Chapter 5:

The Spirit—The Real Self

1. Metaphor of the Pencil

I HAVE been using the metaphor of the common pencil by ask­ing groups of people what is the color of the pencil commonly bought by Filipinos in neighborhood stores and they have almost always been unanimously replying, “yellow.” When I ask them why a red ballpen has to have red ink while a black-graphite pencil is almost-unanimously thought to be “yellow,” they gradually see the point of es­sence, in contrast to the point mere appearance, in my question.

Then comes an opinion poll where I would ask them whether or not they believed it true that “every human has a soul,” and they are in instant unanimity that it is “of course, true!”  Their eyebrows ask me why I have to pose that question in the first place, until I explain my own vote.

My own dissenting view is that “every human is a soul, and it has a body,” and this instantly disturbs their feeling of cer­tainty, and it even tends to reverse the collective view altogether towards adopting my opinion.  But of course, it is in the area of souls (pardon the tentative plural here) that I have had the urge to keep reminding myself and others that we do not really know very much about this, and much of the dogma are, I think, a collectivized, institutionalized official opinion of one group or another. The Roman Catholic Church is one such group.

I don’t intend to foment a sense of defeatism and help­lessness here. My call is rather one for honest humility, for re­verence, instead of fear, of the unknown, for willingness to enjoy what admit­tedly is not, or at least not yet, comprehended ra­tionally.  There are bodies of collectivized official opinions about spirits and divinity and I disagree with the proclaimed levels of certainty especially when they would say that the human “is created in His image and likeness,” while their teachings have somehow created God in the image and likeness of the human, complete with very human negative emotions I person­ally would not associate with a Supreme Being deserving to be recognized as one.

While I wouldn’t go into much discourse about a subject I instantly concede to be beyond my mind to fully understand, I value my faith in the existence of the spirit as created by divine and loving Source as “His” own fulfillment and mirror to “His” greatness, and I have described this creator as “the great and loving Cosmic Con­sciousness, the loving Creator and Synergy of ALL Synergies…” One cannot even begin fathom the greatness of this, if we consider synergetic magnification to be quantum leap from one holon level to the next all long the infinite holarchy.

2. Spirituality and Religion

And the importance of the spiritual dimension in our apprehension of the human is something akin to appreciating the pencil beyond the visually-perceptible color of its body paint (“of course, it’s yellow!”), it is appreciating the human being way beyond the good-looking face and healthy physique, beyond the clothes and the color of skin, well beyond the apparently separate and self-contained personalities housed by such phy­sically separate bodies.

Leo Bugscallia writes in Personhood, p. 89: “…It can be observed after reading (the book chapter that gives summary descriptions of the various major religions that) there is little dissonance among the several philosophical and religious systems in their suggestions as to what it means to live in full humanness.”  

It is my humble opinion and personal faith assertion that religions are human-made creations in the attempt to organize the spiritual praxis of the people. But the designs and details in the form of disctinct structures (intellectual dogma, official policies, organizational hierarchies, finances, etc.), all come from the human intellect, which is very vulnerable to the tempt­ations of the various competing power agenda of religious lead­ers.  Raised as a Christian, I cannot miss the contrast between, on the one hand, the early Church community founded by the Christ having to hide in the catacombs for they had no worldly political power and, on the other hand, the modern-day Catholic and other Christian churches that are obviously more politically and economically powerful but have, apparently, to a large extent lost sight of the basic teaching of the Master, who had said, “Love one another as I have loved you.”

It is a matter of both faith and opinion that I say we are all literally interconnected as harmoniously team-playing “fin­gers of the same hand.”  For this reason I consider one indicator of spirituality to be sine-qua-non (without this indicator there is no spirituality to be indicated) and this is the uniting effect. Unlike organized religion, which almost always divides, true spirituality always unites people.

3. Incarnation and ‘Ensoulment’?

About the soul-body synergy of the human, let me bring up the conflicting views of soul incarnation (embodiment) be­lieved to occur during the merging of the sperm and the egg, and the process of ensoulment believed to occur three months after conception or as late as when the baby breathes its first.  

My view is that the soul is itself the power that moves the sperm and the egg to combine their respective half-DNAs into one and likewise moves this first cell to go through all stages of cell division and cell differentiation and all the processes of building and repairing the anatomy and operating all processes studied by physiology.

In my view it is the soul that builds and composes and orchestrates the physical synergy of the body from billions and zillions of various molecules throughout the life of this human being, until such time that the soul leaves the body and the latter decomposes back into those separate molecules of the earth.  

I believe that a central part of the soul’s orchestration work is the flow of chi (life energy) from and along the chakras and the meridian channels (anatomically invisible energy channels studied and mastered by acupuncturists), and outward to the colorful aura (photographed by Kirlian cameras since before WW-II).

Thus, Ms. Robledo and I wrote in the SanibLakas Found­ation’s “Motherhood Statement on Mother’s Day” in 1998:

“Far from being its mere location, the Mother’s Womb is the conducive setting and protector of the great Miracle of Human Life: conception.

 “Two synergetic fusions are said to take place.

 “One is the synergetic fusion of an ovum and a sperm cell -- neither one a living organism, and both would disintegrate and be discharged as waste if they had not fused in fertilization.

 “The other, dependent on the first, is the synergetic fusion of the sperm-egg combining with the Spiritual Force, said to be an individual soul needing a body for soul-growth experi­ences in earth life. Both these synergetic mergers occur in that one moment of conception.

“Although it may not feel as ‘heavenly’ as the ecstatic synergy in copulation, let alone in simultaneous orgasms, this quiet occurrence is no less than the very Miracle of Human Life!  For nine long months, the womb nurtures and protects the new human life, passing on later to the next miracle: Childbirth. And then, finally, on to the mother’s caring and nurturing arms and nipples.

“This is the Miracle in the Womb, the Glory of Motherhood.”

So, is it a soul incarnating or a body attaining “ensoul­ment.”  I now repeat for you this portion of a download from the InterNet, the choice of which tends to show which side of the controversy I’m on. It is the opening item in somebody’s idea of the wording of a memo issued to a human being upon enrollment in “a full-time informal school called Life.”

“1. You Will Receive A Body.  You may like it or not, but it will be yours for the entire period, this time around.”

4. Metaphors from Computer and Astronaut Systems

The intellectual discourse about the matter of spirit, which defies all intellectual­ization, is enriched by metaphors from computer systems and astronaut systems.  These items on the cutting edge of current human technology are useful in starting to comprehend the spirit and spirituality.

Computer systems are composed of hardware and soft­ware subsystems. In human terms the brain is hardware, the mind is program software, and thoughts, ideas, and some of the feelings are data-type software.

Computers have operating systems.  In this system, the Random Access Memory carries information chosen by the operator (through the program) to be under focus, and displays part of this information on the monitor screen.  But no one would believe that this is all the computer can display.  Like­wise, the mind’s attention is focused on something usually as chosen by that mind, and people know that the mind is capable of carrying so much more than what is focused on.  Stored thoughts, etc. can be retrieved from the brain cells that function as hard disk drives and floppies.

Although the memory capacities of these are already quite impressive, our concept of the total memory capacity of such storage systems cannot even come close to the magnitude of information accessible through the InterNet. Through a mo­dem, a computer can “call up” and chat with all other com­puters similarly hooked up, including large computer memory banks called “web site hosts” and the volume of information that can be accessed by each computer that are “on-line.”

Is the human mind as adequately-blessed as the computer that is on-line with the InterNet?  Yes, because the human mind has a tool called “computer that is on-line with the InterNet” and can access whatever this tool can access. Yes, because the hu­man mind could even invent a tool called “computer that is on-line with the Internet” and invented the InterNet itself as well.  Yes, because it can decide to shut up so that the real self, the soul, can hook up with what my brother Jimmi Reyes calls the “InnerNet.”  We return to this after discussing astronaut spacesuits.

Computers are amazing human inventions with awesome capabilities. They accomplish faster than an eyeblink what the human mind can also do but very, very slowly. But each human, with built-in capability for accessing the innermost of Truths, surpasses any human-made computer. Still, some computers are given the opportunity to “forget” this. Without having to wish upon a star, these hi-tech Pinocchios are allowed to consider themselves becoming, even surpassing, humans.  Actually, all that imagination is ours.

Now, what are “astronaut systems”?  That is the unit composed of a person (that has a body and has had training fit for space travel) and that person’s computerized spacesuit.  The latter is a very important tool that enables the astronaut to sur­vive in outer space and perform his tasks. Because the space out­fit is computerized, it is sometimes called and oftentimes treated as an “intelligent” equipment, a robot in the shape not of a per­son like CP30 of Star Wars but in the shape of a suit for a person to wear.  CP30 always remembers his relation to his master, Master Luke, as it speaks alternately like a diplomat and like a butler in expressing obvious respect.

Sometimes, however, the intelligent built-in computer of the astronaut’s spacesuit would forget that this entire outfit, including itself, is just a tool. And sometimes the human occu­pant-wearer, having allowed himself to be totally dependent on the astronaut suit’s computer read-outs instead of relying on The Force deep within him, would also forget who is whose tool, or decide to sleep on the job nd put the spacesuit on auto-pilot.  And the robotic voice would then occasionally speak and refer to “my occupant-wearer” or “my human operator,” and would eventually even argue that “humans really exist” and that every astronaut suit has one (astronaut) deep within itself.  

Now, isn’t that as ridiculous as the brain commanding the mouth muscles to say the phrase “my soul”?  Isn’t it funny that human brains sometimes have to argue spiritedly for the “belief” that every human person “has a soul”? 

Isn’t it much closer to the truth to say that “every human is a soul and has a body”?

Now, back to the InnerNet. The InnerNet carries no mere data and analyses, the InnerNet carries wisdom much more profound than what the mind can commit to thoughts and words.  Wisdom of magnitude that can only be hinted at by such words as these that came from King Solomon: “Two can accomplish more than twice as one.”  Or such assertions as this one from the presentation from Surf Reyes during the Lambat-Liwanag Conference on Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education:

Perception is to illusion

as being is to reality.

Knowing the difference

is true wisdom.

If we do occasionally come across profundities of this sort while surfing the World-Wide Web, it only means that some people, with “downloads from the InnerNet” whispered directly into their heart-minds, placed them there. And the good news is you don’t need an Service Provider to get you on-line in the Innernet. You just have to quiet your mind (as in, “Shut up, CP3O!”) and look for the loving presence of The Force in the innermost recesses of your real self, the spirit, the Soul.

5. Evil and the Ego

 “Evil” is the absence or near-absence of good (as their homophonic pair, God and Devil, are conceptual opposites). Do I take sin or evil to be the absence or the opposite force of togetherness, integration and synergism? Yes, it’s just an absence or a lack, and I go on to say sin is the simultaneous alienation from God, the great Synergic Totality, and from one another. I expressed this in the form of a segment in my own personal version of the "Our Father," where we oftentimes mechanically mouth the very last word, "evil," without giving it much thought, without feeling any relevance of it to our own personal and social daily lives. Here’s that version:

        Our Divine Parent,

        Holy be Your name,
        Your Dominion come
        Your will be done on Earth
        As everywhere else in the Universe.

