Waking up Together is primarily about the role of the feminine principle, especially as it shows itself in women at this unique moment in the history of the human race. The feminine principle is not just an idea or a symbol. It refers to something real and eternal in the Cosmos, and something of utmost practicality in our daily lives.
Most women, and some men, want to see a new balance of masculine and feminine capacities and power. Women have wanted it for a long time, and many have tried repeatedly throughout history to bring about such an integration. However, the resistance from patriarchal institutions such as religion, science, education, politics, and government (in addition to the personal fear of most men and boys) has, until now, been overwhelming and often brutal.
Today we have a new scientific and spiritual Story to support this integration. And even men are now calling for women to “step up.” Today, for the first time in millennia, women have the wind at their backs.
What is it about the Feminine that is so essential to our collective future? Scores of books have been written pointing to the distinctive capacities women developed during humankind’s evolutionary history with our unique birthing, child care, and sociability. New writings and scholarly articles are drawing attention to how similar this historical women’s wisdom is to the talents now sought by corporate recruiters in hiring global leaders for guiding organizations into an unknowable future.
What women know
Importance of relationship
Women, more easily than men, can believe that any activity is more satisfying when it takes place in the context of relationships to other human beings—and even more so when it leads to the enhancement of others. Women know this experience in a way that men do not. Perhaps the most important scientific “discovery” of the last hundred years is that everything is relationship; nothing is an isolated object. If we want to influence a system we must understand and participate in the relationships that comprise it.
Active receptivity
Women’s attributes are often defined as “passive.” For example, listening to another, taking in, receiving, or accepting from another, are often seen as passive. However, they all generate a response, for one never merely passively receives; one also responds verbally or silently, externally or internally. Thus
the Receptive plays it own activating role in co-creating the future.
Men often feel more pressured to cut short their receptiveness and to rush to put forward an answer or an action. In doing so they often betray the fact that they have not heard much of what the other was communicating. Women, on the other hand, have often heard much more than was overtly stated because of their complex processing of information. They are more likely to be attuned to the larger dynamic in play.
Constant change
The very essence of life is growth and change—physical, mental, and psychic. Women are much more in touch with change, and thus more attuned to facilitating it in a positive way. Women, as family caretakers from early on, are literally forced to keep changing if they are to continue to respond to the alternating demands of those in their care. Thus, in an immediate and day-to-day way, women live change.
Men, on the other hand, tend to resist change. From the earliest age, men are taught to live up to the highest values of their society, which are presumed not to change; they are taught to maintain the status quo.
Serving the whole
In our male-dominated culture, serving others is a lowest-level priority. In fact, psychoanalytic data suggests that men’s lives are organized against such a principle. Yet serving others is the principle around which women’s lives are organized. There is a great deal of evidence to support the fact that women have a much greater and more refined ability to sense and respond to others’ needs, and to do so with ease.
Women are better geared to first recognize others’ needs, and to believe strongly that they can be served. Women can respond to others’ needs without regarding it as a distraction from their sense of identity.
This is not to say that men do not serves others. They do so, and in many ways. However, the need to serve others, except perhaps as warriors, is not central to a man’s self image, and can thus be set aside when other more appealing definitions of leadership dictate.
The above are only four of the many ways the differences between men and women might play out in addressing challenges and problems in a family, community, country, or global institution.