Woman, through the lens of her nature, is fundamentally an attracting force; she draws in. For each woman to admit that she holds power, that she moves the world around her with attraction, feels dangerous. So instead, she does it under the radar and makes it look like an accident.
To be fully realized, she must bring to the surface—both in her own consciousness and visibly to the world— how she has drawn in the circumstances of her life through active or passive magnetism.
Furthermore, a woman's power is her appetite; it cannot be defined on masculine terms, based on the capacity to restrict or renounce. Instead, we must recognize that her ability to draw in the world is her gift and her purpose. A woman in her realized form is like gravity; she moves the world around her from a deep-rootedness in her Erotic self, operating from a position of interdependence.
Having taken on the masculine conception of power, woman has also taken on restriction as a value. But for a woman, this only restricts her power. In order to develop her capacity to receive, she needs to feed her power quite literally. A woman who cannot receive is hard, self-reliant, and lacking maturity. She is either defiant or dependent, most often swinging between the two.
When seated in her power, she reigns. She needs neither affirmation nor protection. She is self-possessed, rather than self-reliant. She knows her power is accessed through interdependence. Her power is the result of surrendering to something deeper. She draws out the best in others because they want to touch the power that emanates from her. Around her, the masculine is not merely doing; he is doing in alignment with a deeper value.
He self-organizes to greatness in her presence, not because she is managing, controlling, directing, or even worse, withholding, rejecting, or denying—these are powerless forms of power. No, the masculine becomes great because the power that radiates from her is a magnet drawing forth his inner compass. He wants to be great in her name because it feels good.
And yet there are a series of initiations she must go through in order to be fully seated in this power, beginning with a fundamental understanding of power itself. It can be neither taken away nor granted. It is something she must realize within herself, according to the laws of power, not the laws of man or human.
Next, she must understand each phenomenon has laws for growth within it. For a tropical plant to grow, tropical conditions are required. No matter how much we may want a plant's origin to be irrelevant, it simply is not true that all plants are the same. We will discover this from the fact that our plant will die. There are certain liberties we can take and certain liberties we cannot.
No matter how much we want it to be that biological sex is not relevant, it is. Our uniqueness matters. The methods for masculine access to power simply do not work for feminine realization. She may try to access power through masculine ways—restricting harder, chaste-ing better, spiritualizing more, being more selfless and kind, practicing right speech, decreasing sensual expression, even finding worldly success—and find it all results in a decreasing happiness index and an increasing sense of powerlessness.
She garners greater authority in the world and feels less gratified, because there is only one route to gratification for woman: to realize her internal power. Not despite or in spite of the present circumstances, but using these very circumstances as her crucible. In other words, the circumstances need not change in the least.
It is she who needs to find her power right here and right now. And when she does, the miracle will occur; the circumstances will transform. The circumstances were a result of her absence. When she arrives in full power, everything will organize itself around this power.
To arrive here, her path will need to be radically different from what it is now—women applying the rules for men, from spiritual to worldly, with greater and greater fervor and less satisfaction. She has never stopped to question whether the methods might not work for her particular makeup. She has never noticed that the things she is renouncing are female-specific nutrients. She has become the primary warden of her own cage.
She has so separated herself from her genuine power that she lives her life performing power rather than letting it naturally flow. She either simulates woman, in order to act like she has power without having to actually go through the initiation to get it, or as a "demonstration of power," she rejects all things feminine as shallow.
That which is not integrated is exaggerated, and the issue of woman's power is one of integrating the Erotic force into her body. Because there is no mediating force of real power, she is hyper- or hypo-feminine, hyper-sexualized, or hypo-sexualized.
Without a steadying concept of what it means to be a woman realized in her power, she is especially vulnerable to external forces defining who she should be and how she should act. She ends up in dizzying and often opposing sets of concepts as to how to be a woman.
What Eros says is simply this: the work to tap into woman's genuine power may look daunting. Especially when she is viewing it already tired and wired from jumping from one externally defined concept to the next. For example, in society, we think that women should be more natural, softer, more spiritual, a better mother, in better physical shape, and more interested in empowerment and transforming herself.
She should achieve more and give herself more pleasure. But in the end, self-definition is the only thing that will remove her from the day-labor currency she has now and generate a steady increasing income where who woman—and what in this world truly matters—is not defined by ideas and projections, but based on who she actually is.
A woman is realized when she defines who she is and what the experience of being a woman is. Her means of expression has its own authority and is not to be considered sane relative to a man's. The location of the great power struggle—sex—will be defined on a woman's terms.
To be clear, sex, or more accurately Eros, is power. And Eros is a deeply feminine power.
Women have fallen prey to feminine materialism. She develops and refines the egoic aspect of woman rather than engage in her birthright to access true power. By plugging into the ego-dissolving power of Eros, she radiates true beauty rather than spends her life in an exhausting contortionist's simulation of this power. It is a strange thing she does.
She is invited to be free, but she would rather just act or look like she is. But without this power, it is a masquerade, where she is constantly maintaining a charade.