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Who would we be as man and woman if we were not attached to the fact of our biological difference, and yet at the same time were not denying or avoiding that difference or whatever that may imply? I'm speaking about an unselfconscious, utterly natural state of being that simply allows the natural expression of gender to reveal itself.
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As we begin, Please answer Yes/No to two questions:
1. Are you a man or a woman?
2. Do you want to be free?
If you answered Yes to both questions I invite/urge you to read on, and to follow the links to three amazing articles. First up:
A Feminist Who Has a Male Spiritual Teacher
by Elizabeth Debold, Senior Editor, EnlightenNext
As Elizabeth's journey unfolded through feminist activism, consciousness raising, psychotherapy, assertiveness and the dynamics of human development, she discovered that her searching had come down to two questions: how true partnership and equality between the sexes could become a living reality and what that meant for women and their development.
Then she met Andrew Cohen. And in her telling of that meeting, her story became my story. She describes her disappointment that the idealism and genuine desire for transformation that had been the driving passion behind the women's movement had "hit a dead end in the path toward a genuinely new future"; that the search for voice, empowerment, deeper relationship and self-worth was "somehow remedial and rooted in victimization, rather than transformative." She began to feel that the movement had become narrowly focused on only two possible models - women either became more like men or we became more different.
~~~~Who would we be as man and woman if we were not attached to the fact of our biological difference, and yet at the same time were not denying or avoiding that difference or whatever that may imply? I'm speaking about an unselfconscious, utterly natural state of being that simply allows the natural expression of gender to reveal itself.
~~~~
As we begin, Please answer Yes/No to two questions:
1. Are you a man or a woman?
2. Do you want to be free?
If you answered Yes to both questions I invite/urge you to read on, and to follow the links to three amazing articles. First up:
A Feminist Who Has a Male Spiritual Teacher
by Elizabeth Debold, Senior Editor, EnlightenNext
As Elizabeth's journey unfolded through feminist activism, consciousness raising, psychotherapy, assertiveness and the dynamics of human development, she discovered that her searching had come down to two questions: how true partnership and equality between the sexes could become a living reality and what that meant for women and their development.
Then she met Andrew Cohen. And in her telling of that meeting, her story became my story. She describes her disappointment that the idealism and genuine desire for transformation that had been the driving passion behind the women's movement had "hit a dead end in the path toward a genuinely new future"; that the search for voice, empowerment, deeper relationship and self-worth was "somehow remedial and rooted in victimization, rather than transformative." She began to feel that the movement had become narrowly focused on only two possible models - women either became more like men or we became more different.
We were caught between two poles, poles that had been defined by the opposition that created the biases and dynamics between the sexes in the first place. Nothing truly new or liberated existed in either position.
She continues: "In meeting Andrew Cohen another possibility awoke in me - something that at the time I couldn't articulate but found so compelling that I had to pursue it." What she realized a few days later about that first encounter was:
He wanted nothing from me. He only wanted my liberation.At one point Cohen said to her, "If you realized that I am a man, and through me you have realized liberation, that could take you all the way." These words bashed around inside her for days, rudely challenging her assumptions of herself as a woman and a feminist and of Cohen as a man. She came to understand that she had not simply happened to find a male spiritual teacher - she had actually needed one. She concludes:
In an instant, I saw that every encounter that I had had with men was tangled up in an unvoiced reciprocal web of wanting - and I don't simply mean sexual desire or flirtation. It went deeper than that - as though in every encounter there were subtle trade-offs by which we constantly validated each other and created each other as the women and men we are now. In the next second, I realized that this was true, but in a different way, in my relationships with women. But Andrew wasn't part of that suffocating web of need and want. He was free of it. And in that recognition simultaneously was my own freedom.
More importantly, in standing in that freedom together, I knew that men and women could meet on entirely new ground.
Suddenly I got it: the fact that in meeting him I met the new, the unconditioned and free in myself ... in that place there is no separation, no opposition between male and female. In fact, there is no Other.
Amazingly, I've come to realize that Andrew being a man is essential to my liberation. Why, said one well-intentioned feminist friend, if you wanted to dive into the spiritual life, couldn't you have found a woman teacher? But had I done so, I would have clung steadfastly to my identification with being a woman first as the most essential aspect of who I am. And it is not.
In this dimension of freedom, this place before and beyond time that is who we all are most deeply, there is no gender, because freedom has no history. It has no past, and in the spiritual work we are doing, that freedom from the past is the first step.
Men and women together have a lot to learn from Elizabeth's story, and again I encourage you to read the full article HERE.
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Liberation Without a Face is a conversation in EnlightenNext Magazine between Elizabeth Debold and Andrew Cohen. If what you read here showed you something about yourself and/or your relationships that you needed or longed to see, I encourage you with all my heart to take the time to read this one as well - if you think you can't go much deeper into the man/woman realm than Elizabeth has done alone, I dare you to take the plunge with her and her teacher together.
It's only by coming together that something can change because our separation - from both a spiritual and cultural perspective - is what holds everything in place. ... (Andrew) reveals a radical reality that challenges each of us individually and collectively to go beyond our known identities into the revolutionary heart of an unknown possibility for human being that destroys separation and otherness. There may be nothing else on the planet more important than this.~~~~
Liberation Without a Face is Total Revolution is a shorter essay by Andrew Cohen along the same theme - if you're pressed for time, this one's for you (but promise me you'll read the other one sometime). Here's a clip:
Finally liberated from the ceaseless distraction and fascination with difference, we can constantly realize and freely be who we are, as woman, as man, without fear, free from the need to assert the significance of difference over the ultimate fact of truth.~~~~
Truth has no gender. It has no name and has no face. That’s why it is a mystery and that’s why it will always be a mystery…. Through that mystery, an enormous potential is born that releases us from the limitations of who we have been–personally and culturally. It is up to us to make good on that potential. And then discover and create who we are as women and men based on that truth that has no gender.
- Andrew Cohen
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