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So basically: "men search to self-improve, women search to recognize that they are already perfect".
I think your comment illuminated for me a weird fact that I've noticed about the meditation community and the distribution of male/female meditators among the different techniques. One set of meditation techniques heavily emphasize linearly developed skills: there are specific tasks that you must accomplish, and those who can't do those tasks are "worse at meditation" in a very straightforward way than those who can do those tasks well. Put in the time, do the work, and you get better at meditation. This would be the male approach to meditation, and it's the one that I see most guys who pick up meditation gravitate towards. Yet, there is another set of techniques that reject the very premise that there is anything to be done: you are already perfect, exactly as you are right now, you just need to recognize it, any skills you try to pick up and improve are distractions. But in a weird way any attempt at trying to recognize this goes against the point, you must be totally effortless in recognizing you are already perfect, here and now. Trying to do anything at all is useless and against the point. Going on this path requires a weird sort of mental flexibility and intuition, you need to recognize something without trying to do anything at all. Women seem to like these techniques much more than men do, and now it makes sense why they would. In the meditation world both paths ultimately lead to the same place, and it's very hard to get to the end without practicing both to some extent. I think there is something archetypally profound here.
Yes, I think you’ve hit something there.
I would formulate it thusly:
What we call the masculine develops from two things: austerity and challenge.
Its ultimate goal is freedom.
What we call the feminine develops from from emotional, spiritual, and spatial fullness.
Its ultimate goal is love.
The profound silence of deep meditation is a monstrosity to her. For she requires fullness, not emptiness.
Singing, dancing, drinking, laughing, and the like is where the feminine finds it home and flowering.
A man indulging thus because a lump of uselessness. Just as a woman indulging in a life of challenge becomes a bearded lady.
I believe this to be archetypal.
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