Following yesterday’s post about the ignored Universal Theory of Physics, that once we allow for interconnectedness and consciousness we have can begin to allow for a robust, common place understanding of quantum physics, rather than have an ‘ordinary dead-world physics of daily Newtonian life’ and an amazing world of living, shifting, energetic and dynamic world of physics only open to people with PhDs which refers to very small things, I’d like to add a further musing on biology.
I was very disturbed that the more I studied about ovums and spermatozoa the more (and not as I had assumed less) they sounded like how people behave in night clubs. As a feminist I was indignant to learn how this huge, blob of slowly moving DNA sat like an oversized queen bee while surrounded by frenetic, desperate suitors, buzzing round till one burned its way in with some chemical and sealed the deal.
It was more a story of rape than conception and seemed to point to ‘biology is destiny’ at the social level. If this is how sex-cells behave, the story seems to imply, and wecare made of cells we are hardwired to rape, intrude, succum, be invaded.
When I discovered that Taoist thinking has put the femal aspect with the passive, dark, hidden, and the male with active, light, in the world, I can blame historical patriarchy but I also feel depressed. Here is a story from another culture which describes egg cells as the females aspect and women’s roles seem tied to this. We can change but we must fight these legendary ‘truths’. Well I’m not so sure it is true, we are seeing in sex cells and in cultural stories reflections of our lives, not universal truths.
The egg cell instead propels itself and selects the sperm cell to admit. It eagerly opens up to unite to get the best materials to realise its destiny as a zygote and beyond. Conception isn’t a rape on a cellular level, but a sophisticated dance on both sides.
The story of the rape of the ovum says more about us than nature, as Philip Shepherd states,
our tendency to describe the world according to our own experience of the self: we resist descriptions of nature that do not reflect our self-image.
He goes on to argue that we struggle to really accept the findings of quantum physics for this reason, the science points to holism while our daily lives are built around reductivist habits.
The atom’s existence is not contained by four dimensions, and so it will confound all such four-dimensional models.
As the atom has been reduced to untrue models of it as a nucleus surrounded by orderly rings of electrons instead of a space-time event dependsntbon a conscious observer, so has the ovum been politicised and rendered helpless.
The consequence for a quick translation of ancientvTaoist thought have been even more damaging. The feminine aspect is not passive, but ‘receptive’, the divine traditions of the woman including Mary, Tara and Tin Hau follow the root of the word ‘receptive’ to ‘patient’ and ‘compassionate’, the one who can fully experience joys and sorrow, a heart open to profound truth and love in the midst of horror. To witness, to keep a sacred space with peace, to trust in transformation, to submit and in doing so sustain, to be present with what is. To experience stillness.
Our cultures unbalanced obsession with activity, doing has forgotten about being. It isn’t that the ancient stories defining our potential for activity got it wrong or trick us with a choice of being force to act or pointlessly passive but that we interpret them in this way because this is our story routed in patriarchal norms.
Instead indigenous wisdom around the world points to the importance of being and acting, to witnessing and doing, to accepting and challenging. At different times people of either and any gender will feel called to make a different plan but seeing the feminine energetic principle of receptivity gives us more choices not less. It’s our ‘norm’ which short-changes us, not our biology, physics or energetics.
