Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Fall 2018  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Kinney, Jay, "Gender Fender Bender: If Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus, Then Where Is Everyone Else From?" Quest 106:4, pg 14-17

By Jay Kinney

The last several years have seen an upsurge of attention to gender issues. Whether it has been the controversies over transgender bathroom policy, the heavily publicized transitioning of Bruce Jenner into Caitlyn Jenner, or Facebook continually upping the number of gender identities that its members can choose from—they stood at seventy-one at last count—gender has commanded our attention at every turn.

Exactly how this came to be seems mysterious, especially for those of us who do our best to ignore celebrity news, social media, pop culture, most television, and the distant roar of the protests du jour. If one takes a sufficiently long perspective, “this too shall pass” becomes an abiding motto, although it is not exactly certain in the case of the current gender shakeup that any of it is going to be passing any time soon. Indeed, there are days when it seems like a more apt slogan would be “this too shall mutate.”

Once upon a time, things were simpler. They were so simple, in fact, that gender wasn’t even a word in most people’s vocabularies. Males and females were referred to as sexes, as in the male sex, the female sex, the fairer sex, the battle of the sexes, and so on. The default assumption was that one was born either male or female, and except for a tiny number of exceptions, such as hermaphrodites (now called intersex people), that was that.

Of course what that meant exactly was different from culture to culture and from era to era. A homesteading couple raising a family on the American frontier divvied up their respective roles differently than did their counterparts in, say, Samoa or the Hindu Kush. Yet overall there seemed to be a certain pattern of sex roles, shaped in part by the demands of propagating the human race.

Women had “motherly instincts” and “ticking biological clocks.” They gave birth to children and were inclined to nurture them and guide their development. Men were driven to venture out and bring back food or protect their mates and children from outside threats. Tradition and social pressure maintained these roles, and the human race survived.

Nature seemed to mirror this notion. For many birds, their mating rituals had clearly delineated male-female interactions. Anyone who lives in an urban area is likely familiar with puffed-up male pigeons strutting around trying to impress potential female mates. In earlier eras, when humans lived much closer to nature and observed how other species behaved, common sense suggested that humans and the animal kingdom shared certain patterns. The question of how those patterns arose was most often answered through scriptural examples, such as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden or the pairs of animals on Noah’s Ark, or through biology, as rudimentary as that may have been at the time. The logical conclusion, given such assumptions, was that the male-female binary was both natural and normative.

The natural realm, at least as far as humans, other mammals, and most two-sex species were concerned, propagated itself through the mating of males and females and their inevitably resulting offspring. Whether this was due to inborn instincts, hormonal influences, chromosomes, or the divine rules of God’s Creation, it was a given that few were inclined to challenge.

Not So, Now

Recent decades—since the ’60s, really— have seen a sea change regarding sexual and gender differences. For starters, some psychologists began to differentiate between what had been called sex—the sexual apparatus and characteristics with which one is born—and gender, the interplay of how one regards oneself sexually versus the roles and norms enforced by society.

This began to open up some space between the traditional biological categories of males and females (or men and women) and what it meant in a given culture to take on those identities. Animals and other fauna were assumed to be at the mercy of instincts, while humans, with the capacity for self-consciousness, were granted the agency to rise above the instinctual level and set their own path, individually or socially.

But this raised the question of how much one’s inclinations were a result of nature or nurture. In stark terms, was a baby born into this world already shaped by a genetic inheritance from its parents and ancestors, or was it a relatively blank slate subsequently influenced by its parents, environment, and society? The common sense answer was usually “some of both,” though some theories tilted strongly in one direction or the other.

For instance, after the Bolsheviks won the Russian Revolution, there was a conscious effort to create a new Soviet man and woman through the imposition of new socialist norms and an egalitarian infrastructure and society. I think it is safe to say at this late date that things did not pan out as planned.

Conversely, the theory behind educational experiments such as A.S. Neill’s Summerhill school had it that children’s innate curiosity and capacity for learning were crushed under conventional schooling and discipline. Remove such coercive structures, and over time children, with some benign guidance, would in effect school themselves. Here too success was elusive.

Indeed, if we look back to the mid-nineteenth century, which saw the first wave of American movements of utopianism and reform, the dream of human perfectibility was already a staple of progressive thought. The romantic conception of America itself, projected as a New Jerusalem or as some other idealistic vision, proved fertile ground for reformers who believed that society could be successfully remade along one model or another.

