The Union of Wills

‘Union of Wills’ whose ultimate fruition is service to all beings. It will make the man-woman relationship more beautiful than a symbiotic union.

Man is a thought - adventurer, says D.H. Lawrence. Real thought is an experience. It begins as a change in the blood, a slow convulsion and revolution in the body itself. It ends as a new piece of awareness, a new reality in mental consciousness.

On this account, thought becomes an adventure, and not a practice. In order to think one must risk oneself doubly. First one must meet life in the body. Then, face the result in the mind.
The risk is double, because each of us has two selves. First is the body which is vulnerable and never quite within our control. The body with its irrational sympathies, desires and passions, its peculiar direct communication, is defying the mind. And second is the conscious ego, the self.
Historically, the male has changed considerably in the past fifty years. The earlier male was a person who was hard-working, responsible, fairly well-disciplined: he didn’t see women’s souls very well, though he looked at their bodies a lot. The present day male is vulnerable to collective opinion: if you were a man you were supposed to like football, cricket and other games, be aggressive, never cry and always provide. But this image of male lacked female. It lacked some sense of flow; it lacked compassion. He was a macho man.
Separation and unity – the excitement and fear, the triumph and anxiety they generate-will remain continuing themes in adult life. In adulthood, when we find ourselves in an intimate relationship, each of us experience again, even if only in highly attenuated form, those early struggles around separation and unity-the conflict between wanting to be one with another and the desire for an independent, autonomous self. 
For each woman and man who comes into any relationship stirs the yearnings from an unremembered but still powerfully felt past; each brings with her or him two people-the adult and the child. Both know the agony and the ecstasy of a symbiotic union. Ecstasy, because in the mother’s arms the infant could experience the bliss of unity and the security that accompanies it. Agony, because from the time of birth life seems a series of separations. 
Of course as adults we know there is no return to the old symbiotic union; survival is no longer at stake in separation. But the child within feels as if this were still the reality. And the adult responds to the archaic memory of those early feelings even though they are far from consciousness. Thus, we do not usually know what buffets us about-what makes us eager to plunge into a relationship one moment and frightens us into anxious withdrawal in the next. We know only that we long for closeness and connection with another, and that we feel uncomfortable when we get it. 
In this process, two things are central: the crystallisation of a gender identity and the maintenance of what psychologists call ‘ego boundaries’ that set us off from the rest of the world. This in larger part, is what a child’s separation struggle is all about-a struggle that’s different for boys and for girls just because it is a woman who has mothered them both.
It’s obvious that the experience of being male and being female is different. But what has been less clear until now is how the process of developing and internalising a gender identity affects the development of ego boundaries and thus, determines the shape of feminine and masculine personality in adulthood. 
Today, the man-woman relationship is a microcosm of the interaction of larger forces in the greater cosmos. However, this sacredness is lost when men and women relate to each other primarily as personalities. Then their magnetic polarity is diminished by what is known as ‘little needs’ for entertainment, excitement, security, admiration and so on. The real magic of love can happen when their connection reflects the dynamic interplay of the energies in the cosmos at large.
J.G. Bennett writes about the inner meaning of marriage as a ‘Union of Wills’ whose ultimate fruition is service to all beings.  
In order to be able to serve others, we first have to learn to serve one another, to consider other person’s well-being before our own. This union of wills will make the man-woman relationship more beautiful than a symbiotic union.

Are Men Equal to Women?

As men have the stronger sex urge, women have the stronger “sympathy” urge.

