The Principle Of Gender

"Tell me about it. Anyway, I hope I've made my point: deeply-held Truths are communicated to our rational mind via archetypes. The King is just one archetype, and obviously its application isn't just relevant to men. Women also need to take responsibility for their Kingdom and evolve into loving Queens. Queens make Queens of other women. They don't tear each other down or engage in insecure, bitchy, catty behavior. To quote a Nikita Gill poem: 'If all girls were taught how to love each other fiercely instead of how to compete with each other and hate their own bodies, what a different and beautiful world we would live in.'

It's also interesting to examine the archetypal depictions of men and women throughout the ages. Remember how humanity blamed everything on Eve (women) in the Genesis story? Well, archetypically, men represent what is known and logical and linear and rational; they are the head. Women represent intuitive non-linear chaos; they are the heart. After all, it was Eve who created chaos in the first place. She bought the darkness upon man, and by 'darkness,' I mean That Which You Are Not. In a mathematical sense, Eve brought upon us everything that exists outside our own Markov blanket.

If you extend this further, women represent chaos, but they also represent creation, birth, and new life. One cannot have creation without venturing into chaos. The two go hand-in-hand, so it is a befitting symbol. Chaos is the birthplace of creation.

Furthermore, women archetypically represent softness, love, care, and empathy — all the lovely things that feel like home. But what is home? God — the realm of the infinite — is our real home. Therefore, women archetypically represent the divine, the Source, the Goddess, or whatever you want to call it. Men go out to war, to fight their egos and their enemies, and stare down the material realm of the relative, and then they return home to their woman. This is like them returning home to God.

Now, don't take this literally. Just like in our conversation about the patriarchy, I don't literally mean women belong in the literal home, doing the ironing, or anything like that. I also don't literally mean every woman is soft and caring, while every man is hard and ego-driven — because everyone has a mix of these two polarities. Nor do I mean that same-sex couples don't have this polarity, or people who identify as non-binary. If you strip away literal physical gender, it is just that: a polarity. It's a yin and yang. It's a tension between the material, relative, fear-based illusion, and the whole, love-based home that is God. When I go out and wage war in my life by marching through the material realm and pushing up against fear and obstacles, I need to internally return home to myself to refocus and recharge. This balance exists internally as much as in any partnership. The Kybalion talks about this polarity in its Principle of Gender…"

“Gender is in everything; everything has its Masculine and Feminine Principles; Gender manifests on all planes.”

The Kybalion Three Initiates

"Basically," I continued, "everything has a tension between the wholeness and the relative; between truth and illusion; between the implicate and explicate; between love and fear; between chaos and order; between heart and head; between feeling and thinking; between art and science; between intuition and logic; between non-linear and linear; between soul and ego; between spiritual and physical; between wisdom and cleverness; between spirituality and science."

"Now," I said, "just looking at this table, it should be pretty damn obvious why the scientific establishment has convinced themselves that materialism is true. Tell me, Zachary... what gender dominates the scientific community?"

"Men."

"Right. Men. And men happen to represent the masculine polarity — hence why it is called the 'masculine polarity.' And what does the masculine polarity represent?"

"The world of the relative," Zac said.

"Exactly. The world of the relative. The material world. Materialism. And now tell me, Zachary, which gender has been in power for the past few thousand years?"

"Men."

"Right. Men. Our society has been built on the underlying assumption that everything is separate and fragmented — which is an archetypically masculine belief. We worship material goods, yet feel spiritually vacuous. Our education system teaches children to be orderly and incremental, not creative and intuitive. If there's a funding cut, the arts are the first to go. Men are taught to suppress their emotions, not to use them as a feedback system — and then we wonder why some men can't control their anger, and beat their wives to a pulp. In Western healthcare, we treat people with pills instead of treating their symptoms holistically. We worship the masculine material realm, and yet wonder why we are lonely, sick, overweight alcoholics who are drowning in debt. If you were to draw our society as yin-yang symbol, you can see how unhealthy this is."

"Now," I continued, "that's not to say that the masculine polarity is bad. It's not. We live in the realm of the relative, and we need that polarity to navigate the pragmatic physicality of life. But to quote Robin Williams in Dead Poet's Society: 'Medicine, law, business, engineering — these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love — these are what we stay alive for.'

It's possible to lean too far into the feminine polarity, too. Postmodernism is a great example of this. Postmodernists focus on feelings over facts, 'lived experience,' and a belief that everything is fluid and there is no objective truth. Such a philosophy makes it incredibly difficult to navigate the realm of the relative. If 2 + 2 = 5 because all truth is subjective, then how do we create buildings and launch rockets and write code? All of these things are based on hard facts and objective truths in the explicate order. Postmodernists also hate labeling things, but labels are essential when operating in the explicate order. To label something is to distinguish it from what it is not. If I can't label that object a 'boat', then I can't communicate the idea of a boat to you. In the absence of particular things, the beautiful physical experience of life becomes moot. We may as well just kill ourselves and return back to the realm of the infinite from which we came."

"The Principle of Gender is about integration. When women and men integrate through sex, they create new life. Likewise, when individuals and societies integrate the masculine and feminine polarities, healthy creation takes place. Therefore, an enlightened society must integrate science with spirituality; the head with the heart; order with chaos; the masculine polarity with the feminine polarity."

"Furthermore," I continued, "the tension between these two polarities is what lies at the core of every story worth telling, throughout the ages. You cannot create a story without these two polarities, because there would be no conflict and, therefore, no learning or growth. The story would simply be, 'Once upon a time Adam and Eve existed in the perfect Garden of Eden. They lived happily ever after. The end.' That's obviously not a story. Logically, then, the core dynamic in every story is the battle between Who The World Tells You You Are (Fear), and Who You Really Are (Love)."

"Can you give me an example?" Zac asked.