Of all the collective manifestations of the ego that we see around the world, perhaps the one that is most disturbing to me is the systematic suppression of women and the feminine psyche. The ego finds much more fertile soil in which to grow and multiply itself in the male of the species. This is not to say nor suggest that women are somehow free of the ego, no human being is. It is, however immanently less pervasive and destructive than it is in men. History bears witness to this, especially in the last two-thousand years or so.
The lack of ego primacy in women, when compared to men, is largely because they are far more tuned into their intelligent faculties of intuition. Thus, they tend to be far less constricted by role than males – far more empathetic to other people, other life forms, and the natural world. Women would most likely never have declared war on nature on the scale we have witnessed in recent centuries.
Worse yet, war was waged directly against women themselves. As best can be reasonably estimated (record keeping was sparse, limited, and secretive at the time) between three and five million women were killed by the male dominated church between the 12th and 15th centuries. There are only a few runs of mass murder in history on this level. Women who were doing nothing more than being in keeping with their inherent feminine nature – walking alone in a forest, demonstrating care for animals, learning about medicinal plants in order to help alleviate suffering, were branded as witches and burned alive. The feminine was cast as evil and the resulting subjugation of the qualities that could heal the world were banished from it en masse.
Christianity was certainly not the lone purveyor of this mass psychosis and collective insanity, though notably the most violent. The hands of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, even Buddhism were not clean either. The status of women, through a massive act of reductionism, was rendered that of child bearer and property of men. Once this campaign was in full complement, the running of the world became the exclusive wheelhouse of males who denied the more nuanced and incredibly valuable gifts of the feminine. The world would careen toward and be engulfed by the violence and destruction that have been the organizing paradigm ever since.
All this begs the question of why? History prior to this clearly demonstrates that there were cultures where the feminine ethos was not feared but revered and celebrated – the Sumarians, Egyptians, Celtics. So why then? What changed such that men felt so threatened by women? The answer is an ego driven epiphany of sorts that saw men come to believe that only the male would be capable of completely dominating the planet. Power was the goal – women needed to be rendered powerLESS in order to achieve it.
A heartbreaking by-product of this mass suppression is that most women feel it as emotional pain – most often it manifests as an omnipresent current of background unhappiness. Other times it takes the stage front and center through the horrors visited on women like rape, torture and violence.
Gratefully, we are beginning to see a seismic change in many parts of the world. People are waking up in large numbers – sometimes individually, sometimes collectively. We can know this because we see the growing pains. Deep schisms are appearing as those who are still under full control of their power-hungry egos start building ramparts to reinforce their slipping grip on that power. But their position is indefensible.
They will lose the war.
The world will change.
The balance will restore.
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