A Vexing Dilemma

We are a world without an exhale. A world addicted to up. The inhale, the consuming of life propels us, but not the release. The drive, the amphetamine, the speed pulls us in. We’ve locked ourselves upstairs, away from the “lower” realms. We’ve locked ourselves away in our heads, our minds, our rational thoughts, our corporate ladders, achievements, our upper management. We’re locked in our ideas of heaven, enlightenment, and higher consciousness. All that is below is beneath us, and beneath is slovenly, dirty, and profane. This includes our bodies, the caverns that yearn to receive, to be the receptacles for this life. Having adopted the masculine ethos, having not carved out our own, we believe that to be a receptacle in this life is to be trash. And so, without the bodies of women that could receive and transmute as redwoods might, the world remains littered, scattered with this rubbish, filled with smog. 

Our animal natures are locked in the basement, snarling. We lock ourselves in the attic away from life’s thrum, away from our passions, but most importantly, away from our senses that would tell us beyond the various rational formulas, the cold readings, and the rationalizations of a world of men without the compass of woman, the direction of truth. 

We exiled ourselves from our bodies and all they would be a conduit to and leashed ourselves to dogma and doctrine rather than the instantaneous, unalterable truth of bodies that never lie. We commenced our efforts to scramble signals and demagnetize compass needles so as to silence any interference, any counter-intelligence that would go against the conforming and contortions that would make us good dependents.

The wrathful deities of a woman’s soul—who would rise with machete, not against man but against delusion—have been the object of the machete not the subject. Her otherworldly capacity to cut through illusion, to empty, to bring another to his knees—in supplication not to her, but to the realms he would access through her—has been reduced to the eternal cutting down of herself by her inner critic. She has been riddled with an auto-immune disorder, her powers of discrimination turned rampant and malignant against her. 

Woman is here to empty, and in a world designed by man, where acquisition is king, and there is no queen, her gift—the exhale that would empty the body the spirit might incarnate, that he might land in himself, that the exhale that ensues upon arrival into the body—is cast as evil. He resents losing access to the fruit when she is the tree. She refuses to produce her fruits lest her weighty, round-breasted bounty reveal her hidden capacities. 

The drives all co-opted, we have applied the drive even to notions of egalitarianism. As if we could wipe out nature herself: the bee and flower, the bats who see shapes, the plants that eat light, and the ants that march maps. Without the X-ray vision that woman brings, we have truly come to believe we can wipe out the invisible operations of life and polarity. We have truly come to believe we can wash away the unique and elegantly complimentary differences making us unique and then wear costumes of specialness in their place. We truly believe we can wipe out the divine settings within us. I would suggest that we believe this because woman—who uniquely brings creative power to literally create life and the ensuing capacity for perception that can see the workings of nature—has forfeited not only the rights of her stature but the responsibility to train man—just as an eagle trains its young on her wing—to see the delicate and far-superior operations of pre-existing systems.

We want it both ways. We want to keep him ignorant, send him out into the world a big dumb oaf without the insider information he would need to succeed, lest he ever be able to match us and connect in polarity in such a way that we genuinely have to relinquish control to something bigger, the third that we created. We keep him three-dimensional in a four-dimensional world and then endure and tolerate his lack of capacity, his brutishness. We keep the upper hand even if it is invisible and must be disguised by Bambi-like expressions, the upward gaze of prey. And when it gets out of hand, when he cannot read our indecipherable signal of no, when it goes too far, we call in other men equally ill-informed and equally desperate for snacks to stand guard, protecting our feigned innocence. 

Read my mind, we say, not wanting to employ the coarse nature of language. Read my mind, but I have written it in a unique and indecipherable language that I do not want you privy to because I want the right to conceal my motives and intentions. I want the right to conceal my power lest you call the age-old bluff of woman where she uses that power to convince you of her weakness that you might carry the load, so that you carry the weight of the unruly aspects of this world—the violence of both man and nature as soldier and firefighter, the chaos of power forged into civility. Most importantly, we foist upon you sex and Eros and say, “You deal with it,” and wear a veil of disgust to disguise our unwillingness to face the depths. Until, having been rendered incapable by our lack of engagement with the volatile realms of existence, we find ourselves riddled with the anxiety and hypervigilance that we call upon physicians to prescribe medications and spiritual leaders to suggest meditations for. We fancy ourselves teacups perpetually triggered, shattered by the mere suggestion that we can handle it.

