Vulnerability (Restored Discussion)

[Balder]

Vulnerability

• Posted by Thomas on March 18, 2010 at 8:43pm in Engagement
• View Discussions

vulnerability, fr. Indo-European wele, wound

Here's my short version evolution:

rock ---> crocodile ---> neanderthal

We're still largely in the neanderthal age, though from little green shoots appearing on a few hillsides one can I think glance the outlines of stage four in this mini-series.

Notice any trend in the above timeline?  Here's a hint: if vulnerability means "wound," and if neanderthals feel more wound than crocodiles than rocks, woundedness is evolutionarily specified.  Sensitivity, permeability, pain, feeling, openness, susceptibility---these are likewise specified, the Big Design. The universe wants woundedness.  Spent 13 billion years (at least) fashioning it as its highest, at least so far as this earth is concerned.

Jump a moment to post-neanderthal: the naked human body.  More and more defenceless as things go, yes?  More sensitive?  More vulnerable?  More susceptible?  More influent?  More permeable?

But why woundedness?  Here's a poem I wrote many years ago.

Uni Verse

Before humans

were the animals

and only the animals

only the animals

carrying life

through the ages

through the aging growth 

of this one earth’s 

one simple time

in aeons of 

emergent grief 

and slowly kindling light

until sometime somewhere

mid-late early before

who knows when

 

the animals birthed us

Their Legacy 

birthed and fed 

and wanted us as the 

next of all that

went before

wanted the Skin

that 

touches Skin

the Feeling

that 

outwardly Goes

and Words

that

say the Love

scattered so Everywhere

it could easily be

mistaken for

Everything

Reply by Thomas on March 18, 2010 at 9:11pm

Ok, I'll stop being coy. Here's my slightly less compacted, four-stage short-version evolution:

rock ---> crocodile ---> neanderthal ---> woman

And that brings us to evolution's apex, here. If you think I'm missing something, I'm a reasonable guy, let me know. I know my Darwin and I'll give it a good gander. Skwaauk.

[Balder]

Reply by Patrick on March 19, 2010 at 1:31pm

Aren't woman more resistant than man?



Reply by Thomas on March 19, 2010 at 2:28pm


They're more sensitive, receptive, permeable, open. Where does that place them in the evolutionary history I'm drawing?


Let me add some context here. The loss of the sense of separation marks a very high inner state or threshold of unfolding. What is separation but a barrier, and what is a barrier but a shell, or a thick crocodile skin, or a thick neanderthal attitude? Evolution, so far as I can see, develops to ever lighter forms of guardedness; so, too, inner unfolding if given its own: higher attainment tracks that deep forest path to ultimate openness.


Femaleness is constitutionally more open. Look how women easily bruise compared to men: even their musculature is designed to receive more fully and with greater sensitivity that which touches it. So, too, their hearing and sense of smell: these are more sensitive than a man's. And aren't most psychics---persons sensitive to subtle realms---mostly women? Add in emotional sensitivity, a sensitivity to difference and uniqueness (gay bashing is more a male sport), relational sensitivity, a greater sensitivity to surroundings---all of this suggests a thinner skin. A thinner skin is less separate by definition. Isn't that the goal?


People look high and low for a teacher. To me, half the human race is a living, breathing teacher of where this life is going, a tremendous signpost of evolutionary unfolding. Many men will of course immediately put up a thick skin to simple facts as these. So be it. This is a universe of you get what you grow.



Reply by Patrick on March 19, 2010 at 3:58pm


Dear Thomas,


We are definitely living in a time where the feminin archetype needs to be reintagrated. Our forefathers have been a bit - the least to say - blinded by their own masculin power.


But your position seems to exalted for me. It becomes an "all woman" club, which is kind of the same mistake we made as men. On a short time basis, that's nice. But honnestly, I think we both need each other.


So what about rock ---> crocodile ---> neanderthal ---> woman ?


So: Rock->stupid and non emotionnal as one...Crocodile->reptilian and non limbic as one..-> neanderthal..and just carry your woman around holding her by the hairs...Woman-> all is beautifull and glittering!!!


Sorry, but I'm not subscribing to that scenario. Exaltation leads to vertiginous downfall.


Neither in me (UL) nor elsewhere (LL) do I want the feminin principle to replace the last tyran.


Both we need.


And one last thing...our children also need both.


P:

[Balder]

Reply by Christophe Witz 1 day ago


Tom,


I have a question. I understand that for you 'woman' means the Endpoint of all Evolution. Is this Endpoint unchanging over time, or does this Point itself evolve? For example:


Earth -> female crocodile -> Neanderthal Lady -> Woman -> WonderWoman -> Ueberwoman


What do you think?



Reply by Thomas 1 day ago


Keep working at it, Cartoon Chris. There's a great idea in there somewhere. Actually, I take that back.

[Balder]

Reply by Mascha 1 day ago


Hi Patrick,


of course, we need both. It is always ShivaShakti, SitaRam, RadhaKrishna - these old Hindus knew what they were seeing/feeling in the depths of their own psyche.


It's quite a stretch to call Thomas' deliberate highlighting of women's more permeable constitution an "exaltation". Have not the masculine qualities been exalted to the point of insanity for thousands of years, in other words, much too long to call it long enough? Isn't it time to lift the feminine out of the bog into which it was banished, finally? At long last, stop belittling, stop the mental, emotional and physical crushing of what is the most sensitive, the most delicate and undefended part of YOU, as men and women alike, here on earth.


For heaven-on-earth's-sake, give praise where praise is long overdue.



Reply by Patrick 1 day ago


Hi Mascha, nice to see you on the war front...LOL


Let me explain where I come from.


On a personnal level: I'm working at 60%. the rest of the time I'm taking care of my 3 y.o. son: I cook, I wash my own laundry, I iron my shirts, I clean the appartment. My wife is working at 60% and does the same as me.


I'm not saying this model is good or anything like that, but it's the one we're living.


I have a profession which is mostly represented by woman and there are no diference of salary for the same job.


So honnestly, in my daily experience, be it family oriented, professionaly oriented or socialy oriented (i choose my friends), I'm not encountering the slightest situation where woman is not honored.


My son is learning to cook, to wash, he loves ironing, he makes jewellery, plays music, drives my car (lol) and loves screw drivers. And with all that...I'm not fearing he'll turn gay! LOL. And if he does...honnestly, from the bottom of my heart, I hope he'll be happy with it.


So that kind of exhaltation of woman is overdue for me: I honor woman around me and I also the honor the feminin aspect in me. But I fully understand that there's a great need to heal some wounds as the collective experience has been difficult for woman.


But I also want to draw attention to the fact that any idealisation or exaltation will in time foster a reaction of the neglected polarity. And this can be endless.


My interest, sadness and anxiety is directed towards the powerlesness we both feel, man and woman, towards a world which is technologically, economically and socialy violent. And the impact of that on both archetypes is devastating.


But now if you guys want to go on saying how beautiful the feminin archetype is, and how reptilian and neanderthalian the masculin aspect is, then you can go on. I don't mind. But I'm not feeling any resonance to that.


So if this thread is the club for doing that, then I'm really sorry and I'll leave you to your healing.


Big hugs,


P.


Reply by Mascha 1 day ago


Patrick said: So honnestly, in my daily experience, be it family oriented, professionaly oriented or socialy oriented (i choose my friends), I'm not encountering the slightest situation where woman is not honored.


P.


Have you asked some of the more insightful women in your environment whether that is their experience too?


I'm asking because you and the majority of men I know are still so quick to dismiss any real attempt to create a balance that is felt by both sexes equally.


Hugs to you too, my friend Patrick.


Reply by Patrick 1 day ago


Ok, so I just asked my wife. Her reply has not been very clear, and I think it'll be processed in time. But she rules out any thing that is linked with the feminin. She says that she's seen me not accepting or honoring things in her and people, but that does not seem to be connected with the feminin archetype.


She could not point her finger on what's triggering my "discarding" of things and people. If I think about it, I can't either clearly point it.


For me, I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with "balance between sexes". My challenge connected with duality/polarity/the other is situated somewhere else.


This is a good trigger for self-exploration.


You quoted me by copying a sentence, but in some strange way, after the quote there's my signature:" P." But the sentence you copied is in the middle of the text, and my signature "P." is at the end of the text. And when I sign, I mostly add a litlle feminin blessing, like "Big Hugs". This has been omited in your copy. So there's some editing going on here. Nothing terrible.


But that's definitely a trigger for me..LOL...Exactitude! In a discution I'd go mad on that. LOL.


Number one enneagram...I'm getting tired of myself sometimes.


Affectionately,

P.

[Balder]

Reply by Steven Nickeson 1 day ago


Hey,


A few thoughts on this topic.


1) It is a small item but the sequence should run:


Earth---> Crocodile---> Neanderthal---> Extinction!


Geneticists have shown that Neanderthals were a distinctly different species than Homo Sapiens, thus interbreeding between our species and Neanderthals was either unproductive or resulted in infertile off-spring. So, Neanderthals, who had larger brain cavities and were physically stronger than modern humans, were an evolutionary dead-end. Did their extinction come from being more vulnerable? Jerad Diamond says yes.


But, while I'm sure we all got Thomas's point, the lack of research kind of torques the attentive mind off-topic at a critical time in the reading of the initial post. Bad production value, like seeing the shadow of a camera boom flash past on-screen...credibility takes a dive. However, it is a small matter.


A weightier issue is:


"We're still largely in the neanderthal age..."


Unless the "We" of that statement is a personally isolating "Editorial We" or a "Royal We," no, we are not. This is too flippant even for me. We are modern human beings, 21st Century. What you see is what we are.


2) The initial posts allude to the conventional wisdom (at least) that women are more "open" than men. Fine, I'll check that assumption and sure enough--at a site in which one can take an Empathy Quotient Test (I don't need to labor over empathy/openness correlations here, do I?) it was found that the Women's average score was 47 and the Men's average score was 42. But wait a minute here, I score a 60. And to double check that anomaly, I take a different test only to find I score an 85 and was warned that I could be afflicted with Idiot Empathy and be taken for a ride gratis of my over-openness to the feelings of an other or others. (If only they knew.) It gave me pause...only 47???


Maybe it is time to drop from the clouds and exaltation and look at some stuff on the ground free of one's celebration on identifying with the anima. If women are the apex of emotional evolution and can only score a lowly average 47 in a 80 point possible test, something is amiss. Why are they not living up to their mythological capabilities. Where is the romance? Gone is the pedestal, at the base of which men worshiped and, thus, insidiously, insincerely, controlled.


3) Non-exalted statistics: Women are more liable to have suffered abuse in childhood than men, in some statistical bases by more than 33%. Most of this abuse came in the form of corporal punishment or neglect. (While sexual abuse gets a great deal of media play it does not figure into the abuse suffered by most female children.) And according to the statistics of the U.S. Government, almost all of this abuse came at the hands of the little girls' mothers. Yes! How evolved, how feeling! And to take it a little further, 90% of the children who have been murdered by a parent, have been murdered by their mothers. Yes! How evolved...Medea uber alles!


One has to note that those who have suffered abuse as children are more likely to perpetrate abuse on their own children than those who have not. Evolution does nothing but "progress." Right? It only stands to reason that as the population expands, somewhat geometrically, so does the pain inflicted on little girls...by their mothers.


4) So what is the result of child abuse in later life? There is in the latest DSM a category regarding the adult survivor of childhood abuse...I would give full details but I left my copy in a self-storage unit four years ago when I fled your fine culture. But the foremost is an emotional shut-down...women shutting down women while men safely bow and scrape at the feet of the romantically sustained, exalted, metaphysical illusions, and write winsome cloud-born posts on the subject. But there are other symptoms, dissociative behavior, failure to finish beginnings, failure to establish lasting relationships, self-destructive behaviors, addictions, etc. etc. And I will add failure to score an average higher than a paltry 47 on an Empathy Quotient test. It is either that or the conventional wisdom that says women are more emotionally evolved, indeed the apex of such evolution, is a crock of sour owl shit.


5) Those least likely to report instances of child abuse are the victims, themselves, of that abuse. So there is a hell of a lot of abuse that gets in under the radar because so much trauma visited on those little girls a la women, and the hands of women, will never be seen by school officials or cops or social workers or neighbors. And so they just shut down, armor-up, score a lowly 47 average on an 80 point test and rest their vaunted emotional prowess on unearned laurels. No problems for there are the true believers...conventional wisdom uber alles...there'll be pie in sky when you die...


6) This gets down to my own experience; too many women in the alternatives--alternative medicine, alternative community, alternative psychotherapy, alternative spirituality, alternative sexuality (including the 44 lesbians I had once as clients in a civil right suit), alternative alternatives, have confided in me the heartbreaking extent of the abuse they suffered far too often at the hands of their mothers.


7) And so, alternative though they are, the women never score higher than an average 47 while a cynical, world weary cowboy pulls a 60 without a sweat.


8) I sit here and look at these numbered items and my blood boils for the pain that made this post. I'm not going back up to blithe whimsy at the top of this thread for I might write something unkind.

[Balder]

Reply by Bruce Alderman 1 day ago


Tom, thank you for starting this discussion. This thread has led to lots of contention! I expect you were having fun being a little provocative. I do not personally find much use in the argument that women are more evolved than men (which women?), but I do agree that evolution appears to have followed a trajectory of the development and refinement of sensitivities. This is the view of the integral-participatory philosopher, Henryk Skolimowski:


"The evolutionary tale is one of augmentation of consciousness and the continuous acquisition of new sensitivities through which organisms react to the environment in ever more knowing and purposeful ways. As their sensitivities multiply, organisms elicit more and more from the environment. They draw upon reality in proportion to their ability to receive it and transform it.


…There is, therefore, an intimate relationship between our total evolutionary endowment in terms of consciousness, and all the knowing powers we possess, and the nature of reality we construct, receive and recognize. We simply cannot find, see or envisage in reality more than our senses, our intellect, our sensitivities, our intuition (and whatever other evolutionary endowments we possess) allow us to find and see. The more sensitive and knowing we become, the richer and larger becomes our reality… The organism’s interaction with reality is a dual process of being in it and articulating it: by grasping onto any aspect of reality the organism invariably articulates it. Reality is never given to the organism (human or otherwise) except in forms of interactions: that is, in the form of continuous articulations and transformations specific to a given organism. We never just receive reality. Even a mirror does not photograph reality: it only reflects some of its features according to its limitations and its specific capacities for reflection.