Feminism, socialism, abolitionism, spiritualism, diet reform, clothing reform, water cures, mesmerism, magnetic healing, temperance, and free love were espoused, practiced, and more often than not abandoned. Slavery was abolished at the cost of a civil war, but most of the other reforms failed to achieve liftoff and languished as niche beliefs or crank theories.

The grand dames of first-wave feminism, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, rallied their supporters with the tacit assumption of women’s moral superiority. Women’s innate nature, they asserted, was to defend the innocent, to care after the sick, to be the embodiment of Christian charity. Such empathy, so valued in the home, was dearly needed in politics and society at large. By setting women on equal footing with men, the social order would be inevitably improved.

This assumption of an essential feminine virtue was counterposed to an assumed masculine brutishness, insensitivity, and dominance. This binary split of gender roles and behavior was carried over into the early theorizing of second-wave feminism in its radical break with the New Left at the end of the 1960s. But this break was more rhetorical than substantial. The male left was denounced, but the pattern of left analysis was maintained.

Utopia in Theory and Practice

The legacy of the departing left of the ’60s was the spread of its template of oppressor versus oppressed. Originally modeled on the Marxist theory of a working class oppressed by a capitalist ruling class, this Hegelian idea of dialectical conflict leading to eventual resolution and advance was applied to nearly every perceived social injustice and inequality. Women were oppressed by men; gays and lesbians were oppressed by heterosexuals; the disabled were oppressed by the able; and so on.

During the final decades of the twentieth century, these neatly binary oppositions subsided as a theoretical framework for reform. With the arrival of third-wave feminism in the early 1990s, a theory of intersectionality arose. It attempted to conceptualize the interaction between different “systems of power” and “the multiple layers of oppression” affecting the numerous victims of capitalism, imperialism, the patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and other rather abstract bogeymen. This resulted in an intricate dance of legal and social pressure seeking to end all oppressions within society through a push for equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Ironically, in the last two decades, corporate human-resource departments, governmental agencies, international NGOs, the military, and the mainstream media have all joined in this push. Perhaps they conclude that taking the path of least resistance is simply bowing to the inevitable and needn’t harm profits, power, or funding.

Nevertheless, the increasing speed of these changes has meant that no sooner has a victory over oppression in one quarter been celebrated than the philosophical and ideological framework behind it is shifted and new problems are discovered, requiring new adjustments.

The progression in the academic field of what is now called gender studies is a case in point. Originally an offshoot of women’s-studies departments, which were increasingly under pressure to ditch binary gender concepts, gender studies employed both feminist and postmodernist critical theory and phenomenology as its framework. Rejecting the essentialist philosophy of second-wave feminism, exponents such as Judith Butler questioned the common differentiation between an individual’s sex and their gender.

If I read Butler correctly (no easy matter, I have to say), the broad categories upon which early feminism was constructed, such as those of “men” and “women” or an assumed femaleness that all women share, are illusions that upon closer examination are revealed as “a sedimentation that over time has produced a set of corporeal styles which, in reified form, appear as the natural configuration of bodies into sexes which exist in a binary relation to one another.” If one decouples gender from “sexual reproduction within the confines of a heterosexually-based system of marriage which requires the reproduction of human beings in certain gendered modes,” it becomes possible to free up gender into a multiplicity of styles and performances.

According to Butler, one’s default sense of self is a subjective fluctuating illusion caught up in a feedback loop with external, socially imposed roles and taboos, and not some unique essence such as a soul or, in Jungian terms, a Self. Therefore this fluctuating self exists as a blank slate of possibilities to be explored through performative acts. With enough repetition, you can become a new you—or at least free yourself from imposed concepts of gender. So the theory goes. Where this leads, nobody knows.

Gender theory assumes, or at least hopes, that it will lead to a greater freedom for all, to a throwing off of the oppressive shackles of binary conformity, to a world in which everyone can define themselves as they wish and can expect—or, if it comes down to it, demand—the respect of everyone else in doing so. But, like all utopian visions, the path to fulfillment is difficult, some would say impossible.

