Balancing Masculine and Feminine Ideals of Awakening
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What do we most deeply desire?
Relate to the following exploration of this question not as an assertion about what is true, but as an invitation to inquire directly into your own experience. Discover the truth of the answer to this question for yourself.
We desire both freedom and connection; we want autonomy and intimacy. My teacher Douglas Brooks, and the Tantric tradition he represents, Rajanaka, which evolved from Sri Vidya, describes these as the masculine (liberation) and feminine (intimacy) ideals of the spiritual path.
These desires are in tension with one another. This tension is not a problem to solve; it’s a paradox to manage. Most contemplative paths attempt to simply solve this problem in a particular way: by renouncing worldly life and desires. This represents the first option of the yogic traditions: nivritti, to turn away from. The second path is pravritti yoga, to turn towards.
Historically, these paths and the institutions designed to perpetuate them are male dominated traditions that place a strong emphasis on the value of liberation. While one could say that they still value intimacy in the form of a spiritual community, these practitioners gave up sexuality and romantic relationships. Moreover, these communities were traditionally exclusively male, or they created a system in which women were subservient to men.
Men should renounce their sexuality, and should often be separated from celibate female monastics, because men can not control their sexual desires in the presence of the opposite sex. Women, the old story goes, will tempt and distract men from their destiny, in this case, liberation. This points to the archetypal fear of man that we see depicted in myths across cultures: that woman has the power to make man conscious of his vulnerability. This above all is what man hates most: the feeling of being out of control.
On the one hand, man is drawn towards the wildness of the feminine because it is The Divine Feminine, The Shakti, in all of us that turns us on. Psychotherapist and relationship expert Esther Perrell says that men talk all the time about things that women do that turn them on, but women almost never talk about things men do that turn them on. Why is that? It’s because woman is the turn on. In nondual Hindu Tantra, the creative power of the universe, The Great Goddess, The Maha Shakti, is feminine. Woman is that which gives birth; she is the source of creation. It is the union of this dynamic power with intelligence or consciousness, the archetypal masculine personified as Shiva, that animates this play of consciousness, the divine play, or lila, that is the universe taking form through and as us. In Goddesses: Mysteries of The Divine Feminine, comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell reveals that though there are notable exceptions, including Tibet, most cultures tend to map the feminine as dynamism and creativity and the masculine as space and stillness, as we find in Nondual Tantric Hindu traditions such as Kashmir Shaivism and Sri Vidya.
Deep down, a straight man is possessed by a primal desire to be turned on by that wildness of a woman. Yet it is this same quality of a woman that has the capacity to remind him of his vulnerability, that he is not in control of his emotions. Men have been conditioned to believe that to not be in control of your emotions, to feel vulnerable, is a form of weakness, which is, after all, the greatest archetypal fear of men: to be perceived as weak. From this fear springs forth the efforts to regulate men’s sexuality and to control women through patriarchy. The residue of this impulse pervades spiritual traditions and even some modern, secular adaptations of these traditions. This distorts and disorients our bodies, hearts and minds in numerous ways.
These myths also invite us investigate the ways in which each of us embodies these particular qualities, the light and shadows of our unconscious, that Tantra maps through the lens of masculine and feminine. Many women embody more archetypal masculine qualities or shadows, and the reverse is true. The tensions between all of these forces exist inside all of us, regardless of how you identify your gender or sexual orientation.
The emphasis on celibacy creates a huge shadow centered on sexuality. The way to cut through desire is ultimately by turning towards it. Renunciation is a very skillful means and a necessary phase of the path, but it’s not appropriate for householders. Nor is it ultimately appropriate in the long run for many monastics, based on the numbers of ostensibly celibate men who act out their repressed desires and create immense harm to both women and young boys. We see this from the Catholic Church to Dharma communities.
These male dominated paths focus on how to master desire. I use the word master because if you look at yogic traditions traditionally they represent the typical male orientation within all of us. This is the impulse to obtain the objects of our desire through conquest and control, through means both coercive and subtle, conscious and unconscious. We see these orientations to spirituality across time and place which suggest they are archetypal. We find that male dominated ascetic communities attempted to control their desires through mastery of the body. The goal was union with the divine, but based on a rejection of the body and an attempt to transcend its limitations.
The dominant cultures of most of the great religions focus on the masculine ideals of liberation and transcendence. There is something very deep in the human psyche that reaches for transcendence. However, we’re also social primates by design; we’re wired for connection.
Tantra represents the rise of The Divine Feminine not only in that women assumed more prominent roles within institutions and the teachings, but also that archetypal feminine values began to balance archetypal masculine ones: embodiment in addition to transcendence, intimacy along with freedom, devotion as well as pure awareness.
Like all things in the universe, human beings gravitate towards equilibrium. The journey towards wholeness is a movement towards balance. However, in order to evolve, we need to be broken open. We need to be fractured, then to be put back together again. If we want to be reborn, we have to be willing to die.
The maps of consciousness that we’ll explore are deeply esoteric. They are drawn from both nondual “Hindu” and Buddhist Tantra: specifically, the Nondual Shaiva Shakta Traditions (NSST) of both Kashmir and South India (Sri Vidya), as well as the Dzogchen and Mahamudra traditions of Vajrayana (Tibetan Buddhism). Though these two paths have significant differences on the surface, they are in practice fundamentally similar orientations to awakening.
These maps are not meant to be literal assertions about the objective nature of reality, though they do intersect at points with scientific truths. Tantra offers a particular approach to awakening that’s distinct from the contemplative paths to awakening that preceded it. Critically, the body is viewed as a sacred vehicle for awakening, not an unfortunate obstacle to it. In contrast to the nivritti yogic emphasis on renunciation as a way to transcend desire, Tantra is a form of pravritti yoga that invites us to turn towards our desires and emotions. Our desires and emotions become doorways into freedom and into greater connection with ourselves, others and the natural world. All of this helps us to cultivate awe and wonder; it’s a means by which we construct and connect with a sense of the sacred.
These pravritii yogic pathways, including Tantra, are by design more compatible with householder pathways to awakening. This is not to say that modern practitioners can not and do not adapt paths originally designed for renunciates to modern householder life. A prominent example of this happening today is within Theravada Buddhist communities in The West, as well as yoga schools that focus on the teachings of Patanjali.
However, in my experience, it is a more natural transition in many ways to follow a pathway designed for householders if you are in fact intent on living life as a householder, “in the world,” and not as a monk or a wandering yogi who has renounced all of his or her possessions and worldly desires. For more detail on my thoughts on this subject you can read my posts on “Carving Out the Householder Path,” “Renunciate vs Householder Paths” and “Theravada, Thailand and Householder Paths: Enlightenment or Bust.”
Reflect on what it means to practice yoga and meditation as a householder. Excellent questions to contemplate and on which to journal include:
In what ways is my spiritual practice bringing me into deeper engagement with life?
In what ways is my spiritual practice pulling me away from my responsibilities and commitments?