Eros and Technology

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book “Lifeforce Leadership — Eros, Clarity and Action in the age of Interconnectivity”

The True Crone in the age of interconnectivity

Both the masculine and feminine have been distorted. There was a huge split in our collective psyche 2000 years ago, separating us from the feminine, from the true erotic, from eros — a rejection of the feminine and of nature. The deep madonna/whore split in western religion and society made everything powerful about the feminine — eros, primal power, and mystic wisdom — evil: the witch and the whore, leaving only the virginal maiden or the timid loving mother. Since feminine eros calls the masculine, this split has also deeply distorted the masculine.

We could speak deeper to these distortions, but acknowledging them for now, what I am most interested in is a frame and a feminine calling-in of the masculine that is true and helpful. Even though I see huge distortions in the feminine and in the masculine in the world today, I come across very few frames or calls from women to the masculine that I find actually true and helpful. Most teachers and thinkers who acknowledge the split from the feminine, and who are leaning into bringing back true feminine power, struggle to acknowledge what I see as the true nature of the masculine.

The split that happened was, in a sense, an inevitable and natural one — a split that will and should happen in the healthy maturation process of individual humans and of humanity as a collective species. Core to the masculine's maturation process is to separate from the safety and comfort of the mother and go out on a heroic journey to find his own signature, to discover how he can contribute to his people. This journey is guided mainly by elder men and fuelled by the eros of elder women. If and when he succeeds in this separation from mother and matures into manhood, he will then be able to return to the feminine — but as an adult man dancing with the erotic and powerful feminine, not as a boy relating to mother. The split or individuation route we chose as a species, especially in the west, has led to deep distortion because it became a complete rejection of the feminine rather than a maturation process in service of life, returning to the feminine in a powerful mature dance.

In its pure form, this separation from mother and the feminine is the drive to become a better man — to contribute and provide with ever greater power. For humans, this meant creating increasingly advanced technologies that enable the masculine to contribute and provide more and more effectively. This drive for improvement is utterly natural. Technology advancement is therefore simply an inevitable part of evolution — not good or bad in itself. It can be created in service from a lionhearted masculine or from a ego-driven masculine, which can make it creative or distorted. But the drive for advancement itself is just natural evolution: inevitable, and ultimately arising from a natural impulse in the masculine.

What we now have to acknowledge is this: the technology that partly has come from an distorted individuation of the masculine — but also from a pure one — has become so powerful that it is godlike.

The great mother is the process, the ever-return of the same, and inevitably where we will all go back to at death. Feminine eros fuels the masculine's natural drive for individuation from the mother creates the event, that which creates development breaking the cycle of the ever return of the same. Technology is an event, and we have created technology so powerful that it is itself speeding up the eventification of the human worldview and of society. So when I hear teachers and philosophers advocating for bringing back ancient feminine wisdom — with the truth that the deepest spiritual realm is the goddess, and that the masculine represents an equal but more human consort — that dynamic is no longer adequate. Because this masculine drive for maturation, pure and natural, has resulted in technology that has now made the masculine equally powerful to the goddess. Just as the goddess can metaphysically tap into the mycelium of everything, so can the internet. And just as Kali can metaphysically destroy all life, so can the atom bomb.

This naive stance of feminine worship, which fails to truly acknowledge the masculine, is neither true nor helpful — and I think it is dangerous.

What is needed is a frame and an invitation toward the masculine that comes from the pure, powerful feminine. A call that acknowledges the natural and necessary separation from mother and the feminine that the healthy masculine needs, and the technology creation that has come from that drive — while still meeting him in the powerful feminine on the other side of that maturation. Calling him back into realignment, in service of his people, and therefore in service of the feminine and of life. But not calling him back to ancient wisdom from before technology — refusing to acknowledge, or worse, trying to shut down, the godlike power of technology we have created through the masculine and eros. A power that is not inherently good, not inherently bad, but evolutionary inevitable.

What we need are women who, instead of trying to shut down the masculine and inevitable technology development, level up their own feminine power and stand in a frame and a call that fully acknowledges the godlike power the masculine now carries through technology — so that we can call men in to, together with us, take the immense responsibility required to steward it.

This means holding the unilocal truth that the masculine in his nature is and should be moving away from the feminine, and that the masculine ultimately needs to be in service of eros, of life, of nature itself. And from that truth, calling men into their power to together take responsibility for what we have created.

