Rising above: A spiritual path to gender equality

Since time immemorial women have always been at the receiving end of all kinds of atrocities committed in the form of wars, terrorist attacks, domestic quarrels and most recently now extremism of male domination. You go to any part of the world, and you would find a lot of cases where women are exploited from the time they are born till the time they die. So, the question that arises here is ‘Why Women?’. Everyone who is living on this planet called earth should ponder over this, that for what fault are women being subjected to these atrocities?

Since Independence, Government of India has been spending trillions to create mass awareness among its countrymen to change their attitude towards girl child, but the patriarchal attitude ruling the society has failed all the schemes of government with no change in attitude towards girl child. The cases of female foeticides are still on rise, cases of dowry killings are also very much increasing, cases of domestic violence are rising, cases of minor rapes are rising, So what has changed? Nothing!! Men carry the same attitude of being a stronger gender compared to women who are forcibly considered to be a weaker gender. So how can these attitudes be changed? Who will do it? When will it happen? These are the questions for which society has no answer, not even the government. However, as ordinary citizens we can make a resolve to slowly change the attitudes by getting united in our approach & thought pattern. YES, indeed it can happen, because if one goes down the history, then one would clearly see that it is we ourselves who have started this, so only we can stop this. The task is to challenge and root out the attitudes that were made years ago. So naturally it will take time, but it is Possible, provided there is a united will to do so.

There are thousands of pieces of advice that people would give out to root out this evil of gender bias from society, however experience shows that even in ancient times, Spirituality has been a game changer to resolve this issue of gender bias. Yes, it’s true because Spirituality concentrates more on subtleness of one’s being i.e. Soul rather than physical aspect i.e. Body. All the current issues faced by women in society today are due to powerful body consciousness that makes men more powerful. Human Energy is considered to be the most powerful & potent compared to all the powers in the world and that is the core of all the issues. If one learns the art of channelizing human energies in the right direction, then probably things would gradually start changing. It is this unchanneled energy that creates havoc in society of which the natural victims are women. So, the crux of the matter is to channelize one’s energy through some positive activity and raise to a level of higher consciousness that is above body and bodily relations and experience the power of divinity within self. Imagine, if everyone of us raised to this higher consciousness, the world would be a nice place for women to live in. So, c’mon let’s do it for the sake of our mother’s, sister’s, daughter’s and wives for they are the ones whom we worship.

(Writer is a spiritual educator & popular columnist for publications across India, Nepal & UK. Till Date 8500+ Published Columns have been written by Him)