Looking
Back To The Future
Because
we are at a major cultural turning point, we are standing on a frontier between
the old and the new. From here we can
see the possibilities of what being a free and conscious woman might entail,
because frontiers are those boundaries we cross over in the hope of finding
something new, something unknown. We
discover these unknown possibilities not only for ourselves, but also for our
men, our daughters and our sons, and for the future of our planet.
It
is sometimes necessary to look at something greater than ourselves to find the
images of who we might become. This
involves a change of perspective.
Joseph Campbell spoke of the power of myth to give us "clues to the
spiritual potentialities of the human life."13 Myths are the Big Stories that help us
understand our experience of being alive, by opening our imaginations and
moving us forward in our lives. We need
to use these mythic stories to help us find our new identities, identities
outside the patriarchy, identities that give us a big purpose. When we look to the stories of the ancient
goddesses, we begin to understand that these goddesses were the guardians of
the transformative mysteries of birth, death and rebirth. So when women open up to this meeting with
the unknown parts of ourselves, we re-discover our ancient function as
mediators of transformation.
When
we look beyond our humanness to a more universal Feminine Spirit, we can begin
to imagine the place and powers of women in the world. Many women have turned to the ancient images
of the Goddess to reclaim a sense of their own wholeness. This Goddess wears many faces and She tells
women that we can be many things and take on many shapes. It is never 'either...or' with Her, but 'this
and also that.'
And
yet, we really can’t go back and worship these ancient images as our
fore-mothers did. We have to reclaim
them by experiencing where they are operating in our lives unconsciously and
naming them, thereby transforming them into consciously lived spirit. We have to engage the Goddess in new ways,
because this age we live in demands equality between God and Goddess, male and
female, such as the Celts seemed able to manifest in their culture and
spirituality. This new orientation to
the feminine, earthy, instinctual aspects of life is emerging in the collective
unconscious through dreams and fantasies and rituals, as well as in collective
consciousness through environmental and social concerns, for the Earth has
shared the fate of her daughters in being defiled and devalued for centuries.
The
development of Western ego-consciousness and our patriarchal model of culture
repressed the Goddess, and the feminine consciousness that She represents. Perhaps this was caused by the fear of the
Feminine and its power – for it is powerful!
Women partake naturally of the transformative mystery by shedding blood
each month, which in turn leads to new life.
Men have never been able to do this, except when they created rituals to
mimic this mysterious shedding of blood that brings new life – usually at great
loss of life to animals and people who were sacrificed by them! Or in the end, perhaps the Goddess was
repressed because it was the time of Her descent into the Underworld, the time
of the dark of the moon when Goddess energy is hidden from sight so it can be
renewed.
With
the repression of the Goddess and its effect on the status of women came a
devaluation of the feminine, symbolic mode of consciousness. In accepting the domination of rational
consciousness, we have all been deprived of the wisdom that an imaginal,
intuitive consciousness brings to our lives.
This type of consciousness is a way of perceiving through images and
stories, dreams and visions. It speaks
to the heart, not to the head. Matthew
Fox, the Anglican theologian, calls it our 'mystical brain' and believes that
its suppression is the underlying cause of unbalance in Western civilization.
A
crucial dimension of this imbalance in the West is the stunted growth of our
mystical awareness and the underdevelopment of our mystical brain. Our brains are amazingly complex creations of
time, nature, and divinity. Part of what
we know about the brain is that the right and left hemispheres perform
different tasks. The left lobe
accomplishes analytic and verbal processes for us, and the right lobe
accomplishes the synthetic, sensual, and mystical tasks. Western civilization, which dominates the
globe today, has invested almost exclusively in left-lobe processes in education,
politics, economics, and religion.14
Right-brain
thinking is associated with feminine consciousness. By exploring the image of the Woman Clothed with the Sun through
images and stories, I hope to show what this consciousness is and how it works,
because this is how women naturally envision life. Men, too, can and do engage in right-brain
thinking. They also know the Feminine
Spirit, whose name is Wisdom. So many of
our greatest teachers, thinkers and mystics have been men who have seen with
this mystic vision truths about life and the cosmos. I believe that it is time for women to
incarnate this new vision of Feminine Spirit, which means walking in the path
of Wisdom. When we do, women will shine
in this area of human consciousness, but we have to name it, reclaim it and
value it for ourselves. It is time for
the feminine imagination to come
alive again.