        Give us today our daily bread
        And forgive us our offenses,
        As we forgive those who hurt and offend us,

Do not bring us to the test
But deliver us from all alienation and separation
                                from You and from one another.

Say you "Amen" to that? Can that be our prayer, as self-proclaimed siblings, from now on?

Surf Reyes proposes Egology as a kind of “practical theology”: “Ego is the attachment to the appearance or illusion of a self separate from the whole. We define Egology as the study of the ego, the block to awareness of Truth. It is learning to be aware and be free of the veil that covers the Truth. It is learning to grow from knowing with the mind to knowing with the heart.”

6. Earth Life: The Practicum of the Soul

One subject assigned to me as a learning facilitator (the title is “professor”) under the Applied Cosmic Anthropology program at the Asian Social Institute is the three-unit Practicum Course, for which I developed the concept of “Living Learnings.” In this term, the word “living” carries one sense as an adjective to refer to all the lessons conspicuously flowing directly from a set of actual experiences, and also carries another sense as a transitive verb to mean applying the learnings to one’s own life.  Then I added the bold assertion that Earth Life is the practicum course of the soul.

There are varying but intersecting schools of thought about the purpose of Earth Life. One, like James Redfield, a disciple of Carl Jung and writer of the Celestine Prophecy novel series, would have us believe that Earth Life is a great school where we get enough reincarnation opportunities to repeat courses that we do not learn fully well in the first attampts, for which learning we even get to choose the circumstances to grow in that are most suitable to really learning the lesson chosen for that Earth Life.

Neale Donald Walsch, on the other hand, consistently says in his Conversations With God trilogy that an Earth Life is the opportunity to create ourselves according to our choice for our respective essential identities, an endless stream of oppor­tunities where our thoughts and actions are choiceful Statements of Who We Really Are-- God’s own body through which God experiences and appreciates all the more all the specific facets of His creation and His own glory.

Why the schools of thought would be seen to differ is due to the operation of the intellect which sees more clearly the lines of division than the commonalities in various realities; why they intersect is due to the fact that they are all seeking to explain the very same realities.  Language, after all, is differen­tiated at cultural and personality levels and the uniqueness of creativity in the employment of metaphors would logically result in widely varying metaphors that essentially say the same thing.

To experience Earth, God uses a being that is a synergy of spirit, energy body and physical body. Spirit like He is, phy­sical bodies and like the flesh and blood “astronaut earthsuits” that we have been wearing since conception. That is why the “instructions” begin with the words, “You Will Receive A Body You may like it or not, but it will be yours for the entire period, this time around.”

But the usual problem is that much like the astronaut taking a long long nap, going on auto-pilot, and depending fully on the artificial intelligence of the built-in computers of the spacesuit. The spirit slips into a half-awake fixation on the excit­ing details of the body, warts and all, of the Earth and of Earth Life, forgets its real self almost completely save for a haunting “inkling.” Spirit, the real self, then leaves it up to the gray-matter computer of the body to completely take over the spirit’s very identity and command of the “education and self-creation mission,” the very reason in the first place why the spirit had to “receive a body” and wear it, and synergize with it.  It is not at all surprising, then, that the body’s built-in computer in the skull can freely command the body’s mouth to say “I am hungry” instead of  “my body is hungry” and to also say, “I have a soul.”

What has happened?  The spirit has forgotten the reality that all spirits are not only interconnected but actually one conti­guous reality. Only an inkling of it has remained. And the mind of the body, paying more heed to illusion-prone perceptions of the “five-only senses” and perceives humans only as skin-wrapped (at best, aura-wrapped) separate but interacting indivi­duals, not as individual parts of a glorious whole, of a seamless reality.

Ken Cousens tells us more on this spirit-body synergy teamed-up in continuing creation. He says in his The Doorway to Alcyone (Capstone Publishing, Colorado, USA, 1998, p. 65):

“In the study of quantum physics a simple axiom was ar­rived at upon which the whole study of subatomic universe is founded.  This axiom is that the object of observation cannot be separated from the consciousness that observes it.  The actual act of observation affects the perceived nature of the object of ob­servation. If this is true in the subatomic level, then it must be true on all levels. All matter is made up of atoms and all atoms are made up of subatomic particles. If the act of observing a par­ticle influences the nature of that particle, then the very acts of observing our world will affect the world that we observe.  Stat­ed another way, this perfectly describes how we are creating our world.  If it were true that we are separated from self. then we observe the world through a filter that reinforces that picture of reality. If we experience ourselves as separate from God or any other description of the eternal and divine, then the world we project outside of ourselves will reinforce that perception.

“That is why the foundation of this entire book rests on the perception that we cannot fix that which is broken.  By our very acts of interacting with something that is perceived to be broken, and a reality construct that supports that perspective, we reinforce the nature of the problem.  This has always been understood and utilized by those in control on this planet.  The only solution is to focus on what is real. We must start from a position that we are perfected and whole beings. That is real.”

But how can we tell what is real?  Back in 2000, I wrote a yet-unpublished mini-book, an anthology of short pieces of profound thoughts from various authors, and said in the “Author-Collector’s Introduction”:  

“Into the new millennium, information gluts will be flooding all the ‘RAMs’ and ‘hard drives’ of our mind, and only those of us with Wisdom will know the useful from the useless, and will thus be saved from drowning in the sheer volume of the latter. Only those with reawakened wisdom will know how to use whatever can be made useful.  Only those with reawakened wisdom can prevent their minds from degenerating into mere ex­tensions of floppy diskettes and hard drives and Internet connec­tions, and instead preserve their human identity and human dignity in full exaltation of their greater capability and destiny.  

“They would exalt the faculty for discernment and appre­ciation that is far beyond the capacity of diskettes and state-of-the-art computers equipped with whatever brand of ‘Intel Inside,’ ”

Half a decade earlier, I wrote this ten-word “EdR Deka­log ‘95” which says: “Information Superhighway good, but for own Human Life seek Wisdom.”  If we seek an enhancement of wisdom, we keep ourselves above being mere extensions of the storage spaces of copies of trivial data files from the Internet.

We can be that, too, why not, but well beyond that. Downloads for wisdom resonate well with downloads from the Innernet, where the whispers of bright realizations move us ever closer, even if very slowly to remembering our real identity in this convincingly-realistic virtual-reality Matrix of earth experiences as packaged in a learning-experiencing-creating program called “earth life.”

Remembering our identity is “re-membering” our iden­tity, says Walsch in his Conversations with God trilogy. That means being aware again that each one is a member of a Great and Glorious Whole.

 

7. ‘Character Confronts Circumstance’

Why the “big fuss” about remembering our real identity?  Because almost all of us are in varying degrees of confusion about who we really are.

Do you know this guy?  “Of course! I know his face, I know his name, I’ve been given his calling card long ago, I have read in the news how much money he makes in a year, and just recently I attended his talk and heard his full bio-data when he was being introduced. He even knows me, too!” So, do you know this guy?  Then you’ll get shocked if tomorrow morning he’ll publicly admit having masterminded a largescale scam or if tomorrow morning he commits suicide. “I can’t believe this! He looked so nice, and he looked so contented and happy with his life!” Isn’t the world a stage where role-players pretend, and then begin to believe their own costumes and charade?

And you think he even knows you, just because he has shaken your hand and exchanged smiles and calling cards with you. How can anyone else know you when don’t even know exactly who you really are, when you get confused with all the layers of astronaut suits and costumes you’ve grown accustomed to wearing like your body’s skin and mistaking your body for your real self? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to insult, I’m just trying to jolt. And the whole thing applies to me, too!

One of the dozen or so books I have written is titled My NoveLife: My ‘Novel View’ of Life (Manila: Educar Enterprises, 1996), where I used the novel as a metaphor for life, where God is referred to as the Great Author and myself as co-creator of my life.  This passage comes from Chapter 3 (p. 9):

“Well, I do have some thoughts now dancing around in my mind since being triggered off by the question (what do I really know about novel-writing?).  If I am to run down some of the thoughts, there would be seven words starting with “C”: characters, who are reflecting culture, in confrontation with a series of configurations of circumstances, reflecting bigger contexts, with consequences, in turn affecting some of these characters, configurations, and circumstances to varying degrees. That is quite a mouthful when read aloud, but not so heavy, really, when they are just dancing around in my mind.”

What came out as abovequoted started as a basic des­cription of a scene, with only three words, and let me come back to that basic description now: character confronts circumstance.  For every human, the most basic awareness in moment-to-moment episodes of one’s earth life can be described in terms of character confronting circumstance.  “There are two basic challenges faced by writers of stories, especially of novels,” I say further in that book.  “One is the creation of very realistic human characters… The other is the stringing up, or weaving, of a complex set of circumstances to be confronted by the char­acters….” In analyzing (while co-authoring and appreciating), my very own earth life as an unfolding novel, where should I put the boundary between character and circumstance?  Isn’t my face, long taken for granted as a part my identity, actually part of my circumstance?

Yes, if I re-member who I really am -- an embodied spirit that is seamlessly an organic part, a jigsaw-puzzle piece with boundaries healed enough to vanish, of the Great and Glorious Whole.  I am now circumstantially wearing a personality vehicle called body-mind and synergizing with it in earth life for actualization and further growth.

I am, therefore I do. Do what?  I do re-membering.

And from the “whole-tree” viewpoint (involving all the chakras from the roots through the crown), I become increas­ingly aware of, and I increasingly appreciate from total body-mind-spirit experience, my real identity, where the terms “my body” and “my mind” will frequetly be used to relate to most of the earth experiences, and the phrase “my soul” will be banished forever as a redundance.

Early on in the previous chapter, I enumerate “ins­tructions” that start with “You will receive a body,” and include a line that says “The Answers Lie Inside You.”  And if I do remember right from my first reading of this long ago, the last line says: “You will forget this.”  I bring in now in a line I com­posed from the opening episodes of the Mission: Impossible series, “Your mission, Jim, should you decide to accept it is… to remember who you are.”  

For, as Walsch says, we don’t have to “go to Heaven”, we are already “there.” We just have to wake up in it. And Redfield says Hell is not to know this.

The answers lie inside each of us, deep within the very core of one’s being as one whole human synergy of all our respective body, mind and spirit synergies, while we individually and together travel, amid all the noise and haste, down the path of our Awareness Journey and gradually re-member fully.  

After receiving your body and forgetting all this, your mission is to remember who you are, an awareness so much enriched and actualized in living experience of bringing glorious divinity into the filthiest marketplaces of earth life.

