Wisdom and Method

The manifested world is the fruit of the interaction between two fundamental properties of the Great Spirit – the Force of differentiation and the Force of union, of separation and merging, of repulsion and attraction, expressed in His two primordial Faces – the Great Father and the Great Mother of worlds. Both forces are present in any manifestation, in any process and object of the world, and the world itself is thus their child, an androgynous manifestation of the Great Spirit’s integration.

Of course, these Principles are present in the mind as well, giving rise to the primordial qualities of Knowing and Wisdom, where knowing is the active striving to reveal the mind’s potential, its cognitive activity, and wisdom is the inner, deep, non-conceptual knowledge of synthesis. It is clear that knowing seeks to manifest, directing attention toward objects — that is, it has an expansive nature, whereas wisdom draws attention inward into itself, dissolving it into itself — in other words, it is attractive.

Although both forces are found in any stream of mind, a stream may rely predominantly on one of them: some streams of mind are driven primarily by the impulse to know, while for others it is more important to feel. Nevertheless, a sufficiently developed striving to know always leads to contact with wisdom, just as immersion in wisdom leads to appropriate modes of its manifestation.

This last observation was made across different cultures in ancient times and found expression in two ways of mental development – the Way of Method and the Way of Wisdom. Streams inclined to knowing manifest as masculine, active, expansive beings, while streams inclined to feeling manifest as feminine, receptive, attractive. The two mentioned Ways can quite rightly be called Masculine and Feminine (or, following the tantric tradition of the East – Paternal and Maternal).

At the same time, any manifested being that combines Masculine and Feminine principles possesses both the means and supports for expressing each: we have said that, as a rule, men have a “feminine,” that is — an attractive — vital body, while women, conversely, display expansive vitality. Accordingly, in terms of vitality, men require external sources of energy, whereas women are able to radiate vitality outward (not only in the sense of bearing offspring, but more generally as a mode of action). This is why masculine creativity always needs a “muse,” inspiration, an external stimulus, while for a woman a sense of security and support is of greater importance.

If on the “physical” plane the channels of the mind usually complement each other in a binary fashion, then on the level of feelings and thoughts other combinations are possible: both men and women can exhibit both the expansiveness and the attractiveness of these “bodies,” which gives rise to gender diversity.

For mental development, of course, the Way it chooses is of great importance. Although, as always with clearly expressed polarities, each effectively manifested pole involves its opposite’s activity, the initial point of such manifestation is extremely important. In other words, while Method leads to Wisdom and Wisdom to Method, only the trajectory that matches the nature and predispositions of the stream of mind is effective. Moreover, the very manner of interaction and reciprocal reflection between the poles matters at all levels, which accounts for the special role that sex-related practices played both in Magic and in other Ways of development, for example in tantric traditions.

At the same time, although the mind as such has no “sex,” it nevertheless manifests gendered traits depending on its prior history and on the current tasks that have matured for it, and therefore its worlds do have “sexual” characteristics, at least — nefesh, ruach and neshamah.

Despite the modern tendency toward unification and even the mixing of Ways, traditional conceptions of the Masculine and Feminine modes of development as distinct trajectories of mental growth demonstrate their effectiveness. Thus, on Masculine Ways a major problem is the widespread unresolved relationships with the mother, and many “practices” are in fact merely sublimations of this problem. It is no wonder that among contemporary men in the near-magical milieu one often encounters female “guardian spirits,” which are, of course, simply projections of the maternal image and have nothing to do with the real Higher Matrices. At the same time, regrettably, centuries of patriarchal dominance have caused severe curtailment and loss of originally feminine ways of development, and therefore today’s attempts at their restoration must not be reduced to an “adaptation” of masculine practices and their presentation in a “female” idiom. A much more careful inquiry and the activation of the wisdom underlying female nature is needed. The difference between the Ways is far more fundamental, and their distortion or mixing certainly does not lead to success.