For Any Woman Undertaking this Evolution

The rite of passage from girl to woman is from illusion to performance to self-abandonment to disillusionment to influence to the essential self, one’s true nature. We have enacted performative women’s revolutionary actions as girls. What we speak of is girl’s liberation, not women’s liberation, for we have no concept of what it is to be a woman, what it is to surge with such non-referential power that you define the world rather than conforming to pre-existing definitions. What we have called women’s liberation is marked by defiance, and, make no mistake, defiance is the shadow of permission, and both exist under the delineation of adolescent.

 

Until we have a context for our existence that is infinite enough to contain the finite subset of political, our politics will be limited to ready-made and formulaic adaptations of masculine concepts. The world we are here to make cannot be constructed from within these confines. We are here to weave in a whole and complete, complementary system of operations that, by its very inclusion, will unalterably change reality.  

 

The passage into womanhood is the inverse of the passage into manhood. His grail is located at the top of the mountain and so he sheds the excess that he is, the over-identification with his self and his attachment to the material: his excess hungers, carnality, and passions. He goes to his antithesis, his renunciation to bend the paper back, to meet himself in the realms of the absolute, that he may stand atop the watchtower as a sentinel of honor and ideals and carry out the vision from below. The masculine is agency. It does. To grow from spiritual boy to man is a matter of shifting what he does “for,” from doing for oneself to doing for other.

 

Woman, on the other hand, is to meet herself in the depths, in the mystical, the soul realms. To weigh down what would otherwise buoy to the surface for lack of internal gravity or ballast. She is to travel the interior terrain and reclaim the weight she has shed—the desire, the hunger, the erotic in perpetual service to other. This, so she may descend to bedrock, take her seat, and reign. To know—incontrovertibly—who she is, that in the face of other, even the most compelling other, she does not lose her moorings and does not impress, convince, or accommodate. She rests in the depths where the treasure is located, the “what” that makes the world go round—what the masculine would provide for, peacock for, serve in honor for, become greatness for. But he will only develop this greatness to the extent that she rests in this value. 

 

She is to become the source itself, what draws greatness from others. She is to emanate the radiance, the elixir of life that would draw the genius of the other. This is why a woman’s recognition and guardianship of her value interlocks with the greatness of men; it is from remaining in the center of her value that she can infuse the world to such an extent that man and material will be drawn organically into a brilliant order beyond what he ever could have imagined himself to be. In every dimension, the trick to true genius is the aspect of for; the magic is in the process, be it in doing for others in altruism or in doing it for woman as the gateway to the sacred underworld wherein genius resides. 

 

From the masculine perspective, the cause of suffering is some form of greed, hatred, and delusion—the attachment to the notion of self. The dissolution of self or the abandoning of self to God is a skillful endeavor should you aim high. 

 

From the feminine perspective the cause of suffering is a lack of understanding of the inter-penetrating, co-creative, reciprocal nature of life. To understand is to step into the flow, the dynamic and symphonic nature of reality. It is to know your impact, to be moved by other, and to develop in equal concentration the capacity to send and receive, to exist as a carrier signal in the white-noise confusion, the massa confusa that causes the cycles of gripping, rejection, and distraction that mark a reality of discontent. 

 

The Feminine, rather than rise above the mass confusion, enters, engages, connects with it in such a way that she not only experiences clarity but becomes an agent that clarifies. Masculine light can shine on the issues we experience; Feminine love can heal them. Together, as inter-penetrating forces, the world is illuminated with love. We can cease the chronicling of the suffering, the diagnoses, the accommodations that a man-leaning world creates. 

 

But this is not about living in endless processing, in a  solely relationship-focused world, where power and agency become the new enemies. This is about creating a world that is literally—not figuratively— in the perpetual process of making love, where the masculine sentinel can see the causes and the feminine ballast can carry the cures. Together we can move into the next state of global consciousness; we can, as a people, ascend Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to top tier, peak consciousness states. 

 

Here I would suggest that we are all children, men and women alike, in a world lacking the feminine aspect. It’s time for us to pick up our big girl tools and learn to wield the forces that would surge through us and bring us to a maturity that could then draw out maturity from the masculine. 

