Consciousness and the Feminine and Masculine Experience
Have you ever wondered why animals don’t seem to share our interest in prolonging the experience of sexual intercourse? Of course humans can also rush the sexual experience to conclusion but we make a distinction between having sex and making love. When we are making love we are not just “getting our rocks off” . We are sensitively appreciating our connection with our partner. Intimacy is not just physical proximity but also involves conscious appreciation of our connection. While we are capable of animalistic behaviour our capacity for conscious awareness modifies our personal experience and our interactions with each other, allowing us to respond rather than just react to situations or each other.
I have heard that in the King James English version of the Holy Bible to know someone meant to make love with them. What is un-known is made known by joining with it, filling the space, inhabiting the space. The interaction between feminine and masculine energy can also be expanded to include the dynamic of negative and positive energy. I recently shared some thoughts about embracing the “in-between space” of the un-known or un-manifest. This could be called negative space.
Negative space can also be conceived as a pessimistic energy dominating a space. For example a friend makes a negative comment about themselves like “I am not good at…such and such.” The typical masculine reaction is to want to fix the problem with a comment like “How can you say that? Look how you have done this and that.” One rushes in to counter the negative comment with a positive one. In fact the negative comment is often a call for the soothing salve of a positive comment to remove the discomfort of feeling negative. The mind rushes in to provide a solution to the problem. It is in its nature to create problems then to seek solutions to solve them or eliminate them. We can benefit from slowing down this reactive process by responding more consciously. This promises a deeper understanding of our experience and deeper knowledge yields a more complete resolution.
It is like making love. Rushing towards conclusion is not nearly as satisfying as taking the exploration further. So when our friend, or even a voice within, says “I am not good at this” or “I am not good enough”, instead of denying the perception one can ask “ What makes you think that you are not good at this?” or “Why do you think that you are not good enough?”
Someone has said that there are no problems, just opportunities. It might be a bit a reductive to apply this concept to all situations but we are more likely to manifest a desirable outcome when we take our time to consciously embrace our experience rather than rush to resolve it or make conclusions about it.
The art of living is to create harmony by according our feminine and masculine impulses consciously.