Beyond the universe –  the tao –  is void, unknowable, something beyond the distinction of existing and non-existing.  That is not god in any of the senses in which we humans form religious beliefs.  Our gods are right here in the illusion with us.

When we are in this world of illusion –  what the Hindus call Maya –  we may respond to it though, as though it were ‘god’s will’.  This means that if we interrogate sacred Nature, we may find our path.

And what is that path at the moment?  The world, the universe, what we might conceptualise as the Great Mother, is telling us as loudly and as clearly as she can that our Big Patriarchal Religions –  Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and to some extent some of the Eastern religions too –  are past their sell-by date.

(I refer here to the literal interpretation of religious texts, not the mystical tradition in each and every religion which ultimately leads beyond that religion, which is why mystics are so feared by religious hierarchies.)

If the world could speak, what would she be saying?

• Stop desecrating My body.  Stop raping Me.  I am ailing and sick and I will have to cast you aside so I can recover, if you will not stop.  Make no mistake; I am old and I will survive.  But you won’t.  Leave the fossil fuel in the ground where it cannot choke Me.  Leave your poisons and your plastics out of My oceans, and rivers; My blood is lifegiving water.  Keep your pollution out of My body, the soil.  Leave My forests uncut; they are My lungs.
• Act as one, and for the common good.  Leave off the fighting, the squabbling, the murdering, the wars.  It is time to act as an intelligent species, as the bees do, making the sacrifices you need to make to ensure your long-term survival, building your love and compassion for one another, and your intuition about nature, so you can llive in harmony together, and one day go to the stars.  Never mind your identity, your individualism, your uniqueness, your choice.  You have no choice in a world this poisonous, you live not much longer than a blade of grass, and you will be one with the cosmos in the end, whether you choose it or not.  Grow in love and co-operation instead. 
• Women must be free and sovereign.  There are too many of you; give women the tools and they will have fewer, healthier, better-cared-for children and everyone around will benefit from what they give to the community.  Women are My daughters, the first form from which the male is derived.  Who are these upstart males with their upstart gods to dare to prescribe anything at all to women?  If women are not freed, you will die, because you will go on in your violence, your foolhardiness, your contempt for the earth, and I will cast you off like an old dog scratching Her fleas.  

It should be obvious.  And instead we have climbing CO2, increasing signs of fascism all over the world as governments hand over their power to the corporate world, an increasing tide of narcissism and identity politics that threatens to swamp us in self-absorption, a resurgence of religious war and of misogyny, especially online.  What does it take to see that this path will kill us?  More capacity than we have, apparently.

What do I mean by imaginary?  Consider the opening chapter of the Tao Te Ching:
The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The named is the mother of myriad things
Thus, constantly without desire, one observes its essence
Constantly with desire, one observes its manifestations
These two emerge together but differ in name
The unity is said to be the mystery
Mystery of mysteries, the door to all wonders

Both the nameless and the named are concepts of our minds, and if there is an ultimate reality, it is beyond the ability of the naming and categorising mind to conceptualise.  It is something which we may experience a little of, and only if we can silence the mind for a while, and experience ourselves on a level both quieter and more fundamental.  This is why Buddhists, Taoists and some Western mystics avoid concepts like “the name of God”.  It is not that God is so special that he or she cannot be named; it is that the act of naming creates a concept in the mind.  And all concepts distance us from that experience of reality.  Whether you think about Santa Claus, or Jesus, or abiding non-dual awareness, you are thinking about something, not experiencing it.

That isn’t terribly useful when he have to live in the universe of the myriad things though.  Where it is important, is to understand that our gods, our religions, our codes of supposed morality, all have the same origin: someone, somewhere, experienced something close to this essence, something tranquil, vast and impersonal which takes away human cares, the peace of god which surpasses human understanding, if you like.  Then that someone tried to tell others about their experience, and they tried to understand it by thinking about it, then they conceptualised it, wrote books about it, made laws about it, set up holy places where it was supposed to have happened, turned it into a publishing and trinket industry, and before you know it you have religion, and look at the trouble that’s caused!  The difference is like eating a banana – experiencing a banana – versus thinking about eating one.  You go to church or synagogue or Mosque, on a Sunday or Saturday or Friday, to talk about thinking about eating a banana, or worse, to listen to someone else talking about thinking about eating a banana.  That’s the nonsensical level that most religion has descended to.

Here is a little myth that makes it easier to understand what has happened.  It’s called: the Story of the Container and the Contained.

