The Way of Mother Mary and the Divine Feminine
By Sally Patton
When I read about the “way of Mother Mary” in The Forty Days and Forty Nights, (Days 18 and 19), I felt something in me break open. I stopped reading and went for a hike.
Fortunately I can walk from my house right into the expansiveness of northern New Mexico. Two hawks spiraled overhead. To me they were signaling a message from the Divine. Halfway through my hike, I felt everything in this life, as well as multiple parallel lives, coalesce into a still point of awareness. I knew that everything had prepared me for this moment to follow the “way of Mary.” I knew the voice of the divine feminine had been released within me, although I did not have a name for it at the time. I felt at one with all life. I was filled with immense grace and gratitude.
After a few days, however, I allowed some confusion to enter my mind, even though I felt this was my purpose in Union with God. I was not sure what Jesus was actually describing.
That divine experience occurred two years ago. Only now has my heart fully opened to what I feel it means to follow the “way of Mary.” In addition to A Course of Love, other channeled reading—especially from female Christ Ascended Masters including Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene—contributed to a deepening of what it means for me to follow the way of Mary and to be a voice of the divine feminine.
Jesus says:
My mother, Mary, was responsible for the incarnation of Christ in me as I am responsible for the incarnation of Christ in you. This union of the male and female is but union of the parts of yourself expressed in form and story, expressed, in other words, in a visual pattern that aides your understanding of the invisible. It is one more demonstration of the union that returns you to your natural state. (T1:8:16)
Jesus goes on to talk about the union of heart and mind as necessary to bring together all parts of the self, including male and female, in order for the truth of the resurrection to be revealed and lived.
Feminine and masculine energies reside in every one of us and are meant to exist in harmony, in wholeheartedness. They have nothing to do with gender identity, even though that is what we attempted to create within the illusion of separation. However, when masculine energy dominates as it has for eons under patriarchy, it causes an imbalance between the heart and mind. The divine feminine in each one of us is the heart and the right side of the brain. It has been suppressed in favor of the reason and logic of the masculine left side of the brain. I equate ego/patriarchy to the relentless mind loops that occur on the left side of the brain, suppressing any connection or input from the feminine, creative, heart-opening right side of the brain. When this happens we become fearful. We lose our authentic self and our power. Yet by trying to control what can’t be controlled, we actually become powerless.
This dynamic is exemplified in the current political situation. The politicians are terrified of feminine energy, because feminine energy is seen as weak and ineffectual. So they cut off part of themselves, blame women for not being able to save them, and end up hating themselves and others. The more they fear and hate, the more they lash out and try to control through fear and intimidation. It’s a vicious left-brain ego loop.
Yet the divine purpose behind our current experience of political chaos, I believe, is to allow us to truly see the dysfunction of patriarchy by interrupting the usual flow, the status quo. Once seen as being unlike love, it can then be healed once and for all.
All of this is possible because the divine feminine voice has been released. We need the loving mystical medicine of re-birth and creation to free fearful masculine energy. Then it can be transformed into divine masculine in support of the heart, joining in harmony with the divine feminine and healing into wholeness. We then can live the truth of the resurrection.
Those called to the way of Mary are called to be what they want to see reflected in the world and to the realization that this reflection is the new way of creation. In their being they become what they want to create. (D:Day19:4)
The answer lies in the simple statement of as within, so without. By living as who you are in the world, you create change in the world. You create change through relationship. All live and create in relationship. Those called to the way of Mary, however, are called to the creation and anchoring of the new relationship in the new world. Their relationship of union, upon which their contentment is based, is the birthplace, the womb of the new. Their expression is expression of this union. (D:Day19.6)
The divine feminine is the energy of constant creation, the womb of the new. The divine masculine is the energy of clarity and protection. Joined in harmony we heal into wholeness and bring into being the new world. We become divinely human. The release of the divine feminine after thousands of years of suppression makes this possible.
Even though it appears as if patriarchy is especially strong at the moment, I know deep within that it is in the last stage of existence. Like an animal that’s been cornered, it viciously fights for survival. More than ever we are being called to our authentic self, to live in harmony with Self. And living in harmony means embracing both the divine feminine and masculine energies within. With this embrace, we return to our innocence and come into wholehearted voice.
The way of Mary anchors this new energy of wholeness by creating a pattern of being and weaving it into the web of reality.
Sally’s book about parenting without fear, Don’t’ Fix Me I’m Not Broken: Changing Our Minds about Ourselves and Our Children, is available through amazon.com. To sign up for her newsletter or to schedule a mentoring session go to www.embracechildspirit.org.
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A Stuffy Room
By Elliott Robertson
It is a stuffy room we’ve been in these many years
ever since the shepherd, peasants,
kings and mystics faded, giving way
to scientists and thinkers who love reason
more than sheep, pastures and lakes.
Oh, how my soul longs for a trapdoor
to overtake my being, send me
falling down a hole to new surroundings
and fresh scenery, to places
where servants of God are honored
and the sanctity of life is revered
more than the dollar. Here, poetry
becomes the spaces between words
and music–an outcropping of silence.
Here sun and moon and breath take on a mystery
you cherish, and no one is asked to justify
her life by straying from her heart.