8. Creation’s Self-reflexive Appreciation

Soul of our spirit’s nature apparently chooses as instrument matter of the nature of our living cells with mind and energies of our personality, then this soul had to wait for matter to evolve to such levels of refinement for its incarnation for whatever purpose such incarnation would be.  Cognition, emo­tions, comprehension, appreciation, love bordering on unconditional, and joy that is profound – these are activities and capabilities widely thought up to now as exclusive to human experience, exclusive to the homo sapiens sapiens, or to the still emergent homo universalis.

Brian Swimme (1984) tells us:

“Just as hoof is memory, the human body is memory. Think of how many creatures are involved in the ancestral tree for the creation of our fingers! When you lift your hand, you are lifting all the vast experimentation that led to that hand. There before you is the history of the great events in the universe: the biological exploration, the supernova explosion, all the significant moments of the last twenty billion years are remembered.”

To emphasize this point beyond the Darwinian evolution of the body, Swimme says:

“(F)rom a physical point of view, the movement of the ions in your brain corresponds to your subjective experience. Different ion flows would give you qualitatively different ex­periences; or, equally true, a qualitatively different mood would manifest as a different movement of iopns in your nervous system. The question I want to ask is simply this. What enables the ions to move?  Or what enables you to think? On what power do you rely for your thinking, feeling, and wondering?

“Ions don’t move by their own power: they have to be pushed and tugged about.  A close examination shows that an energy-soaked molecule in the brain is responsible for the ion movement. Closer examination shows that this molecule is able to push ions around because of energy it got, ultimately, from the food that you eat. The food got the energy from the Sun; food traps a photon in the net of its molecule webbing, and this photonic energy pushes and pulls the ions in your brain, making possible your present moment of amazing human subjectivity. Right now, this moment, ions are flowing this way and that because of the manner in which you have organized energy from the Sun.

“But we’re not done yet. Where did the photon come from? We know that in the core of our Sun, atomic fusion cre­ates helium atoms out of hydrogen atoms, in the process re­leasing photons of sunlight. So, if photons come from hydrogen atoms, where did the hydrogen get the photons? This leads us to the edge of the primeval fireball, to the moment of creation itself.

“The primeval fireball was a vast gushing forth of light, first so powerful that it carried elementary particles about as if they were bits of bark on a tidal wave. But as the fireball con­tinued to expand, the light calmed down until, hundreds of thousands of years later, the energy level decreased to a point where it could be captured by electrons and protons in the community of the hydrogen atom. Hydrogen atoms rage with energy from the fireball, symphonic storms of energy held together in communities extremely reluctant to give this energy up. But in the cores of stars, hydrogen atoms are forced to release their energy in the form of photons, and this photonic showed from the beginning of time powers your thinking.”

I take note of two points from this lengthy description from Swimme: one, that the origin of power for ion flow in brain activity is the entire stretch of creation and evolution process; and, two, the way ions do flow is determined by how we organize that same energy coming to us from our Sun. The first point underscores how intimately interlinked we have always been and always will be with the rest of the Cosmos; the second point underscores a cumulative process of the way we shape the organizing of this energy, the cumulative consciousness which synergizes all the whispers of our innermost selves with all the experiences we undergo in earth life. The first is in the realm of physics and bio-physics; the second is in the realm of developing awareness and appreciation.

James Redfield, of Celestine Prophecy fame, gives us this summary of the Tenth Insight, titled “Holding the Vision”: “As the tide of remembrance (of our individual and collective birth intentions) continued to sweep the planet, all humans began to understand that our destiny was to discuss and compare the perspectives of our relative religions and, while honoring the best of their individual doctrines at the personal level, ultimately to see that each religion supplemented the others and to integrate them into a synthesized global spirituality." … "The key aspect of this Vision is not a mere experience of it, although that's hard enough.  It's how we project this Vision of the future, how we hold it for the rest of humanity.” [from "Remembering the Future" and "Holding the Vision", The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision by James Redfield (New York: Warner Books, 1996)]   

 Holding the vision for the rest of humanity is immense enough a task. But humans have apparently been designed to hold the appreciative vision of global spirituality for a mandate that goes way beyond the collective consciousness only of our own species. Swimme goes on to attempt an explanation why the universe took all the trouble of evolving the humans, or, put another way, what the humans can accomplish for the universe from hereon, given our unique capabilities that represent a synergy of all earlier evolutionary stages:

 “We need a new human in a new Earth, creating and entering new relationships with the primary realities of the universe. In the most obvious meaning, all our difficulty as a species on this planet stems from our false relationships with winds, seas, life, sunlight, and land. It’s not that we’re bad; we’ve simply been trying to live outside our true relationships with these primortial cosmic presences.

“But as you move into the full universe, you will discover something stupendous. All these powers are yours! They cost nothing! They do not depend on the color of your skin, the name of your religion, or your place of birth. The further development of the Earth community depends upon our ripening as a species, but nothing is more natural for the human person to accomplish.

“We sometimes fall into the delusion that power is elsewhere, that it belongs to a different group, that we are unable to find access to it. Nothing could be further than the truth. The universe oozes with power, waiting for anyone who wishes to embrace it. But because the powers of cosmic dynamics are invisible, we need to remind ourtselves of their universal presence. Who reminds us? The rivers, plains, galaxies, huricanes, lightning branches, and all our living companions.” (p. 150-151)

Earlier in his book, Swimme is more direct with this point (all underscoring mine, except those set in boldface):

“The human provides the space in which the universe feels its stupendous beauty. Think of it this way: before the human arrived, the Earth and universe were magnificent realities. However, some of the depths of this magnificence had yet to be felt, yet to be appreciated. We enabled some of the depths of the universe to be tasted, and we have only just begun our venture; much waits on our maturity.  …  “Think of what it would be if there were no humans on the planet: the mountains and the primeval fireball would be magnificent, but the Earth would not feel any of this. Can you see the sadness of such a state? The incompleteness?  … (H)umans can house the tremendous beauty of the Earth, of life, of the universe. We can value it, feel its grandeur.” (pp. 32-33)

 “We are the self-reflexion of the universe. We allow the universe to know and feel itself. So, the universe is aware of itself through self-reflexive mind, which unfurls in the human. We were brought forth so that the experiences of beauty could enter awareness. The primeval fireball existed for twenty billion years without self-awareness.  

“The creative work of the supernovas existed for billions of years without self-reflexive awareness. That star could not, by itself, become aware of its own beauty or sacrifice. But the star can, through us, reflect back on itself. In a sense, you are the star. Look at your hand. Do you claim it as your own? Every element was forged in temperatures a nillion times hotter than molten rock, each atom fashioned in the blazing heat of the star.  Your eyes, your brain, your bones, all of you is composed of the stars creations. You are that star, brought into a form of life that enables life to reflect on itself.  

“So, yes, the star does know of its great work, or its surrender to allurement, of its stupendous contribution to life, but only through its further articulation – you.”  (pp. 58-59)  

If the living organism Gaia that is planet earth has for its circulatory system all its waters, and for its digestive tract the soil including all the microorganisms therein, what makes for Gaia’s mind?  The preceding paragraphs seem to point to us humans, to our consciousness.  Are we now about to sigh, “Poor Gaia!!!”?  An English poet once lamented…

Full many a gem of purest ray serene

The dark unfathom’d depth of oceans bear;

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen

And waste its fragrance in the desert air.

And this whole point dovetails with, and is elevated still further by, what Walsch writes in Conversations (Book 3, pp. 50-51) as God saying to him:

“I am the Creator – That Which Creates. Yet I choose to know Myself in My Own Experience.

“Just as I know my perfection of design through a snowflake, My awesome beauty through a rose, so, too, do I know my creative power – through you.

“Through you, I can know every aspect of Me. The perfection of the snowflake, the awesome beauty of the rose, the courage of lions, the majesty of eagles, all resides in you. In you I have placed all these things – and one thing more: the consciousness to be aware of it.

“Thus have you become self-conscious. And thus have you been given the greatest gift, for you have been aware of yourself being yourself – which is exactly what I am.

“I am Myself, aware of Myself being Myself

“This is what is meant by the statement, I Am That I Am

“You are that Part of Me which is the awareness, experienced.

“And what you are experiencing (and what I am experiencing through you) is Me, creating Me.

I am in the continual act of creating Myself.”

Before I end this section, let me recall that tree, that is “breathing heaven while deeply rooted in earth.” No experience of ours on earth is so petty that it would be useless in God’s continual self-creation or in the self-reflexive awareness of the universe.  Cherished well are those experiences of ours in the effort to rediscover and actualize who we really are, embodied spirits experiencing earth for the greater glorification of its Loving Creator and Synergy of All Synergies, incarnated souls simultaneously aware of our body-mind experiences and of our divine real selves as fingers of the same Divine Hand.

9. Appreciation Powerfully Creates  

Just as the Human Mind can be seriously considered as the self-reflexive appreciation organ of the entire Creation, the self-reflexive experiencer-appreciator of God Herself/Himself, the Human Mind is a powerful creator.  This should not be surprising at all for people who believe that we are all fingers of the same Divine and Almighty Hand.

The Mind is not quite just the Intellect but it also --------has that intel­lectual part faithfully subscribed to its self-developed force of logic. But it also that other part whose acts are not exactly always logically-defensible but nevertheless very real, and often more creative and more powerful than the Intellect. We call it Intuition.  

Synergy between them, the synergy between the more logical “Left Brain” thinking and the more intuitive “Right Brain” feeling, makes the Human mind a super-creator in its own right. In synergy, which I believe to be the natural mode of existence of the Human Mind and of everything else, the Mind as a holonic reality is at its best. However, disharmony between the “Left Brain” and the “Right Brain” limits this power tre­mendously. Remember my narration and explanation about “halving a synergy”?  

The usual culprit in preventing the synergy, actually breaking the synergy in the realm of our consciousness, is the logical part. While the Intellect -- accumulating all of what philosopher Ayn Rand calls conceptual integrations, including the effect of the study of Logic itself as a basic subject in Philosophy -- is a very useful, universal and almost-exclusive tool of the Humans, earning for us the self-edifying label, “homo sapiens,” we also often allow it to be powerful a self-limiting force. This is why most of the inventions of the mind often comes more from the more creative and more daring Intuition part of the Mind.

One lesson that has to be learned really fully by the Intellect is honest humility that there exist realities that have to be acknowledged even if our sciences have not developed enough to fully comprehend them, and even if our sciences may never actually develop enough to fully comprehend them. Veneration of the unknown, instead of fear or resentment (and therefore stubborn rejection) of it, is not at all a very easy lesson to learn.

Still, we are learning, albeit very gradually, to acknow­ledge the Intellect’s innate limitations, and acknowledge as well the very real power of Intuition.  Quantum physicists are at the forefront of the scientific community becoming more and more spiritual and frankly admitting so with nary a tinge of guild of defensiveness.  You’d hear “We don’t really know” more often from them, in talking about the atom, than from the over­confident student who had just passed an undergrad course in Basic Physics. From experience, the leading practitioners and academicians of Science have attained full agreement with the realization that “The more you know, the more you know that you do not know.”