 

Just as the physical analog of hormones moving through our biology changes us from child to pubescent, where our bodies mature and take shape and our identity is no longer merely compliant to our parents, so, too, do we develop in consciousness when we infuse with the catalyst of Eros, of primal forces. Women shun and avoid them at the expense of our spiritual adulthood and, consequently, the complementary adulthood of man. There is no way for him to develop into an adult capable of full mutuality if there is not a counter-pole. He will remain an entitled spiritual boy pretending to be a father. And women will remain a possession to be cared for. We will live at the lowest common denominator of the default settings of honor and duty.

 

This is not okay with me. The unnecessary suffering, needless pain, and wasted potential creating low-grade discontent is not okay when there is a solution. Is this okay with you? Because this is the suffering I see in woman that is easily solved: feeling invisible, powerless, overworked, drained, exhausted, and as if she does not have a voice. Not seeing the meaning in life. Hating men and being privately desperate for their approval, love, attention. Wanting to be a liberated woman and feeling conflicted about wanting to live conventionally.  Living in a state where the primary source of arousal is anger and outrage, perpetually irritated and triggered. Sick of being nice and wanting to be nicer.  Treating our bodies like show animals and forcing them to align with our agendas until they are sick, rebellious, overly sensitive, and hyper-aroused.

 

Only to be met by men who are oblivious, insensitive, and cannot “hear” us. They are violent and under-responding, perpetually avoidant of intimacy on our terms, and running from commitment. They are narcissistic, self-aggrandizing, and entitled.

 

These are the twins birthed by polarization rather than inter-penetration. What is called for is osmosis, the process by which molecules of one form pass to another through a semipermeable membrane, equalizing both. But at present, the membranes are so defended that they are impermeable. Excess and deficit cannot equalize.

 

In other words, our approach to equality has been to demand the decrease of one form down to the level of the other, rather than an exchange where one may be made stronger and the other less concentrated. This could be a living, dynamic equality where both sides share full capacity, rather than amputating down to the lowest common—and I would suggest unrealized capacity—of woman. What we will not cultivate, we demand they cut off and I believe this is at a dangerous price.  

 

A world absent of power, Eros, impact, assertion, aggression even, without the truly human qualities of jealousy, greed, obsession—a world lived from the “heart center” up—is a world devoid of life itself. It is a life lacking plot and animation. Imagine an eternity of women’s circles, Kleenex, and rom-coms if we remain on the great neutering trajectory we are on. Our sensitive men, in aprons, will be begging consent to feed us the appetizers they made for us, rubbing our feet as we all move into a non-aggressive, non-competitive nanny state where the force that exists within each human to move through mediocrity toward human greatness is deactivated, while we fantasize about a violence that will break this Pleasantville spell.

 

This  is the moment when we must answer the question, “Will you put the key in the lock and open the door?” The grappling hook of internal drive that would pull us from the feminine swamp of self-pity can be activated within us that we may have the capacity to, rather than cut off masculine legs of greatness, develop our own. And stand up. In true genius. A genius never before imagined in the blue ocean of woman far beyond the red ocean shark-infested waters of man. We do not need to avoid the water altogether: we need to swim out further and do for woman, and reality, what Cirque du Soleil did for the circus. This is our gift, the added dimension of art, elegance, taste, quality, and mysticism to the pre-existing world. 

 

But it requires taking full ownership of our erotic powers. 

 

By now, you may have noticed how I have circled the subject of women and Eros for some time. This is because the immune response is so great, and the misinformed connotative understanding of what I am referring to is so laden that I can scarcely speak without an automatic rising up of a defense system that shuts people down. As women, we feel a collective disgust and disdain for the erotic that is our natural spiritual plane. 

 

It reminds me of the appropriation of psychedelics from the native territories they grew in within the full context of their spiritual prescription and intention. What was intended to draw us into deeper perceptions of union, to “see” unmediated by religion or dogma, the nature of reality. It became the industrialization of spiritual substance. And then, we respond to what it became in its mutated form rather than the original. It would be then like taking the deeply spiritual food of maize and approaching it with fear and loathing because the industrialized form is corn syrup. When all forms are extracted from the ecology of the habitat of the sacred— which is always a sum greater than the parts, and the synthesis of all the parts wherein each is of consequence—the sacred gives way to the commercial. And then, in a world absent of woman—and thus absent of the depths that would reveal the powers of sacred substances and therefore liberate—we are all exiled to the surface or horizontal world, the world devoid of both spiritual and sacred, where habits, conditioning, and commerce rule. Things are defined in utilitarian terms, including people; they are not defined by their meaning and their unique value. 

