Our Role in the Future

I found this the most challenging part of the website to create, because it required describing something that is emerging. It was and still is a “journey into the unknown.” While I drew from past experiences and resources for inspiration, what I share here unfolded as I wrote. Over time, I anticipate returning to this part of the site to refine and expand my vision of women’s role in creating humanity’s future

an evolutionary perspective

My doctoral degree

Developmental psychology has been the focus of my life’s work, and what I’ve shared through my books and websites on this topic has concentrated on mapping the development of individuals, couples, and families. When I talk about my PhD degree, I usually tell people my major is in Developmental Psychology. It’s not. Officially, it is in Planetary Psychology, with a minor in Education. I earned my degree in a self-directed multidisciplinary doctoral program where I created all components of my learning experience. I created my curriculum, studied with professors and mentors who specialized in my areas of interest, selected my doctoral committee, and titled my degree. It was both a scary and exhilarating experience.

When I presented my final documents to my dissertation committee at graduation, they said my major should not be Transpersonal but Planetary Psychology. I didn’t quite grasp their logic for this change, but I trusted their opinion and accepted their recommendation. After all, these people were some of the most highly respected educators in the world because of their non-traditional, out-of-the-box thinking. It took me many years to realize what these people saw in my work, and in me.

My self-directed degree encouraged me to be personally involved in all aspects of my learning process. I was able to include psychotherapy, bodywork, and travel experiences in the required personal development component. I used a heuristic model in my research project, rather than the traditional quantitative model. I was able to research the nature of human development, and integrate my findings in ways that were both personally and professionally meaningful. I was both the “object” of my research and the “observer” of it.

Everything I studied had personal meaning, and I was able to really follow my own inner process through the whole program. My committee members, some of whom were peers in the same program, really encouraged me to take expansive risks—in my thinking, in my personal potential as a person, and as a professional in my field. It reinforced my natural inside-out approach to learning so deeply that it has become a way of life.

I will say that I had to grow my sense of Self in order to feel and experience myself as a Planetary Psychologist. That’s another story.

Becoming a planetary psychologist

Growing my sense of Self in order to become an embodied Planetary Psychologist was a long co-creative process. Much of this growth took place during my 37-year marriage that was also a professional partnership. We created Developmental Systems Theory, a multi-tiered model that mapped the optimal development of all human systems: individuals, couples, families, organizations, nations, and the human species. Over time, I learned how to think systemically, and could envision the big picture of human evolution.

I understood at a process level how all these human systems evolved through the same four stages of development: codependent, counterdependent, independent, and interdependent. This map not only simplified my view of the world, but turned me into a real planetary psychologist. The most expansive part of my professional development was creating a map for the evolution of the human species, beginning with Her-story.

I equated the Herstorical or matrifocal era with the codependent stage of individual development. The symbiotic relationship between humans and the Earth during the matrifocal period parallels an infant’s symbiotic experiences with its human mother during the codependent stage of individual development. Preherstoric people and babies both experience life from the right hemisphere of the brain.

Riane Eisler writes about the period from 7000 to 3500 B.E in her book, The Chalice and the Blade. Here she describes the archeological evidence of the Trypillian culture found in a region known as Old Europe located in southern Ukraine. Considered to be one of the most ancient civilizations, research shows it predates Sumer, Mesopotamia, and Egypt.

The Trypillian culture practiced equal gender relations and had peaceful relations with neighboring settlements. They lived as hunters and gatherers, their consciousness intermingled with the primitive energies of Nature—animals, rocks, and climatic and natural forces. Their undifferentiated consciousness, or flock mentality, kept them in an oceanic state of existence, unable to separate their individual world from the world of other people the life around them. In this symbiotic state similar to mother and infant, there was no sense of self-and-other.

I equated the His-storical or patrifocal period of human development beginning around 2500 BCE with the counterdependent stage of human development. During this period, humans—like babies—began separating from Mother Earth. They moved from being tribal, nature-dependent hunters and gathers to farmers living in villages. This period also marks the development of left-hemispheric brain functions: language, math, analytical thinking, judging, discerning, competing, and dividing things or people into good and bad. In all human systems, the counterdependent stage of development involves conflict, mostly caused by duality and black and white thinking.

Based on the high level of conflict present in the world today, it looks like all human systems are stuck in this stage of development. What I see looks like the behavior of toddlers in their “terrible two’s”—having tantrums, making threats and ultimatums, being oppositional and defiant, unable to use their words to get their needs met, and full of entitlement, grandiosity, omnipotence, euphoria, and other narcissistic, immature behaviors.

Moving beyond the counterdependent stage is extremely difficult, because it is a process of awakening one’s consciousness. It is intense work and requires mastering many subtle physical, biological, psychological and emotional challenges. Exactly at this point in the evolutionary process, is where we—especially women—must awaken. We must become conscious, individuated, and self-responsible if humanity is to survive and evolve. I worry that humanity will destroy itself before we get to the next stage.

As a species, we are wavering at the boundary between the counterdependent and independent stages of human evolution. Although technology has helped us become more connected, this stage requires we advance our consciousness to the place where we can cooperate for the common good. We must get beyond the competitive counterdependent structures that are blocking our evolution. I fervently hope this crisis is an opportunity for us to wake up to both the seriousness of our problems and create the critical solutions to them.

Women have a wealth of Herstoric and mythic resources to direct humanity’s future. We can use our epigenetic memories containing the wisdom, skills, and practices of the Herstoric period to help bring balance to the world. It is time for us to create Our-story.

Inspiring Prophesies & predictions

Helena Roerich, Russian-born Mystic & Feminist

From a very early age, Helena Roerich displayed outstanding abilities, and could read and write in three languages by the age of seven. Helena took serious interest in literature and philosophy, and received a musical education that offered her a career as a brilliant pianist career. She said later, that “life decided differently.”

