For a long time, because survival was the dominant factor, humanity has given too much significance to the masculine. The feminine can come to its proper place only when societies have handled their survival well and reached a certain level of stabilised culture and civilization. Today, societies are coming to that phase but economics has become the main force in the world. Once this happens, everything is back to the law of the jungle – survival of the fittest. It may look different, but it is still all about survival.
The divine feminine is an expression of exuberance. May you know the bounty of exuberance this Navratri.” – Sadhguru
Once you do that, again the masculine will dominate. Only women who have become like men, who operate like men, who have no room to use their feminine in anything and have become very masculine can manage to make money or find success.
The feminine can flower only in a certain situation of relaxation. And if feminine does not flower, you will have everything in your life and you will have nothing in your life. So, consciously nurturing the feminine in a society is very essential because without that, you will have full grown trees which will never flower. That is like living half a life. Half a life is not a good life.
Allowing the feminine to find its place is very important for any society. Masculine and feminine should not be looked at in terms of male and female. These are two qualities. The feminine can be as alive in a man as it is in a woman. Only when these two qualities happen in balance within a human being, can a human being live a life of fulfilment.
Today, there is a danger that the female is giving up the feminine. Survival has once again become a dominant factor and has been pushed up to a very demanding scale like never before. Earlier, survival meant just gathering the day’s food. Today, survival means a Mercedes or a BMW, which is very challenging. There will be no room for the feminine to find any place in society.
These aspects need to be nurtured right from school. If the feminine has to really flourish, if it has to flow, we need to create a society where our values are more spread out to all aspects of life. Children should go into music, art, philosophy and literature as much as they go into science and technology. If this does not happen, there is no room for the feminine in the world. Female you may be, but masculine you will become. So celebrating the feminine is very essential. This is not about women, this is about the feminine.
If you want to use analogies, if you call the root the masculine, the flower and the fruit is feminine. The very purpose of the root is to bring the flower and the fruit. If that does not happen, the root will go to waste. Survival by itself does not take care of everything. After survival is taken care of, the subtler aspects of life have to happen to you. If the feminine does not become alive in you, whether you are a man or a woman, the finer things in life will never happen to you.
All your life, you will only think about survival endlessly. You will only make survival more difficult. Just getting food and clothing is no longer considered survival today. Every society is trying to push up its bar for survival higher and higher.
The very nature of this is masculine. The masculine is always about conquering something. The feminine is not about conquest. The feminine is about flowering, about relaxing, about living, not about getting. That shift has to happen. Otherwise, we will exhaust the planet too fast. If the feminine ruled this planet, there would be no ecological problems, because it would not be one mindless, endless conquest, it would be about living.
Ranked amongst the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and bestselling author. Sadhguru has been conferred the “Padma Vibhushan”, India’s highest annual civilian award, by the Government of India in 2017, for exceptional and distinguished service.
-This article is a contribution by Isha Foundation in collaboration with Varnam Malaysia-
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