First, there’s the question of gender dysphoria, a psychiatric diagnosis that characterizes a subject’s alienation from his or her (or its or their) “sex” as a psychological disorder. Is someone who insists that they are “a woman born in a man’s body,” or vice versa, suffering from a mental illness, or is this person a pioneer of gender freedom? Do they need therapy or celebration?

Then again, consider the challenge of raising gender-free children, which until recently was not even a thing. If gender, as heretofore conceived, has been the result of the rather straightforward task of giving the newborn baby a cursory glance and shouting out joyously, “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy!” well-meaning progressive parents are beginning to balk at such presumptions. Let’s not get too hasty here. Let’s hang loose until the little squirt makes its own determination.

And what determinations might those be? Some states’ vital statistics and birth certificates have bravely begun to offer a third option to the usual gender choice of an M box or F box: an X box. As reported in Newsweek, Washington state in 2018 provided this third option as “a gender that is not exclusively male or female, including, but not limited to, intersex, agender, amalgagender, androgynous, bigender, demigender, female-to-male, genderfluid, genderqueer, male-to-female, neutros, nonbinary, pangender, third sex, transgender, transsexual, Two Spirit, and unspecified.”

Mercifully, this is not a choice that the babe in arms (or its parents) has to make on the day of birth. Rather it is a catchall option that can be used to revise the birth certificate at some later date, perhaps years or decades in the future.

Nevertheless, as New York magazine noted in a recent report on gender-free children, we are increasingly witnessing the raising of “theybies”: babies whose gender designation is kicked on down the road until someone—the child itself, a proactive teacher, or perhaps a social worker—decides that things are settled enough that gender identity can be established.

Which is all very well, except for the growing number of transsexuals who decide, years later, that electing for surgery to transition to another sex (or is it gender?) was a big mistake that is not easily reversed.

Even among those who choose to shift their identification from one gender to another without surgical intervention, the question remains whether someone born “male” who chooses to identify as a woman, but who retains their penis, is truly a woman. Some old-fashioned radical feminists insist that simply declaring oneself a woman does not make it so. Rather, the sum total of one’s life experiences living in a female body and navigating the culture as a woman makes one a woman. Such naysayers have earned the epithet of TERF—trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

Unsurprisingly, some conservative thinkers have been reluctant to applaud these advances in gender freedom. Rod Dreher, a convert to Orthodox Christianity who blogs for The American Conservative, has gone so far as to describe them as “diabolical.” He exclaims, “It’s all unraveling. All that was solid and coherent is shattering into fragments. Wake up!”

That is perhaps returning tit for tat when gender theory would seem to dismiss the traditional perpetuation of the human race, sustained over millennia, as oppressive and coercive. Not everyone agrees that heterosexuality is a plague or that following the patterns of nature is retrograde.

Kåre Fog, a Danish Ph.D. in biology, recently criticized the broadly accepted theory within gender studies and other soft social sciences that gender is socially constructed. Analyzing citations and cited sources in multiple papers, books, and studies arguing for the social construction of gender, he found that evidence was repeatedly misconstrued or mistaken, and that in hard-science terms, the social construction of gender was unsupported. In other words, gender theory was just that: theory, and not an especially persuasive theory at that.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

I will readily confess that I lay no claim to a better understanding of the present muddle than anyone else. By dint of living in San Francisco over the last forty-five years, I have arguably “seen it all,” or at least witnessed the eclipse of the counterculture, second-wave feminism, “divine decadence,” the peak of the AIDS crisis, and Marxist-Leninist optimism. If I live long enough, I may see the eclipse of gender theory.

It is a cliché—or perhaps a bit of hard-won wisdom—that the older one gets, the more one appreciates traditions and folkways that have withstood the test of time. The youthful impulse to tear it all down and start afresh begins to lose its allure, as the tally of radical, revolutionary, and utopian failures continues to mount. The passion for battle begins to appear more a product of youthful hormones and less a response to imminent disaster.

For all the flak they catch these days, the world’s religions and spiritual traditions have played a vital role in preserving those shards of ancient wisdom that might have otherwise faded into the mists of time. They are, no doubt, not to be followed blindly or literally, but sheer age commands its own respect.

