Wisdom's Daughters: The Conscious
Feminine
So
what is the role of women, and feminine consciousness, during these chaotic
times? What do women have to offer to
the 'new world order' that has arisen in the last decades? If we are not to establish it on the basis of
the old masculine dominator belief system, what new birth must women mother
into being? The image of the Woman Clothed with the Sun is Lady
Wisdom, the anima mundi. It has also been attributed to Mary, the
World Mother. I believe that it can be
attributed to all the faces of the many goddesses from around the world. And I believe that if one woman gave birth to
the 'Son of God', then all women have the potential to be the Mother of the
Savior. It is this potential that I want
to explore.
My
dream of the wounded lion, the tidal wave and the voice that spoke to me of a
new birth of the Savior has been a guiding light to me through the years. The images created order out of the chaos of
my changing life. I go back to these
images again and again, and I always find that they have something new to teach
me. Soon after that dream, I moved to
that town by the sea, and I experienced the ebb and flow of the tides and the
moon, and I was called upon to nurture and mother the creative potential of
many people there. That's where I
learned to become one of Wisdom's Daughters.
Like
my dream of giving birth to the Savior, women are dreaming and then manifesting
this Wisdom in their lives. The New Feminine is appearing with great power in
the dreams of modern women and men.
These ancient archetypal images are alive and well and living in the
collective unconscious of humanity. They
want to incarnate in us and so they come to us through dreams and visions.
The
Woman Clothed with the Sun is an
image of what Marion Woodman calls Conscious Femininity. She redeems and births a new consciousness on
a collective human level. It is an image
of Lady Wisdom, a consciousness of human and divine love and will. It is a consciousness of the sacredness of
life and of our essential place as stewards of the paradise our Creator has
given us. The Earth is also this Woman, and we, Her human children, are
embodiments of Her consciousness. She
calls upon us to know ourselves, to become conscious of our instincts and
emotions, to understand ourselves as earthly beings as well as spiritual
beings. It is time to stop rejecting
this earthly life out of fear and guilt.
It is time to let our knowing
support our being.
During
the years ahead, we will need to reckon with our collective unconscious, the
World Soul, or anima mundi. We need a new story, a bigger cosmology, to
help us understand the changes occurring in our world. But we first need to look at the ancient
stories and myths that are the formative elements of Western culture. Our whole history calls to us in these
stories of the end of an Age. The
collective unconscious of our many diverse backgrounds has been chewing on
these images and producing many more in an attempt to understand what these
times call for. What is the psychic
model necessary to take an evolutionary leap in consciousness?
C.
G. Jung said that the god-images that have shaped our ancient and modern
psyches have been reduced to psychological processes, and we are marked with
their spirit. In struggling to attain
this new consciousness and our place in the scheme of things, we have to
re-examine and re-imagine what our stories and our values are, and live them
out in fullness of spirit as responsible adults - freely choosing our life, not
moving through it at the mercy of big business, government bureaucracy,
religious control and modern media techniques.
The
idea of a conscious Earth is not new or even so far-fetched. Most cultures at one time had a reverence
for, and the knowledge of, the ways of Nature.
The Earth was The Goddess, the great mother of us all. But we seem to have forgotten this, for we
have chosen to live in our heads and in our rationality for a long time
now. And the Goddess retreated into the
Unconscious, and was only remembered by the rejected and the downtrodden. But the extreme degradation of the Earth and
of women has finally been recognized, and as our culture began to protect and
defend both the Earth and women, the Goddess has returned once more to
consciousness and is giving birth to new life, for that is the purpose of the
Feminine aspect of Spirit. This time,
the return of the Goddess will be as an equal partner to the God, not the
ancient Great Mother nor Patriarchal Father, but Christ and Sophia, man and
woman, united in partnership.
If
we want to see a rebirth of consciousness and of culture, we need women to
mother it into being as well as men to father it. Women who are conscious of their own womanly
gifts and consciousness, women whose gifts are of life and of the Spirit. Women can give birth to new dimensions of
consciousness, ones that are based in the intuitive and imaginative functions
of the human psyche. These are the wings of the eagle that the Woman receives in Revelation. The eagle
symbolizes the spiritual intellect, and is a symbol for Lady Wisdom. It is an image of the balance of vision and
understanding that we all need to attain if we are to do our soul work. Lady Wisdom wants to incarnate in our
hearts. We are seeing women everywhere
stand up and speak out of our wisdom.
For it is time to wed imagination to intellect in a new renaissance of
Spirit. To create a truly democratic
society, we must recognize and respect the Feminine Spirit as an equal
co-creator with the Masculine Spirit.
Because
women's experiences differed from men’s, it is important that women define our
own understanding of Feminine Spirit.
Just as our external characteristics are different and yet
complementary, so too our inner knowing, which is honed by differing outer
experiences, will be different, but once again, complementary. Therefore, while I speak of women's
knowledge, it does not mean that it will be foreign to men, for the feminine
soul in men is developing and speaking to them. But this knowledge comes from a vision of the
world that springs from feminine consciousness and a woman's experience.
It’s
sometimes hard to believe that western women have just recently achieved outer
freedoms that were unavailable to our foremothers. And we’re still struggling
against a very strong patriarchal bias that wants to dictate our sexual
freedom. But women feel the need to ‘be’ ourselves more than men, who have been
dominant for so long. Women now have the
freedom to challenge patriarchal rules and discover the boundaries of
freedom. Since real personal freedom
can’t be dictated by law, but only experienced and learned, that is what women
are doing – learning to be free in the world and in our relationships.
Women
are growing into an independence of mind and spirit that not many women have
achieved in the past. On the one hand,
we’ve done this through our struggle to receive equal rights in society. Unfortunately, that meant we’ve had to allow
ourselves to be molded by the patriarchy’s demands. We have learned how to think rationally, to
orient ourselves to business and finance, to live and teach the moral codes of
the culture. We have clothed ourselves
with the sun of individuality and rational consciousness. But because of our cultural training, we have
built up an ego-consciousness that is basically one-sided, like our dependence
on masculine, rational left-brain functioning.
We have become Father's Daughters.
But
being Father’s Daughters doesn’t give us our real freedom. And so many women have gone in search of our
freedom by looking within, as well as back to our ancient heritage, to discover
the potentials inherent in the feminine aspects of spirit. It is the possibilities that these potentials
offer women that can lead to true freedom.
As women look to these feminine models, we are re-discovering the
goddess images that have been repressed within our psyches. As we remember and reclaim our feminine spiritual
heritage, we regain a true knowledge of ourselves as women.
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