WOMEN'S LIBERATION

“Whatever did happen between you and your Korean teacher?” my friend Mary asked me one afternoon. “Well,” I said, “in those first months with him, during his occasional trips to the United States, he would visit me and sleep with me in my bed, and we'd just hold hands . . . and occasionally kiss. But at a certain point, he seemed to catch himself. During one of his visits in the early stages of the relationship, he said he thought it would be better if he slept on the couch in the living room. That's it—that's all that ever happened.” “Really?!” she responded with surprise. “It's true,” I said. “And knowing that he had made a clear decision to uphold his role as monk and teacher, something suddenly dropped away, and I was left with myself, and with the question of whether or not I really wanted enlightenment for its own sake.” “If he had asked you to have a sexual relationship with him, do you think you would have gone for it?” she pressed. “Well, Mary, given what I wanted at the time, I can say quite confidently that if he had proposed it, there's no doubt that, like all the women I've spoken with recently, I would have said yes.”

Guru and disciple, man and woman, sex and spirituality, revelation and romance—as was clearly evident from my own reflections, and from speaking with so many other women about their experiences, it's been all too easy to get our circuits crossed. Annie, from her viewpoint as a teacher, shared her understanding of how our yearning for transcendence can be confused with the attraction to sexual intimacy. “You're seeking several things,” she said. “You're seeking to be seen and known to the bottom of your being and to be accepted as you are. And you're also seeking to transcend who you are as an individual and merge in the only place that true merging is possible, which is in the universal mind, in the universal awareness, where complete intimacy is possible with all things. But we tend to mistake that for the only kind of intimacy we have experienced, which is sexual intimacy.”

The confusion between spiritual aspiration and sexual attraction has a physical origin as well. According to Dr. Fisher, who has been doing extensive groundbreaking research on the brain chemistry associated with romantic love, the universal human experience of romance relates to certain brain circuits linked to heightened energy and motivation and a craving to win a particular mating partner. And Fisher conjectures that those same brain circuits are also activated in spiritual experience. “I think it's the same dopamine circuits in the brain, because you can feel real elation, energy, and focused attention.”

While it may be hard for a woman to discriminate between a spiritual and a sexual impulse, particularly in the presence of a powerful spiritual teacher, must a woman necessarily default to her more primitive instincts if that teacher's motives prove to be corrupt? Is it true that, as Heyn says, when the teacher “doesn't help her with reaching for her higher good, doesn't allow her to sift through her socially constructed impulses in order to reach her 'freedom impulses,' she's bound to fall back on older, less-evolved 'desires'”?

Certainly, if a spiritual teacher transgresses ethical boundaries, it's far more difficult for a female student to make her way through the confusing maze of her biological and social conditioning toward real spiritual freedom. And yet, something does seem to be evolving in women's consciousness. These ten women were surprisingly willing to speak about their sexual relationships with their spiritual teachers—in many cases, for the first time. And even more significantly, they often expressed a liberated interest in seeing the choices they had made in a new way, increasingly free from the limiting notions of victimhood. “We're looking to awaken the Buddha within us,” a woman named Maryann explained, reflecting on the long-standing sexual involvement she had with a prominent Tibetan lama, “but this unconscious push to follow what we've been deeply conditioned to pursue is something we're just beginning to become conscious of. I think spiritual women really need to think about their lives and what's most important and then take responsibility for everything they do.”

“Suppose you have a spiritual mentor,” Sommers said. “He's celibate, and you get into this kind of situation because you trust him. Then he makes a pass at you. An autonomous, independent woman would just tell him, 'No,' and walk out. That can be done. We're not talking about rape—we're talking about something else, because she wants to enter a relationship. So I do think it's very different from saying he exploited her. I think they exploit each other in a situation like that.” Diane concurred, reflecting on her many relationships with her teachers: “When you have a thirst for God and a teacher has a thirst for God, there's an opening between you. But boy, you don't want to create karma!”

“I believe that nearly every woman who is ready to work at it can act with equal power to men in determining how they will treat her at the sexual boundary,” Peter Rutter told me. “And in my very sad experience,” he continued, “sexual enactment in a mentor-student relationship, although it's a natural temptation, will destroy what you came for, and it could set you back a decade or two in your seeking. When you add the possibility that the woman may eventually, if all goes well, ascend to an equal status in the spiritual tradition, that raises the ante on spiritual transformation. Not only is there the possibility of transforming one's own personal wounds or personal limitations, but there's the new possibility of women rising in the culture to a position of equality with men. And that makes the stakes of the spiritual relationship even higher for women.”

“Young women today are the freest generation of women in history,” Sommers said, “with more opportunities and higher aspirations. To tell them they're the underdogs, to tell them they are victims, to impose on them this grim philosophy that was appropriate for an era long gone by, is wrong. They should have a sense of their power, and of what they can accomplish, and finally, a sense of ethical philosophy—they should be morally grounded. Far more women are now becoming spiritual mentors themselves. We'll probably begin to see young men falling in love with their mentors, creating a sort of moral paradox.”

“The whole evolution of humanity,” said Dr. Fisher, “has been the evolution of the prefrontal cortex—that's the part of your brain right behind your forehead. It's the part of the brain with which we do our rational thinking, and it's connected to many brain areas. You can control anger. It's hard to control jealousy, but you can slowly get over it. You can control fear. We're an animal that assembles data, puts it into patterns, weighs the alternatives, and makes decisions about our lives. So we are capable of rising above biology.”

“Wouldn't it be liberating for women not to carry around with them this sense of having been ruthlessly exploited, and to understand that they got involved in a fairly familiar dynamic that goes back to the beginning of time?” Sommers commented. “It just might make it a lot easier to get over it. I mean, it's not surprising. It's politically incorrect to say this, but it's so anthropologically predictable!”

All this being said, many would still disagree. In fact, the prevailing feminist view of women as fundamentally disenfranchised and unable to fully assert themselves is so ingrained in both men and women that it is often unconscious, and it is reflected throughout contemporary life, from college campuses to public policy to pop culture. Heyn suggests that we shouldn't oblige a woman to take the higher ground, because “if we do, we're just adding huge freight to the culture's already impossibly high moral expectations of women.” But why can't we expect women to be able to take responsibility for their own personal and spiritual lives, even in the face of a corrupt spiritual teacher? As Sommers said, “If you take away from women the idea that they are moral agents responsible for their behavior, you diminish them as human beings.” Granted, it is a tall order. It's edgy. It's demanding. In fact, according to Sommers, it's nothing less than a leap to a new “third stage” of feminism.

But many of us women have never been in a better position to make that leap. We have unprecedented freedom to opt for our higher good, for the higher good, having reaped the benefits of the first two stages of feminism—the first of which gave us equal rights, and the second of which gave us a deeper understanding of the truth of women's victimization at the hands of men. Women now have the freedom to go beyond instinct, beyond social and biological conditioning, a freedom that comes from seeing our deepest drives, motivations, and impulses in a vast anthropological and evolutionary context. In that, we can reach for a higher morality that doesn't bind us but rather frees us and that we can now embrace in light of a genuinely new possibility. That possibility is a new women's liberation born of taking responsibility for our spiritual journey beyond self-serving desires, facing directly and honestly into what we have brought to the situation, and consciously disengaging the age-old structures that no longer serve us. And who knows what effect this kind of autonomy and independence will have on men, including spiritual men and mentors? As poet and social critic Matthew Arnold said more than 150 years ago, “If ever the world sees a time when women shall come together purely and simply for the benefit and good of humankind, it will be a power such as the world has never known.”