H.P. Blavatsky was no stranger to the call of the past or to the tug of the future. By all reports, she pushed the gender boundaries of the late nineteenth century about as far as they could be pushed. Smoking hand-rolled cigarettes in her New York parlor and abjuring most markers of femininity, she nevertheless upheld the importance of ancient wisdom and the past. Confronted with a world rapidly embracing materialism and dismissing the spiritual, she threw her weight behind the spiritual, encouraging those who listened to resist purely materialistic explanations for evolution, and to consider other occluded factors and causes.

One wonders what HPB would have made of our present juncture, where gender has become a zone of contestation, where unproven theories derived from French phenomenology and critical postmodernism have filtered down into shaping states’ vital statistics and birth certificates. In her day she spoke up strongly for the freedom and equality of women, but gender theory was not yet on the horizon.

If there is one motto that sums up the present age, I suspect it may be “if it can happen, it will happen.” Which is to say, if something can be conceived of, someone will do it.

Before modern surgical advances made male-to-female (or female-to-male) transitions possible, these remained fantasies that some entertained but none could realize. An extensive apparatus of transvestite and transsexual playacting fulfilled the performative impulse in traditional venues such as the gay tavern tradition of “Emperor and Empress” elections for most popular drag portrayals. Farther afield, two-spirit otherkin in more primitive cultures found socially sanctioned roles as shamans or other hypnagogic guides to liminal regions of consciousness.

Once surgical transitions from one sex to another became feasible, they became inevitable. As the motto of ACT UP, the gay anti-AIDS activist group, declared, “We’re here, we’re queer, deal with it.” To which most open-minded folks might respond, “OK, we’re dealing with it. What’s next?”

We can only hope that what’s next is a sincere effort all around to rebalance our present gender battles toward common sense rather than ultrautopian goals.

Jay Kinney was the founder and publisher of Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions. His book The Masonic Myth has been translated into five languages. He is a frequent contributor to Quest.

VOLUME 106, NUMBER 4

CONTENTS

Implementing the Ageless Wisdom
Tim Boyd

Gender Fender Bender:
If Men are From Mars and Women are From Venus, Then Where is Everyone Else From?
Jay Kinney

Circle of Nine: A Women's Way of Working 
Cherry Gilchrist

A Stranger No More:
A Journey through Mormonism
Clare Goldsberry

Devata, Devi, and Logos
James LeFevour

Buddhism beyond Gender
Rita M. Gross

From the Editor's Desk
Richard Smoley

Viewpoint: Getting off Autopilot
Barbara Hebert

Members' Forum: Alchemy of Gender
Gwynne Mayer

Printed in the  Summer 2018  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Abbasova, Pyarvin, "Members’ Forum: That Little Light of Mine" Quest 106:3, pg 2

By Pyarvin Abbasova

Quest is starting a regular column in which members share their insights and experiences with the subject of the issue. This is the first installment. —Ed. 

We often hear about the darkness that exists in the world. One click of the remote or one scroll of the mouse, and you will get more examples of the dark side of humanity than you can comprehend. But at least that kind of information is somewhat under our control. We can choose not to turn on the TV, or we can avoid certain pages on the Internet. But what if you are facing a darkness that is extremely difficult to shake off because it doesn’t come from the outside, but from within? I am talking about depression.

As a psychiatrist I knew a great deal about depression: definition, diagnostic criteria, treatment. But as a human being, I was not familiar with it. Don’t get me wrong. I am not upbeat and happy 365 days a year, but the down moments never lasted for long stretches of time. That was until I had my first son. Of course, I knew that postpartum depression (PPD) was common; I just didn’t know how common it was. Also, it was nothing like what I have studied; otherwise it would have been easy for me to detect the problem right away. After struggling with it for a while, I was able to find help and get better. But I will never forget the feeling. It was by far the darkest period of my life.

PDD rates in the U.S. are not known exactly. Official statistics say that about one woman out of five has suffered from it. But this number is way too low, simply because many women don’t seek medical help. Probably at least 50 percent are affected to some degree.

To Western medicine, depression is a chemical imbalance in the nervous system. But having lived through it, I can say it is not that simple. In fact, its physical manifestation as a serotonin imbalance is the last step in a process that starts on more subtle levels. This condition affects the mental body and the emotional body first. I had a clairvoyant friend who could see depression starting in a person’s aura weeks before it manifested on the physical plane.

