Regeneration Masculinity Quotes

This reinforced Rivers’s view that it was prolonged strain, immobility and helplessness that did the damage, and not the sudden shocks or bizarre horrors that the patients themselves were inclined to point to as the explanation for their condition. That would help to account for the greater prevalence of anxiety neuroses and hysterical disorders in women in peacetime, since their relatively more confined lives gave them fewer opportunities of reacting to stress in active and constructive ways. Any explanation of war neurosis must account for the fact that this apparently intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in peace.

Any explanation of war neurosis must account for the fact that this apparently intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in peace. So

I. IDEAS A. The Death Instinct and the Life Instinct: The Death Instinct: separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path—do your own thing; dynamic change. The Life Instinct: unification; the eternal return; the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival systems and operations, equilibrium.26 The life force is concerned with cyclicality, care, and regeneration; the death force sounds to me a lot like “disrupt.” Obviously, some amount of both is necessary, but one is routinely valorized, not to mention masculinized, while the other goes unrecognized because it has no part in “progress.

Even as the feminine principle was venerated for its fertile, life-giving properties, there are also many examples of Goddesses who embodied the entire life process: birth, life, death, and regeneration. This is important because it can be tempting to romanticise the Goddess as a sort of angelic Fairy Godmother or abundant Good Mother. The feminine principle is more complex and more powerful than that. There are many stories from mythology that tell of the different faces of the Goddess. One such myth tells of the ancient Sumerian goddess who “outweighed, overshadowed, and outlasted them all . . .Inanna, Queen of Heaven.”[xxvi] This story originated in ancient Mesopotamia, five or six thousand years ago. In the myth, Inanna, who rules as queen over the upper world (birth and life), decides to visit Ereshkigal, queen of the Underworld (death and transformation). As Inanna descends into her sister’s realm, she is stripped of all the symbols of her upper world sovereignty, so that she comes before Ereshkigal naked and bowed low. Her enforced stay in the Underworld and the return after three days predates the Christian story by thousands of years. It is one of the first stories of ritual descent from the realm of life to the realm of death and the return to life after a time of incubation in the Underworld. This is also the theme of most ancient initiation rituals like the Orphic mysteries, the Eleusinian mysteries, and of much of the Egyptian sacred teachings. At the time when the story of Inanna’s journey first appeared, the increasingly male dominated Sumerian culture was separating from earlier matrilineal forms. Before the descent myth, another story tells how Inanna, in order to rule, had to take power from the God, Enki, assuming his symbols of sovereignty as her own. Ereshkigal, queen of the Underworld, represents the archaic feminine, the dark mysteries of the older religion which had been sent underground. The descent story can, therefore, be understood as Inanna balancing her heroic victories in the upper (masculine) world by reconnecting with the rhythms and cycles of the under (feminine) world. Based on clinical experience, one analyst called this a “pattern of a woman’s passage from cultural adaptation to an encounter with her essential nature”.

Silence is not merely a discipline; rather, it is primarily a state of being. It is in, through, and as silence that we discover our authentic identity, the Self (ātman, purusha). Thus silence partakes of the golden nature of the ultimate Reality. By comparison, speech is like the silver-bodied Moon, which has no light of its own but is illuminated by the radiance of the Sun. Through silence we can attune ourselves to the supreme stillness of the single Being, which is utter silence that is never disrupted by sound. Jean Klein, a twentieth-century exponent of Advaita Vedānta, comments: The Self is silent awareness and cannot be defined in terms of a silence as opposed to noise. How should we react towards silence or its opposite? If you want to rid yourself of agitation so as to attain a state of silence, you reject, you fight, you defend yourself. But if on the contrary you were to accept it, the agitation—which is part of this silence—will disappear within it. Then you will reach the silence of the Self, beyond silence and agitation.2 Once that great, sustaining Reality has been discovered, all our actions, thoughts, and utterances become spontaneous signals of that infinite silence, which is sheer bliss. Thus, the words of the enlightened adepts have transformative power, because they address that part in us which instinctively knows of that unsurpassed silence. Just as in ordinary life, speech and silence are intimately interwoven, so also in spiritual life do they complement one another. This has been recognized particularly in Taoism. In the language of the I Ching, speech is yang, or the masculine pole of silence; silence is yin, or the feminine pole. Together they are responsible for the creativity of human interaction. In spiritual life we cultivate sacred silence to regenerate our inner being so that we can return to our daily activities and to speech from a new perspective. In his monumental work A Study of History, the great British historian Arnold Toynbee has written about the creative withdrawal of the spiritual heroes of the past—the founders and inspirers of religions. They sought out the wilderness in order to find the fountain of truth within their own being. Then they returned, strengthened and ready to uplift humanity by sharing with others their extraordinary discovery. “Silence,” said Ovid, “is strength.” We need not have the spiritual standing of a Moses, Jesus, Mahāvīra, or Gautama the Buddha to practice sacred silence and benefit from it.