self-awareness

That still, small voice within…..can you hear it? Are you listening? When we first begin to attune to our own inner wisdom, it can feel difficult to discern. There is such a cacophony of voices from our inner community of conflicting interests, desires and repulsions, that the pure, clear note of Sophia, the wisdom principle, can barely be heard.(See earlier blog on Inner Community).

As I think or meditate on what my next blog should be about, I wait for some inner guidance. If I don’t feel it, I can’t get motivated to write. When I get very quiet and just wait, something usually comes. It is often in response to some conversation or some reflection on a problem that has come up. This time it was in response to the question of how do I decide what to write about next? As I thought about it, I realized it was connected to this process of inner listening, and waiting for guidance. The idea of “Notes from Sophia” kept coming up, and I kept dismissing it! Who was I to talk about Sophia, the feminine face of divine wisdom? It felt like hubris to me, and greater thinkers and writers than I have done this subject much greater justice. And I wasn’t interested in launching a political discourse on why God contained a feminine principle. And yet, and yet, this idea just kept nibbling away at the edges of my consciousness. Two of my great loves in life have long been theosophy and philosophy, so there She was again.

Theosophy (Theo meaning God in Greek, and sophy referring to Sofia or wisdom) and Philosophy, (meaning love of wisdom) both honour the recognition of Sophia as the feminine wisdom principle. In The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky, who was the founder of the Theosophical movement , explains: “Cosmogonies show that the Archaic Universal Soul was held by every nation as the “Mind” of the Demiurgic Creator; and that it was called the “Mother,” Sophia with the Gnostics (or the female Wisdom), the Sephira with the Jews, Saraswati or Vach, with the Hindus, The Holy Ghost being a female principle.” (Blavatsky, H.B., The Secret Doctrine, Vol.1, p. 353) The Buddhists refer to her as Kwan Yin. The Christians refer to her as Mary, the Mother of God.

The difficulty of listening to the wisdom of the heart is that one must learn to become very quiet in order to hear Her. In my experience, that still quiet voice of wisdom just comes as a knowing or a quiet realization after we have parsed out and separated out all those other raging and troubling feelings and emotions. In my last blog on forgiveness I referred to the Focusing work of clearing a space. When you can put all the various issues troubling you outside of your inner space, even if only for a while, you will have a chance to receive that insight from your deepest Self. You will begin to recognize that ‘wisdom note’ because there is a clarity and a lack of emotional charge to it. There is the feeling of ‘Ah yes’ or an ‘aha’ moment. It is when you know that you know, and something in you can just settle. There is a feeling of blessedness and peace in the knowing, even if there is sorrow in the heart.

The feminine wisdom principle is within all of us. It has nothing to do with whether you are male or female, and women certainly do not have any particular ownership or advantage. And yet the getting of wisdom certainly does seem to come with a gentleness, a compassion and kindness – qualities which in bygone days were more associated with the feminine. There was a recent article in The New York Times about how men were kinder and more generous and in the presence of women (see link below). A world in which Sophia was honoured again as the feminine face of God would I think be a gentler and kinder world.

Free lecture on Blavatsky and the Theosophical movement by Dr. Stefan Hoelller
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New York Times article: