Healing Tones

“He who is near me is near the fire.  He who is far from me is far from the kingdom of heaven.” —Jesus  (The Gospel of Thomas)

In my awakening years I had engaged the fiery dance between the Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine and released the power of feminine energy through my very masculine body.  Back in the day this effulgence was known as “the outpouring of the Holy Spirit,” which I later learned is feminine in nature.  With spiritual awakening came an awareness that who and what I am is neither male nor female, but both. 

I am an angelic being with masculine and feminine energies at my command for creative purposes.  Incarnate in this wonderful male physical form, I discovered that it is far too fragile in its fallen state to fully accommodate the fiery revelation of the angel.  So I’ve learned to turn down the fire in order to remain incarnate and useful while moving through transformation toward spiritual maturity.   

My father’s generation was dominantly patriarchal. My generation’s role has been to provide a bridge for the next generation to cross over into a more balanced experience of these two powerful and complementary archetypal creative energies — which I opened up to full-throttle in my awakening years and nearly set my body aflame.  Those were destabilizing years of radical shift in self-awareness and identity.  I pray the upcoming generation survives to experience ascension to a higher level of being.  It has already undergone a transformation to a higher level of consciousness — and form follows consciousness. 

From SACRED ANATOMY: 

GROUNDING HIS POWER

ONE OF THE CHARACTERISTICS of the Divine Masculine is his open-armed welcome of the Divine Feminine, because, after all, she is his natural dancing partner and the source of his empowerment.  He welcomes her also for the grounding she provides.

I recall an occasion in my own spiritual transformation when my physical form came into direct alignment with the radiant energy of my own angelic presence.  I had tapped into raw power and it was more than my outer form could handle.  At one point, I had difficulty staying on the ground. At night my body would burn with electrical currents running up and down my spine and legs.  My entire capacity felt as though it were on fire and I thought it would burst into flames at any moment. Then a presence was felt in the room like that of a woman.  I immediately felt at peace as the electrical currents subsided. 

At another point in the same time period of several weeks, I felt I was simply going to ascend into another dimension while singing in front of a group of people gathered for a worship service.  Sound has a way of shifting cellular oscillation.  I felt guided to make eye contact with a woman in the gathering with whom I shared a spiritual intimacy and whom I loved with a love that was from a place beyond this world.  As I deliberately looked into her eyes, I immediately felt drawn back down to the floor and anchored to the ground.  Her presence was a grounding force for me.

These were the first of many lessons to come to me about the design of true function between the masculine and the feminine.  I had a new and deeper respect for womankind from that point on, although I had a lot more to learn about both the masculine and the feminine before beginning to understand the dynamics between these two co-creative energetic forces.

In our society, what Carl Jung called “the Anima” (a man’s feminine side) is often squelched.  The young boy who starts to cry, for instance, is told by his father to stop crying and “Be a man!”  To display his feminine side is to appear weak in the eyes of his peers. The truth be known, the feminine reinforces the authenticity of the masculine.   Moore and Gillette knew this all too well when they wrote their books exploring the male and female psyche.

But if a man consciously seeks to develop a relationship with his Anima at the same time he seeks a deeper accessing of his masculine characteristics, he will find his masculinity affirmed and supported.

By acknowledging his feminine side a man raises his consciousness about complementary masculine structures, and can be inspired to achieve fullness of being as a man.  As his sense of deeply grounded masculinity becomes more secure, he is free to claim his feminine qualities without fear of being overwhelmed by them.  His capacity for creative expression will multiply exponentially.  His relationships with women in the outer world will likewise take a positive turn.  Such a man, his masculinity reinforced by his inner feminine, can meet life with a centered sense of wholeness and compassion not often seen in our culture. (The King Within, page 121)

In a word, he becomes “sensitive” to the finer vibrational frequencies of the feminine energies emerging from within himself as well as those around him, including the world of Mother Nature.  Perhaps he would then respect her more fully and acknowledge the sanctity of her presence.  Surely he would stop raping her for her resources and stripping her of her lush and verdant beauty. When a man rapes a woman, I have learned, it is not for sexual pleasure but for power and control. When he rapes the natural world for her resources he does so because he can, he has the power to do it, and that gives him a warped sense of control over the wild kingdoms of this world, as though he must conquer them to know that he truly is all-powerful and resourceful. This is less a demonstration of real power and more an application of brute force. The control he refuses to apply to his own appetite for satisfaction and pleasure is projected away from himself and forced upon his world, which embodies all the essences of the Feminine.

The Dominating Masculine

Raw, ungrounded masculine energy, in men as well as women, develops into an unbalanced charge of power that seeks a channel for release, much as the electrical charge in a thunder-head cloud seeks to ground itself through a bolt of lightning.  It is corruptive when used to control the power inherent in the feminine in order to suppress it. Nowhere is such corruption more prevalent than in the social structures of modern civilization where women have been made to compete with men in a patriarchal society for equal opportunities for employment and equal pay, not to mention the historical suppression and continual deprivation of women in the Middle East and other parts of the world. Vestiges of this deprivation are yet to be found in today’s Christian religions, such as in the Roman Catholic Church where women are excluded from its priesthood and its priests deprived of the natural companionship of a wife.