… The rise and development of the mind is essentially the story of dim light reflecting upon itself and becoming brighter light. In its evolutionary development the mind has not only been continually transformed but continually transforming. The mind, as I have argued, is not to be limited to its one layer embodied in our abstract logical capacities, but must be seen as the total capacity of the organism to react intelligently and purposefully.


Reality for the amoeba has been something less than for the fish, and still less than for the human being…. (Skolimowski, The Participatory Mind)


A corollary for the evolution of sensitivities is, as you point out, the evolution of the forms of our vulnerability, of our capacity to be wounded. In my own life, I have found that spiritual and psychological growth has often followed upon significant woundings – where development of sensitivity makes one more vulnerable to wounding, and wounding sometimes also deepens and extends our sensitivities. I say sometimes, because frequently, wounding leads to a loss of sensitivity; an energetic or emotional contraction, an increase in defendedness and wariness, a dimming of the light of our sensitivities. But if this woundedness is faced, if we enter with awareness into it and receive it in its rawness and intensity, our scope of awareness and compassion (our evolutionary capacity for sensitivity) may also be refined, expanded, deepened.


When I was younger, I used to resonate strongly with the image of Jacob, wounded from his wrestling with the angel upon the hill. I had come face to face with my own deep woundedness in the wilderness near Mt. Shasta, and in finally seeing and accepting it, I found my life transfigured. The wound now was a newly acquired intelligence, a wisdom – the breaking open of a horizon of new vision. Christ, for me, became the exemplar of awakened vulnerability, and of a new kind of strength and power that also flows from that.


I remember, at the time, being struck by the archetypal nature of the process I underwent up in those mountains. In deeply perceiving accepting my emotional woundedness, I was also physically wounded: I had a bicycle accident while riding downhill and tore up my hands, bare feet, and forehead on the cement; and later, out hiking, I fell into a ravine while hiking in the mountains and split my side wide open when I landed on the edge of a large drainage pipe. Only later did I realize how these wounds “mirrored” those of the archetypal Christ I adopted as my guide for the next several years.


Christ is the masculine image of what we see also in the life of Machig Labdron, the yogini of Chod, who in her wounding and fierce love transforms her own body into food for her demons and for all creation. In that image, love is seen and lived as kenotic, self-emptying, vulnerable at its core.


Here is Krishnamurti on vulnerability and sensitivity:


Without sensitivity there can be no affection; personal reaction does not indicate sensitivity; you may be sensitive about your family, about your achievement, about your status and capacity. This kind of sensitivity is a reaction, limited, narrow, and is deterioration. Sensitivity is not good taste for good taste is personal and the freedom from personal reaction is the awareness of beauty. Without the appreciation of beauty and without the sensitive awareness of it, there is no love.


This sensitive awareness of nature, of the river, of the sky, of the people, of the filthy road, is affection. The essence of affection is sensitivity. But most people are afraid of being sensitive; to them to be sensitive is to get hurt and so they harden themselves and so preserve their sorrow. Or they escape into every form of entertainment, the church, the temple, the gossip and cinema and social reform. But being sensitive is not personal and when it is, it leads to misery. To break through this personal reaction is to love, and love is for the one and the many; it is not restricted to the one or to the many.


To be sensitive, all the senses must be fully alive, active, and the fear of being a slave to the senses is merely the avoidance of a natural fact. The awareness of the fact does not lead to slavery; it is the fear of the fact that leads to bondage. Thought is of the senses and thought makes for limitation but yet you are not afraid of thought. On the contrary; it is ennobled with respectability and enshrined with conceit. To be sensitively aware of thought, feeling, of the world around you, of your office and of nature, is to explode from moment to moment in affection. Without affection, every action becomes burdensome and mechanical and leads to decay." (Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti's Notebook)


Reply by Thomas 1 day ago


Thank you for relaying your personal experiences, Bruce, which are very sweet and parallel my own experiences. And thank you for the quotes. I happily add Krishnamurti's affection to the long list of vulnerability markers: permeability, sensitivity to feeling, susceptibility and affection, among others.


I left my original evolutionary sketch unqualified to let people lead with their assumptions. A bit of a fertile ploy to see where people are at and to gauge willingness to talk personally.


Women in their very constitution embody greater openness, vulnerability, sensitivity, feeling values, affection, susceptibility compared to men. I don't see how this is controversial. And if one accepts that life evolves to greater degrees of those very values---a move away from a crocodile's thick skin---what could be controversial by connecting these observations? Men can be (mostly are) terrified to dig into this particular soil. Oh poor me, I can't simply say simple facts and stand my own ground as a man. Notice Chris' reaction above.