We in fact call in the mob of women when the suggestion is made both to destroy a man and to embargo the life force of sexuality that sustains him.

Our humor functions as a threat. Just as a soldier needs rape only one woman in a village for everyone to sense the threat, we fill cyberspace with memes that, under the guise of feminism, inject our hate, vitriol, and poison into the ether of man. It would be a universal neutering of men as if we were spraying aerial pesticides. The jokes were our weapons of the most sophisticated nature. 

We blame men for the fact that they mine the gold that we do not. We are so entranced with our identity of innocence and kindness that it is the result not of volition, not of choice, but of the absence of our primal powers that come from the ground of being flowing through us. We are not gentle; we are weak from malnourishment with judgment and condemnation of those who would go out and work with the live wires of human nature. From our ivory towers, we demand that they not be so muddy, that they be lily white, that they be sweeter and kinder and more sensitive. We grow so delicate in our tower that we can scarcely withstand impact, and rather than develop the resilience, rather than grab the wire with man, we put him in a double bind and bind him with it. 

Which, of course, is why we see the split in every woman’s fantasy: her private disdain of the New Age nice guy and full battalion forces pointed at any man who demonstrates virility and libido. He’s stolen it from us, we say. But this is because we did not acknowledge our value, because we would not cultivate.

Nature is an unforgiving mistress, and our preferences are inconsequential. She wants her species strong and whole. The forces of greed that rape the rainforest are caused by those who are charged with her protection but who won’t develop the strength and power to protect. Those people more attached to the identity of peaceful being than fierce protector—an attachment nature herself exacts at even her own expense. We are called to be whole, to be a counterforce, but more importantly, we are called to convey value, to alter others in the only way anyone is significantly changed: through transmission. Transmission always and ever trumps ideas. The flower in the barrel of the gun was transmission. 

You can only rape a land when you perceive it as having little or no value, and if those who know the value due to their “extra” sensory perception—meaning a perception that goes beyond materiality—do not transmit this value in such a way that those in full regalia and weapons are stopped dead in their tracks, then how is that not the responsibility of those who actually can see? How is it not my responsibility to train one who is deaf and blind in perception to the invisible world—that I see quite well—to develop the senses to know directly for themselves? What right do I have if I sit with wisdom to complain about the ignorance of others, to bristle at the results, and not insure they have the capacity to sense my value in such a way that they can be moved by the heart rather than driven by the mind?

Who did I think would teach these men? Or do I want to continue with the illusion and projection that has proven entirely invalid and not in the least beneficial: that he is the prince who knows and can handle everything? Am I so unwilling to dispense with my fairytale and wake from my beautiful slumber that I maintain my fantasy at the expense of reality, a reality where intimacy might occur? I never feel loved, I can never get enough because he who would love me cannot feel, and I who would be loved am interacting only with a fantasy that I need to conceal myself in, in order to live inside of.

Then I bristle when he is paternalistic, when he, blind, builds a world to accommodate the blind and punishes when I don’t use my seeing eye cane or gets frantic when I cross the street. Because we will not show men that we see and how to see, there is a genuine fear for our safety. We have cashed in on that fear, but sold our souls to do so. 

The expense of reparations would be great because we would have to look at what occurred in our absence. We would have to look at and truly see men: these men we have cast as perpetrator, dog, animal, monster. We would have to see beyond the projection. We would have to see the dutiful heart marching without orders every time into enemy territory, eternally insatiable and ungratifiable because the only thing that would gratify—the activation of our power—we are unwilling to do. We would have to see the wound or men who could never rest because we would not provide the exhale that would empty.