There is enormous and deeply important work being done to uncover the ancient feminine mystical wisdom that was lost. And in this work, we need to remember that this wisdom was distilled in a world before advanced communication and military technology existed. The work of the crones today is to build on the old and catalyze new wisdom, for a new spiritual foundation, one that can lay the ground for an evolved and far more powerful dance between the masculine and the feminine.

A spiritual world view for the age of interactivity

Let us look at a summary of the path of humanity's relationship with the divine that we have explored throughout this book.

All humans began with worship of the immanent Great Mother, where the sacred was everywhere and in everything, but where there was very little free will. We experienced ourselves to be held inside her cycles, subject to her rhythms, dependent on her mercy.

In many places around the world this evolved into a worship of the goddess where elements of human agency became more embedded in the fiber of the spiritual worldview. But possibly here the idea of not having to go through the maturation process of meeting the feminine became too alluring. We tried to remove the power of the feminine and our inevitable connection to her immanence by shifting our worship to the transcendent Great Father, to a God removed from the world and located above it.

Here free will entered the picture, but conditionally. Apply your free will correctly, follow the rules, and you would reach a stable state of heaven. Salvation as the reward for right behavior. This spiritual worldview was extremely effective at creating order and structured civilization in the feudal age.

As we evolved into the industrial age, with the Enlightenment, we exchanged religion and God for scientism and capitalism. We replaced the idea of God and heaven with scientific and material progress. The promise stayed structurally the same but the content shifted. Use your free will to climb materially, accumulate, achieve, work on yourself, and you will be happy. Heaven became something you could buy or build within a lifetime.

The industrial age created immense technological development and with it an enormous increase in quality of life for many, as well as liberation from the more dogmatic views of Western religion. But what the Enlightenment has ultimately produced is consumerism and an individualistic marketplace mentality of everyone against everyone, culminating in today's hypernarcissism. We now live in a way that stands extremely far from the tribal nature we explored in chapter 6, and the cost is visible everywhere. An enormous loss of meaning. An epidemic of mental illness.

Capitalistic forces replacing religion will ultimately create spiritual worldviews that make us into ever better consumers; "You are broken, but you can be fixed and arrive at stable mended state, and here are the things you can purchase to reach this state" Most of the medical, self-help, wellness and therapeutic industries, the context that most of us in the West turn to instead of the church, are built on this premise.

As the next paradigm of the internet age becomes more and more rooted, we can start to sense the spiritual worldview that makes sense for navigating the twenty-first century. Global interconnectedness, with its ruthless clash of cultures and rapid development of technology, means living a life in constant flux and change. This paradigm is finishing what the industrial age started. It is the ultimate killing of the idea that there is a stable state to strive for that we can finally arrive in.

To thrive in this age we have to come closer to the truth of reality. The world is in constant flux. Life is a constantly changing, exciting and crazy ride where we will never arrive but always be in the process of becoming.

If this sounds familiar, it is because this is precisely what it means to have an adult worship of the goddess of life. Where you both surrender to what you cannot control and heroically show up to life. Where humans are seen as complex ongoing processes, and where the goal and the ultimate sacredness is to surf in the flux of life now rather than reach a stable state of heaven some time in the future.

I believe the internet age is dismantling the false masculine spirituality that has suppressed the feminine. It is making it ever more clear that everything which does not require dancing with eros and the feminine, everything that can be done through disconnected rationality alone, will be done better by machines. What is left for humans requires deep maturation into the masculine and deep maturation into the feminine. At the same time, the internet and technological development are dismantling the false feminine that has long suppressed the true masculine. We are realizing that we cannot return to a pre-technological world, that the dream of utopian humanitarianism is failing, and that we desperately need both the honorable holding masculine and creating masculine to develop and protect our societies. We are being called into daring to step into right relationship with the feminine and masculine again.

And this is a relationship we have never before lived in history. Our ability to advance technology has created something entirely new between the masculine and the feminine. We now have to hold the reality of humanity's enormous impact on nature through technology, which in a sense places us spiritually above nature and demands that we take full responsibility for how we steward what we have created. And at the same time we have to hold the truth that we ultimately are nature, in full surrender and devotion to Her. This is as true on a personal level as it is for the societies and systems we build. Surrender to that which is beyond your control and heroically show up to life.

We desperately need crones, women deeply integrated in their mystic intelligence, who can invite us into a spiritual exploration fit for this paradigm. To hold a philosophically constructive and ethical stance toward technological development while staying in deep connection with the embodied truth of life and eros is no easy task. Neither is selling the true messy journey of maturation rather than the quick fix paths we are all being tempted with.

Luckily the true crones of the world are also the cosmic seductresses. And what they have to offer, a life of eros, is worth everything.