Patrick, good on you for engaging this personally with your wife and bringing your honesty (your vulnerability) here. Here's a question for you: what is threatening about venerating the feminine and its particular embodiment in women and femaleness? Why should venerating imply that binary, win-lose warfare mode? Is it really so difficult to say:


We are evolving toward greater sensitivity and vulnerability, and thank you, women and femaleness, for embodying this so exquisitely for us. I venerate you, I venerate your embodiment, I venerate the sensitivity you model.


How could that ever be seen to denigrate maleness, men or masculinity? In my own experience, venerating women, femaleness and femininity for these very real, personal life-giving values, has brought tremendous clarity and freedom to my own masculinity, and has allowed me to allow women in my life to do what they do exquisitely with gratefulness. I have also found that doing so brings an equal valuation back to me regarding my maleness, that I am valued for the strength by which I can hold space for sexual difference without the meanness of defensive equalizing.


Are we really to believe that women and men are no different, that they carry exact same evolutionary threads? If not, what is that difference?


Nor are the values of vulnerability, openness, sensitivity, susceptibility and the like simply the domain of women. But ask any woman, as Mascha has suggested, and the response is likely to be that women embody these in much more mature fashion. The facts here are so obvious it goes without saying.


Men have their own work to do. And that work only partially overlaps the type of work women have to do. Answer me this: do men, in their work, need to become, among other things, more or less sensitive? If the former, why?


Steven, forget the statistics and regurgitation and get real in a personal vein. Boiling blood is a starter, but answer me this: Why do you need a reader? Gonna sidestep again, avoid that vulnerability that you actually need people to feel loved and appreciated, to feel hugged?

[Balder]

Reply by Mascha 1 day ago


Dear Patrick, if you ask the women you respect, and your intent is to sincerely understand how they feel about being honored for what they naturally are, you will be surprised, I can guarantee you that.


You could have asked me, for example, instead of telling me what it's like to be a woman these days. You could have addressed what I actually said in my first reply to you instead of telling me that I'm on the war path, which is a declaration of war (as in feeling besieged) on your part, not some kind of insinuation that is coming from me.


We've got a long way to go, but the next step is so simple, it makes me laugh: please, guys, ask the women, hand on your heart, if there's anything more you can give them that they long for and deeply need.


Reply by Thomas 23 hours ago


There's a beautiful love story from ancient Egypt, one of the greatest love stories in the world. It became one of the most important tales in ancient Egypt and conveys how vulnerability has been and is crushed by the spirits of masculine envy and violence. It is the tale of Isis and Osiris.


Pay close attention to the genders in this tale.


Isis is the Egyptian goddess of nature and magic, worshipped as the ideal mother and wife. Osiris is the god of the dead and the afterlife.


As the tale goes, Isis and Osiris were lovers and Osiris was king. Osiris' and Isis' brother Set , the god of the desert where nothing grows, became envious and jealous of their love and Osiris' kingship, and killed Osiris. Grieving, Isis drew upon her magical powers and the strength of her divine love to bring her lover back from the dead. Here is the power of a woman's love: to awaken the dead. On the evening of their reunion, Isis and Osiris made love and conceived a child, he who would become the beautiful Horus, god of the sky and of protection.


Set flew into a rage with Isis and Osiris' reunion and Horus' conception, and this time set a trap, chopping Osiris up into 14 pieces and casting these widely throughout Egypt. Osiris penis was swallowed by an alligator and sunk to the bottom of the Nile.


In the fulfilment of time, Isis gave birth to Horus. Set sought to kill them both. Isis, worried, then sought a surrogate mother to care for her son, and chose the goddess Hathor (Venus in the Roman era). Hathor is often pictured with ears of a cow: she who gave divine milk to suckle the divine child Horus.


(How many women have been derisively called 'cow'?)


When Horus grew into manhood, he didn't take another woman for his bride, but took Hathor, who transformed into his wife and lover. Hathor was fully honoured as fully female: sexual, maternal and divine, and carried divine powers to raise the dead. (She was also mother, daughter and wife of Ra.) No Christian mother and whore split here. More children in Egypt were named after Hathor than any other god.


End of the tale for our purposes. As time would tell, the beautiful artifacts of ancient Egypt were viciously defaced by marauding Christians. All visual representations of a god other than Christ were violently hacked by early Coptics during the early centuries of the first millenium. Nowhere was the hacking more brutal and more vicious than at the temple of Hathor.


(Thank you Marianne Williamson for parts of the above retelling.)


Question of the hour. Were the brutal hackers:


A) men


B) women



Reply by Christophe Witz 17 hours ago


Thomas said: Keep working at it, Cartoon Chris. There's a great idea in there somewhere. Actually, I take that back.


Tom,


this comment is incredible passive-aggressive in my eyes. Also you did not answer my question, nor gave me anything meaningful to respond to, so at this point I don't see that this "discussion" is going anywhere.