And, as a result, we would never know our value. It is only in this initiation of emptying, of going into the underworld that is the soul, into the Feminine,—where man loses everything that would impede his relationship with the Divine—that both are redeemed, that the world wherein thesis consummates with antithesis to birth synthesis. Above, Jesus walks the stations of the cross to be relieved of all that is not the bedrock of the sacred until he makes his descent, and the procedure, the coitus that will birth the new garden where he walks not as lord but as gardener walking the newly fecund garden. This new garden, the reconciliation of separation, is the place beyond good and evil. It is the garden where opposites can meet after the Feminine receives the Masculine: they re-emerge as a singular and complementary force.

The entire procedure is the result of her gravity and willingness to receive him. The emptiness of woman, the cavern of being is not stuffed and filled with compensations, nor resentment. It is kept empty until it is time for his descent, the only operation that would empty him of illusion rather than fill him with more ideas. Progressively he is stripped of the obscurations to sight. What we are hoping to tell him, to demand, we cannot do through the film over his vision. It must be cleared, not merely externally corrected. He literally cannot see you. He literally cannot hear you until the illusions of conditioning are lifted. This will bring the humility that paradoxically will relieve him of teacher status but make him a king. 

But woman will not remain in herself, anchored in her value with enough patience for nature to do its work. She rushes from herself into an insensitive man’s arms because she lacks the weight that would hold her in an eternal place where she is so filled with herself, that she is not desperate to fill herself with another. Where the receptivity she is—that would draw from him the excess—is so deeply honored by her that she is willing to wait until he goes through what he would need to go through to wake up to the concentration of her sacredness. You cannot prove your value, you can only be it. To prove it is to devalue it.

You can only remove the illusion that would blind the other to your value. To do this, woman was given the vessel of the body for men to both enter and exit. This is the underworld to where he makes his descent and from which he will re-emerge anew. It is from here that the numinous is spoken, the invisible from which births the impossible. The hopelessness, cynicism, and skepticism that plagues woman is the closing off of this bridge. Alienated from her body, the antennae from where she would tune into the sensory frequencies, she lacks the divining rod of truth. The body reconciles what the mind cannot. Within the center of the pre-descendent mind, the mind that has not descended into the body, there is a barrier, an either/or that slices across reality. Conflict is the natural state. The mind of man, like the world designed by man, is rife with this conflict, violence, and war. This mind breeds this reality because it cannot find the resolution that we might find in the body, in the heart where there can be a coherence. The coherence is Eros. Difference is not merely blotted out. Instead, there is connection through sacred substance, taking the very elements that plague us—transgression and aggression, dominance and submission, position and status, fragility and weakness—and charging them with the arousal which can break through the valence of good and bad. What we previously could only define as polarizing, we can now see as bodies and minds erect with dynamic tension.

This is nirvana—this ordering of consciousness that comes when it is drawn forth, made taut, all contents moving in a single direction. To be so rapt, so taken that not a single stray thought distracts from this moment. This gives us the polarity that would otherwise give us fracture. This can only be achieved through polarity with visible or invisible forces. It is the artist in dynamic tension with the genii or daimon, the force that mediates all creative endeavor. It is the troubadour in dynamic tension with the longing that lies between himself and the woman at the window. 

The art of having and wanting that would birth life, birth vitality, is altogether lost in the having that we get with the demands we make on our neutered men. Yes, we want safety and some level of certainty. We want to open the refrigerator door and know there will be food. But the certainty that man—on his leash for his treats—will do tricks for small rewards, in the fear of punishment or to impress our girlfriends at how well we tamed him, at the fact that he will cook our dinner, at the guarantee that he would never aggress or violate, that we have sapped him of all animal and libidinal force— this is death. This polarity, this swirling mass of atoms that we are, needs both poles (preferably in each partner) if it is to remain dynamic.

