As a passionate activist in the women’s liberation movement for nearly two decades, EnlightenNext’s Elizabeth Debold has developed a deep understanding of the spiritual challenges faced by women on the leading edge. In the following quote, she shares her vision for the new role that women can play in the future evolution of culture: Continue reading…
The Future Feminine
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Is sex evolving? Barbara Marx Hubbard, renowned evolutionary visionary and author of Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, speaks with EnlightenNext‘s Elizabeth Debold about the emerging new potentials of an evolving human sexuality. Continue reading…
The following post is from Amy Edelstein, a former editor for EnlightenNext magazine, who spent the past week in Melbourne, Australia at the Parliament of the World’s Religions with Andrew Cohen and the rest of the EnlightenNext team:
From UN Millennium Development Goals to an exploration of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy and a call for integral education to start informing our higher education systems to new visions for women of faith, the Parliament themes bombard participants at all kinds of different levels and dimensions of the mind, psyche, and self.
The session on the Divine Feminine was one that perhaps the most disturbing and confusing of all the sessions I attended or heard of. Continue reading…
Quick: “masculine”–take ten seconds and say the words that come to mind that describe masculine. Next, do the same with “feminine.” That was the first exercise that my friend and colleague Cindy Wigglesworth and I asked participants to do in the breakout session that we led at the Integral Leadership in Action conference (October 15-18). What did the participants say? Continue reading…
In the following excerpt from her groundbreaking article, “The Divine Feminine Unveiled,” EnlightenNext magazine senior editor Elizabeth Debold describes the challenging and sacred role that women need to play in the evolution of culture: Continue reading…
I’ve decided to create an ongoing series of posts to challenge one of the most popular beliefs of our era: that women have a profoundly different value set than men, and that embracing these particularly feminine values will change the world. Men, and masculine thinking, have dominated the world and made a mess, so now women, and the feminine, are desperately needed to clean it all up. That’s how the story goes. And in postmodern spiritual circles, these traditional qualities of women that are associated with our roles as mothers, wives, and caretakers are often raised to, well, divine status. That’s why I call this the myth of the Divine Feminine.
This isn’t problematic simply because women end up once again with the thankless task of cleaning up after everyone! As I have written before, this way of looking at the world polarizes the masculine and feminine, and men and women, in ways that are simplistic and divisive. Moreover, our ideas of the feminine — representing compassion, feeling, caring, embodiment, nurturing, etc. etc. — are reheated leftovers of the Victorian ideal of the good woman, the “Angel in the House.” We’ve just sexed her up a bit. How can we create a new culture, if our template for women’s role is based on being sexy but “good,” bound to 19th C. ideals of womanhood? Those feminine values that are supposed to change the world are primarily based on women’s age-old roles of relating to sex and reproduction. That can’t possibly lead to anything new between the sexes, can it? If we want to create a new culture, then men and women will have to find a new basis of trust that will be its foundation. Because the relationship between women and men creates the bedrock dynamic upon which any culture stands.
So, here’s my first salvo at the idea that women are inherently different (read: more caring, compassionate, peace loving and just plain good) than men. Check out Cleopatra and the Macedonian queens. (Sounds like the name of a girl band!) In a recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, Stacy Schiff comments that Cleopatra, who ruled for 21 years, “was essentially a female king.” Continue reading…
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