The chosen ones

What a cumbersome, outlandish burden to bear.

When my first book, Unearthing Venus, came out in 2013, I found myself doing dozens of shows and podcast interviews about my search for the lost feminine nature within me and the way society had …

No … wait. I have to go further back …

So many stories have their roots in other stories.

Equal and different

In 1999 I did an interview with a Brazilian shaman who talked about the masculine/feminine dynamics of the Amazonian Shuar tribe. He explained how the tribe’s daily operation divided down gender pathways—the guys did guy things, hunting, fishing, cutting down trees to make canoes and that sort of thing. And the women took care of domestic chores, raising kids, collecting wild edibles, etcetera.

“Both men and women are equally represented at tribal council,” he hastened to add. “But frankly, the most important job of the whole tribe can only be done by the women.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, you see, we understand human nature and the energetic natures of men and women,” he said. “Men tend to be doers—we have no “off” switch. Women, on the other hand, are more quietly attuned to the needs and energy dynamics of the whole tribe, including our relationship with nature. They sense the balance of the whole and innately strive to regulate that balance.

“Left to our own devices, we men will hunt until there’s nothing left to kill. We’ll fish until the waters are empty. So, the most important job in the tribe is up to the women.

“And that job is telling the men when to STOP.”

Shock

Hearing his words, my life literally flashed before my eyes.

I realized, sitting there at my desk, phone in hand, that, just like most men, I had no “OFF” switch. I was a driven soul. A doer. A fixer. A socially masculinized woman raised to revel in her “liberation,” never realizing that being liberated to act and be like a man while ignoring and despising all feminine attributes wasn’t liberation at all.

Nor was it equality.

That conversation forced me to take stock of my entire life. And, taking stock, I realized I didn’t have the foggiest notion what a woman even was. Which set me on a 12-year journey searching for the lost feminine energetic within me … which became the subject matter of the subsequent book.

Fast forward to 2013, and I’m doing all these shows and podcasts, talking about the feminine and masculine aspects of life and how, left to its own devices, nature is inherently a balancing act of yin and yang forces in constant motion. How it’s important to embody ALL the energetic qualities of life—action and passivity, penetration and receptivity, doing and being, building and deconstructing, tension and relaxation.

I talked about living as a whole, unified human being, expressing both feminine and masculine characteristics, balancing intellect and emotion, logic and intuition. Most of all I stressed how important it is to surrender to life … how important it is to let go and trust nature to guide us, individually and collectively.

A very feminine perspective to be sure.

And yet, in the midst of doing all these shows, saying all these things, I recognized that I was only 75 percent certain that I was right about my own message.

Trust life?

Was that really such a good idea? What if I was wrong?

Let life lead? What if nature/life/the body/the feminine were leading me done the garden path to hell? What if all the fire and brimstone preachers were right about life being corrupt and the body being the tool of Satan?

What if I were steering people in the wrong direction?

Seventy-five percent of me knew this was ancient, patriarchal, fear-based religious programming. The other twenty-five percent of me wasn’t so sure.

And then life stepped in and gave me the lesson I needed.

Hierarchy

I fell in love with a younger man. A younger man who fell in love with me who seemed to align with all my spiritual values. And then, two years into the relationship, he declared that in order to get married I had to make some changes and “come to believe what I really believe.”

Stunned and mystified, I asked “So, what is it you really believe?”

Turns out he was a fundamentalist Christian who believed, amongst many other things, in the Elect.

Unbeknownst to me, for many months he had been preparing me for this revelation, frequently saying things like, “You’re special. You’re obviously God’s child and have the angels by your side. I’m proud to stand beside you.” Things like that.

And I’d been duly flattered. Doesn’t everybody want to be special? Especially in the eyes of their lover?

But now he presented the whole picture.

He was one’s of God’s Elect. And so was I. We were part of The Chosen Ones who would go to heaven after the Apocalypse. The only thing standing in the way was my unGodly, pagan New Age spiritual belief system. “You’ve got to renounce your ways and ask Jesus, who is Jehovah, to forgive you of your sins so we can rise together,” he said earnestly.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You mean to tell me billions of little children that hardly even know Jesus exists are going to hell because of ignorance?”

“That’s right,” he said.

“And people like … like Gandhi and Albert Einstein went to hell because they weren’t Christian?”

“That’s right,” he said. “That’s their role in God’s plan. A few people are designed by Him to sit at the capstone of the pyramid and are destined to rise to heaven to be with Him. But most people are designed to be expendable and sit at the bottom of life’s hierarchy before descending to hell. Just like the stones at the foundation of the pyramids, they’re only here to support those at the top.”

OMG.

Now, I won’t deny a flicker of pride went through me at the thought that God had made me special. I won’t deny there was a sense of profound satisfaction embracing the thought that I was obviously better and more valuable than everyone else. So valuable that I would be saved at The End.

And I won’t deny there was a moment of splendid relief knowing that, if I accepted this crowning, I wouldn’t ever have to be afraid of anything ever again as long as I lived.