Instead of asking the question: “Are women equal to men?” we should reverse the question to: “Are men equal to women?” and we will have a question which can not as easily be answered by a resounding “Yes”.
The obvious fact - no less scientific because it is obvious - is that women can be mothers and men cannot. Biologically speaking there is no comparison between motherhood and fatherhood for the simple reason that a man is all but unrelated to his own child in that the mother has alone been carrying the child for nine months; the mother is the one who has been feeding and coddling and burping and tending the child; she has all but monopolised him and he her. Man is an extern, a foreigner, an intruder in the biological process which has cast him aside as a mere casual incident. He does posses a muscular superiority and dominance but his system is not changed according to whether or not his sperm shall have impregnated an ovum; his whole life has not taken on a sudden, overwhelming, terrifically personal new meaning; to him there has been no radical change of outlook, no constant feeling of personal responsibility and dedication, no deep-seated pulsation throbbing throughout his system saying: “We are no longer one but two.” And as the days of confinement and hour of delivery draw near, there is not the same numbing apprehension of an impending rendezvous with destiny, the glorious climax of immediate cooperation with God in the struggle that new existence may find his way into a bright world; nor with the victory won does there come to man the warm rich glow of achievement and honour and personal fulfilment as a tender warm bundle of life looks up with clear but unsteady eyes into the wan smiling face of the woman he will ever after call “Mother.”
It is impossible for an adult, even for an adult savage, not to understand that it is particularly from the mother and within the mother that the child lives and moves and derives its being. More than that: after the child is born, nature has decreed that the child needs its mother for “a nourishment that has never been equalled” and the mother needs the child not only for deep psychological reasons but because the child “through its (breast-feeding) functioning is related to the uterine involution which it facilitates and completes.” Mother and child need each other for their physical, emotional, and psychological well-being. In all of this, the man is certainly not equal.
The burden of hundreds of weighty doctoral dissertations and thousands of excellent educational experiments has been: a child’s earliest days are his most important and impressionable days. Yet biology is oblivious to any complaint of the male that the woman is by nature destined to be closer to the child. Or that she will have more to say about moulding the human race. Or that she will be the one who will more closely cooperate with God in moulding and developing the future inhabitants of home, state, and heaven, if God had wanted the man to be closer to the child, he would have given the male the appropriate nurturing equipment and functions.
Sociability
A woman is much more likely to become emotional about somebody. Her greater affectivity is toward persons; she is a more social person. She is interested in the living human being; not in things, actions, accomplishments, theories, statistics, or impersonal plans as such. She is more interested in getting along with others, and she works at it. Allport and Hartman found that girls are less resistant to social situations generally; they are the greater “conformists.
Heidbreder found that women prefer more socially approved traits than do the men; they prefer more desirable social traits in themselves and in others, while men-egotists as they seem to be, prefer more desirable traits in others than in themselves. The man is less willing to put himself out to “get along”; he is more satisfied with the role of the “great independent” or the lone wolf. In considering woman’s greater sociability there is the biocultural factor that the woman “gets ahead” through marriage and therefore by attracting another through personality, charm, and ingratiating ways, while the man “gets ahead” by proving himself in business and other more impersonal ways.
Cooperation
As men have the stronger sex urge, women have the stronger “sympathy” urge. As women need greater affection, social attention, emotional response, personal assistance and aid, they feel others need it too. And they respond accordingly. Their spirit of cooperation, their willingness to subordinate their own personal aggrandisement or pet project for the common good, their “social aid and uplift tendencies,” are all indicated at an early age. Girls’ “service score” and “altruistic attitudes” surpass consistently those of their brothers even though their male counterparts have a worse reputation for lack of cooperation than seems to be warranted. Daughters perform more kind deeds and do more chores for both parents.
If we ask why it is that from early childhood to old age it is the female sex which in general is the more “socially aware” and altruistic, the answer seems obvious enough: women expand their “motherliness” into the whole broad, needy world with which they come in contact. In this second division of the emotions, the altruistic, there is accordingly no doubt that women are superior.
The Hardy Sex
Doctors agree the woman has the more viable, more resistant body, The secret of her success in this field, as in so many others, is her excess of female hormones, Our hormone supply is our medicinal supply-we always have an ever-ready automatic medicine kit, Nevertheless, as Dr. Hugh H. Darby of Columbia University points out, though both sexes produce both “male” and “female” hormones the production overwhelmingly favours the woman for:
Even among children from three to ten years old, little boys, on the average, produce twice as much of the “male hormones” as do little girls while little girls produce forty or fifty times as much of the “female” hormones as do little boys.
This excess of hormones with their healing power gives woman such marvelous recuperative powers that she can look forward to six more years of life than the male. At all ages the female death rate is at least twenty-five per cent lower than the male. Not only will the Woman benefit proportionately wherever there are improved living and medical conditions but she has less chance of being a victim of anyone of the major diseases.
Physical versus Psychological
Leclercq characterises man as more “carnal” and woman as more “passionate.” Man’s libidinous affectability is localised and propulsive; woman’s diffuse and more amenable to psychological implications. This dimorphic sex impetus gives rise to such rough approximations as the followings:
It is estimated that in about 90% of the boys it is the physical factor (of the sex instinct) that predominates, while in about 90% of the girls it is the psychic factor. Dr. Bigelow expresses it this way: The sexual instincts of the young man are characteristically active, aggressive, spontaneous, and automatic; while those of the girl, as a rule, are passive, and subject to awakening by external stimuli, especially in connection with affection.
Not only in the human world but in the whole animal world it is primarily the male who searches for the female. In the cellular origins of multicellular life it is the spermatozoa which seek out the ova and vice versa. This basic male-female pattern as existing among the games continue the biologic stairways right into the formal ballroom of mankind: the male is the aggressor and the female is the coy latent potential mother - the conserver, nourisher, personal protector, and builder of the vital world. To the male, the sexual union is more often an end in itself; to the woman it is more often a means: a means to satisfy the male, or a means to obtain children.
The consideration of these basic sociological, and psychological differences helps us understand why there is some truth in saying that for the male love is ninety per cent physical and ten per cent psychological, and for the female love is ten per cent physical and ninety per cent psychological. Do they also go to prove women are far superior to men?

