Masculine Versus Feminine? Not So Fast.

There’s been a lot of talk in spiritual circles about the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine. Healing them, honoring them, balancing them…. In one way or another, it seems to me like we are taking the War of the Sexes into spiritual circles, when I feel like the ideas and approaches aren’t even related to the genders.

Gender Versus Characteristics

Many of us got our definitions of gender attributes from David Deida’s work The Way of the Superior Man, which took the Taoist concepts of Yin and Yang and applied them to Western relationships. He relates that masculine characteristics have to do with stability, focus, directed action, construction, the physical reality. Feminine characteristics have more to do with intuition, expressiveness, change, creativity, the non-physical aspects of our world.

Of course, we each have different mixes of these qualities. Men aren’t devoid of emotion, or instinct, any more than women are devoid of physical acuity or focussed action.

What strikes me is that these differentiations by gender have caused a lot of division. We could actually look at this less in terms of Male and Female and more in terms of Mind and Soul.

The Masculine Mind

When we speak about masculine attributes such as focus, attention to physical reality and so on, we’re really describing the job of the mind. In the World of WorldCraft, the mind is the interface through which the soul interacts with the experience it creates. Its whole purpose is to translate physical reality into something the soul can interact with.

As it grew more complex, it tried to do things the soul does naturally – primarily, decision making. It began to categorize things, as shortcuts to compensate for the fact that the mind is much more limited than the soul. (It would be like a character in a video game thinking that it could be the player, and trying to upgrade its own software.)

What we ended up with was an interface that, in its attempt to handle far more than it was intended to do, sorts and categorizes everything into boxes and levels of importance. It tries to nail things down, make them concrete, so that it doesn’t have to keep track of those static things.

This is “The Wounded Masculine.” The mind, in its attempt to keep everything static, attempts to impose control over everything it cannot.

The Feminine Soul

When we speak about feminine attributes such as intuition, change, expressiveness, these to me are attributes of the soul. The soul is what populates the experience the mind portrays. Everything we touch, see, sense with our senses, is part of what the soul has made for us.

Because the soul works outside of the world to create the world, the mind is a little freaked out by it. Things happen outside of the mind’s control, because it cannot, by its very nature, comprehend what is outside of the video game. It doesn’t normally understand why things change, even as the soul instigates those changes from the outside.

Intuition is a soul-level process, where souls are interacting outside of the 3-D world they’ve created. The soul informs the mind, telling the character what to do in the video game. The mind either listens or ignores the instructions, depending on how much it is trying to keep everything organized while it pretends to be the director of the show.

So Why “The Battle of the Sexes?”

How did genders get involved when it’s Mind versus Soul? I think it’s due to our very different relationships with our bodies.

When the mind is simply doing its job of Soul Interface, without attempting to put its own spin on things, something cool happens. Our bodies float through life. There is far less resistance in our movements. It actually feels like we are observing our bodies doing things while the mind is simply watching. This is The Flow.

When we are in The Flow, the body feels directly connected to the soul. Our mind watches, but really it is like our body has taken on a life of its own and is acting on its own volition.

A man’s relationship with his body tends to be unidirectional. We ask him to do things for us, and by and large, he does, as long as we feed him and don’t overstress him. The man’s body is primarily a servant.

A woman’s relationship with her body tends to be bidirectional. Every month, a woman’s body asserts herself in a way that no man can experience. Through cramping, emotional release, nausea, a combination of the above, along with bleeding, the body says, “You will pay attention to me above all other things.” The woman’s body is much more of a partner.

Women tend to have a much more intimate and mutual relationship with their bodies, their instruments of the soul, than men do. And so they tend to be more associated with the soul, and men with the mind, even though both genders have both.

So Why “The Battle” At All?

The key lies within the mind’s belief that it is supposed to be a player like the soul. It recognizes that, compared to the soul’s capacity to create this entire playing field, the mind is a very tiny part of the whole being. It fears that, if it relinquishes its sense of self, of identity, it will be lost, a grain of sand on the beach of the being playing this game.

So the mind does everything that it can to keep its sense of importance. Self-talk. Self-control. Control of the environment (of the soul’s creation). And as men tend to be more associated with the mind, they tend to be more connected to this need. This is where patriarchal societal structures originate, in that need for the mind to control.

The mind’s fear of dissolution keeps it from realizing that, as “small” a part as it is, it is the only part that allows the soul to experience its creation. The mind is vital to the game of life. Just, as a mind, not a player.

Let’s walk away from male-versus-female, and walk towards the mind letting the soul act through the body. Whichever body it is.