Psychologists were among the first to assert publicly the power of the “mind over matter,” with the most obvious effects of a person’s state of mind on his or her physical health. And then the practitioners of the paranormal sciences followed suit, with their studies on telepathy, psychometry and telekinesis. Phenomena related to hypnotism, near-death experiences and astral travel have since been documented with great levels of consistency in patterns.  Then came studies on “consciousness grids” for humans and even for such animals as monkeys. A chapter in Part Three of this book carries accounts on the “Hundredth Monkey” experiment, and the “Hundredth Human” experiment.

Because of increasing numbers of incidents unexplain­able by the pure and hard sciences, more and more from among even the most die-hard fans of pure-logic are being forced by their very same logic to acknowledge as real many things their own sciences cannot make sense of. The universe is unfolding as it should, the inevitable is happening –Human consciousness is increasingly ready to accord enough respect for Intuition. Human consciousness is moving back to the synergy of Intellect and Intuition to end the long mental negation of this perpetual reality.  This negation, though merely mental, is powerfully real, because the Mind is powerful enough to create and to de-create.

Are there many people who still seriously doubt the power of the mind?  Then these people have not heard of doctors employing fake pills, called placebo, that induce in patients a sense of certainty in the efficacy of that pill and that sense of certainty actually cures her. These people may not have heard of cancer patients “dying on schedule,” that is, killing themselves along the timeline predicted by their doctors. Or of people dying of suffocation in stalled elevators just because they had not been informed that air vents in those elevators were working all the time to supply them with more that enough oxygen for days. Or of that hitchhiker who “froze” to death after he found himself locked in a refrigerator train coach and did not know that the refrigerating mechanism wasn’t even working at the time.

A medical student was once charged with “excessive happiness” and almost got expelled from medical school, before he received fame for his very effective but unorthodox ways.  His name is Dr. Patch Adams, M.D.   And he is quoted in House Calls (of the Robert Reed Publications) saying (emphasis mine):

 “Faith can have a profound impact on health. It is a very personal experience of thought and surrender, which can comfort in every situation.  Faith is free and available to all people at all times.  It only requires that one fully embrace possibility, and the ultimate value is in the depth of the embrace.  

Dr. Adams speaks of depth of embrace of possi­bility. If we can as much as be “simply open” to many possi­bilities, including those we cannot logically predict, then that is already a very good start, for we shall have decided to stop rejecting. We  can deepen the embrace by visualizing it vividly, by desiring it fervently, and having enough faith to “thank heavens!”  -- well in advance -- for its coming to pass, the way we can thank the waiter immediately after he says “Coming right up!”

 Hey! Doesn’t that sound like a form of prayer, complete with enough faith to say “So be it, thank you!” (Amen!)?  Well, isn’t it precisely that clarity of desire and strong faith in its fulfillment that makes prayers powerful? And in praying, aren’t we creating the desired reality by clearly recalling Who We Really Are and talking to God within our very selves?

In Conversations With God, Book 3 (pp. 60 and 67), Walsch has God telling him:

“In the creation of individual reality, thought control, or what some might call prayer – is everything.

“Thought control is the highest form of prayer. Therefore, think only of good things, and righteous. And even in moments when things look bleak – especially in those moments – see only perfection. Express only gratefulness, and then imagine only what manifestation of perfection you choose next. In this formula is found tranquility. In this process is found peace. In this awareness is found joy.

x x x

          “… Assume a different perspective and you will have a different thought about everything. In this way you will have learned to control your thought, and in the creation of your experience, controlled thought is everything.  Some people call this constant prayer.

          “…dwell not in the negativity and darkness, though you may be immersed in it.”

(Of course, I have no doubt that Walsch meant such “thought control” to be self-control in favor of the positive, based on wisdom gained from experiencing the effects of indulging in negativity.)

          When we pray, do we look upwards to some distant God? Shouldn’t we look within, instead, and confidently invoke that same almighty power of which we all partake within the reality of the Divine Oneness of All?

J J J

 

   

PART THREE:  JOINED IN GRANDER SYNERGIES

“JUST as fully functioning persons write the script of their own lives,” says Buscaglia (1978, p. 104), “they also respect the connectiveness of all things along the way. They realize that the self is only the self in that it has a world, a structure of which it is a part – a part, yet apart. We are a community of persons and a world of things.  We are what we are because birds exist, plants grow, bees pollinate, winds blow, tides change, rains fall, and accidents happen.  Nothing occurs in the world that in some way does not affect us all.  Even the most insignificant act we perform will have some effect upon the world.

Further down, Buscaglia adds: “… We are each a singular person but we are each a universal person. Both are equally important.”  

In Part One we discuss various metaphors of the synergism principle and their varying degrees of appropriateness in represnenting this powerful principle.  Human beings are potentially the most excellent metaphors, nay embodiments, of this principle considering our nature with its evolved capability to unite dynamically for the full re-membering and full synergy.  

However, human beings have been accorded free will, and in the present stage of evolution of the use of this freedom of choice, the stage of only a blurred inkling of our real identity, the tendency has largely been towards separativeness, turning our potential excellence for personifying synergism into the actualization of its exact opposite.  Two humans together can have the team power of three, but if in the exercise of their free will they choose to compete, they can easily cancel each other out and the resultant capacity may be a big fat zero.

Whenever a group of humans choose to ignore or even reject the reality of our essential oneness, they are unable to avail themselves of the ever-present power of the synergism principle.  Many human attempts at building mechanisms for united action collapse when separative ego rears its ugly head.  On the other hand, whenever they do the opposite and actualize their essential oneness as humans, they find synergism is instantly in operation, increasing the capability of each one and of the larger holon they create among themselves.  

Synergies set up by humans are always at risk of falling apart because of “evil” which I have referred to in my own version of The Lord’s Prayer as “all alienation and separation from (God) and from one another.”  Synergies set up with creation itself are only at risk from without, that is, from the separative and therefore destructive tendencies of humans.

Like the Sun, which never actually sets and never actually rises, the synergism principle is always there ready to play its “magical role” whenever two or more of us are gathered in the name of Our Divine Oneness.  I expressed this of the Sun in a short text-message I recently sent out to some of my friends:

“The sun constantly smiles upon the earth, but half the time the earth turns away from its unconditional love. Sunrise is when the earth begins to smile back.”

J J J

 

   

Chapter 6:  

Intimate Personal Bondings

 

1. Love – It’s All There is

NEALE Donald Walsh (Conversations, Book 3, 1999, pp. 206-207) had God saying:

“Love is that which is unlimited. There is no beginning and no end to it. No before and no after. Love always was, is and always will be.

“So love is also always. It is the always reality.

“Now we get back to another word we used before—freedom.  For if love is unlimited, and always, then love is… free.  Love is that which is perfectly free.

“Now in the human reality, you will find that you always seek to love, and to be loved. You will find that you will always yearn for that love to be unlimited.  And you will find that you will always wish you could be free to express it.  

“You will seek freedom, unlimitedness, and eternality in every experience of love.  You may not always get it, but that is what you will seek.  You will seek this because this is what love is, and at some deep place you know that because you are love, and through the expression of love you are seeking to know and to experience Who and What You Are.  

“You are life expressing life, love expressing love, God expressing God.  

“God – Life – Love – Unlimited – Eternal – Free.  Anything which is not one of these things is not any of these things.  You are all of those things, and you will seek to experience yourself as all of these things….”  

2. Intimate Personal Bonds—Families and Friendships

Families are said to be “basic units” of society. In ancient times, they were considered to be household units, where the “man of the house,” the patriarch or the petty patriarch made all decisions for the internal affairs of the family and represented the latter in broader decision-making processes like exercising the right to suffrage. It was only within the century just past that women won that right and the basis of membership in society became individuals as citizens.  But families and their role in the social structure were changed by social dynamics since the advent of the industrial age, which Alvin Toffler calls “Second Wave” and more so in the current transition to the Information Age.

Meantime, with family ties getting weaker and weaker in modern and post-modern society, friendships have been fulfilling more and more of the needs of humans as social beings.  Frustrated parents are complaining that their children are gravitating more and more to friendship circles, even as these parents themselves are spending more and more hours with their “associates, business partners, and potential clients.”  Both sets of associations are inherently noble and both deserve to be developed instead of allowing the convenience drift to completely obliterate the erstwhile “basic unit” of society. This can be done by fully appreciating each of the two in their commonalities and contrast, and by aiming for complementation, for synergy, for mutual enrichment between the family dynamics and friendship dynamics.

My article proposing a serious and wider study on the mutual enrichment between family ties and friendships, which is Paradigm No.13  (A Gathering of Light for Empowerment), says that “personal bonds are developed by each individual on the basis of shared experiences and according to that person’s hierarchy of needs. All these are human synergies, where each party enjoys from the interaction a magnification of her or his own strengths and capabilities, and fulfills the basic needs of the human person as a social being, including self-actualization and self-affirmation.” The following paragraphs make up a substantial excerpt from that article:  

Although these personal bonds make up the reality of community and society, the depth and nature of specific personal interactions or ties vary widely. They range from the level of being friendly acquaintances and functional interactions to that of close friendships where bonds develop on many levels and upon a set of mutual needs being satisfied, all the way to being very close friends and close-in team-ups where the parties relate with one another and are enriched at the deepest personal levels or at levels deemed by these parties to be most important (according to their respective value systems).

The personal bonds that we -- often half-consciously -- develop with persons around us are shaped by our unique personal needs within our unique personal circumstances. In a way, there is at least a mutually-accepted, though unwritten, commitment to a set of expectations from each party.  These range from the minimum expectation that the other person would not do you harm intentionally, and would act in civilized behavior, or would contribute something for a common interest, or even assist in some way when the others need help, all the way to formalized commitments of fidelity to relationships, like marriage, or to common missions and tasks, like membership in organizations.

When the expectations are not met, or especially when one or some, or even all, could not or could no longer maintain the commitment, the bond slides down in level or may even be completely ended.  Many of the expectations are frustrated because they had not been clearly agreed to in the first place by the parties.  In many other circumstances the parties may have benefited from a brief interaction and were satisfied with that one-time pleasant interlude, and saw no need or possibility to relate to each other any further. This happens very often with simple acquaintances, too often in fact to be noticed and remembered, that such friendly acquaintances really just come and go in our lives.  

Beyond friendly acquaintance, however, there are two kinds of personal bonds that last longer and touch the parties’ lives at least a bit more deeply or profoundly. These are relationships within a nuclear family, and relationships among friends, let alone among or between close friends.  Family and friendship relations have their own respective characteristics that make for advantages and disadvantages.

But these bonds do vary in texture and depth from one familial relationship to another, and also from one friendship to another, due to the specificity of their respective circumstances and histories and due to the respective needs they satisfy or fail to satisfy.