Feminine Genius

Her strength is her weakness.
She challenges by faltering,
she fights by yielding,
and she conquers by falling.

- Author unknown
ll cultures have adored women; studied their physical structure; researched on their thinking process; glorified their beauty; wondered at the subtle splash of wisdom that comes from them; But finally they shut them in to a cascade and present them as show piece not knowing what to do with them. Understandably that is precisely the work of a male who stresses the aspect of doing instead of being.
For a man, a woman is a paradox. She seems to be weak, losing, soft, tender, supple and yet that is her strength, victory, dominance and superiority. She is strong with all her weaknesses; she fights while giving in, and conquers while falling.
There are differences between man and woman. Many have written about it, though not so eloquently. Many cultures, be it western or eastern, have tried to vocalize it in the desire to bring out the essence of women. Though we have greatly succeeded in explaining, we find ourselves at a loss when we try to explain their true essence. We find ourselves incomplete, confused and some times totally missed the point. The individuality of a woman stands before us with ever more richness beyond our normal logical, mathematical and human calculations.
This leads us again to further the discussion on the missing side of male psyche, namely the extra sensory perception, imagination, intuition, lateral thinking etc., of which the female psyche seems to be way ahead of a male psyche. At the same time we know that there is a man in woman and a woman in man lying dormant showing himself or herself occasionally in thought or in action. This leads us to the androgynous nature, the principle of Arthanariswarar, the Yin Yang etc.,
After centuries of domination of male psyche in developmental, historical, mathematical and logical fields, there is an emerging search of the female psyche in ecological, philosophical, metaphysical, anthropological and parascientific fields. This search takes place in the unexplored vicissitudes of human life. This certainly opens us a whole new way of being, thinking and responding to the human problems and challenges existing for centuries for which the male psyche could hardly find a solution and to which the female psyche was forbidden to enter.
The Genius
A genius may be taken as one who is recognised for his/her extraordinary power of invention or origination. In pre-Christian Roman theology a “genius” was a spirit presiding over the destiny of a person or place. By extension we have come to take a genius as one who through domination of his particular field influences a sizable portion of mankind. There is no common acceptance of what is meant by the word. Therefore, there can be no question of claiming any scientific exactitude in the following discussion.
Sorokin’s investigations indicate that only about 100,000 individuals left any notable trace on the memory of history from the forty-five billions who inhabited the earth through the 2,250 years that his study covered. Thus, only one person out of every 4,50,000 had immortalised himself. The chief arenas in which they have attained their pre-eminence are the following nine: government, religion, literature, scholarship, science, philosophy, business, music, and the other fine arts. Of these 100,000 historically towering elite, perhaps 95 per cent are men. More striking is the fact that all our recorded great geniuses have been men. Not one woman has ever risen to the ultimate heights in any field of human thought, action, or cultural creation. When we start to mention such names as Sappho and realise that only scattered fragments of her works remain, while her name is the dubious symbol of an immortal cult, or the name of the little known Benedictine nun Hroswitha whose copious works of the tenth century might be considered as the bridge between ancient and modern drama-when we dig and scrape into the bottom of the barrel labelled “All-Time Geniuses” and come up with specimens of such mediocre size as this, it becomes all too painfully clear that there is not one woman who could be classified as an all-time-great creative genius.
No one has given a satisfactory explanation of this amazing enigma. This brief present sketch will not change the history of the past’s unsatisfactory explanations but it may suggest further investigation.
Feminine Genius
The archetypal relationship between man and woman seems ideal and beautiful on the surface, and we are all taken up by its glamour. We are flabbergasted and are immersed in the subject. But where is the individual in the tragic tale of Tristan and Isolde, of Romeo and Juliet, of Salim and Anarkali, of the prince and princess who live happily ever after? The individual psyche stands far outside the tale, because it is an analogy, a symbol of what goes on within himself. Male and female within the individual must battle with each other in opposition until they achieve union. But the actual man and woman who live in the world and love each other must not lose sight of their true identity in the battle and the union. They must not mistake this one symbol for the whole story of their lives. There must be surrender, surely, in the act of union, in the bliss of love, in the hell of hate, but one’s individuality is more precious than any archetype.
But there are few individuals, few who have emerged from the primordial ooze enough to stand outside these archetypal dramas. Men and women who are asleep, who have no real individuality, find themselves compelled to be like the polar opposites of masculinity and femininity, like stereotypes, regardless of who they are. Men feel they must be dominant, aggressive, and active, and women feel they must be submissive, passive, and receptive. They cultivate the qualities of the archetype rather than their own peculiarities.
Since we live in a patriarchy, masculine values based on masculine qualities are the prescribed modes of thinking. Women take on the dark side of this. If the masculine world would open itself to feminine knowledge there would be a hieros gamos on a large scale, a union of opposites, a marriage between art and science, between poetry and philosophy. This alchemical union takes place on the individual plane in a few people but rarely, and these people attain to something like genius of being. So, though the masculine mind rejects the feminine, on the individual plane this most despised thing, the stone rejected by the builders, is actually the cornerstone of the alchemical work.
