talk about spiritual practice we often refer to the journey that brings us toward stillness.
This spiritual goal, while beautiful and lofty, represents a lopsided half-truth that arises from patriarchal notions embedded within our religions, traditions, and institutions for so long that we have stopped investigating their absolute validity and applicability in our complex lives.
What I call the “masculine ideal” of spiritual self-inquiry is indeed important and does present us with deep guidance when applied wisely, but without the call of the Mother, of the Goddess, who integrates us back into embodiment, human community, and relationships, these spiritual ideals are fundamentally limited and sometimes even injurious.
The masculine path represents a turning inward of our attention toward a state of transcendence. This requires curiosity.
When this curiosity asks the question, “who am I?” or, “what is happening here?” we move into a very certain path called self-inquiry by most spiritual traditions. This is when we get interested in ourselves and start to wonder how and why we do all the things that we do, and especially how and why we suffer. Inquiry offers a chance to turn our attention inward because we need a break from our overactive, thought driven, emotionally reactive, and technology addicted minds.
At some point in the spiritual process we will come across a call to practice non-attachment, which is a “letting go” of the complex mind patterns involved in thinking and emoting so that we might drop into that core of transcendence. In some ways, non-attachment represents the most potent and pervasive imperative of the masculine path.
All of what I call “let it go spirituality” could be summarized by lessons in non-attachment. In the classic literature of many wisdom traditions this concept was taken literally for so long that whole social structures were commonly followed to favor a removal of one’s self from community to signal and facilitate better non-attachment to worldly things.
All convents, monasteries, ashrams, temples, and mountain hermitages are birthed from the transcendence driven spiritual model. The spiritual ideal of several millennia has shown us story after story of men leaving their kingdoms, their wives, and their children, under the noble call to non-attachment in order to seek reality and enlightenment out in the wild, isolated forest grove.
In spiritual archetype, the divine masculine represents that which is perfectly still and unmoving. In religious terms God is often depicted as steady, deep in meditation or even asleep, if not totally above us in another realm, like heaven or the sky, barely paying attention to us but requiring us to honor Him strictly at all moments. He is the Father of Heaven.
The masculine spirit with deep integrity does not lose that center of steadiness no matter what happens in the world of movement. He is success in total non-attachment. Unshakable love and steadiness is what makes the divine masculine trustworthy. It holds total presence, keeps us organized and on task by staying still. It also gives us the concept of goals: the total silence that holds and supports our very being. In relationships the divine masculine in all of us says:
“I am unmoving. I love you no matter what. You cannot shake that love or tear it down or blow a hurricane through it. As much as you try to shake and uproot me, you will find me steady and shining my love. I am here.”
The divine feminine, or the Goddess, is that which dances, the weather, the wind that knocks against the doors of our inner stillness. She is usually seen as fertility and nourishment, as distraction, an illusion, or a force of destruction in the outer world and in the inner spiritual worlds.
The feminine is that which compels movement, vibration, or radiation outward- not sequentially as in time but expansively in a circle pattern like sound. Like the weather, the divine feminine has no goal to Her movement but moves for the sake of movement itself. “Notice what you notice” is Her motto.
She is usually connected to things we can see, hear, and feel, like the earth, beauty, vibration, and food. The divine feminine thinks globally, moves outward and infuses into the periphery, and prioritizes chant, sacred art, and visual imagery, like sacred geometry, over thought. Her highest art form is to reflect back upon herself- to see herself. She moves in order to see and be seen.
Patriarchal religion and spirituality tends to be sequential, rule oriented, goal oriented, and body negating- either as salvation from the body after death or cessation of attachment to mind and body while alive.
These both reflect the death principle, or what some traditions call salvation. Because the mind, including perceptions, thoughts, emotions, and sensations, are changeable, their illusory nature must be absolutely overcome as the seeker moves toward their definition of total emptiness that is fundamentally blemishless.