Here dancing is permitted and frolics
in the forest are understood as holy,
the whole of existence speaks to you
through mushrooms and moss
or a loaf of bread share around the campfire
under the full moon.
Is our human need to keep seeing things as divided (including whether there needs to be separate masculine and feminine characteristics of humans) part of the privileged way we have created these thought systems? Do thoughts like this continue to create division? As we pay attention to the present moment, may we work to join the characteristics of whole persons to create whole systems that benefit ALL. If you wonder about an example, please look at the picture of the celebration at the White House to celebrate the recent passage of the House proposed health care bill revisions—All appear to be White males in the photo I viewed. Where are the multicultural/multi-gender faces this bill claims to benefit? We have a very long way to go to uproot systems, from the bottom to the top, to create more equitable, inclusive societies that benefit ALL, throughout the entire world. As I understand the messages that Mary’s son Christ brings to us, Christ’s messages are the guideposts leading us on this path. May we grow in our ability to come to know the holistic divinity in each person we encounter.
In knowing (as in Gnosis) the Divine Feminine, one comes to realize that the Divine Masculine is IN the Divine Feminine and, conversely, the Divine Feminine is IN the Divine Masculine: the two poles of what is –and is in — the One Self. Just as in giving I receive, in receiving I give. Giving and receiving are One in Truth. Similarly, Cause and Effect are One; the Cause is in the effect and the effect is in the cause.
Unless and until, the two are seen and known as one, there is the inadvertent, unintentional, and unconscious result which is the “Shadow” effect that is born out of this imbalance.
Dualism can only be transcended by seeing/knowing and recognizing that both of these polarities, and their possible effects, exist within everything and everyone. In re-cognizing this, one is perceiving this from a “neutral” position. That “neutral” position is a third component and, as such, is part of a larger context; a triune and/or triadic framework: three parts of what is a unified/united whole or Oneness.
The Way of Mary includes the Way of Jesus and the Way of Jesus includes the Way of Mary. The One within the Other; the Other within the One. Otherwise, one falls back into Dualism and the dualistic conception/perception that accompanies it.
The world (Western Civilization) is based in and on a linear dualistic, patriarchal belief and value system and all that arises out of that and what is inherent within its unconscious and inadvertent framework. It is not “grounded” in what is the True Self or True Nature:” the Christ Mind (Unitive Mind/Unitive Consciousness).
The difference between the two paradigms is essentially — for the sake of simplicity –the difference between a two-wire system and a three-wire system. One is grounded, the other is unstable, vacillating back and forth, on or off.
The Way of Mary is essentially a three-wire (triune or non-dual) system; the Way of Jesus, as it has been historically interpreted, is a two-wire (separate and divided, dualistic) system.
One Eye One Heart One Love.
The eye with which you see God is the same eye with which God sees you. ~ M. Eckhardt
Or as T. Merton says, ” God is not somebody else.”
The Mary that ACOL should be highlighting is Mary Magdalene, not the birth-mother of Jesus. Jesus made no claims to being virgin-born, confirmed even by Paul later stating, “Jesus, born of a woman,” not a virgin. (The virgin-birth was a later Roman Catholic invention.) Jesus mother was not even a disciple, did not follow him, appeared with her sons where she was rebuffed with the reference that those who do the Will of God were his family, had to goad Jesus (because of her unbelief) into turning water into wine, etc.
Mary Magdalene, on the other hand, was not only Jesus’ closest disciple, but also his wife, had her own group of women disciples, was the first to be visited three times after the resurrection, had her own gospel in the Nag Hammadi collection (along with Thomas and others), and who appears sitting next to Jesus in the Last Supper painting by Da Vinci.
It is hard to accept ACOL’s claims to be an extension of ACIM with this kind of material.
(Sorry–I must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed–after crawling over my wife, I guess.)
Jesus says in the New Testament that we all can be his mother:
“Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”
~Mark 3:35
What is doing God’s will? Doing God’s work. When we do God’s work, God is doing His will in us as we when we do it. And what will and work is that? That we believe in Him whom He has send to this world. And that He send Himself to this world and is appearing here now as each and every one of us. When we believe that, He is believing that in us as we. That it is God believing this and reading this now in our human appearance. Which is God’s human appearance.
“Then said they unto him, What shall we do, that we might work the works of God?
Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.”
~John 6:28-29
This is being the Mother of God; by believing this, even though there might be resistance and an inner battle between accepting this divine truth and rejecting it in the mean time . But those are labor pains while the process lasts. The result is that God’s Zelf-awareness is born in us; the consciousness of Who we truly are; God in human appearance, often still being a cross to ourselves, until we resurrect to our Life in this human soul, all to its benefit as well as to the benefit of the collective soul of everyone, the soul God has as all of us, as well as each one of us.
As God we have all given our Life for the humans we seem to be, that also they would enjoy the divine Knowledge and Love of God Himself.
Although “patriarchal” here is referred to masculine energy, it can appear in feminine form of women so we don’t confuse it as appearing only in men.
I love the idea of this being a time of emergence of what’s present as an opportunity to present what’s possible.
Thank you for sharing Sally…I thoroughly enjoyed it!