Once upon a time there was a poor, lame woodcutter who got lost in the forest.  He stumbled around looking for the path home for the best part of the day, but he just couldn’t find it.  He was completely and utterly lost.  As the light began to fade, he stumbled down yet another path taking him in the wrong direction, hungry, thirsty, tired, afraid.  Suddenly he heard water flowing, and turning aside from the path for a moment, he passed between the trees and came upon a small spring, flowing strongly with a cheerful bubbling sound, and with the clearest water he had ever seen.  He had thought he knew every square inch of the forest, but today he had been lost for hours, and he knew he had never seen this spring before.  He bent down, washed his face and drank deeply.  The water was the sweetest and purest water he had ever tasted and he knew at once that it was holy.  His hunger, thirst and tiredness fell away; so did his fear, and he was filled with an abiding peace and clarity of mind.  He lay down beside the spring and slept deeply.  The next morning he awoke refreshed, drank once more from the spring, filled his water bottle from it, and went straight home with a spring in his step.  His lameness was healed.

He gave a few drops of the water to his wife and children, and they, too, were filled with peace and joy.  He went back to look for the spring, but he was never able to find it again.
The local priest came to taste the water, and he too was filled with peace and joy, and called the bishop.  The bishop tasted the water, and declared that it was indeed holy water, and that the woodcutter was a saint, and that his house was holy ground.  The bishop ordered a beautiful silver reliquary to be made to hold the woodcutter’s water bottle, with the last few drops of the water from the spring in it, and the house to be beautifully decorated and made into a shrine, and people began to come to it from all the four corners of the world, to worship the reliquary.  The house became more elaborately decorated and rich people made gifts of gold and jewels to adorn it.  Someone donated a solid gold cupboard to put the reliquary in, and as the years went by and the woodcutter died, the house became a place of pilgrimage and worship.

After a hundred years had gone by, a huge cathedral stood on the spot.  Priests came to give their sermons there, pilgrims came to see the reliquary, and everyone donated richly to the upkeep of the place, which was looked after by the woodcutter’s youngest grandson, now an old man himself.

One day a young woman, an artist and a seeker, simply dressed and with dust on her feet, arrived at the cathedral, and asked if she could see the reliquary.  The woodcutter’s grandson reverently took it out of the gold cupboard, now kept behind red velvet ropes.  Might she touch it, she asked, so he gave it into her hands.  She opened the reliquary and took out the container, the woodcutter’s old bottle, which no one had seen for a hundred years.  She turned it upside down and shook it, but it was as dry as dust on the inside, and only a few bits of dessicated insect fell out.

“There is nothing here,” she said angrily, and threw the bottle on the ground, where it shattered.  And she turned and walked out of the empty cathedral.

And that is religion.

Another way of thinking about this is to think of this ultimate, indescribable essence as a multi-faceted diamond, very bright.  If we look into the glowing heart of the diamond, we might see something of the truth; but what usually happens is that we see a little bit of the truth, but distorted by our own reflection in the shining diamond, and we come away believing that the reflection is the truth, when there is just a tiny bit of truth in it.  And so christians, jews, muslims, hindus all believe that they have the truth, when they have just a little shard of truth and a lot of cultural baggage.

There was once a Sufi mystic who put this very well.  His name was Gibrail Kham.  “Truth,” he said, “is like a mirror which was shattered by time into a hundred thousand pieces, so that everyone who finds one can say: my religion is the true religion.”

Now in our world, it has been this way for five thousand years: we have an excess of male gods.  All our gods and goddesses live within the mother of the myriad things, but the worshippers of these male gods all believe that their god is the only one, and that he is beyond the cosmos, and the first cause.

Needless to say, this is nonsense.  Yahweh, Allah, Baal, Molech are all variations on the same Near-Eastern deities who came to prominence when archaic states were starting to form after the Indo-European invasions.  And this was the point in history when men began to control women, our bodies, our ability to bear children, probably because they had recognised their role in reproduction, and because increasing their property and their populations was vital to stabilising those early states.  It is no coincidence that the various legal codes from the period all have remarkably strictures on women’s conduct, treasuring chastity, institutionalising marriage, making it difficult then, as it is now, for women to live single and autonomous lives without being under the control of a man, and without being answerable to anyone for when and with whom they choose to have children.

And what has this led to?  They fear us, they hate us, they know us to be one with rebellious wild nature; and they need us desperately.  They cannot plant their feet in sacred soil and grow strong as a tree without our care.  And we cannot be free to grow and tend them while they are our jailers.

