I read she is the most popular goddess in the Buddhist pantheon, and her description–click on detail on any of them for a more complete summary–sounds not that unlike Mother Mary.
What if focus on, meditation on, an image of perfect feminine compassion and wisdom is a method for dealing with maternal attachment issues?
And I would submit that the ideals of feminine and masculine represent real potential energies within each of us. I do think psychological androgyny is clearly most healthy, but that is not the same as confusing the energies, conflating them, or denying their utility as ideals in human consciousness.
What myths do we still retain in our world, myths that mean something? We have a propaganda of efficiency, which was called such by Jacques Ellul in the early 1960’s, of which “hacking” is but the most recent manifestation. We have of course residual religious sentiments, but they are under sustained and somewhat effective attack.
We have the myth of Science, as a quasi-omniscient God. But this is an entirely masculine ideal. It has no compassion, no nurturing, no love, no feeling.
We have the myth of Compassion, but it has in large measure been denuded of actual sentiment, if not sentimentality. It is for practical purposes most often wedded to Science, in what to my view looks like a gay marriage. Both are masculine, as implemented. Compassion is not listening in the modern world, not when expressed politically, which is where the word is most often used. Rousseau, who more or less directly called for mass murder, used the word often.
Where is there time to listen? To feel honestly? To love honestly? Who embodies this for us? Mother Teresa, perhaps, for a short time. The Dalai Lama?
Women, in our world, are much too eager to be bad men. It may be that substantially all things men can do women can do. But it is certainly the case that there are things women can do that men cannot hope to do as well. They have natural strengths, such as empathy, which are not much valued in an industrial/information industrial economy.
We all need balancing. We all need to believe in unconditional love. We all need to believe there is a place for us, and the feminine is what creates and preserves those places.
People–here of course I mean Leftists–would not be in such a hurry to destroy everything they see if they felt they were in fact loved, that they did have a place, and that there was a sanctuary at the end of their day. They lack the sacred feminine.