Helena Roerich is best known for creating Living Ethics, a rigorous teaching of selflessness, courage, compassion and sacrifice; also of collaboration and co-creation, of collective action and personal heroism, of scientific discoveries and self-discovery, of aspiration and achievement.It reflects her deep personal connection to the creative fires of the universe, and the the powers of the human mind and heart–particularly those manifesting in love, thought, and creativity.

The language she uses in Living Ethics to describe the structure of the universe is pure quantum science, before this field was barely known. Her highly developed feminine intellect, her acute sensitivity to energy, and deeply spiritual nature earned her recognition as one of the “New Women” during the early part of the 20^th century.

Helena was a voracious writer, and spent many hours corresponding with a huge network of friends and colleagues. Her letters, gathered into two books, are filled with inspiring, hopeful, heartful, life-affirming messages. She was a great channel for creative forces that endlessly streamed through her. A huge optimist, she wrote constantly about her dreams and visions for the upliftment of women and of humanity’s next step in evolution.

Helena’s statement, “We need women to plant a new science about the heart, about its powerful force that can compete with the energy of the atomic. How many wonderful and urgent feats can be manifested by women!” has been one of my biggest sources of guidance and inspiration. Only after writing LOVEvolution: A Heart-Centered Approach for Healing Developmental Trauma, did I realize that I am one of these women.

Quotations from Helena Roerich

Mother of the World,
Nicholas Roerich

After Atlantis the Mother of the World veiled Her Face and forbade the pronouncement of Her Name until the hour of the constellations should strike. She has manifested Herself only partly; never has She manifested Herself on a planetary scale. Illumination (1925) – 2.8.11.

A woman who knows her high destiny, a woman who strives for beauty, knowledge, will raise the standard of living of the country.

All experienced and future disasters and cosmic cataclysms have at the root cause – the humiliation of women.

A woman should realize her importance, her great mission of the Mother of the World and full responsibility for it.

It is the woman who is to perform the double feat – to raise herself and raise her eternal companion, a man.

inspiration

feminism

I reluctantly bring in the topic of “feminism” here because there are so many versions of it, and some have negative connotations. I’m doing so to clarify and distinguish historical feminist movements from Harmonious Feminism, which I describe below.

True feminism is the desire for equality. It’s not about devaluing traditional women’s roles, or bashing men. Women do not want to be treated as reproductive or sexual objects. They want to be accepted as an equal part of society, and respected for their unique role as life-givers.

First, a little history. Feminist movements have come in waves, with its earliest roots in ancient Greece and medieval times. A second wave took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, emerging out of an environment of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics. This wave focused on temperance and abolitionist movements, and particularly on women’s right to vote.

A third wave emerged in the 1960’s and continued on into the 90’s. Initially, it worked within the structure of mainstream society to create equal and gender-based equality through political and legal reform. Later it included the anti-war and civil rights movements, along with the growing awareness of minority groups. Voices within this wave grew increasingly more radical, bringing in sexuality and reproductive rights.

The fourth wave of feminism, which began in the mid-90’s, focused on post-colonial and post-modern thinking, and included the destabilization of many traditional social constructs, including “universal womanhood,” body, gender, and sexuality. Some of these feminists can be described as radical, hold more extreme desires for change, and view the traditional family as inherently sexist. Some with this belief system think that women should quite literally separate themselves from men and start their own society. This is a come-full-circle perspective, from my opinion, one that catapults society back into the worst parts of matriarchy during the Herstorical era.

There are now subcategories within the fourth wave: socialist feminism, eco-feminism, black feminism, and trans-feminism. This has created masculine-like competition among them, and fragmented feminism as a movement. This made it difficult for women to cooperate at a time when it is most needed.

Harmonious Feminism

I am inspired by a form of spiritual feminism, known as Harmonious Feminism, which lies outside the numerous historical waves of feminism, particularly the Fourth Wave that I describe above.

Harmonious Feminism is a spiritual philosophy and practice that was created by Helena Roerich, a Russian-born philosopher and writer whose work has been described as some of the highest on the planet. She believed that women’s ‘harmonious holistic thinking and consciousness, creates and provides global peace.” Most importantly, she embodied Harmonious Feminism—she lived it.

It is best described through the many inspirational statements she wrote in her letters about the harmonious nature of women and how to use this as a force for uplifting humanity.

Woman should realize that she herself contains all forces, and the moment she shakes off the age-old hypnosis of her seemingly lawful subjugation and mental inferiority, and occupies herself with a manifold education, she will create in collaboration with man a new and better world
The Age of Woman has come, and the woman must raise the mindset of humankind to the next level.
In the hands of a woman is now the salvation of humankind and the planet. The Sword of the Spirit is now given into the hands of the Woman.
I believe so in the female common sense, in female magnetism, in the female heart and the ability to work selflessly.
The time has come for a woman to become a full member of the human family, let the women raise their voice against the greatest shame of humanity – his self-destruction.
The present time should give the woman a place at the helm of life, a place next to the man, her eternal companion.
The cosmos asserts all the greatness of the creative beginning of a woman. It was in all areas of science and art that a woman showed that she can reach the highest heights.
Woman is the personification of Nature.
A woman should realize her importance, her great mission of the Mother of the World and her full responsibility for it.
We realize our great purpose of the mother—life giving. Therefore, let women realize all the greatness of their beginning and rush to Knowledge; where there is Knowledge, there is Power.

These statements testify the unique depth of her thinking and intuition, the unprecedented scale of her planetary consciousness, the historical significance of her ideas, and the full social responsibility women that’s inherent in her Harmonious Feminism.