Both the familial bonds and the friendships play important roles in the comfort, growth and happiness of each individual.  They both provide the circumstances needed by each one for self-actualization, self-affirmation and overall growth.  They jointly hold up to each one a mirror of oneself.

What are the innate differences between family members on the one hand and friends on the other?  While family ties automatically result from the shared blood circumstance, and are therefore basically permanent, friendships are basically choiceful and transient.

You don’t get to choose your relatives; you just get born and find yourselves in the same family or in the same clan. They did not exactly choose you, either, but you can make them glad to have found you in the same family with them!  

Although a common upbringing together under one roof often results in a shared value system during the formative years when the children are still generally receptive to influence from the same pair of parents, commonality of genes do not at all make for similarity of character, habits, tastes and peeves. There would, therefore, be a lot of conflicts, including emotional ones, while they are practically forced by circumstances of home setting to continue sharing common bedrooms, using the same toothpaste tubes, and tolerating one another’s personal habits.

Still, these are the persons who know you best, including most of your worst personal habits, including how terrible you look when you really look your worst. The problem with many family members is that they tend to concentrate on remem­bering your worst, and do not bother to express, or at times even notice, your positive points. And because love is supposedly automatic here, something “to be taken for granted,” many family members, es­pe­cially the siblings, don’t bother to express such love with “terms of endearment.”  

What often makes it worse is how the factor of perma­nence of the bond plays out here. Siblings, for example, can assume they don’t have to resolve emotional conflicts among them, and may tend to just let time gloss over these. In some cas­es, time does heal and they would be prepared to laugh together later about their earlier conflicts. However, in some other cases conflicts or at least the really deep resentments accumulate, and the affected parties, or at least one or some of them, would feel trapped in the permanence of their having to remain as siblings. Instead of appreciating the permanence as an endless stream of opportunities for endearment and mutual affirmation, and for resolving conflicts when these occur, they tend to suffer the permanence as an “endless period of mutual tolerance,” or even a constant “cold war.”  

In this situation, the feuding siblings often forget that they have already shared years upon years of common weal and woe and have helped and forgiven one another countless times; they somehow accord more value to what friends have done for them over much shorter periods.

(The tendency is to appreciate more the endearing gesture from a friend, because it’s supposed to be essentially “voluntary,” than a bigger favor or even a countless stream of favors from a brother or a sister, because it’s supposed to be essentially “done out of duty.”)

Close friends often start off as friendly acquaintances who know only what one would choose to let others know or have to let them know about one’s own personal habits and history, generally excluding the most embarrassing parts. Friendly acquaintances often afford you the comfort of “quiet” companion­ship. There is the enjoyment of having some fun together or even just laughing together about some very forgettable thing or other. In this setting, they are happily away from disciplinary lectures from parents or other authority figures.  

Such enjoyment is also available to family members, especially between arriving home from work or school and going to bed, but no effort is made to seek and give the availability of family members for this, especially if pressure is applied and is resisted. In some cases, the size of the family, the age gaps between the siblings, or the necessity of focusing all time and energy to breadwinning for survival, would become the challenging factors. To some people, spouses have become pressure figures they would rather be away from when they want to relax. Even in the face of mounting problems in the family, including its mounting expenses, married couples have to learn to relax and enjoy together.

Many of us would tend to feel relaxed with friends or in other words more “at home” with them than with those people we live in the same house with.  

And you choose to develop close friendships with some of these friendly acquaintances or choose to allow the deve­lopment of such close friendship, calibrating which things to re­veal about yourself at any given time, to ascertain their levels of trustworthiness.

And as a close friendship gets cherished, you tend to be willing to walk the extra mile to maintain it. After all, because friendships are transient, you are aware that you can still possibly lose it anytime and you choose to try your best not to. Here is where terms of mutual endearment and mutual support are deemed as needed and express­ively appreciated in a continu­ing stream.

Still, when a conflict does erupt, friends have the option to keep away from one another for a while, even for weeks on end if needed, and then slide back to normal togetherness after resentments cool down a bit. (This option cannot easily be chosen by feuding siblings who have to share a bedroom every night or by feuding spouses who share the same bed; here, taking the option of keeping apart can be dramatically traumatic, and one would likely choose to suffer the conflict in silence, and, worse, just “get used to it.”)  

As some of your friendships get closer, you get to be known more intimately by your friends than by your parents and siblings. While the latter tend to have a frozen picture of you on the basis of your latest meaningful transaction with them, your current close friends get front seats, even active roles to play, in the drama of your life as it unfolds in real time.  

This situation holds both the positive and the negative potentials in terms of influencing the lives of young people.  

On the one hand, friends provide you with listening ears to vent your woes into, with shoulders to cry on, with sources of affirmation, for persons who need such support badly. They would even offer a lot of wisdom and prudence to the despe­rately confused or self-resentful.  

On the other hand, bad feelings and tendencies to rebel can, and at times actually do, get mutually-reinforced and result in the group members finding themselves together in more trou­ble than before.  

These two tendencies are often present simultaneously and often contend with each other; the situation is often saved by those group members who had been given enough moral foundation by their respective families before they even ven­tured out to bonding closely with peer groups.

The problem is there may be a growing number of pa­rents who alienate them­selves from such groups by exerting pressure on their children to stay away from their peers who they fear might be a “bad influence” on their children. Worse, a growing number of parents have chosen to abdicate or have been forced to abdicate on their role of giving the “good influence” (moral foundation-setting) on their children much earlier.

Nuclear families generally live together under one roof.  Parents and the children, who are not necessarily the natural offspring of either or both of them, are expected to do so, sharing the family home and the food on the table.  Close family relations have been built in this kind of setting for centuries, even for millennia, on end.

Closely-knit families were still the rule much more than the exception in the Philippines at the time the Katipunan was gather­ing a synergy among the diverse communities in our archipelago to birth our nationhood and win our national freedom.  That is why Andres Bonifacio, the Katipunan founder, chose the family as the central metaphor for the nationhood that was being birthed: the Katipuneros professed their love for “Inang Bayan,” called them­selves “mga Anak ng Bayan,” and called one another kapatid or sibling. But the Katipunan leaders were careful not to be racist, and they even campaigned for relations among nations based on the same bonds of symbolic siblinghood, which he explained as the philosophy behind the ancient practice of having blood compacts. They instituted their own version of such a compact by signing their oaths of allegiance to the Katipunan in their own blood.

Up to much more recent times, closely-knit families were giving meaning to the words “para ko nang kapatid” referring to friendships so close that the bond is almost like that of siblinghood.  No blood compact accompanies such descriptions but the elements of intimacy and mutual trust and intended permanence that we dis­cussed above are realities lived and enjoyed by all concerned.  

These, and the phenomenon of extended families that in­clude close friends, are living metaphors of the family as a healthy and happy synergy. They result from choiceful inclusion, intended to be permanent, into a framework of unity that is both innately automatic and permanent. The readiness of a family to “adopt members” reflects a certain level of self-confidence and a generally wholesome attitude to the rest of society outside its own bloodline boundaries.

There are, however, some metaphorical allusions to close family ties that do a disservice to the latter.  One of these is in the formation of many student fraternities (brotherhoods) and sororities (sisterhoods) whose behavior as formalized friendships defined to be dedicated to some social service is very much tainted by a long tradition of mutual antagonism with some other parallel groups that are basically identical with them, a sub-culture of war-like competition that tolerates, even abets, violent initiations within the organizations and violent rumbles among rival groups.  Enjoying the loyal tolerance of alumni who are considered permanent mem­bers but whose development of personal maturity has not been tapped as a moderating influence, these groups have apparently been trapped in their glamorized traditions of violence that have destroyed their social image.

The violent routines, and their constant preparations for these, have dissipated energies that could have been focused, in­stead, on the voluntary social services they have offered. Worse, the rivalries have prevented many of these groups from achieving magnified capabilities in working together. Such a mixture of formalized and ritualized friendship, with the expected permanence of narrow loyalties, has been an unfortunate one.  There is hope for change, though, if enough people in the position to influence these groups would exert enough unified efforts to effect such change.

We can also talk of metamorphosis, of transformation, where a close friendship actually develops into a family relation­ship. This would involve something like a blood compact, but blood from the parties to this kind of compact is mixed not in wine as in the ceremony between our native King Sikatuna and the rep­resentative of the King of Spain, and neither in signatures affixed to a sacred document such as the Katipunan oath, but mixed in the begetting and conceiving of offspring, of new human incarnations and chan­nels of Life.  This is the delicate transformation of simple friend­ship to romantic friendship, and finally to marriage.

Within the friendship stage of this process, there is a trans­formation of needs and expectations being mutually served. It can and often it does in fact begin with some physical attraction and gratification between the sexes, and seeking to fulfill the personal and social need for steady dates and all-around companionship. Then it gets more serious and develops into an exclusive com­mitment for mutual courtship, and still more serious in ascertaining and confirming compatibilities for a life and continued growth together, including a comfortable and effective teaming-up for joint parenting, and, once ascertained by both parties as “meant to be,” preparing the relationship itself for the next stage, which is marriage.  If it does not reach that, the relationship gets ended.

The act of choosing one’s life-partner, and the quality of mutually-supportive and mutually-fulfilling interaction between parties of such a relationship before their marriage, would generally determine the quality of interaction the partners would have within the marriage and would thus showcase for their children what sort of wholesome relationship can be developed and enjoyed within the family. They can thus lead together by example.

What value systems are chosen by both partners for their family to live by would not necessarily determine the stability and level of personal fulfillment they can expect to achieve in the marriage and in the family life.  The more important factor is that the partners are compatible enough to be able to resolve discrepan­cies and really harmonize their respective personal values, and to choose to live by a cohesive and consistent set of values.

Other­wise, they would be forced into a running competition for influence on their children and/or into a permanent state of mutual toleration, even if we assumed that they could manage to stay “together” just “for the sake of the kids.” They suffer this, instead of enjoying deep love and continuing mutual enrichment for as long as they both shall live. And the children growing up under the influence of such behavior would probably adopt this same competition and mutual toleration mode among themselves as siblings.

Searching for a life-partner, one may find it exciting to be with, and try to change, a direct opposite in personality, values and intended lifepath. However, as life goes on and ma­turity sets in, sense of adventure in the mating game, which usually peaks during one’s campus years, is eventually out­grown.

One in­creasingly longs to be in long-term romantic part­nership with someone who has at least similar values, prior­ities and direction in life, someone you wouldn’t have to spend the rest of your life adjusting to. Someone you’d grow very comfort­ably with, who would be your teammate in rearing the offspring, someone you’d enjoy life with for many years and many decades.

Many stable spouses start out being the best of friends, and some do even before romance sparked in their hearts for each other. And they have ensured that the friendship be conti­nually nurtured and deepened. That’s why they have been stable.

There are  real opportunities for building friendships with­in the family, friendships among family members, of varying deg­rees of closeness and in varying levels of development. These are real opportunities for loving one another really fully, in the words of Jesus Christ, “as I have loved you.”  