We have all but neutralized the positive pole of agency. As we demagnetize our erotic selves, our yearnings, our hungers, our desires, we grow heavy, dense, stagnant, bored. Partnership has a burdensome quality to it. Men are lumbering and heavy gorillas that have no initiative of their own. The not so funny “women’s porn” of a man wanting to co-create a home, participate, that she does not have to discipline and lug around is impossible when we deactivate his nature. Marriage looks more like two exhausted fighters hanging on each other rather than dynamic movement. Neither fly like a butterfly nor sting like a bee. Just hang and prop each other up until he steals away to get tiny droplets of porn, like a man sucking a cactus in the desert. 

The art, the abandon, the enjoyment it would take to activate Eros that lies within, to heat it from the fixed quality that it remains that we pretend over, where we are like smiling numb stones, we as women have prohibited lest we lose control over the precious commodity that we use in barter and trade. We cannot allow for the genuine heat and arousal—and I mean this not even sexually but in the whole of our lives—so we live in a perpetual state of hyperarousal. This tension of any state of arousal coming up against the increasingly constricting band of control held in place by perpetual self-recrimination.  

We can perform it, we can do sensual dances for men, we can move our eyes in order to move him just enough to meet our demands, we can move with sensuality provided we do one thing: we hold at all costs onto the security guard that would remind us we are victims. This gives us justification for doing just enough to get the materiality we want, the approval, the adoration, the goods—but not enough to activate a true polarity in man. Our abandon would activate his agency, the two would interpenetrate, and both would be taken out of control into the “third realm,” the world beyond either but including both. I say this both to the individual woman and the collective women. 

If they are a plug, we are disconnected sockets. There will be no electricity, no illumination at any level. We will be exhausted mothers with the burden of men made into children who must perpetually be scolded, lacking any connective consciousness whatsoever. Our consolation prize will be righteous flustered indignation in the form of “don’t-they-know” and “these-men” superiority. We will win a war we do not want to be in as not only will this become the nation of sisterhood, we will take the neutered masses of men to work against those men who would defy our orders to self-castrate. 

And frankly, I would not care. I am not that compassionate were it not for the fact that we, as women, will mutate into hideous forms if we do not have the flow of masculine force. We will exist in a swamp of stagnation, a dead sea, and grow smug as a result. Our perpetual state of low-grade hatred and discontent will be the waters we swim in, polluted with our indignation, having become so accustomed to the swamp that we scarcely realize our location and the tumors and growths we have developed.

I have been told to write in a more therapeutic voice, more non-violent and mindful. But this is the very malady of our day, that we spend our efforts making ourselves trying to feel better in poisoned waters. With our myriad anti-shaming campaigns, and our dulcet tone care-giving, basically giving each other heroin because we are unwilling to sit through withdrawals with each other. The endless eggshell walking that is not a matter of true care, but a fear embedded in a world where resiliency’s wing that would counter the safety wing that would allow us to fly is broken. Coddling and self-induced segregation where only “prey” animals can enter and when they are not in the room hunt the “predator.” Where we exhibit our erotic selves only in the insulated rooms of blubbering emotionality with other women that would counteract any fire. Feminism has become the great enabler of bad behavior in women, where co-dependency suffices such that we do not have to face the real world and develop the capacity we would need for inter-dependency. 

I am so sick of hearing the bemoaning of emotional exhaustion that is the result of yelling a foreign language at one who could never understand. We so refuse to come out of ourselves, out of our women’s studies departments, out of our collusion sisterhoods passing as “identification” and compassion, where all that happens is endless confirmation of our princess selves needing more and more mattresses to buffer us from the peas of life. We dramatize our emotions and blow off a steam of what we refuse to connect to the turbine of our erotic selves, what would expend that excess in a creation that we would eventually live off the interest from. Instead, we blow it off with our drama, our rage, our indignance, ending up hungover, spent, and more hopeless in search of someone who can activate us again enough to feel alive and go through it all over again.

Woman has a knot in the center of her being. A great Gordian Knot that no one but she can solve.

When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside
like the inside, and the above like the below and the below like the above, and when you make the male like the female and the female like the male, then you will enter the Kingdom. 

Gnostic Gospel of Thomas