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Happy Mothers Day

Mako is a hungry fish

01:57 / 13.05.07

I'm curious about Motherhood in relationship to a magical context - it seems like its a pretty universal theme that transcends form of religion, culture, and magical practice, and yet I'm curious about how these three have interpreted its function and what form has arisen from this.

What are the common themes that motherhood invokes, and what are the more specific ones that are summed up nicely in images such as the Virgin Mary, Binah the Supernal Mother, and Gaia the Mother Earth?

12:42 / 13.05.07

In Buddhism, to view all living beings as having been one's mother at some time in the cycle of existence, (especially one's guru), is considered a very useful meditation. By viewing all sentient beings in this manner, one removes the qualites of motherhood as being specific to women, and also it can help to engender feelings of gratitude and compassion towards other beings.

I tend to view my entire environment as my mother. It nutures me, and sustains me, and communicates with me when I listen. If I viewed motherhood as simply my human relationship with my biological mother, I would have had a very poor understanding of motherhood. No offence to my mom, but to expect any woman to embody those qualities perfectly, is not too realistic.

Unconditional Love

14:19 / 13.05.07

Binah

---Binah is associated in the soul with the power of conceptual analysis and reasoning, both inductive and deductive. The partzuf of Imma Ila'ah is associated in particular with the power to grasp and comprehend the insights of chochmah, whereas Tevunah represents the power to fully assimilate the resultant ideas into one's consciousness.

The "understanding" of binah also implies the ability to examine the degree of truth or falsehood inherent in a particular idea. This is expressed in Job as (12:11 and 34:3): "the ear examines words." The ear, the sense of hearing, is associated with binah. "Hear, O Israel..." (Deuteronomy 6:4) means "Understand...." The initial letters of the phrase "the ear examines words" spell emet, "truth."

Another feature identified with the property of binah is the ability to explain and elucidate concepts both to oneself and others. For this reason it is symbolized in Kabbalah as "the wide river." ---From the above.

This evokes to me the image of a child listening to his wise mother as she takes in his words and discerns the the truth from the expression he offers to her.

Unconditional Love

14:30 / 13.05.07

I wonder something about the images of mother and father, i can see how idealistic notions of them could actually destroy a child's relationship to there human parents, who are not always going to be able to offer there child an ideal.

But i also wonder how useful the notions of father and mother are, from reading Aldous Huxley in my teens i have notions of children competing about which designer lab they came from in the future, which i find scary, my corporate birth is better than yours nah nah.

What kind of place does the idea of mother and father have not only spiritually but as identifiers as well, somewhere between no parents at all and the very idealised notions inherited from the spirituality of the past, is the middle ground to look at the essential humanity of parents and children and identify what it means to be a loving human being and highlight those qualities as the qualities of a good parent. No mothers and fathers but good parents and guardians?

Unconditional Love

14:57 / 13.05.07

So for example with gay parent(s) you would have two good parents or one and not two fathers or mothers, the whole father mother paradigm seems to be loaded with a certain bias.

Unconditional Love

15:04 / 13.05.07

add to that single parent families, extended families through divorce, and family created through shared belonging and it could well be argued that the nuclear family adds to a break down in modern community (alittle over the top opinion i expect), but my main point is that as spiritual language father and mother evoke certain ideas of spiritual family and community at the exclusion of those family structures which dont fit into that model. Those kinds of spiritual modalities dont include family models of the last 30 - 40 years (i suspect much longer) and are employed to exclude. If that is an inherent component of traditional spiritual structures it is one that needs to be perhaps questioned very closely.

19:54 / 13.05.07

WA, I found your posts above to be very insightful, thank you.

Mako is a hungry fish

03:57 / 14.05.07

I've often encountered those whose ideals of mother and father have stood in the way of their overcoming the reality of mother and father that they have grown up with, often to the point where this is harmful. It never ceases to amaze me just how strongly our parents influence us, and how so many parents fail to appreciate this.