What Is the Divine Feminine?

What Is the Divine Feminine?

Sadhguru: What we refer to as feminine is a passage. It is an access. It is a dimension of insightfulness and intuition. Establishing and seeing and pursuing the divine in its feminine form has been a universal process across the planet. Every culture at some point had divine feminine worship.

As very aggressive, dogmatic and patriarchal cultures sought power in the world, they got militarized. This militarization of what should have essentially been an inner process led to a situation where the divine feminine got wiped out in most parts of the world. It still exists nominally almost everywhere. But this land, Bharat, is the only place where worship of the divine feminine is still an active process.

Divine Feminine and Ecology

When you worship the masculine, it is very natural to look up heavenward. The sky is referred to as the masculine God. When you worship the feminine, you inevitably look at the planet on which you exist. It is not a coincidence or a consequence of linguistics that we refer to the Earth and the soil as the mother. There is an innate intelligence in this that when you say Earth, you naturally think it is feminine because it produces life. Everything that nourishes us comes from the breast of the Earth. It is from this context and an innate inner experience in every human being that when you say Earth, it is feminine.

Bringing awareness to the divine feminine is of great significance in today's world, when we are going through various levels of crisis, particularly ecological ones. At a juncture like this, where our own capabilities, science, technology and enterprise is destroying the very basis of our life, the divine feminine becomes very significant.

Those cultures which looked upon the Earth as mother and had a worshipful attitude towards that never caused too much damage to the environment around them. It only happened where people saw conquest as the way of life. After doing all this damage to the planet, half the people still cannot even eat properly though there is enough food on the planet. If the feminine was dominant, the population would eat for sure. Compassion, love and aesthetics would be dominant, not conquest. 

Finding a Balance

If feminine was the more dominant factor or at least evenly balanced, I do not think you would have any ecological disaster, because feminine and Earth worship always came together.

If the feminine found a better expression on this planet, maybe our stock market would not hit 20,000, but generally people would smile more, be a little happier and more loving. Life would be a little more beautiful which is essentially what we want. After all, all these things were done in pursuit of human wellbeing. That has been forgotten because that is the way of the masculine, that it just goes on in one way. The feminine is not trying to go anywhere, it is happy where it is. That is the big difference. If these two things are in balance, then we can go somewhere and also enjoy where we are. That is what needs to happen in the world.

It is important that every human being understands that as the divine can be approached as a masculine process, there is also a feminine way of looking at it. This does not mean that there is a man God and a woman God, but there are two different ways we can approach it within ourselves. We can either approach it in a patriarchal, masculine way or in a matriarchal and feminine way. It is necessary for the wellbeing of humanity that we recognize these two qualities within ourselves.