What is the feminine part of the psyche? It is a blind spot, so it is difficult to see. Let us say the intellect is masculine; it is ordered, structured, and finite. Objectivity and rationality, we shall also say are masculine. And therefore, what lies outside these masculine realms is feminine territory: intuition, subjectivity, and irrationality. It is not this simple though, because objectivity is very subjective, rationality is very irrational, and the borders between intellect and intuition cannot be found. And here lies the threat of the feminine point of view: it forever beholds the folly of pure rationality, pure intellect, pure objectivity. However, given the strict duality of the male-female myth, men are rational, objective, and intellectual; women are irrational, subjective, and intuitional. We who have lived under the yoke of this myth for thousands of years have become like the creatures of the myth. This is a sad state of affairs because intellect without intuition is a stale rigid trap.
Men need the qualities they project onto women. We believe because of our conditioning that a man is not a man if he has any of the qualities he gets rid of by claiming they are exclusively female. He knows unconsciously that he needs those qualities-that is why he is drawn to certain women, women who display outwardly the qualities he has hidden within himself, in the dark shadows of his psyche. It is no wonder a man wants to possess a woman, he really wants to reclaim that lost part of himself, to be whole again. He must have or imagine he has a woman who is all of those qualities he is missing. She will be an extension of himself, devoid of individuality. This is how she fulfils her role as mate to her man.
The tragedy of this situation strikes at both sides. A man may seem to have individuality and dignity but he is not himself if he has repressed part of himself. The tragedy on the other side is that a woman doesn’t even have this false individuality and dignity. She is only a part of the man, like Adam’s rib. She has individuality and dignity vicariously: She must repress the part other psyche that demands these things and project this part onto her man. He opens all doors for her, he blazes a path through the world for both of them. One wonders what men do with their emotions and what women do with their aggressions. What does a man do inside himself when he would weep? What does a woman do inside herself when she would be forceful and take over a situation? There must be murders and imprisonments inside, amputations and other tortures, punishments and deformities.
What is the feminine view of the world? It is a preoccupation with the relationship between things rather than with the things themselves. Men believe they are objective because they take careful note of individual things but they are coming more to realise that the object is not alone, it is inseparable from all the objects around it. In fact, it is the whole that must be understood before anyone object can be understood. This is a more feminine point of view: In conversation, a woman is more occupied with the way things are said, the tone of voice, gesture, body language, than is a man. A man is more occupied with the content of the words. In modern psychology, body language is studied by intuitive persons because they find that words can lie but the body cannot. This is a field in which women are unconscious adepts.
Because of her peculiar orientation, woman has developed talents to see where men cannot see, to see from angles he cannot see. In this patriarchy, what men see is what mankind sees. Woman is silent about what she sees. She does not see what she sees. Now is the time when we are beginning to look at ourselves and reassess our possibilities.
Why is it there have been no women of genius, only an occasional one who even aspired? Because woman has always had to play a part for man’s sake. She has had to be his missing part, so that he can be whole and survive his own unbalanced state. The danger of woman’s desire for independence, for a life of her own, has always been felt by those who train her for this role. Let us hope we can heal a universal neurosis, that we can effect an alchemy that will give back to man his soul, his emotions, his imagination, all that he now sees in woman, and free woman to enjoy her individuality.
There is a renaissance for woman. Once her creativity is allowed to come forth boldly and with its own peculiar mark of femininity, we will see women of genius. It is the flowering of experience from a particular point of view of an individual who is courageous enough to experience life deeply, to experience all the pangs and joys, the awesome vision of death and infinity: Genius and madness and sainthood are all entwined in the vision of life being greater than oneself, and if one can stand the vision and speak of it, though never really capturing it in words and symbols, that is the work of the genius. One can see the mark of psychic courage in these words. They seem to demand that one have such a vision oneself: They haunt one and lead one on to unimaginable goals, like fairy paths through an enchanted forest.
Women could come out with immortal facts without having any so called scientific research and yet they are true. It is in this background we need to look at the contribution women make to the society: perceiving without seeing, comprehending without listening, understanding without any help from the senses. They are able to prove a logic without logical procedures and conclusions. If asked for the logic behind their facts, we find no tactile experience but intuitive grasp of reality which is hard to comprehend for science.
We derive solutions from the female psyche for the problems. It is not based on mathematics and logic but based on intuition and extra sensory perception; not from outside but from inside. The feminine genius is inviting us to get back to that forgotten traits that used to be and still guides silently the universe, the solar system and the human mind relentlessly. That which guides with no apparent logic of mathematical calculation; that which attracts us incessantly. The question is : how much of it can we comprehend ?

