THE WOMAN'S RIGHT
This is a remarkable chapter. There’s a lot of wisdom and information in a very few pages. Darwin takes a core spiritual principle and applies it to contemporary society – in the process giving a greater understanding of human, and simultaneously deepening our understanding of spirituality because we have seen how it is seen in a human basis.
The official focus of this chapter is regarding a woman’s right to choose to terminate her pregnancy – something that can be very controversial and has gained more visibility than usual recently. Darwin makes it clear from the start, he is pro-choice. He starts right off by saying this. And he immediately explains why. We are soul. We are eternal self-aware sparks of God. We take on human bodies in order to interact in this universe, but we are not our bodies any more than we are the car we drive. Further, if our body is something we drive, are we really going to get behind the wheel while it is still on the assembly line? Most likely not. We might go to the factory and watch it being assembled or monitor it’s progress. But we’re not going to sit in a bare chassis.
In the same token, as souls we are aware of who our parents will be before we are born and we are apprised of our birth coordinates. We may spend some prenatal time “hovering” around our future parents, or checking up on our body-to-be’s progress. But we’re not going to get in before it’s off the assembly line, detailed, with brand new sound system and a fresh coat of paint. Then we open the door, sit in the driver’s seat, get comfortable, put the key in the ignition, and away we go! If something goes wrong with the construction process and we have to wait until a new one can be assembled, it may be disappointing but It’s not the end. And while we may be upset about the delay, we don’t say the manufacturer didn’t have a right to pull the car from the assembly line prior to its completion. In the same way, a woman is not at fault for ending her pregnancy. It’s okay. Nobody was killed – because nobody was in the body yet.
This second point comes up within a few paragraphs when Darwin talks about feminine principles of Kali and Maya. He says Kali is the mother principle, the symbol of femininity, which men both worship and try to control. Then he offers a very intriguing perspective of Maya. She is, he says, “the veil through which life comes”. The Indian name “Maya”, Darwin notes, translates in the west as “Mary”, “Marie” and “May”. And then, almost as a casual aside, He reminds us of Jesus being born through Mary – a powerful symbol of the Soul and the God Principle being born into human form. I like how Darwin does this – taking Spirit and applying it to our thinking so we can see human events from the perspective of soul. The more we do this, the more our meditative state of Naam infusion becomes part of our waking interactive life, until there is a seamless continuity between the two. You start to become Naam, and that is a very good thing.
I first read this chapter as one of Darwin’s columns over 30 years ago, and it immediately resonated with me. The affect was profound and this core spiritual principle that soul is eternal has formed the foundation of my support of reproductive rights and our sisters’ right to choose. If only people could understand this, we would not have the huge controversy about abortion and women’s sovereignty over their bodies.
Why don’t we take a few minutes to read this chapter, and then close our eyes and meditate on it. Make your mantra a combination of “HU” and “I am soul. I am eternal. I am love.” Feel the Shabda flow through you, washing away karmic grit of the day and bathing you in Its golden love. And then take this out into your day.
All my love and blessings in the LightSong Eternal,
Michael Turner
*********************************
50. "The religious orders are attempting to convince not only all women, but he Government and the people of the land as well, that the unborn child is a person. This is not so. The fetus is a biological entity of cells only. The whole point is that soul, which is that individual sparks of God, does not enter the body while it is in the womb of the female, but only after the child has been brought into the outer world, and sometimes later than that.
50. Therefore, it is not murder if the woman decides to bear the child and carry the responsibilities of feeding it, seeing it through school and out into life, any more than it is murder if I cut off a bit of skin from a finger. It is her decision alone; there is no karma attached. There is nothing but the guilt and fear that has been pressed upon her through man’s ignorance and religious false moral statements.
50. In the East, India for example, there exists worship of a feminine principle that is referred to as the Kali, the mother goddess.
51. Kali, the mother principle, . . . represents the great womb of the universe and out of her womb is born all life. Christianity adopted the Virgin Mother idea from the Indian philosophy (mainly Shakti, Mother of the triad group) and completely lifted it and fashioned it into a westernized idea. The whole point is that Kali has become the symbol of the feminine mind. The whole mystery of the feminine principle is found in the Kali symbol.
50. Maya, illusion, is the veil through which life comes. Soul steps across from the higher planes through the veil of Maya to incarnate in the body of the child after it is born, animating it beyond mere biological existence. Now the word Maya has a dozen meanings. In the West it can be seen as Marie, Mary, May, Molly, Polly, etc. Hence comes the Mary who gave birth to the savior Jesus, yet he only used her body in order to visit this planet.
52. Man is trying to put down the choice of the individual woman to decide for herself whether or not she wants the responsibility throughout the rest of her physical life of bringing a child into the physical world. For the woman in my point of view, it is simply her choice. There is no guilt factor for those are on this path, because they have the understanding to know that life is not limited to just this plane of awareness and that there is no death as Man thinks of it.
52. Each of us as individuals choose and control our lives, and it is not some else’s part either through religion or legislation to attempt to dictate the good of all mankind."