On a very deep level, a woman ‘calls’ a man to himself. Something in her asks for a response of consciousness, of true manhood from the man, for him to be present and for him to inhabit himself in a rightful way.
This calling asks us to leave behind the childish reactionary emotions and the ceaseless inner chattering of our brains, which we ‘men’ occupy ourselves with the whole time, and to inwardly walk away from the automatic in us, to rise above it courageously, and find an inward silence we can listen to. This is to be a man, and we see it in glimpsed moments when everything feels in balance, when we are more rooted and possess clarity.
This something, even in modern woman, just as lost and confused as modern man is, requires us to be grown up men, responsible for our inner and our outer lives. She yearns for the ‘self-authority’ that emanates from this way of being, and which can help her rise within herself to responsible womanhood, holding her own authority: a mutual assisting on the Way to consciousness.
I am afraid of women while I occupy my ‘sleep’, yet I love, very much, to be asleep. I don’t like being afraid of women though, that certainly tastes wrong, but in my sleep I react to this fear I feel, with aggression, self-pity or arrogance, anything in fact, to try and attain for my ego a feeling of some degree of superiority or detachment that will blot out the pervading fear. And so the wheel turns.
But can I respond to this call from woman with conscious attention instead of re-acting unconsciously? Her deepest self doesn’t truly wish me harm and she doesn’t want to be faced with the man of sleeping violence. She is calling me to be strong and to fight the sleeper within myself, she asks me to be awake, and this needs true bravery on my part to hear her call and respond well. To stand, present, within my self, to occupy the place of this moment, Now, demands real courage but also holds the key that is required to enter into real relationship.
The ‘Now’, needs to be re-occupied at every new moment, otherwise I remain lost in my dreams of the past or my dreams of an imagined future. Then as I seek it, I begin to understand that the Now is not an object that I can achieve and keep, I must pay over and over again without end. I must renew my effort of searching for presence, continually. In this, woman helps me, because this deep call from her womanliness is constant, and I can see that when I stop paying attention, my fear of woman returns instantly. There is inner ‘considering’, there is a loss of manhood in that very moment, and it is all sensed within man and woman instantaneously and at a very subtle level, without the involvement of one’s everyday consciousness.
As a man loses his sense of self, a woman becomes disappointed with him or ‘energetically’ separated from him. He senses this and without consciously knowing why, becomes full of fear. The connection is broken as soon as he forgets this responsibility to be in the Present.
All of this rests on the proposed fact that each man and woman, in their essential nature, wishes deeply to become conscious. If this were not the case, which modern living believes it isn’t, that we already possess full consciousness, then life would be meaningless and relationships between men and women would quickly become coarser and more base, putting more emphasis on sexual attraction and surface qualities alone, which is what we see increasingly clearly in today’s western society, and which is infecting the rest of the world. By believing ourselves to already possess consciousness, we experience no need to seek it, and we lose our fundamental reason for existing. We end up vainly searching for comfort and distraction from this painful inner lack, with material and sexual gratification, by indulging in ever more enchanting dreams and by increasing the complication of our lives.
The attention I need to pay with, to begin fearless relationship with woman, is not the attention of compliments which I pay her to assure her that she is attractive and ‘loved’, and to reassure myself I am doing the right thing, it is the ego-less attention to my own presence. In being with a woman, there is a strong call to maintain the search for this attention. There is she, and there am I, and we must remain separate in this inner way in order to become one, we must work hard to each fulfil our individual oneness, to be of any genuine help to the relationship, to have any possibility of real love between and for each other. It is a never-ending work; the striving to love another person, and when I am not in contact with myself, I am essentially in a state of fear, which is the true opposite of love.
A great mystery at the heart of the whole thing now becomes more evident. Why, once I have seen the situation and experienced the difference between fear and love, do I actually choose to remain fearful? If I am sincere with myself, I observe that I return continually to an unconscious state in which I am afraid of women and they are afraid of me.
In this matter we can only bear responsibility for ourselves, but by trying to help ourselves, there is a lawful reply from woman that is her helping her self. This symbiotic action helps us both. If I come into contact with a woman who is striving to become conscious, this becomes evident, because it will either prompt me to search for my own attention or it will make me more noticeably fearful.
Re-examining this question, I see it leading me to exactly the same place that all my other questions do: to the realisation that I have to return to a sense of myself, of my being, here, Now. I must listen more attentively, and take occupation of this present moment with awareness of myself, something that I can renew continually, that I must renew continually, because of this observable phenomenon of ‘losing’ my attention, or falling asleep, which carries on relentlessly.
So the situation is this; that the only time I am not afraid of woman, or indeed anything else that I may usually be fearful of, is when I am present or when I actively remember myself. At the same time there is some mysterious, ever-present force that makes me forget. I cannot relax my search without losing what it is I seek, and I can never find what I seek in the way I can find an object, which can result in the possession of something once and for all. It is my destiny to search my whole life without a result as such. Yet with this repeated active search, there are some ‘results’; I begin to find meaning in the nuances of every day, I feel myself to be more alive as the experiencing of time expands, and real relationship with woman becomes possible.
J B Wiskey