My Christ­ian back­ground makes me invoke the very first two words of the prayer that Christ was said to have taught us: “Our Father…” By start­ing with that phrase, this prayer invokes the family as metaphor, and teaches us a profound lesson in jointly acclaiming our personal choice to love one another as members of one family.  

Family members and friends are really living the lesson from this when they love one another -- “As I have loved you” --- closely and consistently, whether or not they mention God or Christ at all. I’m sure there would be equivalents of this in other religions; but I’m not familiar enough with them to have the confidence even just to attempt to discuss them.

Family-oriented programs and projects of Christian insti­tutions and organizations, like the various Christian church­es, may consider adding to the effectiveness of their efforts by helping their members see and love the Christ in each one of them and the Christ in their midst, in their strong unity or synergy.   

Focusing their attention only to other matters, especially “hea­venly themes,” would somehow allow their members to simply paraphrase the Lucy character of the Peanuts comic strip and say: “I love God, I love Christ, I love the Church, I love the Pope and the bishops and the priests and the pastors and the deacons and ministers, and the nuns… and our benefactors and friends and the poor and the sick. I love Mankind. It’s just these people all around me everyday that I can’t stand!”

I know of families who had prayed the rosary on sched­ule everyday, but with most of the family members resentful of being forced by their parents to be present for it.  The approach doesn’t work in having a family that stays together. To them I offer this paraphrase: “The family that prays together, with its members really living the prayers, stays together.”

In fact, this goes beyond families. The inner synergy (“innergy”) of the family can come a long way in contributing to the social synergy of the bigger community, in bigger and bigger concentric circles of inclusive embrace all the way to the Global Human Family and the entire Cosmic Whole (which we can also refer to as “Creation”).  In this manner, inner family relation­ships can and still do contribute to the enrichment of all other social relationships.

Indeed, there are countless opportunities available for persons living under one roof to establish mutually-supportive and mutually-fulfilling bonds of love and mutual support.

Unfortunately, many married couples and many siblings feel more the pressures of permanence and of external factors (like parental authority, or the marriage contract), forcing them to cope with, to get used to, prolonged toleration.

Worse, a married person can become increasingly vulne­rable to temptations of extramarital affairs when he or she finds more emotional and spiritual (not religious) support or all-round gratification and affirmation from friends of the opposite sex than what his or her spouse is willing or able to give.

As mentioned above, siblings actually share years upon years of common weal and woe and help and forgive one another countless times, but they somehow accord more value to what friends have done for them over much shorter periods. Thus, many friendships are often given more focus in nurturing and are allowed to substitute for family ties, often uninten­tionally contributing to the latter’s further disintegration.

Both the bonds of kinship and the bonds of friendship can be functioning side by side as complementary personal bonds with their own varying levels and forms of mutual per­sonal support, their own varying bases of endearment, and their own varying opportunities for common enjoyment. If these are handled erratically and reactively, or, worse, overreactively, one can ruin the other and both can get ruined eventually.

In the history of human development, families had been viewed as mechanisms for material resources accumulation, with the royally wealthy often engaging in arranged or even incest­uous marriages to keep the wealth in the family or in the same small group of allied families.

In the more recent era of encouraging extreme individu­al­ism, the stability and integrity of nuclear families have given way to other, more choiceful, groupings of people for their col­lective and individual needs, like informal or formalized friendships.

3. A Heartwarming Case Study    

Considering that romantic love is something like a bridge between friendship and family dynamics, considering that it begins in friendship and has the perspective of teaming up for family-building through marriage, there are various nuances in friendships where at least one or even both parties would feel romantic energies.  A little less than half a decade ago, I had an opportunity to write about one such friendship.  It is a synergism-oriented essay based on true-to-life characters and circumstances, and I carry it here in full:

“A close friend of mine came across a story that would not be your usual mushy stuff for the Valentine season. This friend wants to share it with people who might find it insightful. I hope I do justice to this story both in my note-taking and retelling.

“The story tells of a man who met by chance a young lady whom she has since been describing as wonderfully beauti­ful inside out, a child-fairy who was very much mature for her body-age. He came to love her the way he was loving no other, and dreamt of the day she would be his lifepart­ner.  She found him pleasant and inspiring, friendly and profound, his writings, his articulat­ed insights, struck her with ‘deep, deep awe,’ and she asked that they be ‘celestine partners.’ Fondness sang in the way she pronounced his name on the phone whenever he called her up and identified himself, and he at first thought she was asking him to identify himself further. She beeped him often with sweet messages that he has cherished to this day as real priceless treasures from his past.

“Why past? Because all that was to last only until she heard it from him that he had fallen in love with her. To her, he was supposed to be ‘simply a friend.’  Still, she continued trust­ing in his integrity like no one else ever did outside his family, and went on long working trips alone with him. Finding him too precious a friend to lose, and feeling fulfilled about its hap­py and practical effects, she stuck it out in a close work partnership with him, in a product­ive synergy of thoughts and efforts, of sighs and cheers, of laughter and songs. They’ve practi­cal­ly been inseparable, through a string of widely-varied jobs and projects together, in a happy synergy and close-in companionship others would admire aloud or quietly envy.  How they clicked! People around them noticed. Some started wishing they’d become lovers someday and others imagined they already were in some secret or subdued romance.

“However, this was not to be— perhaps not yet, more probably never. Her love for him is for a friend, no less than a very special one, all right, but no more than that, either. That, and just that. She has been in love with another man, committed to that one for many years, and feels a deep sense of triumph in such longevity of focus and commitment. She sticks with the ‘self-appointed best friend’ and by him in teamwork and friendship, but she has repeat­ed­ly clarified that it’s all there is to it, that not even a tiny spark of romantic love has ever been felt, or could ever possibly grow, in her heart for him. Actu­ally, that’s all very plain and simple to take, and he has accepted it, at least intellectually, though not without tears.

“But over a long time he failed miserably to kill or divert the romantic part of his deep love for her, and he has left her no room to doubt either that depth or that failure. Still, it has been general­ly all right between them, save for times when he lost his brakes and expressed his romantic feelings distinct from their mutual friendly fondness, getting carried away by unmistakable expressions of that fondness from her. Those times, she’d get turned off and rebuke him, and she would threaten and seriously contemplate walking out of the friendship. Quite a number of times she actually did, but eventually cooled down and forgave him. And he promised to try harder in sup­press­ing those express­ions of feelings or even to try to find a new beloved for his overflow­ing heart energies and his urgently-felt need for one. She’d believe him and the friend­ship would deepen and blossom even more and more… until his brakes failed again. Or until some well-meaning but insensitive kibitzers teased and got her pissed off… with him!

“She told him of her revulsion for his romantic love, that it upsets her, but assured that she enjoys the friendly fondness, the very deep bonds of friendship between their minds, and hearts (for non-romantic love), and even between them as souls. He expresses puzzle­ment at this, aside from disappointment. He just could not, and still cannot, understand why his love of that undoubted depth and sincerity can cause a negative feeling in anyone, let alone in her, and elicit a negative response at all, let alone a strong one. Unless he could suppress all overt ex­pressions of it, his romantic love for her has been an offense?  Another woman could reject such love but without the revulsion, or with even a feeling of flattery or affirmation, instead. He just can’t understand it. But he knows he doesn’t even have to, and neither she. What is strongly and honestly felt in her heart de­serves everyone’s real respect.

“She reacts adversely to direct or implied comments and questions being posed by friends who can’t get it, either, or cannot conceal their wish for the two of them to be a lov­ing pair.  Her special-fondness behavior toward him has caused the wonder­ment. But if told that, she would likely decide to alter that behavior, instead of looking inward to try and understand it herself more deeply and really profoundly. Because even if she doesn’t understand it, she doesn’t really have to. But why does she have to reject the possibility of romance with such certainty and finality? they ask themselves aloud for him to hear. He says he’d rather take her word for it: He’s simply not her type. Period.

“But he did ask her about the puzzling revulsion, and she said that’s how she feels and she owes no one any explanations.  True enough, for one never imposes mental logic on the feelings of the heart. Moreover, her right to privacy and her independence of mind and heart prohibits any demand for explanations.  Her unique­ness here is part of her total uniqueness as an empowered woman, and he has been totally devoted to her empower­ment, as he has been to her safety, health and happiness. (He was much earlier advised to woo some ‘dumb coun­try lass’ if he wanted to really be loved and valued; and he instantly ruled that out as exploitative and unfulfilling.)  Despite the pain of hearing again the articulation of her rejection of his love, he took it all into his heart, even with gladness that the beautiful friendship has endured and blossomed even more. She was glad about that, too.

“These two are both unique, he and she. Both beautiful persons, by their own reckon­ing of each other, and surrounded by beautiful common friends who have deep respect and the best wishes for each of them and for their friendship. And so is their friendship unique and very beautiful as it has been up to now.  It has proven how deep and sincere and even passionate a friendship can be between a man and a woman who are not into romance (where romance would tend to overshadow everything else and stunt the growth of many vital aspects of friendship). How it could even survive the way it has despite the tension coming from the emphatically-declared non-mutuality in the romantic element has been unbelievable in the eyes of many people around them.

“One friend kidded him: you’re plain ‘crazy.’  But they go on having that very productive and empow­er­ing synergies in many of their efforts, including those in the very personal affairs of each (health, family, money, careers, etc.). That is their joint uniqueness. And it’s very beautiful in its own way, so much so that it may have become irrelevant whether they would ever both want anything beyond it. That can remain hanging.

“So, he has asked his friends to stop asking now and then whether any ‘progress’ has been made. He tells them the friendship is blissful and he’s very happy to have it. Are you giving up?, they gasp out disappointed. He answers with a sigh, ‘I’m trying to.’ And why not?

“Why not, indeed! They’re both deeply happy jointly being a living tribute to Friend­ship itself!  It is a reality that they both can now cherish, nurture, enjoy. Think they’re crazy or at least he is? Who cares? It’s their joint choice and reality, their joint uniqueness.”

End of article.  Now let me ask you, how many friend­ships do we see around that are as beautiful even if at times tension-filled as that one?  What nuances of interpersonal dyna­mics can we learn to appreciate in this friendship for possible application to our own friendships and family ties?

J J J

 

   

Chapter 7:

Gender Harmony

WHEN SanibLakas Foundation decided to address the gender question in the context of the Foundation’s serious study and application of the principle of synergism between the sexes, we knew that we could not be contented with mere gender sensitivity, although for reforming the consciousness of many people that would be a very good starting point. Neither could we advocate only for gender equality.

1. Gender Harmony as a Paradigm for Empowerment

While for the sake of fairness this should be sought and institutionalized in all civilized societies, we cannot stop at this level that could border on overmeasuring and nitpicking on relative valuations of various aspects of the inter-gender relationships. Because the valuations of the aspects can only be subjective, and because a woman cannot fully behave like a man and vice versa, the process would only trap both genders in endless, even rancorous, debates.