There was also a reversal of the roles the male and female played in the ritualistic approach to worship of and union with God. Whereas before, even in the first three centuries of the Early Christian Era,  it was the priestess who provided the erotic alchemy through which men might commune and merge with God, now it is the priest who is believed to provide the liturgical alchemy that makes such communion with the divine possible for women.  Sex is left out of the picture altogether, with the exception of its limiting but necessary role in procreation.  It is as though the early Church Fathers of the first ecumenical council held at Nicaea in AD 325, were intent upon making the statement that union with God is only possible by way of the all-male priesthood and is not to be sought after through the erotic alchemy of the feminine priestess, whose sacred order was simply eliminated altogether with the priestess decreed a witch and burned at the stake. Men have long maintained control over women, but that is coming to an end as the corruption in this male-dominated culture continues to erode the patriarchal model of leadership by imposition and intimidation.  Love neither imposes nor intimidates.

This patriarchal treatment of women as second class citizens appears to have roots as far back as the early Christian era when pagan goddess temples were either converted into Christian churches or utterly destroyed. In ancient religions, God was known and worshiped in male and female as well as sexless deities. According to Houston Smith, in The World’s Religions, in Islam Allah was simply “the God,” neither masculine nor feminine.  In pre-Islamic times, Allah “was worshiped by Meccans not as the only God but as….creator, supreme provider, and determiner of human destiny.”

In the Kabbalistic tradition the name of God once included an entire family: Father, Mother, Son, Daughter (Yod He Vav He), a name which is supposedly coded in our DNA, also known as the Tetragrammaton which is the Greek name for the four sacred letters in the word Yahweh (YHWH). “From this holy ‘Name of Names’ emanates the Ultimate Divine Vibration.  It is the ‘word of light’ that becomes life” (Deborah Van Dyke, Traveling The Sacred Sound Current: Keys for Conscious Evolution).

In its most ancient of forms, dating back six or seven thousand years ago to the Canaanite language, Allah was Alat, or Elat, the feminine gender.  The concept of God embodied by the word Allah was based in its meaning, which is Sacred (or Cosmic) Unity.  “All of these names,” writes Scottish Aramaic scholar Neil Douglas-Klotz, “are based around the root el and al, which points toward the unity of existence, embodied in a name that idealized the sacred.”

In truth, the sacred is embodied when the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine are one and function together as partners in creation, symbolized in Hindu tradition as the lingam, “which is not exclusively a phallic symbol, as is often thought. Rather, it symbolizes the masculine and the feminine conjoined.” (Thomas Ashley-Ferrand,  Mantra – Sacred Words of Power).

  The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all worshiped gods and goddesses as equal partners in their lives and fate.  The God of Genesis is androgynous, creating Man male and female in our own image and likeness.  Interestingly enough, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Wisdom (Sophia), who was present in the creation of this world, is a Goddess—or is at least seen as the feminine aspect of the androgynous deity—and the Holy Spirit is seen by some contemporary  Christian theologians as being the feminine aspect of God.  The Feminine Principle has also been acknowledged and accessed throughout the history of Christianity in the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary as an intercessor between Roman Catholics and the Lord Jesus.        

The question might rightly be asked, as it has been by some, why is God worshiped today only as “He?”  Why should not God be known and worshiped in the feminine gender as “She?”   Is it not “She” who gives birth to “Him?”  Is not Mother God as divine as Father God and as responsible for the creation of this world?  There are cultures in the world that do still celebrate the Feminine Principle, although in by far the majority of religions in the world, women are subordinate to men and the feminine aspect of God is made to serve the will and pleasure of the masculine and often ignored or denied outright.  Women have had to demand to be heard and given equal rights alongside men. Today these cultural assumptions are all being challenged by the “liberated feminine” in men and women, who are both becoming acquainted with their whole Self.

Through all the tomes of spiritual writings, one instruction stands out above all the rest: “Man, know thyself and thou wilt know God.”  The Reality of God is known and understood to the degree that I know and understand myself, made male and female in the image and likeness of God.  Our approach to God, then, is rightly one of discovery of our authentic Self.  In our social, political and religious traditions we have been thoroughly dominated and led forth by an image of the masculine side of God, largely by a dark, intimidating image.  Is it not time for us to be generously immersed in a light, nurturing, understanding Goddess in partnership with a caring and benevolent Godhead? 

In my next post, I examine the nature and function of the Divine Feminine.  As always, I welcome your thoughts on the subject of this post.  Until then,

Ne safe.   Be at peace.   

Anthony

tpal70@gmail.com