 

We know the end result of corn as diabetes and obesity—from the reduction of corn to corn syrup, just as we know psychedelics as dirty junkies in alleyways. We ignore that there is another use of this profound medicine. In the same way, we know the end result of Eros as pathology—the unwanted pregnancies, the transgressions, the affairs, the pornography. And we know it as a pathology imposed on us. In the world of commerce, we know the shadow but not the light.

 

It is time for us to know the God-given birthright, the light of Eros that is ours. To reclaim it from the harmful and damaging form, if only that it stops being damaging. But there is so much more available, and we might recover the very source of feminine illumination. This is why we recover Eros for ourselves. 

 

Eros is the entry into the world of the third—it is what consummates, what mediates, and impels one’s actions toward destiny. It is an intelligence—or sentience within—that draws together human with sacred, human with human, and human with nature—including her own. It draws together but will not be collapsed or cemented, demanding that we live in a consciousness of perpetual dynamic micro-adjustments in order to keep it charged and alive. The reward, the reinforcement, is full citizenship in the eternal, the location outside of time, outside of self-consciousness.  

 

The power of now—we are that as women. We may look capricious, impulsive, and unpredictable to an artificial time-laden world—this is because we live in the now mind. But we have not allowed it to steep in the depths of the erotic. 

 

The erotic is what catalyzes your inborn and immortal talents and natural abilities to activate who you are. It is the Erotic that lies between the Mystery and inspiration that they may make contact and create a reaction. That chemical reaction is creativity. Imbued with a sentience and vision, it knows the possible, the numinous, beyond what the everyday mind can recognize. With rapture, passion, desire, and enchantment as its purview, it is restless and cannot settle for anything less than exquisite beauty, excellence, quality, and transcendence. 

 

It is only through Eros that we can live in the delight that is life as eternal paradox and not sloppily collapse on one side or the other, leaving us in a perpetual state of conflict. It is only through Eros that we can live in a third consciousness as neither dominant nor submissive, but co-creator. It is Eros that forges the dynamic bridge between all things, a bridge that can be traveled beyond right-doing and wrong-doing, good and bad, us and them, to a place full enough to hold all of it. Eros, then, is the agent of transcendence.

 

At this time, to be woman means to pride yourself on your anorexia and your capacity to deprive yourself of what would transport you, to deprive yourself of transcendence.  We congratulate each other on our capacity to resist and demonstrate a visible disgust at the very thought of the Erotic. That we can dismiss, riddled with disdain, the mere suggestion that Eros is the feminine spiritual plane, that we can scoff and smirk at any expression of such, is the symptom of a self-loathing that runs so deep, a real internalized misogyny so great that we would attach our own shackles and throw away the key. The snide jokes we make about men’s body parts or the idea that men “want just one thing” is a signifier of how deeply we have projected the shadow of our desire into the world. With every judgment of Eros in the world, we erode and corrode our own power, we disempower ourselves, and we throw acid at our angels. 

 

It is time for us to do the long, slow work of eating, starting with eating our shadow. To rather than condemn masculine expression of the erotic, go forward and say, “I want my erotic back,” “I want the power to assert and perpetuate myself in the world back,” “I want the unassailable nature that facility with desire brings back,” “I want my conviction and deserving back,” “I want my bottom half back,” “I want my body back,” “I want my hunger back,” “I want my voice back.” It begins by drawing back the rejected, discarded power of Eros.

 

Your symptoms are an absence of Eros. The inward-facing collapse in consciousness that perpetually grips and obsesses is merely the form without enough currency flowing through that would keep it pushed open. Shame is a channel not blown open with current. Emotionality is the same. The electricity of Eros moves through like a purr, a hum in the line, ordering all the disorder to move in a single direction. 

 

And yet women are thieves. Every woman, numb, half dead, musty, feeling unattractive, and wincing at the thought of oral sex, with visible disdain when a guy reveals his lust fangs. She’s justified in her disgust. Any woman would support her and agree. Her body has become moldy from lack of light, and the mold has turned into passive aggression and perpetual low-grade criticism and negativity.

 

Until she gets her groove back on, as it were. Then she is willing to enter, like a white man in Harlem or a sorority girl in the ayahuasca rain forest, or a priest in the red-light district, all starving for what they perceive to be less than them. Dehumanizing and devaluing that which, when the time comes, you progressively die without. Your insides grow bitter or disassociated because you cannot stand your own smell. You check out and send in the placater to represent the absent soul. 