For this reason, the paradigm title recommended for consideration and officially adopted by the founding council members of the SanibLakas-convened Lambat-Liwanag Network of Centers for Empowering Paradigms became focused on Gender Harmony as an ultimate goal. Although many of those who attended the paradigm-specific conference on this were apparently hooked on highlighting the gender conflict and the quest for gender equality, and they were carrying the empowerment advocacy as one of women’s liberation or even of feminism, we can say that the mainstreaming of the gender harmony paradigm has started.  

This is very significant, because without this overarching paradigm, efforts for gender sensitivity and gender equality would likely lead to its diametrical opposite-- gender hostility, the overzealous and mutually-suspicious overguarding against inequalities, an antagonism that impairs productive and mutually-enriching complementarity, a relationship so far removed from any trace of love beyond the basic level of fairness.

More and more people are beginning to see the truth in these lines Joydee Robledo and I had put in the SanibLakas Foundation statement issued for International Women’s Day in 1998: “Can humanity be uplifted as the female of the species merely carry and birth children and then raise them?” xxx “The liberation of women from patriarchal ideas and practices is in the best interest of entire human communities. Both the womenfolk and the menfolk should synergize for this liberation, and synergize further on the basis of this liberation. No positive social change is possible without it. No social change can be complete without it.”  

We have also started to help spread the poem, For Every Woman by Nancy Smith, which shows that the patriarchal culture harms and hurts both the women and the men.  

  For every woman who is tired of acting weak when she knows she is strong,

     There is a man who is tired of appearing strong when he feels vulnerable.

 

  For every woman who is tired of acting dumb, there is a man who is burdened

with the constant expectation of “knowing everything.”  

            For every woman who is tired of being called an “emotional female,”

     There is a man who is denied the right to weep and be gentle.

 

For every woman who feels “tied down” by her children,

    There is a man who is denied the full pleasure of shared parenthood.

 

For every woman who is denied meaningful employment and equal pay,

    There is a man who must bear full responsibility for another human being.

 

For every woman who wasn’t taught the intricacies of the automobile,

    There is a man who was not taught the satisfaction of cooking.

 

For every woman who takes a step toward her own liberation,

    There is a man who finds that the way to freedom has been made a little easier.

Ken Wilber tackles this matter head-on. At the beginning chapter of A Brief History of Everything (Revised Edition, 2000, pp. 2-3), he says:

“…(W)hile it is true that, on the average, the male body is more muscular and physically stronger than the female, it does not follow that masculine must mean strong and assertive and feminine must mean weak and demure.  And we are in a transition period where masculine and feminine roles are being redefined and re-created, which has thrown both men and women into a type of rancorous sniping at each other in various types of gender wars.

“Part of the problem is that, whereas masculine and feminine roles can indeed be redefined and refashioned – a long-overdue and much-needed refurbishing – nonetheless male and female characteristics cannot be changed much, and in our attempt to level the differences between masculine and feminine, we are dangerously close to trying to erase the differences between the male and the female. And while the former is a fine idea, the latter is impossible. And the trick is to know the difference, I suppose.”

A bit further down below these explanations, Wilber adds:

“The tricky part now is, as I started to suggest, is how to do two very difficult things: one, to resonably decide just what are the major differences between the male and the female value spheres…, and then, two, to learn ways to value them more or less equally.  Not to make them the same, but to value them equally.

“Nature did not split the human race into two sexes for no reason; simply trying to make them the same seems silly. But even the most conservative theorists would acknowledge that our culture has been predominantly weighted to the male value sphere for quite some time now. And so we are in a delicate, dicey, very difficult, and often rancorous process of trying to balance the scales a little bit more. Not erase the differences, but balance them.”

Still, men do have to concede, with nary an effort for justifying excuses, that they have long been abetting, condoning, even energetically performing the perpetration of injustice by one half the human population upon the other. The prizewinning essay, A Historical Analysis of The Philippine Revolution, by Manuel F. Martinez (2002, p. 84) carries this passage:

“Every person must pass the circle of the womb; otherwise he cannot break through the seal of existence. From the Universal Womb emanates all mankind. On the other hand, man is only man. This is not meant to be derogation but simply a description of a process: man is, in one sense, only an adjunct in the phenomenon of human creating. If he wishes to claim his glory, he must resort to finding it in other ways, and therein lies the problem. He tries to find it in wrong, unwise, cruel and self-defeating ways.”

2. Parental Teamwork: A Challenge

The quest for gender harmony starts with respectful acknowledgment of the discrepancy between the males and the females especially in terms of their respective roles in the bringing forth of offspring.  In this process of begetting and conception, pregnancy and childbirth and even in the breastfeeding and suckling stage, the mother, the female parent, has a big edge over the father, or male parent, in terms of intimacy with the child.  

Under the gender equality paradigm, the woman may just feel that this pre-natal discrepancy is all right, considering that it only serves to balance, at least partially, the many aspects of life in society where the men are favored.  Such an attitude would be discouraged under the gender harmony paradigm, for under the latter paradigm the greater concern of both parents lies in developing a parental teamwork, as close a teamwork as possible, and therefore both parenting partners would be conscious of seeking to bridge the discrepancy.  In a Father’s Day article I wrote in June 2000 about this effort, I say this:

“Between the two parents, the mother has the momentum and natural instinct for closer physical intimacy with the child, especially with months or possibly even years of breastfeeding as the next stage in the sequence.  She had been with the baby for all those prenatal months, aware of the baby's growth and motions all that time; on the other hand, he could only relate to her ‘growing tummy’ and perhaps with memories of his earlier orgasms inside her body when they, about nine months before, enjoyed the highest physical expression of their intimate resonance in love- and life-partnership.

“The discrepancy is real. But it doesn't have to be absolute and permanent. The baby is now out of the womb. While the father can never breastfeed any baby, he can immediately start the physical bonding by giving his tender loving touches and gentle rubs often, as tender as his often crude physical ways can be tempered and trained by affection and determined self-control.  A father can consciously take time to make faces and ‘beautiful eyes’ at his baby whenever he can, and get this baby to identify his face, his touch, and the sound of his voice fully with his love.

Of course, he can choose to read the newspaper or talk on the cellphone while his wife breastfeeds, and channel all his love for the baby through earning more and more money for the family, but that obviously won't help diminish the discrepancy in physical bonding. He would have then chosen to allow his own role to be boxed in as that of ‘financier’ and, probably, also as ‘disciplinarian’ -- to be thanked and feared by his children while they feel much closer to Mom.  No father deserves to do that to himself or be allowed by his wife to do that to himself.

“As soon as the baby is born and throughout the ensuing childhood, adolescence and even adulthood, the father can play about as many roles as the mother can in relating directly with his child (their child forever) physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. After all, between the two parents, it should neither be a contest nor a defeatist overreaction to the prenatal physical discrepancy, but a parental teamwork to anchor and lead a wholesome family synergy and security.  Fatherhood can only be fully enjoyed or appre­ciated within this warm-home framework.”

3. The Feminine Principle

The quest for gender harmony is given boost by the reemergence and mainstreaming of the “Feminine Principle.”  As editor of a newsletter for the “Earthlite community” in Cubao, Quezon City, I asked Dr. Serafin Talisayon, head of the Center for Conscious Living and a professor in both the University of the Philippines and the Asian Social Institute, to write an article on the feminine principle, which I had earlier heard him discuss with a group.  Dr. Talisayon obliged, and here are some major excerpts from his article (“The Return of the Feminine Principle,” Earthlite Sparks and Reflections, March 2000 issue, p. 3):

“Underneath many seemingly-unrelated global trends and paradigm shifts, something seems to be happening today, a single subtle but powerful planetary movement: something which can best be described as a  ‘paradigm suprashift’ from yang to yin, or a return of the feminine principle which had been predominant in much earlier civilizations. It is taking place across national boundaries, across diverse spheres of life from education to international relations, from economics to science, from entrepreneurship to religion. It is indeed a  ‘paradigm suprashift’ because it is trans-societal in nature.

“To discern and recognize it, let us examine the essential nature of several global trends or paradigm shifts and discover their common denominator:

“In politics and culture: feminist movements.

“In development: the environmental movement, which moves development attitudes and orientations towards one­ness/harmony/interrelatedness rather than exploitation/domin­ance over ‘Mother Nature’; from working on to working with nature; from burning of fossil fuels and risky nuclear power to ‘soft energy paths’; from cancerous or parasitic growth modes that is eventually mutually suicidal to more sustainable lifestyles and development modes.

“In organizational dynamics in business, government and NGOs: a paradigm shift from vertical (pyramidal, hierarchical, authoritarian) to horizontal (network, cooperative, democratic) structures and processes.

“In international conflict: a paradigm shift from superpower, Cold War logic (zero-sum games or conflicts) to free market and trade logic (positive-sum games or win-win relationships).

“In education: a paradigm shift from IQ to EQ (emotional intelligence), from cognitive to wholistic learning (right brain, values education, experiential learning), from intellectual to affective.

“In entrepreneurship, economics and accounting of assets: paradigm shift in wealth creation from technology and markets (manipulation and dominance) to human and intellectual capital (education, training and HRD); from ‘smokestack industries’ to ‘knowledge-based industries’.

“In economics and development planning: from purely GNP (measure of “doing” or “having”) to inclusion of social indicators, sustainable development criteria and HDI or Human Development Index (measures of “being”).

“Rise of feminine aspects of deity and worship: Wicca and other feminist/naturalist cults; women in priesthood; Roman Catholic debate: Mary as co-redeemer or co-redemptrix; rediscovery of eco-spirituality and creation spirituality among Christians (‘God is everything, everything is in God’); appearance of ‘God the Mother’ themes in religious discourse; surge of interest in North America and Europe of East Asian spiritual and healing practices like Buddhism, Vaipassana meditation, tai chi and Reiki which are less paternalistic or authoritarian than the Abrahamic or West Asian religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam).

“In science: shift in interest from the outer, empirical world towards the inner, experiential world as seen in the growth and emergence of transpersonal psychology, paranormal research, phenomenological approaches in social sciences, and research in new areas such as NDE (near-death experience), lucid dreaming and remote viewing.

“Grasped as a totality, the above diverse paradigm shifts seem to point to a ‘suprashift’: from ‘hard’, materialist, masculine and yang perspectives to ‘softer’, more inward, feminine and yin perspectives.  These paradigm shifts are not occurring as complete shifts but appear as gradual movements towards a discernible direction, serving to — at minimum — leaven and moderate the masculine character of Western-dominated planetary civilizations or — at maximum — perhaps eventually dramatically altering the mix or character altogether.

“Who knows? Here we are grappling with rather subtle themes or undercurrents in planetary mass consciousness, seen across various spheres of life (trans-societal) and “feminine” or “yin” is the closest descriptor to this most intriguing undercurrent or ‘suprashift’.”