In other words, the divine masculine represents pure subjectivity. Some religions call this absolute subjectivity “the soul,” while others go even further and call it “undifferentiated awareness.”
Even the terms that we use, “God” and “the Goddess,” indicate the subjectivity of the masculine (God) and the objectivity of the feminine (the Goddess).
In the most transcendent models the true subject is emptiness, the Void, Shunya, Nirvana, the Kingdom of Heaven, or Grace, which is a profound experience of No Self. In these cases the flow of perception has been subordinated by a silent absolute subject.
The divine feminine- the flow of perception and our self-reflexivity that emanates out from our center and into all that we do- has barely been acknowledged by us, our cultures, and our traditions because she represents the objective or perception. “Notice what you notice” has been kicked to the side for, “overcome the unreal. Abide in the unchanging, unmoving Truth,” and “let it go.”
Curiosity has been relegated to a tool used in education and learning, rather than as our fundamental superpower. This is pure insanity because our ability to turn our attention back into ourselves, the flow of perception, is actually the core and most critical aspect of our lived experience.
The Goddess collapses subjective awareness into perception, bringing us to the exact same understanding of totality and wholeness but with a flavor, if you will, of integrated embodiment. Because of this absorption into perception rather than subject, self-realization in the Goddess path represents radically accepting the flow of life. In the divine feminine we see awareness claiming and dancing with the whole from the perspective of relationship. Thus, the feminine path or the outward path of self-realization is inclusive, radically free, always moving and pulsing, and it is in love with us, through us, and as us.
More precisely, the feminine path is about self-reflexivity, that is, the power of the heart to look back upon itself while it is doing whatever it is doing.
The English language has almost no words for this concept of self-reflexivity.
We have many words for that which shines outward as light: the light of awareness, the light of consciousness, light bodies, enlightenment, and raising our vibration.
Self-reflexivity is not that which shines outward but instead it is that which reflects back inward, like an image in a mirror.
In Goddess lineages this is often referred to as the heart. The heart in these lineages is the point of stillness within us, sometimes related to the organ of the heart or to the spine, which pulsates with dynamic luminosity and fullness.
Rather than a silent point that then absorbs life into emptiness, the heart is shining, reflecting, engaging with, seeing itself, watching itself, making itself holographic in and as all things.
Think about this amazing ability that we have that we do not even notice most of the time! Plants, animals, and minerals may be able to reflect light and awareness out into the environment, but they cannot reflect back upon themselves.
We can.
It is our one defining trait. A crystal can reflect light out into the world but it cannot look back upon itself and say, “I notice this light reflection.”
We can turn our awareness back upon ourselves and notice what we notice. In this way, the heart- your heart- as pure perception becomes a mirror that reflects upon itself in all places. This is the most profound recognition of the feminine path of divine unfolding, and we can live this way at all times and in all states.
This requires no practice and no effort. It is closer than close to notice what we notice. We need only stay diligent in our awake curiosity. This understanding is simple and transformational. It is also our birthright.
The feminine path of awakening is not always represented by the soft mother figure who tends to her beloved in demure duty and nourishing patience. Process is always present, but it is not always kind or gentle.
It is often the exact opposite. Process can be difficult and complex, especially when we are getting honest with ourselves. Because every turn of the wheel makes us more honest with ourselves, process actually becomes more bright and intense the longer we’ve been at it. Like lighting a damp log, the first few turns the log burns slowly.
But the more honest we get, the more dry our kindling gets. We tend to move through things more rapidly, but also more brightly- the process gets hotter and quicker. This requires commitment and resolve.
In the path of awakening our curiosity and staying open we make use of our activations. In some classical Indian traditions the great Mother Goddess that embodies life and time as the feminine is often depicted not in her sweet, nurturing, light body of outstretched hands and patient feminine touch, but as a black goddess of destruction and transformation.
