Letting the feminine lead the way

The male principle in us, the intellect, asks the question “Is it possible?” The answer to this question is evident in the modern ‘technological society’ we have created and all its political, economic and social structures. In this, the human brain is continuously put through efficient processes of training for competing in the mad race to maximize productivity. The collective ego has been screaming its lungs out “YES. IT IS POSSIBLE. NOT JUST THIS. BUT MORE. AND FASTER. AND BIGGER. YES. IT IS POSSIBLE.”

Consider this. There are about 89,000 synthetic chemicals in existence, and we are introducing about 700 new synthetic chemicals each year. Only 11% of these have been tested for their safety, most of which have been found to be carcinogens, neurotoxins, endocrine disruptors, organ-toxins, etc. poisoning us. I get news once every two months about someone known to us dying of cancer! This toxic mess is the product of the intellect, in response to its question “Is it possible to put the different elements in the periodic table bonding together in different ways to produce thousands of different chemical compounds with different properties?” Of course, yes!

Is it possible to create a corporation that will grow each year in its size, its market, its sales, its profits, aggressively taking over more and more of the planet? Of course, yes!

Is it possible to make the most potent poison to kill anything that cannot be consumed by the humans; to destroy the ability of seeds to reproduce by modifying it genetically? Of course, yes!

Is it possible to device a machine to bring down a hundred-year old tree in a matter of seconds? Of course, yes!

With every ‘Yes’ for an answer, we are destroying our own nest not bit by bit, but huge chunk by huge chunk every moment. Imagine 1.5 acres of the old-growth amazon rainforest being wiped off every second. We are doing this feeling somewhat macho about it, calling it “conquest of nature”.

We have created a technological society that is completely out of control, out of balance. The problem with all the technology today is that it is born from the dominant brain-thinking bereft of the heart. The masculine has taken over completely with a total assault of the feminine. Our intellect is not in speaking terms with our intelligence. Our mind has lost its way without its partner, the heart.  

This patriarchal culture has achieved what it has by turning every being into a man. It has made it shameful to cry and be emotionally expressive. It has made menstruation dirty. It has made beauty an object of cheap pleasure. It has made us believe that home-making and child-rearing are the pursuits of the unsuccessful. When some strangers ask me ‘So, do you have a job?’, and I respond ‘I am a full-time mother’ they say ‘Oh, so you don’t do anything’ (Summathaan irukkiya?). Meaning ‘anything of value to the technological society’. For our culture cares less to have sensitive children raised through attachment parenting, than it cares to have trained brains to be fed into the industrial hopper. All aspects of femininity are either looked down upon as weaknesses, or reduced to objects of entertainment and aggression.       

Though feminine and masculine principles are part of each and every human being, women are definitely more feminine than most men. But because of our patriarchal culture’s devaluing and desecration of the feminine, women are scrambling to retain their sense of self-esteem by becoming more masculine in the name of ‘empowerment’. So, every woman who cooperates in this mission is part-taking in this massive masculinisation of the human race. As a reaction to her abuse and ill-treatment, the woman has trained to suppress her femininity, to inherit the masculine mind in order to be successful in the man’s world. She is scrambling to seek approval of our culture which sees intellectual women as powerful. Young women in my society all aspire to get into ‘engineering’, a field that is completely bereft of the feminine. The thought of building machines and managing organisations (which operate on the principles of a machine) gives them a false sense of ‘being someone valuable’, a false sense of power.

Our culture sees women who wear men’s clothes and climb up the career ladder to become CEO’s of corporations as powerful. That was why Jyoti Reddy’s “success” story went viral on the internet, by all the well-intentioned people who truly want to support the women and their empowerment, but without a real understanding of the feminine.      

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Our masculine mind is creating solutions to the problems of the imbalanced world exerting itself harder and harder. Billions of dollars are going into cancer research, which is basically about asking the same question 'Is it possible to provide relief to patients, to cure this?' Not that cancer treatment is not important. But to focus all its energy on that alone says something about the mind behind it. This is what Einstein meant when he said “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Now, it seems rather foolish to first ask “Is this possible?”, pursue it to a point where things  go out of control and then ask the question “By the way, is this needed or right or appropriate? Is this safe? Is this sustainable? Is this nourishing? Will it help life to continue and flourish?” This is the question that the feminine asks us. And since this is the question that needs to be asked prior to the other question of possibility, the human race is urgently in need of being led by the feminine.

This is what Fukuoka meant when he said “Before scientists become scientists, they need to become philosophers”. By philosophy, he didn’t mean an intellectual pursuit of some theory, but an active and experiential enquiry about life led by the heart.

This is what Justus Von Liebig (who invented Chemical agriculture) meant when he repented in his last days “I have sinned against the wisdom of the creator and, justly, I have been punished. I wanted to improve his work because, in my blindness, I believed that a link in the astonishing chain of laws that govern and constantly renew life on the surface of the Earth had been forgotten. It seemed to me that weak and insignificant man had to redress this oversight.” (Read the full version here.)

When the white men came to buy their land and tame nature and the tribe, Chief Seattle a native American leader said “We love this earth as a newborn loves its mother's heartbeat." The feminine in him spoke the language of love, power, compassion and intelligence. This is the voice in each of us we need to listen to and reawaken. (Read the full version here.)  

This is why we need to reawaken the feminine that has the power to connect the human spirit to the source of creation itself, to lead the way forward.