Before PPD, I never paid attention to the fact that my life was full of light and joy and happiness. It is hard to know the real value of something until it has been taken away from you. Talking to many people who have experienced depression for various reasons, such as divorce, the death of a family member, or the loss of a home—or no apparent reason at all—I found that we all felt the same thing. It is a feeling that light and joy are being sucked out of a person, leaving nothing but emptiness and darkness.

Finding a way out is a long process, and it goes differently for everyone. In my case, I refused to take antidepressants, mainly because I was a nursing mother. Being a medical doctor myself and having a husband who is also a doctor, I decided to do some research and look for alternatives. I had to recall many things from my internship in psychiatry. For example, back in Siberia, at the Institute of Psychological Health, where I studied, doctors did not rely on medication alone to treat depression. They also successfully used physical therapy, aromatherapy, and music and art therapy. So with the help of my former university mentor and my clairvoyant friend, I embarked on the journey of getting my mental health back.

It was a lot of work, not only for me but also for our little family. We had to shift many things around. It started with the physical body. My clairvoyant friend told me that during depression, the energy flow to the head and solar plexus is altered, and the lower energy centers are depleted. One way to fix that was seeing a chiropractor regularly, going for deep tissue massage, and getting more sleep (the hardest part). Acupuncture was on his list as well, but I didn’t have the time or the money to have regular treatments. Another thing was to change my diet to incorporate more fresh, local, organic fruit, vegetables, and honey, because these are packed with vital energy. I also got back to practicing yoga asanas and pranayama. As for the emotional body, I think therapy would have been great, but I could not afford it. Finding online support communities of moms helped me a lot, because we could talk and share without judgment or fear. I have to say that kirtans (chants) with my Hare Krishna friends were most helpful, for they filled my heart with love, joy, and the spirit of bhakti. As for my mind . . . I just could not meditate. But I loved reciting Shiva mantras every day and doing Shiva puja once a week, and that was my meditation. The energy of devotion slowly but steadily healed my mind. Most importantly, I learned how to love myself in this new stage of life with all its imperfections—first-mom mistakes, rampaging hormones, and all.

For most people who have been depressed, there is a point when a little ray of light creeps in. I remember hearing some of my patients share their stories. For a moment, a person simply smiles or laughs at something, feels joy or happiness, and that is when the dark shell around the body starts to crack. And the shell starts to let in more and more rays of light until life can be experienced and enjoyed fully again.

I remember that moment for myself. A friend came to visit one day. She had a T-shirt on that said, “That little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine!” I remembered the song instantly, and we laughed and sang it together. I still love the song, because it is a constant reminder that despite all obstacles on the path, nothing can hush that little light of mine. I am letting it shine!

Pyarvin Abbasova’s most recent Quest article was “Jyotish: The Science of Light: An Interview with Elena Tihonova” in the winter 2018 issue.

Printed in the  Summer 2018  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Hebert, Barbara, "Viewpoint: Shining a Light into the Darkness" Quest 106:3, pg 10-11

By Barbara Hebert
National President

We typically think of light and darkness as opposites that represent positive versus negative, or good versus evil. The light almost always epitomizes the positive—goodness, happiness, awareness, wisdom, unity, and hope. Light represents the Divine in whatever way we define that term. Darkness frequently symbolizes the negative—evil, ignorance, hatred, pain, isolation, and selfishness. Darkness represents materialism in its most earthly form—ungodly, nonsacred, and almost hellish.

Personally, I sometimes experience cognitive dissonance when thinking of this dichotomy. At times I struggle with the concept of a division between light and darkness, because it seems to propagate the idea that light is better than darkness, and, subliminally, that lighter is better than darker. In a society that continues with rampant racism, we need to contemplate the possibility that this idea perpetuates the belief that lighter-skinned people are better than darker-skinned people. While many may deny that a discussion about light versus dark has anything to do with racism, it remains a point that we must evaluate individually and objectively. Perhaps just a small change in our language may help to end divisions among people.

In any case, the division between light and dark exists, at least in this physical realm. There is light in the daytime and darkness at night. Light and darkness work to balance each other, and as human beings, we seem to need both light and darkness in some balanced manner.

Carl Jung writes, “The word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” Replacing the word “happy” with “light” and the word “sadness” with “darkness” in his statement, we read, “The word ‘light’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by darkness.” Light and darkness provide meaning for each other.