Reply by Christophe Witz 17 hours ago


I am also dissapointed how Bruce is dealing with his moderator's role. If this is the kind of debate you want to cultivate in the Forum, then I don't know what. I mean I could begin to seriously flame both Tom and Mascha, but I am not entirely clear on whether I would be marked as the bad guy or what. It is unclear to me what position Tom holds. Is he a moderator here also? He is obviously protected by Bruce, who is trying to reason his way through this mess, but in my books this is just not doing it.


We really had a chance to begin this anew, on a new morning, in a new space, but now I see the same Power Game coming over here that dwelled in the Gaia site. I feel sad about this.This space has been violated by Nutcases who pretend to act in the name of Love, a Love that is exclusive, fundamentalist, hard-core metaphysical, and seriously misguided. I'm gonna watch this space for a couple days, but right now I wonder if this is the space I want to hang out with friends and discuss (!) things that are important to me.


honestly, chris


Reply by Thomas 16 hours ago


Chris, it's not passive. It's my asking why are here with a comment like that. Why bother if you're uninterested?

[Balder]

Reply by Patrick 17 hours ago


Tom:"Here's a question for you: what is threatening about venerating the feminine and its particular embodiment in women and femaleness? Why should venerating imply that binary, win-lose warfare mode?"


I don't think venerating the feminin is threatening, but it seems that you and Masha want to impose that on me-Tha's how I feel.


I've reacted because your skecth of evolution was...binary...and win-lose...Tom. But I totally agree with you that it hasn't to be that way.


Tom:"Answer me this: do men, in their work, need to become, among other things, more or less sensitive? If the former, why?"


I work as a psychotherapist and I now come to think that man are very sensitive, or equally sensitive to woman. It's in their response that they differ. Balder's quotation of Krishnamurti's point to the anesthesia that we humans look for.


So for me it's not sensitivity that man have to learn, but how to deal differently with it, and I agree that they can learn a lot from woman.


I also want to add that in my experience man and woman are equal towards change. Woman are more represented in psychotherapy, but it doesn't mean they change more- as we are in an evolution talk, let's use the word adapt. What I see in my practice is very individual and not connected to genders.


I want to add that you ask:"Why should venerating imply that binary, win-lose warfare mode"


And that the end of your post on Isis and Osiris is just fostering that binary vision:
"Question of the hour. Were the brutal hackers:


A) men


B) women"


So Tom, I think that the subject you bring is very interesting. But you sometimes in your posts value woman by belittling the male archetype with shortcuts and negative generalisation, thus polarising the debate. Then, if I or someone else reacts, you interprete that has an incapacity to honor the feminin. The other is then in the position of not honoring and you are in the position of the champion who honors deeply the feminin archetype.


My question is then, why do you need to polarise things like this? Why do you need to be the champion of this honoring of woman?


with my affection,


P.


Reply by Patrick 16 hours ago


Mascha,


I'm not sure I understand what you say. I have asked my wife sincerely what she thinks of me on the subject and it triggered something very interesting that we're going to continue to discuss.


You wrote:"You could have asked me, for example, instead of telling me what it's like to be a woman these days." I wasn't trying to tell you what it's like to be a woman these days. I don't think I know what it is. I was talking about my experience of living the feminin archetype in myself.


Mascha:"You could have addressed what I actually said in my first reply to you instead of telling me that I'm on the war path, which is a declaration of war (as in feeling besieged) on your part, not some kind of insinuation that is coming from me." I think I have adressed your first reply in the sense that my way of giving praise to woman is by my actions: I have willingly and naturally stepped out of a model where certain tasks are devoluted to woman, which I always thought was restricting for woman and also men. As for the emotional, cognitive and spiritual lines of development I think that a lot of men nowadays have integrated the feminin archetype.


As for "nice to see you on the war front" I was not declaring war to you, It was just a little joke as I felt your answer was very dynamic. I had the picture of an amazon on a horse, shouting "don't touch the feminin archetype".LOL


Again, you can honor the feminin archetype and I have no problem with that. But I don't feel it is my duty to honor it and feel guilt for my forefathers, as in my present embodiment it is not the issue I encounter. My psycho-spiritual being in this incarnation has never had much affection for the activities solely devoluted to men, such as watching football and drinking beer, or making pissing contest. Since my early childhood I was able to play with girls and boys alike, having fun in both kinds of activities. I was being mocked by boys when I used to play with girls, but what saved me was that I had physicall ability that made me win pissing contest with boys. That allowed me to freely explore both universes.


These personal elements might clarify my position, as our philosophical point of view is mostly determined by the circumstances of our lives.


I have definite lacks and I have to learn to honor certain beings, but it has not much to do, I believe with masculin/feminin archetypes. This lack of acceptance might be a lack of feminin archetype one might say-lol. But it is directed towards both archetypes equally.


My concern nowadays, as I said it earlier, is the violence our society imposes on both men and woman alike.