But it was just a moment. A tempting moment, perhaps. But just a moment.

After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I don’t know what I said to my lover. Certainly, it wasn’t “Amen!”

Within twenty-four hours I made it clear to him that the relationship was over. It was painful. And I was terribly depressed about the whole thing and stunned at how I had been tricked. But, upon much deeper reflection, I rather quickly realized the why of those two years in that particular relationship.

Life had set me up to see the last shreds of an ancient Judeo-Christian belief that—somewhere in my psyche and soul—I still held onto. Life showed me my remaining religious bias and exactly why I wasn’t 100 percent certain of my own understanding about life and my own message.

It answered my doubt clearly.

After that, when I said the words, “You can lean on and trust life absolutely,” I absolutely meant it.

Pass it on

So, where did this whole “Elect” notion come from in the first place?

It started the moment we lost track of our own divinity.

The moment we bought into the idea that we are grotesque creatures of mere dust and clay, created by and subject to some vast All-Knowing, All-Powerful God outside of us, it was pretty much game over.

The dynamic of “Better than / less than” was born. And hierarchy quickly followed.

Out of that was birthed comparison, judgment, and competition. Rampant insecurity followed. Eventually, life became a sort of pissing contest to see who could crawl higher up the ladder to get the edge on the next guy.

A ”No man’s head shall be higher than the King’s” pecking order evolved.

God, of course, was SUPREME. No matter where you looked around the globe, God was creator. Humans the created.

In the material world of the West, at the top of the heap was the Pope—God’s holy vicar and voice. After him came the blue-blooded kings and queens, then the religious prelates. After those religious higher-ups there came the aristocracy. After them came the merchants, then the farmers, then everybody else … aka low-life peasants.

In the midst of this cultural alignment (or misalignment as it were), the “pass it on” game developed.

You know the story. God is disapproving. The Church passes judgment. The priests pass on The Word and rebuke the flock. Men in the congregation, stung, in turn rebuke the women. The women turn around and rebuke the kids. The kids go outside and kick the dog. The dog turns around and bites the cat. The cat savages the mouse. Etcetera.

It starts with cruelty and abuse of power at the top and works its way on down.

It’s just what happens. Because any unbalanced system founded on the concepts of supremacy and hierarchy inevitably ends up abusing power.

Ridiculare

When you stop to think about it, supremacy is a bizarre concept. The idea that one spark of life is greater than and more valuable than another spark of life is surely an idea based in a great sickness of spirit.

For the truth of the matter is—all life is equal.

Not same. Equal

Equal in value. Equal in divinity. Equal in its own unique intelligence.

Equal.

Does life diverge into different roles? Yes. Different perspectives? Yes. Vaster perspectives? Sometimes. A reality of better than? No. The old adage of comparing a kid in third grade to a Ph.D. grad student, saying one is better than or more important than the other, applies here.

Is a carrot less important than a bird? Is the deer less important than the lion? Is the king greater than the horse he proudly rides astride? More important? More precious?

How can we even ask this? All life is intelligent, conscious and present. All life is alive. Which sounds redundant and absurd. But apparently it needs pointing out.

The whole idea that God is better than us and that we are better and more important than the animals and plants and the world and universe around us is grotesque.

And look at what that viewpoint spawns.

Turning around and projecting the “lesser” label upon everything around us has enabled us to commit unfathomable cruelty on all the beings of the world and to abuse the world itself. The inhuman abominations perpetrated on helpless living creatures in countless “medical” laboratories around the world in the name of “science” are unspeakable.

But this is what happens when the belief in “better than” takes root.

We lose our humanity …

which ultimately means we lose our divinity.

I haven’t touched upon the rest of the Chosen Ones story. Bless all my friends of Jewish descent. What a cumbersome and outlandish burden to have to carry being one of The Chosen Ones. What a setup for false pride. And abuse and victimhood!

YIKES!

I’ll never forget that fleeting moment, talking with my lover, standing out beside my car in his driveway that afternoon when the Crown of the Chosen was offered me. How good it felt. How self-important. How protected and safe being special in God’s eyes made me feel.

But the cost! The terrible, terrible delusional cost.

Better I do the hard work of choosing myself. The hard work of truly finding myself—and everyone else—special in my own eyes. Certainly, the resulting world will be a finer place for all concerned when we all learn to do that!

Much love and aloha ~

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About Cate Montana

I’m a professional journalist specializing in alternative medicine and health, and the author of several books, including Unearthing Venus: My Search for the Woman Within [Watkins 2013], The E Word, Ego Enlightenment & Other Essentials [Atria 2017], and a spiritual novel titled Apollo & Me. After Cracking the Matrix: 14 Keys to Individual & Global Freedom, my latest book is Gender, Patriarchy & Sexual Mind Control: Breaking Free. I have a master’s degree in psychology, and am extremely blessed to have been called to Maui to live. I’m grateful every day I awaken here!

For more information you can reach me at www.catemontana.com and info@catemontana.com