In this form as the fierce Goddess, she dances on the prone body of her sleeping consort who is pure and unmoving awareness, trampling the God of Consciousness with change, movement, wrath, and purpose.
She is the grinding process of time which consumes all things. She wears a garland of skulls, which often symbolizes the letters of the alphabet, draping herself in language, form, and movement as she seeks out the places where the ego wants to capture us.
Her skirt is made of severed human arms. She loves nothing more than destroying the ego, killing our arrogant beliefs in our sense of individuality, solitary beingness, or separation from unity in all aspects. Once she has killed the ego she adorns herself with the remains of the ego, those skulls smiling in relief as they are draped on her being.
She reminds us that it is through her darkness, her commitment to the process of the path, and her fierce loyalty to unification, the steady destruction of time, that we begin to trust her, trust the path of the feminine divine, and trust the heart. The great seventeenth century Bengali mystic Ramprasad sings, “the sun of her wisdom never rises or sets. All of my hours have become her midnight.”
Because we all contain the masculine and feminine energies within us to varying degrees, each one of us can shine light on the parts in us that are more energetically masculine and silence seeking and begin to ask if those parts are in balance, in the correct balance for our personal constitution, or whether we need to balance ourselves in a different way with the embodiment process of self-reflection and curiosity.
We can step out of the path we were told leads somewhere and get curious about where we are. In this way we can assess when we need “let it go” spirituality or when we need the antidote to “let it go,” which might be called turning toward the complex, the activating, and the embodied. Even in non-attachment this tending-toward can be practiced effectively.
There is one story in a very old yogic text called the Yoga Vasistha that shows what I believe represents non-attachment from the Goddess lens. In the story there was a young king and queen who were happily married and totally dedicated to the kingdom as well as their spiritual process.
They represented the spiritual and ethical ideals of their time, religious, good, and devoted. The wife became such a devotee of her spiritual path that she became enlightened. The husband, the king, decided that he too wanted to pursue his spiritual path, and in his mind the only way to do this was to wander off into the forest and abandon his family, his home, and his kingdom in order to discover his deeper calling.
Understanding a bigger truth and from a place of profound wisdom, his wife said to him, “your work and your duty is here, stay! You do not need to leave everything to become self-realized.” Of course, the king didn’t listen. Off into the woods he went.
Months turned into years. He suffered terribly.
In this amount of time his enlightened wife, who was now also ruling the kingdom, practiced and developed special yoga powers which allowed her to take astral forms and travel wide distances. Using her magical abilities she would go and visit her husband.
She took the form of a young sage, someone that her husband could speak to and trust. Little by little, in the form of this young man, she was able to pierce the veil and guide him into enlightenment. And so it was that after 20 years of wandering he returned to his kingdom and to his wife, who was also his teacher in disguise, now fully realized, but also more profoundly connected to his worldly duties. He came home.
The spiritual ideal of walking away from, letting it go, leaving it all behind, is a half teaching that doesn’t actually work. Every single one of us has a path and a purpose. Learning to walk that path and purpose with focused reverence and attentive dedication is a much more nuanced journey, but also a more true definition of non-attachment.
We must first define what attachment really means in this context. Attachment is when we believe our desires. It is when we think and act transactionally. It is when we are willing to barter our current peace and happiness for a peace and happiness that we believe lies in the future or in the past.
This sounds something like, “I will be happy when I meet my life partner,”
“I will be peaceful when my spiritual process is complete,”
“I will be happy when I land the right job,” or
“I will be peaceful when I remember my soul’s path from my previous lives and release the trauma of my past.”
We run these agreements all day long in our minds. All forms of attachment contain a core transaction: “I will be happy when…”
We operate on these transactions in nearly all of our patterns and behaviors and contracts. These desires are worldly, the poisonous thorn in all relationships, and spiritual, the source of all that holds us in ignorance of realizing our wholeness.
There are four forms of desire. Desire roots to the present moment but branches into the future in two directions and into the past in two directions.