But again, I understand that woman need healing and be honored by men. I didn't understand that this thread was about that. Otherwise I would simply not have commented as I totally understand and respect that endeavour, even if it's not my actual focus and interest.


With all my love, dear Mascha.


P.


Reply by Patrick


Hello Christophe,


I think that you're a bit right and that your post has been discarded a lightly.


I nonetheless do not at this point share your irritation towards Balder - it's now Bruce? - moderation mode.


I think that things are still healthy and that it may lead somewhere at some point. I do agree though that there's some kind of tendency to generate conflict and not answering questions. I'm a bit amazed at that.


I'm for giving this thing a bit more time to see where it leads.


P.


Reply by Patrick 15 hours ago


Bruce,


Thank you for this post which opens up a new field. I can't really respond as you got me thinking. But there's one thing that struck me: the fact that vulnerability in men's psyche has often been accompanied by images such as the stigmata, as you kind of portrayed in your experience.


It is represented in Christ's passion. I'm thinking of the scene in Scorsese's movie about Christ's passion where he physically reaches for his heart. I'm also thinking about some initiations that shamans have and that are portrayed in images such as being devoured by animals.


As if the door to vulnerabilty for men was more physical than anything else. Then it can set up a fire that reaches all other levels.


We see that also with sexuality, where men tend to use the physical door first, then open up to other levels.


In pathology, woman are mainly responsible with emotional abuse towards their children, as men are more prone to physical abuse, although this could be debated.


Hugs,


P.

[Balder]

Reply by Steven Nickeson 13 hours ago


Thomas said: Steven, forget the statistics and regurgitation and get real in a personal vein. Boiling blood is a starter, but answer me this: Why do you need a reader? Gonna sidestep again, avoid that vulnerability that you actually need people to feel loved and appreciated, to feel hugged?

This is mildly amusing, deja vu all over again...1969 ad hoc encounter groups with the head-amateur-in-charge giving the same old order. What to do? Say, "Sure, why not." or "Fuck you and the pig you rode in on."


Okay, sure, why not...I have less to lose than he does.


I do not know if I am needy for either love or respect for I have never been without them--infused with those blessings since the moment of conception. Blessings like these are cumulative and I have never been without what now seems like an inexhaustible reserve. Apparently I am uncommonly fortunate in that regard. Thus, I do not need a hug from a reader, only a reaction that says in some fashion or another, "You and I are learning a little more about how the world is working now." I need a reader because I have an insatiable curiosity about people and the world.


Reply by James Barrow 12 hours ago


Hi All


Interesting discussion!


Bruce, I like your description of your personal experiences involving physical woundedness, and also your putting it in the wider context of someone like Skolimowski.


In my own life I haven't had the physical parallels that Bruce described, but I do recall my own experiences of staying with my resistance to being in the presence of a particular woman's woundedness. I remember that, when struggling with it psychologically and emotionally, I had a kind of "voice in my head" scenario where the words "Her woundedness is a gift to me and the Universe" seemed to rise up from a deep place in me for which I have no name. I was listening to Ram Dass tapes while driving at the time! :-) I regard this as a deep insight and this has not changed over the years.


At the same time, I love Steven's non exalted statistics:
Women are more liable to have suffered abuse in childhood than men, in some statistical bases by more than 33%. Most of this abuse came in the form of corporal punishment or neglect. (While sexual abuse gets a great deal of media play it does not figure into the abuse suffered by most female children.) And according to the statistics of the U.S. Government, almost all of this abuse came at the hands of the little girls' mothers. Yes! How evolved, how feeling! And to take it a little further, 90% of the children who have been murdered by a parent, have been murdered by their mothers. Yes! How evolved...Medea uber alles!


Holy shit! Steven, you said this comes from U.S. Government statistics. Can you be even more specific please? Could you share any links? This is the first time I've seen this and I find it remarkable.


And thanks to Tom (is it Thomas now?) for starting this :-)
Cheers
James


Reply by Steven Nickeson 11 hours ago


James Barrow said: Holy shit! Steven, you said this comes from U.S. Government statistics. Can you be even more specific please? Could you share any links? This is the first time I've seen this and I find it remarkable.


James,


I'm going to have to back off of the 90% stat because I cannot find the site where I read it. So I did further research in the U.S. statistics and found this chart that indicates that mothers were involved in 63.3% of child fatalities while fathers were involved in 38.3%. As shown here the same pattern holds for non-fatal abuse.


In regard to Patrick's comment I need to mention that these figures do not include emotional abuse.


Reply by James Barrow 10 hours ago


Thank You Steven - much appreciated.
James

[Balder]

Reply by Mascha 5 hours ago


Here we go again. (Jane, Lauren, Gitanjali, the two Liz'es et al must be grinning wryly in their self-imposed exiles from these echo-filled halls - if they could be bothered to read here, that is.) Poor men are the victims... !!!


I've said what I wanted to. Enough of banging my head against these walls.