Birthing a New Heaven and a New Earth
The
Woman Clothed with the Sun is an
image of Feminine Spirit that is embodied, conscious, imaginative and
spiritual. Women have to be willing to
take the journey to reclaim these gifts.
Self-knowledge will lead us to the purpose of this labor we've
undertaken - the birth of the Divine Child.
All things are born of women. The Woman
of Revelation brings lasting values
and a cosmology that can unite us to ourselves and to the rest of the
universe. We are Her daughters and our
task is Her task. She calls us to our
true Selves, to our Wisdom, and offers us an image of who we might become, just
as Christ, the Buddha and Quetzalcoatl have been images of Masculine Spirit
which have shaped the very best character in men.
This
archetypal image of Feminine Spirit expresses the power and purpose of women in
these transformational times - to give birth to a new consciousness and use our
wisdom to help the world. She shows
women who we might become and the reason for our quest for freedom and
consciousness at this time in our human history. The fact that this figure is
found in a story of the End Times gives women a focus and responsibility for
our inner journey. It places women front
and center in the mythic story of our times.
As women come to understand and incarnate the gifts Lady Wisdom bestows,
we will foster change in society as well as help men come to trust and allow
for the growth of these same gifts within themselves.
In
re-imagining the feminine spirit for our times, new pathways open up for women
to explore. The understanding of
imaginal, feminine consciousness can help us own our innermost feelings and
intuitions. I feel that women should own
their feminine potentials, potentials that are rooted in our womanly
bodies. Our capacity for literal
childbearing does not necessarily tie us down to a biological function. The wisdom that our bodies incarnate can be
the basis of other types of creativity and consciousness. We are daughters of Mother Earth as well as
Lady Wisdom, and we have a share in Her gifts of creativity and diversity. We need to look to Her as our teacher.
We
are made in the image of this Cosmic Woman, who is clothed with the Sun, who
stands on the Moon, and whose crown is the Starry Heavens. Her powers are the powers of transformation,
and they are the creative powers of love and union. These are the gifts of Lady
Wisdom. When She appears to us and in
us, She brings a renewed connection to spirit and to soul. If our souls are awake, we have a connection
to the Divine Spirit that continually creates the cosmos, and we can find there
the meaning of our lives and our place in that creation.
The
new consciousness which is birthed can lead all of us to the creation of a 'new
heaven and a new earth'. The millennial
fears people are caught up in are the projections of our own shadows. The horrors of war, plague and earth changes
have to be faced by people working together.
But they also have to be face by each individual. For many Christians, the most horrifying
image from Revelation has always been
the image of the Anti-Christ. We can
look outside for a specific person to be this Anti-Christ, or we can look
within ourselves and at our own culture.
Perhaps the real Anti-Christ is our Western corporate culture as it has
developed over the past 500 years. It
has become a culture that has lost touch with Soul. As our scientific and economic world-view
took over the cosmology of Christianity, it left us a life without
meaning. As the Church condemned the
sinfulness of the body and the Earth, it created the Anti-Christ of rampant
materialism and loss of soul. It is the
other side, or Dark Twin, of Christianity, the second fish of the Piscean
spiritual dualism.
As
we deal with this 'loss of soul' in our individual lives, we are dealing with
Anti-Christ, who is the spirit that embodies a consciousness that is against
‘Christ consciousness’, which is love.
As we reclaim our connection with the Feminine Spirit, we are
re-awakening our human potential to receive grace and blessings and that love
which Christ preached. For each of us
can embody the Second Coming of Christ.
With the help of the Spirit, we can give birth to a truly new world
order, one blessed by the partnership and creativity of men and women of
consciousness and spirit. It is time to
see that our fears of annihilation are really a lack of imagination. Once we understand the divine laws of Nature,
and of our feminine natures, the power of the Imagination can give us the
answers to our most pressing problems.
Then we can create a world of peace and unity where all of us can
partake of the blessings and grace of human life here on Earth.
Ask
yourself what you intend to do to birth a new world that values Spirit and the
feminine dimension of life.
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