| |
Hi Liz, thanks for your reflections on this. It has spurred me to want to comment on many things you have brought to light here, of coarse only to get the conversation going as it is such a huge topic.
Just to give my own initial response to the article by Anita first, I felt she did a good job of discussing the qualities of the feminine and how they contrast/complement the masculine path and principle, but overall I was left somewhat disatisfied. Not so much becuase I think that her assessment was wildly inaccurate but rather because I really feel that if we are going to talk about “feminine spirituality” we really need to include and integrate the current feminist debates that surround gender and spirituality.
I mean, we can talk all we want about the nondual and all the beautiful qualities of the feminine, and that is great, but without addressing current feminist theory and critique, I feel the feminine gets crystalized into ths kind of ideal space that never truly touches the relative world concerns of women. I really feel it is deeply important to integrate these two approaches in a healthier way, as they have been so divided in the past.
In response to your reaction to Willow, Diane and Sofia's dialogue, I have to be upfront about my own bias and that is that I have spent a lot of time around these women and really love the work they are doing around the feminine and within I-I itself so my bias will likely come through in my own comments on this pod(-:
In regards to your question/ambivelance about the quote from Anita's article that references Deida.
I agree that she sounds unsure here, and I would argue because I think she is making a slight pre/trans fallacy; that is, she is confusing stage two (50/50 gender equality) with the nondual standpoint. In my opinion, these two approaches are extremely different both in theory and practice but are often confused as similar by many postmodern assessments on spirituality. The stage two in Deida's scheme is not necessary in order to have a nondual state experience, I agree with you there (see Wilber-Combs Lattice in “Integral Spirituality” which shows we can experience all four states no matter where our stage level development is).
That said, I would still argue that stabalizing a nondual grounding in our everyday experience and life is more likely to be acheived if we are higher up on our stage structure development, because the higher stages (vertical axis on W-B Lattice) are really at their core only relative world crystalizations of our ever-present state-structures (gross,subtle, causal, nondual on horizontal axis). That is, as we develop stage wise I would argue we also have more access to higher states. Higher stages, as they develop and fill out through all four quadrants, become the relative world expression and interpretations of higher states.
Does that make sense for you? I don't know how familar everyone is with Wilbers work, especially the W-B lattice which I think is so essential to approaching these issues.
|
