You may recall that Krivda has a few references to these Principles - as emphatically distinct from ‘gods’ and ‘goddesses’. However, I could not explore them in any depth in a book that was already too densely packed. Besides, a whole other book would be required (sigh…) for this neglected major topic. For now, a few pages will have to suffice.
I am alarmed to realize how utterly unknown those Principles are among us humans, our perspective totally clouded by societal ideas of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’. Such ignorance on our part is an enabler of the sad situation in which our societies exist - irresolvable strife on the inter-sexual front tangled in an inextricable maze of ‘gender’ stereotypes, where un-reality reigns supreme. To be a man or to be a woman is a big problem for many, children are being tortured into gender-bending mutilation, sexed bodies are a mere commodity for consumption and worse… and the list goes on. All of which has taken away from us the profound and simple elegance of what the Principles hold.
We have identified many culprits for all this horror, from ‘patriarchy’ to ‘pedophiles’, ‘satanists’ to female perverts, corrupt institutions to insane ideologies… But how much of it is due to our own failure to know, and to embody, who we are?
Who we are is occulted from us by literally everything in our lives, as we continue to deal with the unfinished business of the patriarchal order, with our programmed beliefs about what is a proper man or woman, with the never-ending commodification and pornographication of (mainly) female bodies, in a fast worsening context of technological falsification - reality-stripping - of all of life.
How many of us remember, or are even aware of the harm wrought by the ‘sexual revolution’ of some decades ago? How easily has the consumer mentality normalized the fundamentally absurd and insulting notion of ‘having sex’, the claimed requirement for society and armies to be served by prostitutes? How easily has ‘science’ persuaded us that ‘having sex’ is basically a matter of ‘hormones’, and just one of those ‘needs’ like the need for food and water? For those who dislike the recent linguistic acquisition of ‘having sex’ (a glorious invention of the English language that has spawned some strange avatars in other languages), is ‘making love’ a better option - as if ‘love’ could be ‘made’? Like bread or small talk?
And then there is the equally normalized repertoire of ‘dirty’ words and slang language, the better to debase and to meat-grind one of the great mysteries of human life…
The unrelenting insult dehumanizes us, and we cringe instinctively at this or that manifestation of it, for something in us knows that it is grievously wrong. Something in us knows that a deep part of us is being raped in a variety of overt and covert ways. Something remembers that we are intrinsically cosmic beings - although few of us are aware of it. And it is precisely for us not to remember our true nature that the mysterious essence of what it is to be a man or a woman must be debased, commodified, insulted, dehumanized, variously traumatized. Reduced to ‘sex’, ‘having sex’, severed from the heart and soul of who we are.
Frankly, do cosmic beings need to ‘have sex’, to twist themselves out of cosmic shape to obey programmed ‘gender’ stereotypes? Is it sensible for cosmic beings to self-hate for being a man or a woman, to undergo sex-change surgery, to despise the other sex for not conforming with expectations? Do cosmic beings really need to inflict sexual perversions on others?
Did everything get better when well-intentioned seekers swung the spiritual pendulum to resolve ‘patriarchy’ by replacing God with the Goddess, and by bringing matriarchy (assuming it existed) out of oblivion?
In all their variety, Gods and Goddesses, matriarchies and patriarchies, are no more than theories, fabrications or egregores, devices to keep our consciousness subservient to the system that wants us ignorant, frightened and manipulated. They keep us divorced from the greater reality that inhabits our male or female incarnations.
But that greater reality is fundamental. It is nothing less than the two primordial Principles that enable the Universe to generate experience, manifestation, creation, consciousness and… ever-deepening love. Through us as their incarnated expressions.
The west, and the whole world actually, are strikingly ignorant of them. Which is hardly surprising, considering how little they show up in the origin myths of the world. All cultures have creation stories or mythologies with a variety of initial feminine and masculine beings, often split from some original androgynous one. But the overlords did a good job of erasing humanity’s holistic memory - those stories are fragmentary, often absurd, and hardly portray their initial masculine and feminine beings as being relevant to the lives of present-day people.
Few of us realize however that at least one major culture has retained something of the Great Principles. Unsurprisingly, India is that culture, which is generally the place to go to in search of relatively less falsified memory of humanity. Russia, that shares much ancient heritage with India, also holds some of that memory, but it is beyond my ability to include here.
The Great Principles having been forgotten most everywhere are seldom even recognized by anyone stumbling upon them - even though India does not keep them secret nor hidden.
Shakti and Shiva
Remarkably, India rendered a huge service to humanity by giving the Principles a veritable revival in the relatively recent past - the wave of Tantrik spirituality that began some time around the fifth century CE, a salutary reaction to the ossifying, deadening system of hyper-patriarchal brahminism.