The positive form of desire in the future is called hope or anticipation. This is where the word desire most naturally clicks. It is when we believe that something in the future will fix us. It is when we hope or project or push our power into some goal that is just there, beyond our fingertips, on the horizon. “When I am seen by my lover more fully then I will be happy.”
The future form of desire that is negative is called worry or anxiety. It makes sense to look at this energy and call it desire when we complete the thought of worry or anxiety by saying “I can’t wait for this thing to be over. I have so much anxiety for this thing that is happening that I desire for it to be ended and then I will find peace.” Worry and anxiety are desire in disguise and they are, in fact, the same thing as hope and anticipation.
Backwards looking desire also takes two forms: one in the positive and one in the negative. When we look backward, the positive form of desire says, “if only.” We call it rose-washing the past or nostalgia. “If only things were as good now as they were back then, I would be happy.” This is how we rose-wash the past and rob ourselves of the present. The negative in the past is all forms of shame and regret. This is the terrible voice that says, “if only I had known back then what I know now,” and “if only I had been a little more wise or a little more awake or a little more lucky, I would be able to find peace now.”
All desire robs us of our current peace by bartering it away for something unattainable in the future or in the past. It is like the king that says, “if only I leave everything behind, I will find peace. I will find truth. I will find freedom.”
This world, with all of its fragmentation and identification and hope and anticipation and worry and anxiety and rose-washing and nostalgia, shame and regret, is all bringing us home to ourselves. The infinite loves nothing more than to express her radical freedom.
Can you think of anything more radical in the infinite to proclaim her freedom than to become bound and fragmented and finite? We are so in love, so very much in love, that we pay homage to the infinite and the unbounded and the thing that cannot possibly be limited by creating bondage and limitation. And thus it is that we walk our way home to ourselves.
Non-attachment has always been understood by the feminine as something that has nothing to do with leaving or letting go or walking away from.
It is merely dropping desire.
But that’s not a small thing.
Dropping desire means dropping every single way that we have injured ourselves and limited ourselves by bargaining away our expansive peace in the present moment for a future or past scenario that cannot possibly exist.
It is by talking about desire and transactional thinking, and teaching our beloveds about the same so that they may be more available to their own hearts, that we claim the Goddess. Even if it takes a couple of decades, the feminine always brings her lover home. She will always go into the woods and retrieve what is lost in confusion.
That is true non-attachment. Another word for this radical act is reverence.
The masculine energy model, when out of balance, all too often subjugates our curiosity and sets us up for that very same rigid thinking that looks to the goal- silence- as the only correct measure of self-realization. If we are spiritual seekers, home philosophers, or interested in awakening it may come as a surprise to us that this is not the most mature understanding of spiritual life simply because, being in a body, it is out of balance.
We need not collapse object and perception into subject. Yet, we have been presented with exactly this model as the path.
But paths can be walked in two directions and the flow of perception goes in both. The road that leads us in also leads us out. We must know how to navigate both to be whole and to be skillful in the actions of life.
The outward path of the heart, which I describe as the feminine path of awakening, is a path of process, a path of unfolding and reclaiming the unique particulars of itself in movement and in form. It is about using the activations, challenges, and complexity of life as reflection points back to the dynamic center of being, the infinite revealed by the finite. It is fundamentally the path of developing curiosity and staying curious.
We stay curious, we stay in process, and if we have deep insights we do not cling to them or urge them toward a goal but rather stay open and available to the lessons drawn from those insights.
Our planet earth, our bodies, and our human relationships could use a little more “turning toward,” and a little less “letting go.”
By applying the divine feminine into our embodied existence we open ourselves to the complex and we get comfortable sitting in whatever shows up. And the earth certain needs us to show up. Anything that activates us is mirror back to the heart and therefore it is sacred.
The Mother calls us to the infinite through the complex. The next time something hard happens, we might face forward, sit down, engage, and get involved. It’s the most sacred act in existence.