Unity versus separation (light versus darkness) is one of the great paradoxes of the Ancient Wisdom. We are One, yet we are individual. We embody the light, and we embody the darkness, and the two make us One. We experience light to bring awareness of the darkness, and we experience darkness to bring awareness of the light. We are light, and we are darkness. We are a whole that encompasses both.

We can look at darkness in terms of those places inside ourselves where we don’t shine the light of self-awareness: the subconscious, the part of our consciousness that lies below our awareness. Every one of us has aspects of our personality that we would prefer not to see, and that we definitely don’t want others to see. Therefore we hide them away in the darkness of our subconscious. We don’t look at them, we don’t see them, we don’t allow ourselves to be aware of them. What do we repress? It may be thoughts, feelings, or even actions based on selfishness, thoughtlessness, cruelty, callousness. We may repress anything that we find offensive about ourselves.

The question arises, “If all of us have these aspects in some form or other, why do we suppress them?” The simple answer is that it hurts to acknowledge those aspects of ourselves that we deem undesirable, and as human beings, we will do whatever we need to do in order to avoid this pain. Jung writes, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

Repression requires a great deal of energy and effort, even though we are rarely aware of it. It requires a lot of work to not see something that is part of us. Another potential challenge of repression involves the explosive potential of these hidden thoughts and feelings. Using the analogy of a volcano may be helpful. A volcano erupts because of increasing pressure within it. Similarly, when the pressure from repressed material becomes great enough, we also explode.

My personal and professional experience indicates that these explosions tend to happen at the worst possible time and in the worst possible place. For instance, a client with whom I worked several years ago had experienced what he considered an extremely unfair accusation against him. This accusation, while never substantiated, caused great turmoil in this young man’s life, and he felt isolated, ridiculed, and humiliated. These feelings coalesced into feelings of anger. But given his life circumstances, he could not express his anger about the situation, so he suppressed it for almost ten years. He came into counseling because of difficulties with his job in retail sales. His manager had told him that if he didn’t work on his anger issues, he would be fired.

Through counseling, this young man realized that he had suppressed his feelings of anger from that previous time in his life. Anytime a customer questioned the young man, he felt unheard, ridiculed, and humiliated again. Not surprisingly, he reacted with explosive anger, couched in sarcastic and hurtful comments to customers. Shining a light on the original incident enabled this young man to see the impact it was having on his current life. This awareness allowed him to heal from the original hurt and to experience more peace than he had had for many years. As Jung writes, “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.” 

This young man was able to shine the light of self-awareness into the darkness of his suppressed feelings and thoughts because the counseling relationship is nonjudgmental. As always, I am a strong proponent of counseling, but I wonder how many of our personal issues could be addressed simply by being nonjudgmental toward ourselves. If we let go of the guilt, if we accept ourselves without condemnation, how much easier it would be to shine the light of self-awareness into the darkness of repression! Even more importantly, I wonder if we would continue to repress those things about ourselves that we perceive as offensive.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” The Ancient Wisdom shares this same insight: the human experience is about learning. If we see ourselves as learners, then we may be able to give ourselves permission to make mistakes, even mistakes that horrify us. We will all—at some point—act, think, or feel selfishly, cruelly, heartlessly. How can we learn if we have not experienced the results of our thoughts, feelings, and actions? Certainly I am not advocating that we purposely make mistakes; but I am advocating that we treat ourselves with kindness and refrain from judging when we do. Jung writes, “Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.”

Imagine two children playing on the playground. A six-year-old says to another child, “If you don’t play on the swings with me, I’m not going to be your friend anymore.” This statement can be perceived as selfish and hurtful. The six-year-old may even have meant to be selfish and hurtful. Do we condemn that child? Hopefully, we will recognize that this is a learning experience for both children and deal with the situation with kindness.

We can apply this analogy to ourselves. If we see ourselves as learners on the playground of life, and if we observe ourselves having thoughts, feelings, and actions that we find objectionable, then we will hopefully deal with ourselves kindly and without judgment.

Of course, recognizing that we are learners in this playground of life does not absolve us from responsibility for our behavior. Even so, nonjudgmental self-acceptance and a willingness to learn and grow may propel us on our spiritual journeys. In this manner, we allow the light of self-awareness to shine into the darkness of repression. As spiritual beings having a human existence, we are light, and we are darkness. We are a whole that encompasses both.