Before the arrival of the male deities, we believe from evidence from Neolithic sites that people in Old Europe and the Near East worshipped female deities.  On archaeological evidence we find what seem to be peaceful agricultural settlements, where females have high-status graves, where statuettes and images of a fertile woman crop up everywhere as an object of veneration, and where there are few, if any, signs of the worship of male gods.

Anthropologists may tell us that there has never been a true matriarchy, that even where men moved to their wives’ clan and inheritance was via the female line, women were exchanged by men and not vice versa.  We will not prove this one way or the other from the available evidence.  But some of us know better.

Let us say merely this for now: we need to imagine different gods, and imagine our gods differently.  The old goddess has been in chains for a long time and it is time to release her.  Nature, her body, the Earth, is dying from continual rape and poison, and she must purge herself.

We cannot afford anachronistic nonsense from old books that tell us that men should continue to rape this planet to death because their sky god has given them violence and death as his gift.  And men will not allow us to be equal in power.  So we must free the goddess of war and floods and destruction, and let the old hag clean house; otherwise we will not continue to live.  Only natural women – witches – can do this; we are the thoughts in the mind of the goddess, we are the leaves on the trees, the pollen on the bee’s wing, the black bird against the pale sky, the dark soil and the green shoot.  We are the ones who know in the bones of our bones that it is Life Herself Who is sacred, not the individual forms She takes. We know that we have soiled ourselves and our world, and if life is to survive then we must strip away to the bones the mess we have made, and grow ourselves and the world back into springing green ecstasy.  Everything man has built over all these tired generations, every building, every road, every city, every army, is as nothing next to one bird singing in a tree.  One blade of grass, one clear stream, one faintly fluttering breath of a breeze.  One wild blue flower, one ear of corn.  This is what we must protect, as the wolf bitch protects her young.  Ferocious we must be.

Anyone who mentions rape culture, or rape, or sexism, or That Shirt (the one which got caught in the spotlight during the Philae landing on the comet) immediately gets bombarded with accusations of not being a ‘real’ feminist because they’re not ‘inclusive’.  And possibly they’re manhaters (or, god help me, “misandrists”.  Misandry is not a thing, as I hope to show a little later.)

A facebook page and website called Everyday Feminism has articles on how men suffer, LBGT issues, transgender peoples’ problems; almost everything, really, except feminism.

Further investigation shows that feminism, according to this rather nebulous grouping, sticks up for everybody, in some sort of vacuously humanistic attempt to achieve “true equality” (which does not, apparently, have anything to do with fighting for the rights of the marginalised or oppressed).  Or rather, feminists fight for anyone else who is oppressed, but not women, because we’re all equal and it’s rude to men.  Or something.

And anti-choice, anti-feminism women, trans people in assorted stages of transitioning (so they may or may not have dicks), porn stars, and really, anyone who wants to, gets to call themself a feminist.  As long as they don’t actually say anything about women’s liberation, unless it’s to proclaim that we are all already liberated in this glorious post-feminist world.  In fact, currently women are more liberated than men.

It reminds me of a quote I read many years ago –  during the Second Wave, in fact, from a book which was decidedly not pro-feminist; it was called “The MsFits”, by Florence King, and the quote went like this:

“The all-purpose feminist goal seems to be an abortion performed by a gay black doctor under an endangered tree on a reservation for handicapped Indians.”

Quite.  And nothing seems to have changed.

Feminism is about the liberation of women.  Nothing more, nothing less.  It is not about gay rights, or transgender rights, or (shudder) men’s ‘rights’, as though we didn’t already have far too many of those floating around.  It is about the liberation of women, and that is the only thing we should be fighting for.  If that results in an egalitarian society, great.  You’re a liberal feminist.  If that results in the overthrow of patriarchy and an entirely new dispensation (and we sorely need one!), even better!  You’re a radical feminist!

“So you don’t care about men and the hurts we suffer,” says the inevitable whining MRA in the comments.  “You’re not a real feminist.  You’re not inclusive.  Do you know that men have to go to the military, and there are more male victims of violence than female victims of violence, but you don’t care about the male victims, do you?  You’re just a heartless misandrist!”