In a nutshell, Tantra as a ‘school’ of philosophy and practice reinstated Shakti the Feminine Principle as the central ground of reality, in full and joyful partnership with Shiva the Masculine Principle.
These two, in spite of everything that is said and written about them, are not a god and a goddess - they are often called such out of habit and inertia, because most people are still wedded to the notion of ‘god’ and not mentally prepared to work with Principles. I use the term ‘Principles’ for lack of anything better. To use the terms ‘god/goddess’ maintains a false ‘spiritual distance’ or barrier, since humans are by definition not gods and goddesses. On the other hand, as Principles of the Universe, the Masculine and the Feminine are alive in each one of us, and thus knowable in each one of us - and especially so in humans as cosmic beings emanated from these Principles.
It bears mentioning that the context in which I bring up the Principles is that explored in the book Krivda - the whole phenomenon of ‘religion’ was devised and is maintained to keep us separated from our source in the Universe, from who we are, to keep us ‘believing’ in some deity instead of directly knowing our source. ‘Gods’ and priesthoods diligently fill the gap of our programmed ‘belief’ that blocks our knowing experientially our direct relationship to the Universe and its prime Principles, of which we are emanations.
How can we approach the Principles? First we need a basic understanding of cosmogenesis. I mean a basic sense of it that works for us spiritually/philosophically, and pragmatically - not an official scientific explanation (since anyway science only gives us theories, in particular the increasingly unacceptable theory of the ‘big bang’ at the speculative origin of the Universe).
Whatever it is that we call ‘the Universe’ or the ‘One’ or the ‘Totality’, it is a ‘realm’ of pure potentiality, of pure all-encompassing ‘consciousness’ (perhaps) that actually knows nothing, and is not capable of creating worlds directly in and of itself. It must generate a first level of ‘differentiation’ out of itself, from which further levels develop the capacity to generate the components of creation that provide back to the Universe the experience of its ‘consciousness’. The first ‘differentiation’ is the core one - a first emerging duality to emanate out of itself all the cascading ‘levels’ or ‘densities’ of ‘dimensionality’, all the way into material manifestation.
If the Universe is to acquire manifested realities, what does it need? Obviously, it needs energy - to do stuff. And something that can ‘orient’ or ‘organize’ the energy into making something. So the Universe starts off with a Principle of Energy and a Principle of Ideation - these terms have to be taken with great caution, for they denote something too subtle and too huge for us to understand mentally. What we must consider is a vast and vague emerging reality in which resides the potential for doing stuff and the potential for ‘thinking’ stuff. Vague though the concept may be, it makes sense - everything we do in life is fueled by some kind of energy and structured by some kind of thought, but living with thought alone drives us quite mad and following only our ‘energies’ tends to throw us against brick walls.
That prime differentiation emanates the third level of reality that begins to make Energy and Ideation operative - the Masculine and the Feminine Principles, which evolve their different ‘qualities’ or ‘attributes’, not for the sake of those differences but towards mutual complementarity capable of generating all manner of creativity (beyond anything our minds can grasp).
Indian Tantra makes it abundantly clear that the Feminine (Shakti) is the ground of reality as ‘energy’, a generative force. Energy on its own is unwieldy and chaotic. The Masculine (Shiva) represents the partner category of ideation, or ‘information’, that which in-forms, gives form to unruly currents of energy. Shiva alone is inert, does nothing. Shakti alone is overactive, does ‘too much’. Their partnership is the greatest game of the Universe. There is no hierarchy between them - they are the core duality of the Universe, utterly and necessarily complementary.
Tantra introduced a truly revolutionary current into the stultified spiritual landscape of India. It is no wonder that it gained tremendous popularity across all social classes and castes. Tantrik art portrayed the couple in countless images where Shakti dances on the inert corpse of Shiva (and his static ‘consciousness’), restoring life energy into spirituality and making it embodied. Tantra enabled humans consciously to experience themselves as direct emanations of the Great Principles.
(Notice that I am not making any reference to ‘tantric sex’ that is unfortunately the main if not exclusive derivation known in the west - since of course the west must not access the ‘real thing’, and western consumers have to get their tantra through ‘sex’).
In most Shakti-Shiva dialogues, Shiva does most of the talking or the teaching, which Shakti absorbs eagerly. But there are some dialogues where she does the teaching, which gives Shiva great delight, for she breathes the ground of reality into knowledge.
As Shakti and Shiva cultivate their dialogue, they refine their own respective being. The Principles here are also the humans who embody them experientially. Shiva deepens the enlivened capacity of ‘mind’, and Shakti activates the ground of reality that is ‘heart’. The exquisite interplay of heart and mind - the energy of love and the power of consciousness - unites and reunites endlessly the mutually loving facets of reality being generated.
