Mommie Dearest

Mommie Dearest

George Gurdjieff said ‘If you want to change a man you must start with his great, great grandmother.’ Although he was never explicit or even hinted at the concept of feminine dominance, he obviously understood at least one of the causalities of ‘civilized behaviour’. If you have not yet read Marie Michael’s post on feminine dominance, please do so. Her excellent explanation of this psychological phenomenon is clear and succinct.

One time, my mother came to visit my wife and myself. During her visit, the way she related to me was how we had always related to each other. For the first day or two, because our relationship with each other was based on thirty-something years of mechanical habits of speaking and interacting with each other, all was ‘normal’.

At the time I had been a student for about ten years. After a decade of working on the non-expression of negative emotions, remembering myself, transforming ‘the thousand natural shocks’ as well as having a working relationship with a conscious teacher, it became clear to me that my relationship to my mother (including my siblings) was based on feminine dominance, a mechanical attitude of obligation we had with each other.

Over the course of her ten day visit it became more obvious to me that our relationship was based on mutual and mechanical expectations. For as much as my mother voiced opinions about how I ‘should’ do this or that, for my part I’s and attitudes regarding my mother were how I believed she ‘ought’ to behave. The longer we spent time together the more it seemed we were strangers to each other. Naturally, because I was not reacting to her expectations, often we would argue with each other, By the end of her visit our relationship, to say the least, was strained.

After speaking with an older student about my mother’s visit, he advised to practice what Ouspensky taught, that is 'Observe, observe, observe.' He also let me know that he had attended a dinner with the Teacher the previous evening and quite suddenly, without any seeming relation to the conversation at the dinner table, the Teacher leaned across the table to him and said, “I have broken through feminine dominance so that my students can follow.”

Although my mother and myself did not communicate with each other for a while, eventually we started talking to each other again. However, she was no longer ‘Mummy’ and I was no longer ‘Sonny’. More than this though, we had become friends. We related to each other as peers and until she passed, it was one of the most satisfying friendships I’ve experienced.

The image of the the mother and son depicts the child hanging onto his mother’s robe. We see that his right foot is impeding one of his mother’s feet. Only the inner chamber of the heart can inspire the steward to disentangle essence from habitual mechanical relationships that, without efforts to BE present, is the achilles heel, as it were, to conscious evolution.

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Mother and Son by a Mosquito Net

Suzuki Harunobu ca. 1769