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Originally Posted by Elrond  How not surprising. I haven't read anything by him besides the raving endorsements on this site of the nowness approach, but as a whole I think New Age promotes a feminime approach.
- The ego is bad - you are supposed to distill your beingness to get to a broader state.
- Experiencing oneness is the best - individualism (in beingness) is bad.
- Emotional words like "peace", "contentment" etc are stressed, as opposed to more "active" terms like "passion", "excitement".
- Mindful practices like meditation are a cornerstone, where the goal is to be present and not really be active in anyway, certainly not think elaborate thoughts.
- "Going back to Source/Oneness" is the goal, always. This "oneness" state is always stressed as something desirable, and having a more focused and direct experience (like all of us) is always thought of as being inferior to that state.
- This as opposed to being adventourus, having new experiences, having a more focused way of experiencing reality, constantly "pioneering spiritually" (whatever that would be...). If used, these approaches are really just a means to an end to get back to Source, and rediscovering who you are. To get back to a state of passive oneness. |
Adding to this line of thinking, many many spiritual approaches strike me as a kind of way of reclaiming the experience of being in the womb. Where you're just swimming in bliss and have your needs taken care of organically.
Now, you can be in the womb as male or female, but the womb itself has a feminine connotation. I think this relates to the notion of being in touch with yourself as Creation instead of as Destruction - moving into yourself instead of away from yourself. But I'd also say the internal world is neutral, neither masculine nor feminine. The internal world contains passion as much as peace, it contains a sense of activity as well as stillness. Or, you can look at it as the body takes care of the action so the mind can focus on the stillness.
But I think folks would be doing themselves a disservice, perhaps, to view spiritual exploration as something counter to their own gender. If anything it seems like it would be about correcting imbalance, since social conditioning tends to lead males to withdraw from and ostracize their innate yang. The yang doesn't disappear just because the culture says it's counter to being your biological gender.