When Dr. Talisayon’s article came out in that newsletter, it was accompanied by an editorial I wrote, which says in part:

“Science has long freed humans from many myths and fallacies but has largely left undisturbed the superstitions that perpetuate the gross imbalance between the genders when it comes to opportunities for leadership, creativity, compensated productivity, comfort and security and appropriate overall care. It is a sad reality to note that even among men who are advocates of justice in general terms or in occupational-sector contexts, the issues raised by women are viewed to be in the interest only of women.  

“By way of responding to this, we can only seek to emphasize what SanibLakas Foundation said two years ago, in a short statement we now carry in this issue: ‘The liberation of women from patriarchal ideas and practices is in the best interest of entire human communities. Both the womenfolk and the menfolk should synergize for this liberation, and synergize further on the basis of this liberation. No positive social change is possible without it. No social change can be complete without it.’ (underscoring ours).

“Such acknowledgment of joint interests of the male and of the female of the human species, along with enough awareness to see dynamic synergies, unities and commonalities among diverse entities instead of seeing only conflict and antagonism among them, reaches a realm beyond the mere recognition and redress of the gender imbalance. This reflects an advance in consciousness by shifting to the ‘Right Brain,’ which is more closely identified with women and girls. The Right Brain, which controls the left side of our body, is our feminine component, though it’s truly neither male nor female. (This has no connection at all to physical attributes or behavior, like some men being limp-wristed or some men being homosexual. Confusion crops up on this matter because of semantics or language sense, where the word ‘feminine’ has been simplistically equated to ‘female.’ or ‘female-like.’).

“The ‘Right Brain,’ or the ‘feminine aspect,’ is the seat of our psychic, intuitive, aesthetic, nurturing and emotional aspect .  Even without explanation or even articulation, it  knows that oneness is all there is. Both the menfolk and the womenfolk need this aspect to be completely human.  However, because women are perceived to be stronger in this, society built up a defense mechanism for men where they have been molded to deny, to shun and to dominate this aspect and to focus on developing the aspect where they, on the average, have had the slight advantage — physical strength, cold logic, and the propensity for dichotomies and competition.  Ever prepared for strife, even if almost always unnecessarily, the Left Brain looks at Reality and only sees division, separateness, conflict and the quest for domination.”

Both genders have the Right Brain and the Left Brain, but the female of the species, on the average, have a slight Right-Brain advantage even as the male of the species, on the average, have a slight Left-brain advantage.  The difference between them is slight, but when men started to dominate human cultures the world over, the men’s Left-brain tendency focused more on discrepancy than on commonality, the difference was exaggerated. The men denied their feminine side and forced the women to deny their masculine side. Then they labeled the feminine qualities as weaknesses of character and intellect. And most of the women were so convinced that as mothers, they molded their sons and daughters so differently from each other.

Some women began to quietly appreciate their feminine selves and began to assert this as equal in value to the masculine characteristics of men. This development led to the mainstreaming in worldwide discourse of the Feminine Principle as carried by such men as Talisayon, whom we read in paragraphs above, and Wilber who writes in Brief History of Everything (p. 58): “The worldview is the mind, the base is the body, of Spirit. These Bodyminds evolve, and bring forth new worlds in the process, as Spirit unfolds its own potential, a radiant flower in Kosmic spring, not so much Big Bang as Big Bloom.”

Total human development and actualization needs the Left Brain and the Right Brain. And these aspects of human capability to understand (Left Brain) and appreciate (Right Brain) reality needs the two aspects in productive and mutually-enlightening dialogue, not in an acrimonious and mutually-destructive struggle.  Einstein’s “Big Bang” image is a very valuable label for understanding the history of the universe, including its dynamics in terms of physics. But equally valuable, I think, is the Wilber’s “Big Bloom” metaphor to appreciate the beautiful unfolding process.  

Meantime, towards the end of the Modern era ushered in and led by the Industrial Revolution of more than a century ago, groups of women sought to liberate women from patterns of the Patriarchy. But, perhaps, because it was a necessary stage in the unfoldment process, they did so under the dominant Left-Brain masculine paradigm, and adopted militant and belligerent ways to say their piece.  This produced the necessary shock effect and forced the men to pay heed and for more and more women to join up in women’s liberation struggles.

The momentum was gained but it was still squarely within the masculine paradigm of struggle and dualism. The women’s movement was not yet conscious to embrace the behavioral patterns that hew much closer to the Feminine Principle, because they had long equated the word “feminine” to weakness, and instead championed “feminism” which advo­cated, to varying degrees of disclosure, women’s domination of the world’s societies, the reversal of the patriarchal game. This has led to counterproductive excesses, which we discuss in the next section.  

But before we end this one about the Feminine Principle, allow me to share another passage from Martinez (2002, p. 88) by way of appropriately applying this Principle to the flow of history as that of profound human development:

“ ‘Retrieving women from historical oblivion.’ Writes (Digna Balanque) Apilado, means a reconsideration of the process of historical research and writing.  First is to see the history of the (Philippine) Revolution as social history that the role of women can better and truly be appreciated, for politics – and war, the grossest, most brutal, most debasing form of human existence – has from the beginning been the turf of men. Parenthetically, it is not impertinent to warn that in the future, politics will become too noble a business to be left to men.”

Mr. Martinez may be referring here to those men who are unenlightened, and therefore unreformed, men, who are obviously not yet ready to enlist in joint efforts for gender harmony.  Within this half-century or fewer decades, with the comprehensive mainstreaming of the Feminine Principle, the number of such men, and the number of women who shall hate them aloud, shall both dwindle to mutually-counterreacting minorities.

4. Counterproductive Excesses

The trouble with many women’s liberation advocates is that their justified anger over centuries of patriarchal oppression has pushed them to seek a simple reversal of roles in the inequality and antagonistic duality between the sexes, shunning the “Feminine Principle,” asserting the prerogative to adopt the ways of the Left Brain, and in effect descending to the level of consciousness and behavior more identified with the men. The tendency to seek retribution within the Mosaic paradigm of “an eye for an eye,” while understandable, hinders the development of gender harmony and therefore hinders human development and harmony as a whole. Is it all right to hinder such develop­ment, just as long as the male of the species is the one mostly to get the blame?

Of this propensity for male-bashing, Wilber (1996, 2000) warns the advocates of women’s liberation and domination that such blame-hurling insults the women themselves along with the men:

“(I)f we take the standard response – that the patriarchy was imposed on women by a bunch of sadistic and power-hungry men – then we are locked into two inescapable definitions of men and women. Namely, men are pigs and women are sheep.  That men would intentionally want to oppress half of the human race paints a dismal picture of men altogether. Testosterone or not, men are simply not that malicious in the totality of their being.

“But actually, what is so altogether unbelievable about this explanation of the patriarchy is that it paints an incredibly flattering picture of men. It says that men managed to col­lectively get together and agree to oppress half of the human race, and more amazingly, they succeeded totally in every known culture. Mind you, men have never been able to create a domineering government that lasted more than a few hundred years, but according to the feminists, men have managed this other and massive domination for five thousand – some say one hundred thousand – years. …

“But the real problem with the ‘imposition theory – men oppressed women from day one – is that it paints a horrifyingly dismal picture of women.  You simply cannot be as strong and as intelligent and oppressed. This picture necessarily paints women basically as sheep, as weaker and/or stupider than men.  Instead of seeing that, at every stage of human evolution, men and women co-created the social forms of their interaction, this picture defines women as molded by an Other. These feminists, in other words, are assuming and enforcing precisely the picture of women that they say they want to erase. But men are simply not that piggy, and women are not that sheepy.

“So one of the things I have tried to do, based on more recent feminist scholarship, is to trace out the hidden power that women have had and that influenced, co-created, the various cultural structures throughout our history, including the so-called patriarchy.  Among other things, this releases men from being defined as schmucks, and releases women from being defined as duped, brainwashed and herded.”

Another example we can use when referring to excesses of some feminists is the term “herstory” seriously being advo­cated by some women’s groups to replace the word “history.” To be sure, the writing of history in most countries up to the present has been biased for the men’s point of view.  “Herstory” as history written from the long-missing viewpoint of the women should really be fully integrated in historiography for the latter to be a valid discipline, and the introduction of the term “herstory” is a creative and very valid tongue-in-cheek reminder of that imperative. Herstory should indeed be fully developed and integrated in order to put more sense, to complete and there­fore to make essentially true, all accounts and summaries of history.  There should be enough women to become historians themselves. And to quote feminist scholar Albina Pecson Fernandez (“Why Women Are Invisible in Philippine History,” Women’s Role in Philippine History: Selected Essays, Uni­versity Center for Women Studies, UP Quezon City, 1966, p. 4, as cited by Martinez (2002), “history should also be herstory.” (underscoring mine)

Martinez (2002, p. 89) partly observes the absence of women stories in written histories of entire nations like ours:

“It is said that women have no collective memory of themselves. Is there no iniquity when more than half of mankind is without history?  The plaint, however, is understated, for this number does not include the teeming underclasses who have no memory of themselves, either – men and women peasants, workers, etc. – because they have been swamped by the summary orthodox history of the very few, great names, great events, great dates.”

Still, as an imperative for clarity, it must be stressed that while contents of historical studies are lopsided in favor of male actors, the word “history” itself has no gender sense. Contrary to the view of serious advocates of the term “herstory” to replace “history,” the latter does not include the masculine possessive pronoun “his” in its etymology; the word comes from the Latin “historia” in which language the possessing pronoun “his” does not even exist.  To allege that is like male chauvinists boycotting Hershey’s chocolate products for unjustifiably carrying a “dou­bly-gender-biased” brand!

If such a word substitution is done with “herstory” supplanting “history,” beyond aesthetics for the cause of poetic justice, that is, if “herstory” were to dominate historiography, sex-based partisanship shall have been intentionally and openly institutional­ized in this very important field of human consciousness. It would simply be a reversal of roles within the unjust framework, a victory in battle for the long-term underdog in the gender war.  

In contrast, the gender harmony paradigm is choicefully grounded on the ideal of love, which goes beyond the basic minimum ideal of fairness. It can therefore push further the evolution of the human species through an unprecedented synergy between the sexes and between the genders. The good news is that more and more women and men in the world are focusing their minds on love and harmony, away from meticulous overcalibrating for equality and preoccupation with full restitution and even role reversal.  

In essence, therefore, the Feminine Principle is graining ground as both genders, feminine and masculine, are growing in maturity to reject wars between the sexes, and wars of any kind.   

5. The Vision

Let us all share the vision of a worldwide human family that is gender-healthy, from the level of our socio-political policies to the level of our homes. And let us work hard in the coming years, and well beyond, to make our dreams come true. Let our countries be symbolized by the pairs of faces of women and men, both happily and mutually empowered, both lovingly and mutually exalted. Let us all work to fully realize gender harmony, the synergy of the two halves of humanity.

J J J

 

   

to continue, click here       to send a comment, please scroll down