“It’s unpleasantly like being drunk!”
“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”
“You ask a glass of water!”
– from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams’ little gag there is actually quite profound. It unexpectedly inverts the entire universe. First, we’re the ones deciding how nice it feels to have drunk something, when suddenly we’re asked to consider what it feels like to be one of those drinks we just “drunk”. How would that feel, to be that drink? I don’t know, but it would be an distinctly different experience from the experience of drinking it.
How does this pertain to The Masculine and The Feminine? Well, I assume we’re all familiar with what it means to experience something – be it a thunderstorm, or a bowl of ice cream, or a sad movie, or a heartbreak, or a glass of water. Each has its own unique feel to it. You feel it. It feels nice, or it feels awful, or it feels scary, or it feels yummy, or it feels distant, or it feels funny, or … you get the idea. These are all ways of experiencing/feeling something.
But what about that something that’s being experienced by you? What’s it like to be that thing? We know what it’s like to experience that thing, but how does it feel to be the thing that’s being experienced?
That might sound like a meaningless question, certainly when applied to glasses of water and bowls of ice cream. But any woman, especially one that has had sexual experiences, would be very familiar with how it feels to be experienced. A woman feels that every day. In this she’s different from most men. Men generally don’t get this. A woman feels what it’s like to be experienced every day, every time she steps outside, and of course every time she opens her legs to be sexually touched or made love to. This is something that is very hard for most men to comprehend. Men are good at experiencing the world, but generally have little experience in being experienced by the world.
But it is possible for a man to see how it feels to be experienced. Actually, there are many ways, but a simple one is: Put him on stage, in front of an audience. It doesn’t matter what for. But he’s the only one on stage, so all eyes are on him. How does that feel? That man knows, he feels it. It’s a very powerful feeling – maybe positive, maybe negative, maybe both – being experienced by the audience. Each audience member is having some sort of experience of him, some reaction to him, some opinion of him – positive, negative, uninterested, anything. It doesn’t matter. They’re all feeling him in some way, and he can surely feel that. That’s what it feels like to be experienced.
Back to the point…
The Masculine aspect of you is the part of you that is experiencing the world around you, every second of every day. This is Consciousness, your awareness. This is you being aware of, experiencing, being conscious of … the Universe (which of course is also known as The Feminine).
The Feminine part of you is … YOU. It’s you standing in the world, being you. And as you are being you, many, many people are experiencing you – your partner, your family, your friends, your work colleagues, your social media followers, the people you pass in the street, everyone – they’re all having an experience of you. This is your Feminine aspect.
Of course, you do both. You are both. You are both Feminine and Masculine, all the time. You could not exist as a being without (a) being physically present in reality, and (b) being conscious and aware of your surroundings. You are simultaneously both Masculine and Feminine, in the Divine sense. Unless you are both, there’s no way you could exist in Reality as we know it. You have to be conscious, of course, or there’s no you to exist at all. And you also have to have physical existence. There has to be a way for at least one other being to experience you, or there’s no criteria by which you could claim to exist. (And by “physical existence”, I include “spiritual, non-corporeal existence”. Even though they have no physical existence, Beings of pure spirit still exist, in the sense that others can experience them.)
You are, at once, a objective physical entity and a subjective observer.
And a fairly even balance of each. But you lean a bit towards one side. Almost all people do. You’ll lean a little bit Feminine or a little bit Masculine. Whichever way you lean, you’ll be attracted to people with the opposite leaning.
There’s a lot more to the Masculine than just being conscious and aware, and experiencing the universe (such as capability and trust). And there’s a lot more to the Feminine than waiting to be experienced (such as beauty and care). That will all be covered later. But this post is about metaphysics, so here we’re going to focus on the metaphysical aspects of The Feminine and The Masculine.
So we need to take a detour into the concept of Consciousness…
Consciousness
We’re all conscious beings. Being “conscious” simply means having an awareness of your surroundings. And most people can relate to the notion that my “sense of self” is my consciousness, the thing I call “Me”, that looks out at the world through my eyes. In this way, most people can confidently say, “I am conscious”, without needing to understand metaphysics.
But what is this consciousness? What is it actually? Science has no idea. Up until the early 20th century, scientists striving to understand the universe could happily ignore the question of consciousness – the undeniable fact that we all have conscious experience – and treat it as a philosophical question. Scientific equations didn’t change whether consciousness existed or not. But then came the bizarre experimental results of Quantum Physics, which seemed to indicate that the universe behaved differently if someone was watching, at least at the microscopic level. The quantum wave function would only collapse in the presence of a conscious observer (according to the most widely accepted interpretation of the phenomena). So suddenly Consciousness was a thing that science could no longer ignore, and had to include in its equations. Consciousness now needed to be explained rigorously, which suggested it may be a new field of scientific study.
Only, that’s impossible. Science can never study consciousness. That’s not what science is.