Leaving aside the fact that this sort of tirade seems to assume that violence is perpetrated by koala bears or something (Men beat up women.  Men beat up other men.  It’s feminists’s fault.  Duh!), what’s missing here is the making explicit of the notion that belief in equality as a principle means that equality exists in practice.  This allows MRAs to gaslight liberal feminists, which they do extremely successfully, by claiming that said liberal feminists are not real feminists unless they give equal time and effort to men’s issues, because it’s all about equality, and if you don’t put equal time into all the other people’s important issues, then you don’t really believe in equality, and hence you’re not a feminist, you’re a man-hater.

What absolute twaddle, and how very typical of men to succeed in diverting women who identify as feminists from what should be their primary goal: the liberation of women.

There are three parts to this fiction.

The first, as noted above, is the implied notion that if you believe in equality, then you have to give equal time to all the groups who ought to be equal.  This is rubbish.  If some groups are oppressed and other groups have privileges, then if you believe in equality, you strive to improve the situation of the groups who are oppressed.  You don’t do some politically correct divvying up of your efforts amongst all parties involved.  You pick your battles on behalf of the poorest, the most marginalised, and then you fight for them.  As a white South African who grew up in the Apartheid years, this is crystal clear to me.  The notion that anti-apartheid activists should have made sure they gave equal time to white rights is ludicrous.  And yes, there were some injustices, like the draft and an exceptionally brutal bush war, visited on white males.  But the focus of anti-apartheid campaigning had to be black liberation.

The second is that you’re somehow morally deficient if you don’t make time for all the causes going.  Nonsense.  If you’ve picked the things that are dear to your heart, then you fight for them, and you don’t allow your energy to be diluted by being dragged into every issue going, or signing every petition doing the rounds.  It doesn’t mean that you are denigrating other people’s issues and priorities; you are just not allowing them to dictate yours. We would not attack an environmental campaigner because he or she was not out there campaigning for Palestinian rights, and we should not attack other feminists, or tolerate ourselves being attacked, for sticking up for women’s issues, and telling men and LGBT people to do their own campaigning.  We can sympathise and be allies where it is appropriate, but we should not get tricked, conned or manipulated into doing other group’s work for them at the expense of our own.  Intersectionality means that women tend to suffer disproportionately from a variety of forms of oppression, and we should be sure that we focus our time and energy where it is really needed, and not where others, particularly men, would like us to focus it.

The third, and silliest, part of this fiction is the notion that feminists have won and rule the world, and that men are in some sort of crisis because of this; that in fact men as a class are now oppressed  by women as a class.  We still get paid less for the same work, we are still the vast bulk of domestic violence and rape victims, we are seeing a frightening level of misogyny in general culture, particularly on the internet, and we are expected to look and behave like porn stars or risk being branded ‘sex-negative’.  But men are oppressed by us, according to the MRA narrative.  It is this notion –  that feminists hate men, have the power to oppress them, and do so –  that is loosely called ‘misandry’, which is supposed to be some sort of symmetrical opposite to misogyny, the hatred of women.  While there are of course some women who hate men, and while many of us have a few “all men are bastards” moments at various points in our lives, women simply do not have the power and social standing to oppress men structurally, the way men are able to oppress women.  And so treating hatred and oppression of men as some sort of institutionalised social evil –  ‘misandry’ –  is not justified, and feminists should be very intolerant of anyone who slings this word around.

A surprising number of commentators spread this fiction.  Women have certainly made some advances in the West over the last 50 years or so, but we Western career women are still disproportionately disadvantaged, and the plight of poor women in our own communities and abroad has seldom been worse.

A very useful book by Kristin Anderson, called Modern Misogyny: Anti-Feminism in a Post-Feminist Era, which has just come out, takes on this myth very successfully.  It’s not a polemic; it’s a research review, and a rather dry reading, but she tackles the various claims of the “end of men” brigade and debunks them with peer-reviewed research, one after the other.

She covers the so-called “end of men” and the degree to which various writers hype the meme that says women now have more power than men, and debunks it, as she does the notion that feminism is “bad” for women.  She also looks at how rampant consumerism and the mainstreaming of pornography affect women.

Another excellent book by journalist Natasha Walter, called Living Dolls, tackles sexism in society and the pornogrification of women, the way children are socialised, and the way that the very thin evidence for biological determinism of gender is hyped and misrepresented.

Radical, cultural, liberal, socialist…these are all terms which attempt to define the word “feminist”.   Feminists vary tremendously, as do people; and thus so do schools of feminism.  But we have not yet achieved good, old-fashioned “Women’s Lib” –  where the second wave began –  and although we have more legal protections than we used to, society is in many ways reverting to old-fashioned patriarchal norms, while telling us that we have won.  We have seldom needed feminism more.