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At the last Human Sun meeting there was a question about the hyperfeminine perspective. What is that?
Here is how I understand it based on what I’ve read of Saniel’s work and also what I know of Integral Theory, specifically Spiral Dynamics.
The hyperfeminine is an evolutionary worldview, a way of BEING that predates the worldview of ego identification. So we’re talking about a long time ago here, thousands of years.
According to Spiral Dynamics it’s the tribal or purple meme. Consciousness was thoroughly embedded in the tribe, the group. There was no sense of an individual “I” separate from the group. It’s difficult to even imagine that from our highly-developed egoic sense of self, but just try.
Hyperfeminine identification is the individual merged with matter, earth, nature, others, the world. No ability to separate out from the world as a specific, autonomous body, mind, soul. I guess the “hyper” in the hyperfeminine is the embedding is so strong that humanity is Stuck.
Every meme is important and useful, the point is not to get STUCK in it, but to continue growing. I heard Don Beck say that the only place in the world we still find the purple meme is very isolated tribal cultures that, by a quirk of geography, have had almost no interaction with the outside world, so again, it’s difficult to even imagine/remember what that embeddedness in nature must feel like.
Somewhere along the evolutionary timescale, humans grow an ego. Progress! We are no longer so engulfed in nature/matter. The evolutionary development of an ego, the sense of a strong, separate individual self was a great leap forward – red meme in Spiral Dynamics. And, the ego, as an operating system, is included ever upward. However, humanity is now embedded in egoic/small self identification. Doesn’t it feel like we’re STUCK here? I am nothing more than my body, thoughts, emotions – a little, vulnerable entity in a big impersonal world.
The goal is now to transcend and include the ego/body/mind small self identification so we continue to grow. (I sense the hypermasculine creeping in here, but forgive me, I’m a product of my culture.)
The beauty of Waking Down is that the feminine – the body and its feelings are included and valued on the journey upward, but we’re not “swamped” in it. And the masculine, egoic, independent and agentic aspect of self is included and valued, but parts of our Being are not “dominated or shunned” in it’s stranglehold. Embodied consciousness, the feminine and masculine in it’s healthy aspect, is the name of the game here.
But then again, as Dennis Miller says….I could be wrong.
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Waking Up Waking Down Blog 
Hi Lisa,
Thank you for this posting. This is very much my sense too of what Saniel is saying; as like you I translate this material into spiral dynamic and integral terms. What was striking for me, and so helpful, is the clarity and and poignancy of your re-framing — just how stuck one is in the egoic mode, how alien the pre-egoic is in terms of everyday living(despite our romantic fantasies, as with the Na’vi of the movie Avatar), and what unstuckness might come to feel and look like in our Waking Down. Beautiful!
In mutuality,
Comment by Michael Schwartz January 15, 2010 @ 1:39 pmMichael