Discover the man within Discover the woman within

The feminism of the post-world war II decades profoundly transformed the lives of women throughout the world. It brought about upheavals in law and the customs of everyday life, and altered the consciousness of women themselves. Obviously, such momentous changes did not spring from unprepared ground.
The world’s first organized movement on behalf of women was inaugurated in 1848 at a small chapel in the sleepy village of Seneca Falls, New York. There the twenty year old Elizabeth Cady Stanton delivered what she described as her first public speech, confessing that she was nerved for the ordeal only by her conviction that the time had come for “the question of women’s wrongs to be laid before the public” and by her belief “that woman herself must do this work; for woman alone can understand the height, the depth, the length, and the breadth of her own degradation.”
Stanton’s statement was not hyperbole. Women at that time were barred from attending educational institutions of higher studies, from voting in elections from participating in legislative bodies or from serving in the judiciary. They lived under a double standard that tolerated a high degree of sexual freedom for males but none for females. Married women were obliged to obey husbands, who had almost unlimited control over their wives’ activities and finances.
The campaigns waged by Stanton and her comrades met with belligerence and ridicule from journalists, politicians and churchmen alike. Sentiment seemed overwhelmingly hostile. Nonetheless, the women persevered, calling conferences, delivering speeches, circulating petitions and making arduous journeys to far flung towns and rural districts to address small groups in churches, halls and even barns.
After long hue and cry, after a long struggle, the United Nations affirmed “ the equal rights of men and women” in its 1945 charter and a few years later established the U.N.Commission on the status of women to advance this ideal.
Decades have passed since this first recorded struggle. Women have made inroads into traditional male professions. Condoleeza Rice is listed among the most powerful people in the world. Hillary Clinton is likely to be the first female President of the US. Parents no longer dream of marrying of their daughters, as every year throughout India, girls fare better than boys in the 10th std exams. Men are increasingly reporting to women bosses dressed in smart designer shirts and trousers with skills and attitudes to match. The non sexist ‘Ms’ is substituted for the traditional ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs’, while gender inclusive terms such as ‘humanity’ instead of ‘mankind’, ‘chairperson’ instead of ‘chairman’ are slowly becoming part of our daily conversations and usage.
However, equations are changing. Men are becoming like women and women are becoming like men. The suppressed man or woman tries to free himself or herself from a perennial bondage of cultural stereotypes. We begin to hate and love ourselves all at the same time. The society as a whole is trying to balance its male – female energies. A perfect yin-yang is in the offing.
We are reminded of the powerful portrayal of Portia in the Shakespeare’s play, ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ pleading for the life of Antonio, the merchant of Venice from the incessant demand of Shylock, the Jew to kill Antonio. We see the silent and receptive role of Mary at the house of Lazarus. Above all, we see the powerful sublimation of Mary, our blessed mother, in the Gospels for the sake of God’s plan. We see her interceding particularly at Cana. These were the women of substance solving problems tactfully with their own ingenuity not with the imposed male psyche. It is obvious that women have the power to solve issues in umpteen unbelievable ways. Even her guess is much more accurate than a man’s certainty, as Rudyard Kipling puts it.
With all these new found understanding, power, freedom and creativity, life emerges as strong as ever for both men and women. This life demands for a balance in the society and within each individual. Every person begins to realize that he / she is an androgen having both the male and female natures at various proportions. Essentially the masculine side comes from a place of strength and the feminine side comes from a place of goodness. Humanity, just as each individual, must have them in the right proportion. Let us discover the man and the woman within. This discovery will make life beautiful.