Fried Yin Yang

Reply by Thomas 5 hours ago


Yes, Mascha, the poor victims. For my part, I exalt yin, feminine, female, mother, goddess, lover, wife, daughter. The power of femaleness, sensitive, open, receiving, inviting, resurrecting: an everywhere-present reminder---in the flesh---of the way of what is, this beautiful movement inside.


Ultimate permeability as boundless love, no boundary, no shell, no protection, no thick crocodile skin. And in that permeability, utter immersion in this inseparable whatness, this moving from That. God praise the female for showing the way.

[Balder]

Reply by Patrick 3 hours ago


Tom, you asked certain questions in a previous post and I answered. I have also given you a feedback and asked you questions. You did not answer.


Mascha, the same with you.


I've been here in all honesty engaging in your discussion. You both do not answer, but I see that as soon as you can, you polarise the debate. It's as if the only posts you'll get on are the ones with which you can create conflicts.


I honestly think that you should both think about the way you handle things. This has nothing to do with honoring the feminin archetype, but more of a negative masculin attitude. It seems you shoot when you can and then hide behind the beautifull feminin.


If that is both your ways of honoring the feminin, I mean the attitude you display on this thread, then we don't have the same definitions


I'm 100% sure that you will in no way see that and that my remark will just spark more fire.


But I had to say it to be true to myself.


Now I'm leaving this thread and will not engage on this subject anymore with anyone of you both.


I'll see you somewhere else,


Hugs,
P.


Reply by Steven Nickeson


Patrick,


I share your disappointment with the handling of this thread. I have been feeding straight lines to Mascha for two days to bolster her position on "Isn't it time to lift the feminine out of the bog into which it was banished, finally? "and she ignored them and Thomas dismissed them in favor of his own particular stylistic agenda.


Well I figure I'm in the wrong venue, but what the hell, I'm going to stay because "lifting the feminine" is a sweetums little concept that can be accomplished through the flowery prose of some young man with a slightly inflated identification with the anima (any of us who have done their five-year, six-year tour of duty through the men's groups have been there and done that and have moved on to something grounded and significant). But stopping women from brutalizing their daughters because they were brutalized by their mothers who had been subjugated in the distant past by men...this goes back to Euripides...attend Hecuba, attend Medea, and it is as recent as Frantz Fanon writing that the oppressed's response to their victimization is to victimize the weaker of their own. This is not about Egyptian mythology. It is about the on-the-ground betrayal of the mythical feminine and the subsequent feminine brutalization of the feminine because of it. As a result what is dreamed in the ethereal concept of the "the feminine" is not what is lived on-the-ground of The Women in North America and probably the rest of the world.


Maybe we should give Thomas and Mascha the benefit of all doubts. He is after all Canadian. Is she? She is not forth-coming and more easily, therefore, to write off. Perhaps they have no background here, perhaps their context is limited to the New Age...perhaps their education systems betrayed them, no instruction in inductive reasoning...we all know there has been a 40-year dumbing-down of North America...perhaps...we could run on forever to try to cut some slack.


But then I am told that what I write is to be dismissed because it is not personal, it does not fit the agenda. There is a little patronization regarding the boiling blood...and then I think back on scenes in which a woman I once loved, a once brutalized woman, was brutalizing her girl-child I loved and that girl-child acquiescing...and then to have been ordered to get personal by a Canadian... Can you get your mind around that one? A Canadian tells a man in Venezuela to get personal. The irony in that is unbelievably funny, but, albeit, a little disappointing--it could be laid to the dumbing- down However, it is not at all surprising.


Patrick, unlike you, I think I'll stay around. The fun has just begun. No hugs.

[Edward theurj Berge]

To expand this topic a bit into a wider frame, first I'd agree that familial relationships are the prototype of all later relationships. And yet culturally we are never taught anything about familial relationships, at least by experts in school. We learn from particpating in families, which by default have been dysfunctional all along. Here we learn to behave like children because our parents behaved like children, and theirs, on and on through history. We don't learn to behave like adults because we don't have adult exemplars in families. And this indeed carries into all future relationships.

I was fortunate in that in college I was exposed to psychology classes to help me begin to understand family dynamics. And through those classes I participated in student counseling, getting instruction in adult behavior and how I fell short of this. It took a lot of study and therapy to even begin the process of becoming a semi-functional adult, having been reinforced to continue in my childhood behavior from family dynamics.

So yes, male-female relations is one aspect of this but more broadly speaking, all relationships are learned in the home and they are all fucked up royally. Culturally we do not even acknowledge this, let alone provide learning in school on how to build healthy family relations. It is not surprising that I encounter all the same childish games in my workplace between people in their 50s and beyond that I did with my siblings when we were in single digits. And when I try to behave like an adult in the face of such dysfunction I'm the one considered the toxic one! This is one sick culture.

[kelamuni]

lol.