 

Until you face the life-support moment of your soul. Now invulnerable and hard in some way, the heart, with its arteries filled with plaque and rigid, the lifeblood no longer pumping through. Everyone feels your caustic undertone, asserting that they are not enough, not doing enough to help you in your misery. That will be your communication, your logo.

 

At those times, so many are willing to rape sex itself. Rape and pillage what sex would bring, so full of themselves that they believe they are doing sex or their partner a favor. They tell themselves that sex is an object, the way the man in Harlem does a black person or the girl with the “natives.” I can take what I want, I do not need to offer myself, be kind or loving or civil. I do not need to protect sex, clean it, keep it beautiful. I am above all of that.  

 

“I believe in relationship,” this woman says. But she believes in the shell. She believes in hospitality, perhaps, waiters. But she does not believe in the offering of oneself that would be necessary to be “in” relationship. Offering is the price of admission into relationship, and to offer herself first to the soul, where the forces thrash about with Eros and power and rage. It is like saying she loves nature but is always using an umbrella, air conditioning, and closed windows.  

 

It’s a lie. Nature is the elements. Nature is relationship with the elements. So is human relationship. If you lack the elements, then what she has are tourist buses through the safari, where she feels justified in disrupting the land but likely offers nothing in return.

 

She turns it up to get the man. And then, having never cultivated her relationship with actual nature, with her own nature—having only appropriated it to look like she was dark-eyed and smoldering or blush-cheeked—what would require charge, electricity, and life force—becomes just flesh. What would animate the flesh is missing. There is nothing transcendent or beautiful. She has good enough sex to call it good, diminishing over the years to tolerating it to justifying that menopause took her appetite. We all tell that story, and men do not know better; they are in this game at this point, so they do what they do to get by in a lifeless and, by extension, loveless interaction amongst polite staff.  

 

How women relate to sex is how men relate to women.  The handmaiden you would rather not deal with, tempestuous, incessant, demanding, irritating, inferior. They are your reflection. Furious that without, life is missing. Hating the power it has over you. And so, you develop sophisticated methods to ignore. To be too busy to respond.  

 

Woman’s relationship with man will change when woman’s relationship to Eros changes. It really is that simple. Men are physically sexist, and women are spiritually sexist. You may pay lip service just like they do. But how could they love someone who hates their own essence?

 

Do you give Eros equal rights of expression in your system? Do you truly honor and tend to it? Not because if you don’t, you will lose something, but because you recognize its value. Do you use it, violate it, harm it? Do you steal from it through masturbation—not using sex for its intended purpose of connection?  Too unwilling to do what it would require, so you steal some aspect of it for your “pleasure.” Like the guy who cops a feel because it’s his right to do so.

 

And is it always there for you, long-suffering?

 

We avoid this, though because as women, we have coded power with evil, abuse, damage. And Eros is power. Those who identify as victims will never have power. It’s an impossibility in the working of consciousness. In victim consciousness, we perceive ourself as having been “done to” by an abuser, by evil. The mind will not perceive and engage in something it perceives as evil.  

It can talk about power but not actually plug into it. Because true power is always elemental, and elemental always risks losing control. Control is the coping mechanism of victim consciousness—it is the catch-all solution. You put yourself in a state of learned helplessness, paralysis to desire power and see yourself as a victim. The mind believes it is being pulled in opposite directions. 

 

The identity then must disable the power source. You run out of the power it could take to make oneself capable of facing the arousal, the unpredictable surges, and inflations without blowing a fuse. To be a person who can progressively open in the face of power surges is the work of a lifetime. To go from the identity of no-self, inverted and progressively send power through the lines without a psychic break, or shut down, is difficult, slow work, rife with much discomfort, so much discomfort and risk of becoming one of “them”—the abusers of power—that most opt for a dim existence with dramatic performative expressions that ultimately drain them. This is why you see many displays of power with no actual change.

 

Without changing at a fundamental level your capacity, the load you could handle in a progressive way, you will end up basically shut down and shut off, or anxious and manic. You will end up with exaggerated expression of low affect. What we call PTSD is a deregulated capacity to work with flow. The challenge with giving it a pathological causation is that it is yet another thing happening to woman, and not a choice she is making.  People who give you such diagnoses while short-term comforting you render you passively incapable. To accept the diagnosis and what it connotes in today’s environment can be an internal death sentence.  

