The Role of the Masculine

The Role of the Masculine Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee The role of the masculine is to protect the women in their work of healing and transformation at this time, to protect the feminine. And I think that is... the masculine can stop... I can give you an example in oneself, that if you are doing this inner-work of inner transformation, right, you need to have boundaries, you need to stop certain things coming in and disturbing it. And for example, self-discipline, which is a very masculine quality, can be a very valuable and important boundary. If you are going to do a meditation practice, which is really creating an inner container, that something come into you, then you can't just do it when you feel like it. You need to do it within a certain disciplined framework. In Sufism, for example, we also talk about “adab,” which is a particular pattern of behavior or attitude of behavior that protects you from just enacting your lower instinctual self whenever you feel like it. There is a danger as you know, psychologically, once you go beneath the surface and open up to what is in the unconscious there's the danger that that floods consciousness, and to have a container, the alchemists call it the “vas bene clausum,” is very, very important. And the masculine attitude within you sets off boundaries and you can't transform somebody else's shadow, and the masculine has discrimination: this belongs to me, that belongs to you. Those are very, very important qualities for inner-work in the individual and I think they also need to be enacted, the masculine needs to value a certain sacred space that belongs to the feminine. So, it is the protector, it is the guardian... You know, the difficulty at the moment is that in our culture we haven't even gone as far as the sacred feminine, so the masculine is kind of hanging out there, because it can't take up its role as the guardian of this process.