Blog

Cultivating the Feminine

__Excerpts from lecture “Cultivating the Feminine in the Male,” by Usharbudha Arya (Swami Veda Bharati) in the 1970s

and other quotations of Swami Veda Bharati

Things useless like smiles, like love, like art, like poetry, like insight, intuition, a holistic vision, not the irrationality of the mind but the intuitive aspects of the mind, not the approaches of life in which you take part, part, part, and another part and hope to complete a whole, but that in which you take a look at the entire whole and thereby understand all the parts; this latter is called the forces of femininity. Those are the intrinsic values that enrich human beings in the form of things useless.

➢ ………Here you sit analyzing everything. That is called a male brain. Everything here has to be analyzed. Everything has to be data. Everything has to be a set of sticks, taking parts and part and parts and putting them together hoping that it will create a whole. It creates the hole without the (w). It creates the hole.

We complain at mind’s resilience. It is thus we see the contrast of the strength of the resilient feminine and the weakness of the brittle masculine. Wherever She is, the resilient strength is to be found. There emanates a light; that is a light of love.
___from “She” in Mother Divine, booklet by Swami Veda Bharati. p 21

The forces of femininity, the forces of the inner essences, always need a physical supporting base to manifest themselves in the world. The body has this spirit but the body cannot act without this spirit….In other words, the essences can exist without the gross forms, but the gross forms cannot function without the essences. It is for this reason that the feminine is considered a more complete whole than the masculine.

Radha played at being Krishna; Krishna cannot play Radha fully.

___from unpublished sayings of Swami Veda Bharati

➢ We are told that as a fetus I was a girl–every individual starts out as a girl in the fetus and only afterwards does the specialization begin through the introduction of special male hormones; but everyone begins life as a feminine being. Unfortunately the gross forms have a habit of hiding the subtle essences.

Here you are sitting, all of you thinking ‘I am a body,’ [while] the essence– because of which the body functions –is forgotten. That, because of which the body becomes complete is lost because that essence is not visible to the senses. So then the body–the muscular, that kind of gross, weighty, heavy thing has the habit of only hiding, concealing, the presence of the hidden essence. It is the hidden essence that is more important.

Where am I to find Her? Where am I to see Her? As in a tiny seed the entire mighty banyan tree dwells, so in my heart, the whole universe vibrates and in the core of that universe dwells She, the still point from which all things emanate and to which all things are gathered.
___from “She” in Mother Divine, booklet by Swami Veda Bharati, p18.

There is a passage in an ancient text that says, that without the feminine potentia— which is the word for Shakti used by the theologians like Saint Thomas Aquinas– without the feminine potentia the Lord is not omnipotent: the Lord is impotent. It is through the feminine potentia, the Shakti, that the Lord becomes omnipotent. This principle of Shakti is a vast detailed subject. There is a large body of text dealing with this principle and we are not here talking about it directly, but indirectly. Actually when I speak of cultivating the feminine, I speak of cultivating the idea of Shakti.

➢ Shakti is not power. Shakti is potency. Shakti is not power in the sense in which the word power is used today. Nowadays power is thought to be a male principle. In the history of human development the support base of the essences has given itself an idea of self- importance. The support base began to say, centuries ago, ‘I am more important because I support the essences.’ It is like the body saying to the Spirit, what will you be without me? In fact, it is the Spirit that should ask the body, ‘What would you be without me?’ A clay pot.

And until we turn to that non-physical femininity that dwells within us all we are not going to become balanced persons, we are not going to become happy families, and we are certainly not going to become a gentler society. My concern for the society is that it should become a gentler society of stronger people, not a hard society of brittle human beings.

___from unpublished sayings of Swami Veda Bharati

If you are male, learn to be feminine. If you are female, remain feminine.

___from unpublished sayings of Swami Veda Bharati

The already feminine have nothing more to learn; the flower need not seek the status of a stone.

___from unpublished sayings of Swami Veda Bharati

Are you with me? So that which has the essence– hidden in all is humility, modesty and meekness –are the true essences, the true essences of good qualities for a human being. Something else has taken over in a more visible form and said, I am the more powerful. It is like a boxer who can in one punch throw down a philosopher and thereby thinks that he is superior to the philosopher. This development has gradually taken place in the entire human society so that the value system has become what you might call male-oriented. [Society] has forgotten that the essential principles can be maintained only by resorting to the feminine principles that creates the core of the human society, human experience, human relationships and human enrichment.

What is important is cultivating the qualities of the hidden essences within yourself and cultivating them without fear.
___from Cultivating the Feminine in the Male

Since God has chosen to dwell as woman in you, know Thyself as Her dwelling place.

___from unpublished sayings of Swami Veda Bharati

Be not hard like a rock. Be strong like water that grinds down the hardest rock into grains of sand. Learn the way of water that is woman.
___from unpublished sayings of Swami Veda Bharati