 

This is a result of the fact that you have not and are not willing to activate the power that would flood through the stuck energy in your body. This is a bitter pill to swallow, seeming to rob you of the comfort and softness that the condition would continue to order, but in the long run, it puts the “problem” and the solution in your hands.

 

This is the real ailment of woman. She will not be held accountable; she will not hold herself in her own hands. She leaves herself like an orphan at every doorstep, from the unconscious man whose program is to pretend that he knows what to do—in fact, having no clue—to the medical community that does more research for breast cancer on men than on women. There is no representative for the inverse models we know. The man with excess requires entirely different methods and yet this is the framework for how we conceive of the conditions within a woman. 

 

To prepare the mind for power, you must deem power as positive and yourself as having had agency in your experience. Otherwise, you will always code lack of power as a virtue and power as vice, formed between the irreconcilable.

 

Like resentment, victim consciousness does nothing to the person you would inflict it on. It poisons you. It disempowers you. You may even “exact justice,” but at the expense of having access to personal power until you undo the story. If you do not rewrite it, there is no way that the mind can bypass the knot. 

 

The least you could get for your difficulties is an identity that might eventually develop not into the shadow of victim, which is survivor, but as a fully realized human being. You would need a boat to cross victim waters, and that boat is responsibility to track precisely how you created the situations in your life. Even if you were to desire that, there is a whole culture more than happy to maintain the status quo by rowing the boat for you, keeping you medicalized or spiritualized but ultimately anesthetized to the pain you would need to feel to move you into real change. The prescription is inside the pain, but while we live in interminable discomfort, suffering, and low-grade negativity, we will not allow ourselves to hit bottom where we could pick up that prescription. 

 

The key for woman that would open the lock would be to distinguish between the pain she calls joy and the joy she calls pain. We have growing pains coded as violation worthy of a trigger warning. What would call us to face the realities in the world we call dangerous? But no one says, “Dangerous, how?” We refer to re-traumatization. What really is the original trauma? Trauma, even in the medical definition, is “unexpressed energy.” The classic example is the polar bear that does not experience trauma in the face of much more life-threatening experiences than humans because it runs it out, then falls to the ground and convulses it out. What would be stuck, what would make a nervous system have to re-route itself and dysregulate the flow that occurs as health on both psychic and physical levels gets moved out in the moment of a stimulation bigger than what consciousness can fully receive. 

 

To be animal is to face trauma. It’s normal. We have reified it in such a way by having so removed ourselves from nature, where this is just the way of life. We can learn effective methods for living with the uncertain, the unpredictable, and the impactful that would make us healthy and resilient, and alive by sensing the interconnection we share with the whole of life. Instead, we have continued to draw further up into the tower and throw dictates down to nature, our own and wildlife, to tone it down.

 

It’s simply not going to happen. And our refusal to apprehend and accept this has made a circus of the world. It is inconceivable to us that rather than turning the volume of the world down, we must turn up our capacity to flow inside of it. And this is where human arrogance has taken root from the lack of an interconnecting ethos brought about by the feminine. Now, with women as the primary perpetrators of this arrogance, it will be our demise. Nature always trumps form. Gravity always draws down.  

 

We are so screwed up that we now code broken and invulnerable as power. We have rigorous self-sufficiency coded as a noble quality. What we were here to counter, we adopted with fervor. There are no truly soft places to be received in the world. Women are too narcissistically shameful, self-referencing, and riddled with trauma to receive anyone, or they are too defended and threatened by the potential of losing control should another human being make contact with the vulnerable soul. A world without soft places creates hardened and insensitive people pretending virtue and locking everyone out. 

 

The true path of woman is a broken heart. Broken open again and again until it is unshielded, big enough to hold the whole of humanity. Not the high drama, the predictable and desperate broken heart of dealing with under-responsive men—are under-responsive because they have been objectified in terms of their relationship potential and are, as such, castrated. Women don’t see “men,” they see projects and future husbands. That creative power of woman is spent “improving men,” men and woman’s capacity for perception that can know life as relationship is reduced to survival-level, lowest-denominator consciousness.  

 

In this reality, women become sex objects, and men become relationship objects, and neither feels seen.