We are all Shakti and Shiva
Women and men all have a different mix of Shiva and Shakti, of what we take often too reductively to be ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’. There is no prescribed stereotype for men to be all-mind and women to be all-heart. But for men in the Tantrik school, there is no bypassing Shakti - they must grow into their own potential of consciousness through the heart-mind of women that transforms them. In fact, for both it is ‘heart’ as essence and wisdom that must be cultivated as the ground for joyfully creative ‘mind’.
A great secret of incarnation as man or woman - a point not made explicit in Tantra - is known to esoteric practitioners, and is highly relevant to our predicament today. Contrary to western ideas about men being ‘stronger’ than the ‘weaker sex’, women being Shakti naturally possess very much more energy than men, who depend on it for their own growth. That energy comes in many forms. And it must be gifted to men (in the many forms that express love) who must know how to treasure it and the women who provide it. That energy is what, esoterically speaking, matures a man into himself - and of course, producing and raising children takes much more woman energy than man energy.
Considering such an energy differential, is it any surprise that male gods and priests, male-dominated religion, culture and society have done a very deliberate and rigorous job of debasing, un-souling and commodifying women, anything feminine, Nature - throughout the past several millennia? The erosion of Shakti energy in women has been epigenetically imprinted into the genome, amplified with each new form of anti-human tyranny, such that today’s women genetically inherit a fraction of what it used to be. It is little wonder that women now have considerably less of that cosmically natural energy than in a saner past.
Although the struggle for women’s rights was a necessary and logical phase in recent history, much of feminism and the acquisition of ‘equality’ with men in the workplace have actually depleted women’s energy further in the pursuit of desirably masculine ‘success’. Which ends up doing a disservice to both sexes - the overlords knowingly chose to target the F/feminine side of the partnership, as the easiest way to make men weaker, subservient and loyal to the system while giving them the ‘privileges’ of superiority over women.
Many men today, who do not receive enough Feminine love energy, rebel against women, instead of questioning how the system works to give them a false superiority and make them weak. There is a backlash against women as ‘selfish’, egocentric, and invaders of male space. Male frustrations are blamed on women, on feminism that has made them ‘like men’, and the only way out is seen to be a return to male rule over the female as a lesser human good only for ‘sex’ and housewifely obedience. Little do they realize that women have been deliberately depleted of who they are. Few are sufficiently aware that men have taken for granted the otherwise naturally flowing energy of women. Little do they acknowledge that in the ignorance of all concerned, there was no other option than for women to seek ‘equality with men’ as the solution for their own survival.
In the process, women have lost the affinity of their energy for the in-forming ability of men, leaving that energy (what is left of it) to run amok emotionally, often in forms of irrationality that men abhor. Everybody ends up lonely and miserable, looking for illusory solutions out there.
Instead of mutual blaming and hating, understanding the Shakti and Shiva Principles offers simple and elegant guidance back into mutually appreciating complementarity - which, by the way, would pull a big chunk of the rug from under the overlords’ edifice.
However that edifice has nurtured a major difficulty for all. Both women and men in modernity have become more ‘mind’ and less ‘heart’. Women have acquired conventionally ‘male’ mind-professions and thinking patterns. We are in a situation unlike the traditional Tantrik one where men’s consciousness must refine ‘heart’ through women’s naturally abundant heart energy. The domineering mind and the orphaned heart of both sexes today are the fertile battle-ground for the overlords to engineer some kind of final cosmic divorce - ripping the Principles away from Earth.
Nowadays, both women and men must restore the root of the mind in the heart-ground of reality. They have a common journey to undertake - unprecedented in human history, the challenge of an extraordinary opportunity, of cosmic significance.
In Tantra, whatever ‘feminization’ is sought by men and ‘masculinization’ may be sought by women, the ultimate result is for both to achieve the full potential of consciousness rooted in the true essence of the loving heart. Women and men today now share the common space of ‘mind’ and the promise of a common space of restored ‘heart’, with the palette of variations that ‘heart and mind’ can elicit in every different human being.
If we understand what has been persistently wrought against our cosmic selves, and accept that the Principles still operate in each one of us, together we have the most exquisite joint project to pursue. It is absolutely within our power to regain the power of our heart, and the sanity of our mind, all in one ‘package’ mutually cultivated. It requires no equipment, money, external inputs, only a sincere dedication to the power of the Principles that never stopped living in us.
Absolutely punctual article in my life, Enna. I was just overlooking the content of the Freyja Course which is about the truly biological roles of Female and Male. Then this comes in! Bang!!!!
This topic is dropping into my range of view for the last 6 months. I hope you do find the energy to write this much needed book. I will post your newsletter on my facebook now. Immense gratitude from my Heart to your Heart!
I printed this out to read -- to 'hold' the words and really contemplate. Comments later.... Thank you, Enna.