Woman Aware: Could Eliminating Religious Creeds Emancipate Women?

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Woman Awakes

Chapter 1

Women

Chapter 2

Men

Chapter 3

The Myth Of Protection

Chapter 4

Flunking History Lessons

Chapter 5

Oppression & Acquiescence

Chapter 6

The Hebrew Chronicles

Chapter 7

Unconscious Influences

Chapter 8

The Newly Conscious Woman

Chapter 9

Whole Is Greater Than Sum Of Parts

Chapter 10

Awake

Acknowledgements

Notes

To D’Elle

with love and appreciation for the inspiration

INTRODUCTION

Woman Awakes

That there are, and have been for eons, unconscious forces at work creating the now infamous woman’s place must be the case. I say unconscious because surely no one would consciously choose slave as a life vocation—would she? I say slave because if the recently touted superiority of the female gender is a fact, then why is it also a fact that nearly three quarters of the world’s women are today living in virtual slavery? Why do one in three women in the United States tolerate mental and physical abuse at the hands of a male? (1) Long before written history recorded the exploits of Homo sapiens; matriarchal cultures were leading the way to successful civilizations. What influenced the shift to male domination? Male physical strength can’t be the definitive answer, or can it?

The other day someone asked me, Whatcha doin’ these days? I tried to be funny and quipped, Just waitin’ to die. This resulted in a halfhearted smile and an embarrassed silence. Definitely not funny I thought to myself as I remembered that my questioner had just lost his spouse to cancer. My not funny remark has been reverberating in my mind ever since. I thought of all the ways, consciously and unconsciously, we use distraction, or try-to-be-funny quips so as not to think about things like death. Maybe I didn’t think about all but certainly quite a few. Death may seem like an unlikely theme to begin a book about women and religions, yet every major religion links women with sin and sin with death. In the introduction to chapter ten in this book, the topic of death reemerges. There Richard Dawkins suggests that all of us are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones.

I personally seem most at ease when I busy myself so that I don’t seem to have time to consider some things while I am waiting to die. The unconscious forces at work in this arena are staggering. In fact, most of our daily distractions are of the unconscious or below awareness variety. As Sam Harris, (2) the brilliant neuroscientist, has said, the entire issue of free will and conscious personal choice can be boiled down to You can do what you want, but you cannot choose what you want. There are always prior causes that determine the final outcome. You did not choose your parents, your genes or even to be born. You did not choose the culture into which you were immersed and, to no small degree, educated to think in a certain direction. Some may invent fanciful Santa Claus theories about past lives, or the like, in order to say we are free to choose or to make decisions, but as Harris said, the basic reality is: A puppet is free as long as they love the attached strings. Again, There is always a prior cause! More often than not, they are unconscious. You may think that you, rather than your brain’s neuro-chemical’s, decided you needed a third cup of coffee, but you would be wrong. Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next, your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this free-will decision and then believe you are in process of making it. Becoming aware of the life events that influence our thinking and behavior, especially the unconscious ones is the major subject of this book.

Why, for example, does a color known as Drunk Tank Pink(3) appear to have an unconscious calming effect? Why would individuals, after being exposed to images of money, become more self-sufficient and less helpful to others? In the pages that follow we will address the subtle subliminal ways in which the unconscious has also influenced the imperceptible shifts in gender dominance.

Perhaps the multitude of unconscious daily rituals, available to all of us, has evolved to keep us distracted while we wait for the inevitable. Consider for a moment, your own moment-to-moment activities during your first hour after awakening from sound sleep; you will probably discover that many bits of your behavior are repetitive, habitual, relatively meaningless activities while you are waiting to wake up. This reminds me of the celebrated story of the Buddha. When he was asked, Are you a saint? Are you a god? What are you? He answered, I am awake. Perhaps the real challenge for us is to become awake or at least aware that unconscious forces influence our every action and thought

Traditionally, while we wait, we Homo sapiens have been educated to look for, what are often called manifestations of celestial gods or goddesses. Actually, they are common correlations to which we attribute magical qualities. While we are in a wait mode, we are prompted by our ingrained belief mechanisms to project outwardly and particularly upwardly, as if someone or something out there is listening and will respond to our human pleadings. Those belief mechanisms, accompanied by complementary actions or rituals, have been repeated for millennia. In fact, the mere recurrence and constant reenactment of this kind of hoping and waiting increases believability in human myth and magic. Why? Because recurring correlations and our beliefs about them actually change brain structures and thus our perception of reality. Consequently we not only survive, but we insist on passing along our mythical survival stories until they become memes. No matter where we go there we are.

Recipients of this kind of meme fabric may eventually be wired or compelled to believe in something extra from another invisible dimension. This kind of repeated mind conjuring makes the fantasy of paradise a perceived reality and even finds gods and supernatural critters within rocks and trees. The Neanderthals, and every generation since, have done precisely this in one version or another. Modern scientific evidence does not exclude all that is, simply because interpretations are sourced in our brain tissue and then reified in order to make survival sense within a certain human demographic.