Science is the study of the objective universe. We pose questions about the nature of the universe, and devise experiments to answer those questions. But the Scientific Method requires that every experiment must be reproducible – a crucial criterion. Anyone should be able to follow the recipe of the experiment and reproduce the results. “Anyone” means that it doesn’t matter who runs the experiment. The results of the experiment are unaffected by who the experimenter is, or their subjective, conscious experience of the experiment. Scientists (and everyone else) made the assumption that the universe keeps ticking along, even when no-one is watching. An experiment works or it doesn’t, independent of any observer. The experiment and its outcome exist entirely in objective reality. Science as a whole, as a discipline, can be defined as the study of objective reality. Consciousness is, by definition, entirely subjective. It is the very definition of subjective. Meaning that science can’t study it. Science can’t devise any experiment involving consciousness, because it won’t satisfy the requirements of being objective and reproducible.
Put simply, Science can’t study Consciousness, because Consciousness is purely subjective, while Science is the study of the purely objective.
To study Consciousness, science would need to expand itself to include other forms of verification besides the Scientific Method.
Western scientists don’t seem to realise this. So they continue examining the question of Consciousness as if it were just another as-yet-unexplained aspect of the objective universe. Their consciousness theories have been … unsatisfactory, to say they least.
One “explanation” that won’t seem to die is that Consciousness is actually an illusion! There’s clearly no such thing as Consciousness, the argument goes, otherwise science would be able to describe it. So because it doesn’t exist, and because we all stubbornly think that it does, it must be an illusion, similar to an optical illusion, tricking us into seeing a lamp, when it’s really the silhouette of two faces. The problem with this explanation is, of course, that for one to be tricked into believing something, one must already have an existing belief about how things are. And having beliefs implies that you have had some sort of experience of the universe. You have – or had – awareness, which is the definition of consciousness. In other words, for us to experience the illusion of having consciousness, we must be conscious.
A marginally more believable theory evolved: Consciousness is an “emergent” phenomenon, something that appeared as a result of our brains evolving to a sufficient level of complexity. Consciousness was somehow not present in the universe from the beginning at all, until eventually intelligent beings evolved, whose brains were so complex that (somehow) consciousness emerged. It’s not a terrible theory – there are many systems that have emergent properties resulting from the system’s internal workings. But it fails to take into consideration that being conscious actually feels like something! Why should this new emergent thing bestow upon us awareness – a direct felt experience of the universe – simply because our brains have reached a certain level of complexity? How do I end up with a sense of self from a complex arrangement of biology? David Chalmers, the Australian philosopher, famously called this question “the hard problem of consciousness”, and modern western philosophers continue to debate the answer.
A much more compelling answer than “emergent phenomenon” is called Panpsychism – an ancient Greek belief, recently coming back into fashion. It holds that all of creation is conscious / has consciousness. Panpsychism literally means “everywhere mind”. So everything is conscious, from people to plants to rocks to stars to electrons. The simplest parts of the universe have the most rudimentary consciousness, while the most complex object that we know of in the universe, the Human brain, obviously “contains” the most consciousness.
And yet another idea comes from the ancient philosophical school of Idealism, which suggests that consciousness/awareness is actually all there is. Everything you ever experience is … experience. The word “reality” thus simply means “your experience”. Your entire conscious existence is nothing but experiencing things. 100% of your existence is just you being conscious. There’s nothing else. The actual things you’re experiencing – objects in the physical world, for example, don’t truly exist. They only exist as we perceive them to exist, and perception is all there is. It’s got a certain internal logic to it, but it seems incomplete.
Put simply…
Illusion theory says Consciousness is not a thing.
Emergent phenomenon theory says Consciousness is the highest thing
Panpsychism says Consciousness is in everything
Idealism says Consciousness is everything.
Now…
Divine Sexuality says Consciousness is half of everything.
Half? What’s the other half? Objective reality. The Universe, and everything in it. All the stuff that science has something to say about.
So the entirety of Reality – everything that is – is half physical universe and half consciousness perceiving that universe.
But it’s not quite as simple as a half-half relationship. It’s more profound than that. They are fully complementary and inter-dependent. Each could not exist without the other. It’s a bit like the relationship between two poles of a magnet, or the relationship between electricity and magnetism, or matter and energy. You can’t have just one!
Put simply, consciousness and the objective universe are two sides of the same coin (Reality). Two opposite aspects of the same underlying phenomenon. The Yang and the Yin.
Subjective and objective reality.
The observer and the observed.
The Masculine and the Feminine.
Consciousness is important! Western science, which underpins much of Western belief systems, would have us believe that the physical universe is all that is. That that’s 100% of everything. No gods, no higher powers, no religion, no spirits, no ghosts, no psychic powers, etc. If you can’t measure it, label it and reproduce it, then it’s not real. No place for consciousness in a worldview like that. No place for feelings in science.
But we all know that consciousness is quite definitely real. We each feel that we are a “me”. We each know ourselves to be conscious. As Rene Descartes said, Cognito ergo sum – I think therefore I am. I exist because I am conscious.
Consciousness is exactly as important as the physical reality that Science tells us is everything. Exactly the same, forever in balance. No matter how complex the universe is, there’s that same complexity of consciousness there to experience it. One doesn’t precede the other. A thing doesn’t exist and then later it is seen for the first time. The existence of a thing and the perception of the existence of the thing evolve together.
And that thing is a being.