Interesting Q&A session, interesting question. For what it's worth, Rama (Frederick Lenz) used to give a very strong talk entitled, "Why don't more women attain enlightenment?" A strong part of his focus was on the enlightenment of women, and he had some equally strong opinions on the subject. I'll gloss over a few of them here, for anyone who is interested.
First, he said that from his perspective women should *theoretically* be more able to realize enlightenment than men, because of the more refined qualities of their subtle bodies. So it's a puzzler when you look at his- torical records and discover that so few women actually *did* realize enlightenment. His explanation for why this is was twofold -- because of men and because of women. Men have pretty much always suppressed women, socially and spiritually. The interview you posted, even though Swami Bharati Tirtha did his best to dodge the subject, made the case that the very scriptures his religion is based on and the structures of the religious hierarchies within that religion are inherently biased against women. Add to that the social realities of being a woman in many eras of history -- the foremost being unable to work for pay, and thus being dependent on either finding a man to support them or living with their birth family for life -- and you have an envir- onment that was hardly conducive to the study of enlightenment. But it was this very suppression of women that, in Rama's view, helped to create the other "gotcha" at work in the question of why more women don't attain enlightenment. *Because of* the need to attract a man to support them, (in Rama's view) women attained a higher proficiency with the occult arts than men did. They became adept at the mini-siddhis that make up the "science of attraction," the ability to "make someone fall in love with you." In his view almost every romantic relationship was initiated by women, and most of the time involved them using their occult abilities to (at the very least) attract the man' s attention and get him to focus on her. And, as he pointed out, there is really "no harm, no foul" in doing this, because women *had very few alternatives*. Finding a man was their only hope of getting out of the parental house and having a life even remotely their own. [ If you bristle at this notion, I might suggest that if you're a woman you might not appreciate being busted, and if you're a guy, you might not appreciate the idea that your romantic decisions in life have not entirely been your own. :-) Me, I've studied relationships for most of my life, and I have no problems with this view. ] So he felt that although this occult manipulation of men's attention fields was justified, given the status that the men had relegated women to, it was terrifically problematic for those women who wanted to realize their enlightenment. Why? Because if you are in the state of attention in which you are consciously manipulating others, that state of attention to some extent *disallows* the state of attention that supports enlightenment. The more you use your attention to manipulate others occultly, the less of that attention is available for the study of enlightenment. A large part of his study, when working with women, involved helping them to realize consciously when they were manipulating others occultly, and in presenting alternatives to doing so. The original lecture was two hours long, so this "capsule version" of it hardly does the subject justice, but since Jonathan opened the subject for discussion, I thought I'd throw out some of these ideas for people's consideration. Over and out... Unc