Some years ago I moved to Hawaii and was repeatedly asked if I’d seen the green flash? The green flash? I inquired, tongue in cheek, because I really thought this might be similar to snipe hunting at summer camp—a kind of Island initiation—one of those so-called New Age mysteries cloaked in its own inherent absence of scientific definition. Some Island mythologies attribute the phenomenon to the Menehune. (The little people of Hawaiian legend.) Similar to forest pixies or Irish Leprechauns to whom magical abilities were attributed, these fables have become a part of Hawaiian storybook legend. Good sport that I thought I was, I waited with the questioner, conversed and watched as the sun went down.

Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it … there! He almost shouted.

Where? I asked incredulously.

Didn’t you see it? It was awesome!

Once again I thought this was some kind of prankish induction to Kona life—a rite of passage—indeed a cloaked mystery.

I waited and watched several more evenings without success. Then another friend produced a picture of an actual green flash. At that juncture I began to think it was another Nessie-like lore-story and some very elaborate confirmation data had been put together by photo-shop for the sake of humoring the Kama’aina (locals). Or maybe like the Hawaiian word haole, there could be multiple interpretations just as metaphysics has done for a multiple of mythical issues.

Then it happened. After several evenings of obsessive surveillance I saw a green flash! I suddenly became awake to a reality that was there all the time. Since there are literally pages of instructive info on the Internet regarding this real phenomenon, I decided to learn what caused it. As the sun begins to set, light hits our earth at a slightly slanted angle, which means it has to pass through an extra thickness of Earth’s atmosphere. That thickness lessens the velocity of the sun’s photon rays so that light rays begin to bend, sort of like a straight pole appears to bend when it is partly immersed at an angle in a swimming pool. Scientists, and the guys who regularly study this stuff, reveal that the degree of light bending depends on the color or wavelength of the light ray, violet most and red least. This color differential creates a kind of rainbow prism so that as the sun sets it will recede down the ocean horizon one color at a time, red first and violet last. The experts also tell us that reddish orange and yellow variants are absorbed by water vapor and oxygen. The blue and violet hues are mostly dispersed away from their path by wind molecules. Our atmosphere has the least influence on the color green and that is what, in Hawaii, we see as a nano-second green flash just as the sun sinks into blue sea. All I could say was, wow. Nature, without Menehune or forest fairies, had used every trick in her considerable bag: refraction, absorption, dispersion and more, to produce this astounding split-second visual experience we call the green flash. I realized that science is the poetry of nature and the green flash is pure poetry!

In short order, I became the green flash expert and started asking visitors to Hawaii if they had seen the green flash. The incomprehensible flash of green mystery was made comprehensible to me and to anyone willing to look for real verifiable answers without appealing to metaphysical machinations or childhood mythology. My willingness to wait and explore alternatives without resorting to magical thinking paid off! Additionally, I had a new waiting ritual each evening during which the so-called inherently shrouded mystery was seen as not only un-shrouded but completely illuminated. I began to wonder how many other comprehensible bits and pieces go floating by my brain without the slightest acknowledgement from me. How many bits of data are whizzing by right now without my being awake to them? How often do my beliefs keep me unawake and unaware of empirical evidence?

Another question then emerged: IF previously so-called mysterious and shrouded information is now readily available to anyone who is awake, and or aware and many of the so-called unknown mysteries cloaked in their historically inherent absence of scientific support are now being uncloaked, where is the evidence that making the unconscious conscious is a change for the better? In short, what has modern empirical research done for us? Specifically, what has it done for the plight of over a billion still enslaved women?

IF uncovering and understanding the multitude of evidentiary data exposes the world of myths and mysticism as bogus, does our waiting to be awakened pay off? Many apocalyptic naysayers and pessimistic prognosticators warn that it is already too late for the rewarding recompense. They argue that we passed the hour of rational redemption for our nation, perhaps for our planet, years ago. Myth and magic still appear to be winning the day. They further suggest that when a single word, such as hope, becomes a national anthem (4) we should give pause. What are we hoping for? Is it worth waiting for?

Many modern authors have asked, Why do women seem so much better at waiting. Are they better at facing up to bogus mythology than the other gender? Actually most experts today suggest that women are better at everything. Perhaps the question we should ask is: how did they become so good at everything? Do unconscious influences affect women less or more than men? Have women evolved a more awakened lifestyle than men? If so, why does slavery still exist for over half of the world’s women?

It seems true that waiting to be awakened has become a familiar stance on the part of women. A few women may vocally object to waiting but look closely; for them, waiting appears to be a major pastime. From in uterus to hospice care, sperms to worms, wombs to tombs, women are expected by most cultures to patiently wait. And for the most part, they do. Traditionally women have waited