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The Spiritual Authority of Sisterhood
Chet Shupe
A Note for the Reader:
Some people will reject this thesis, and I understand why. Those who feel they are managing life reasonably well—and who believe that, despite our problems, the world can still be steered toward a workable future—may find these ideas unsettling or even offensive. They may be right; none of us knows how the future will unfold.
There are others, however, who do not feel they are adequately managing the scene. They may believe they are failures. A thesis that says our circumstances are dysfunctional—not we ourselves—offers relief, self-respect, and a sense that their struggles are not evidence of inadequacy, but natural responses to an unnatural world. It also provides hope that mankind’s circumstances might eventually change.
These are two very different reactions to the same words, from people who have all arrived at their feelings honestly—and who, in that honesty, are doing the best they can. I offer this perspective not against or in favor of anyone, but as another way of seeing things.
* * *
For most of our species’ history, all social primates—including human beings—lived in informal, interdependent family relationships. These families were not held together by rules, contracts, or legal arrangements. They were together because, when together, they could do something that none of them could do alone: survive.
At the center of virtually every social primate family was a female bond—a sisterhood—that supported one another in creating a safe, emotionally grounded place to bear and raise their young. Around these socially bonded females gathered their children and the males who participated in family life by supporting and protecting the sisterhood and its young.
For tens of millions of years, sisterhoods were the stable center of social order among social primates until we humans began formalizing our family relationships around 5,000 years ago through social contracting. By “formalized,” I mean relationships that no longer arise from instinct or shared needs but from roles assigned and enforced by law. It was the moment when legal arrangements replaced natural human bonds, and the state became the arbiter of what people owe each other—not just materially, but emotionally, even declaring when love must be given and when it must be denied. This shift replaced the spiritual authority of sisterhoods with the written word—and in the process, mankind lost its spiritual freedom—our freedom to live by the feelings that reveal our innate wisdom. This set the stage for civilization, in which our freedom has since been limited by the need to comply with social contracts and the laws created to enforce them.
Before there were kings, empires, temples, scriptures, or commandments, human beings lived without written instructions for how to behave. Life was not ideal, but no one had to be spiritually dishonest to fit in, and people did not destroy the habitats our species depended on for survival. Without written rules defining good and evil, how did they do it?
They did have instructions. Instincts.
Civilized people do not regard instincts as guidance. We have been conditioned to think of them as primitive or dangerous impulses that must be controlled. Indeed, that is why social contracts and the legal systems that authorize them exist—to control instincts. But instincts are the seat of our emotional nature. They reward us with contentment when we do what feels right and burden us with discontent when we do what feels wrong.
Think of our emotional nature as an inborn GPS—a guidance system evolution built into us to serve the species, communicating through feelings rather than words.
Before humans began social contracting, this internal GPS guided all human activities. Like all other animate beings, we served life by doing what we felt was right and avoiding what we felt was wrong. We did this not because we were good, but because we wanted to feel good—we preferred contentment to discontent. But when we formalized family relationships—replacing social bonds with legal arrangements—we severed our emotional connections to those around us. In doing so, we estranged ourselves from the relationships through which we had previously served life. And, no longer free to resolve our inborn feelings, we have lived in various states of emotional discontent ever since.
It was, in effect, our expulsion from the mythological Garden of Eden: the moment when humans ceased to be agents of life and became agents of the state, when we innocently chose to control life, rather than continue participating in its process, and when we began to see our emotions as our enemies and the rules as our friends.
I feel privileged to speak with women in domestic violence shelters because, if humanity ever returns to being agents of life, it may well be women like them—women recovering their sense of dignity in one of the few places where spiritual honesty is still possible—who lead the way. They have experienced, firsthand, the mistreatment of women that arises when family relationships are formalized. And because of the circumstances they now share, they can be spiritually honest with other women, possibly for the first time in their lives.
When women are free to speak honestly, be real, and share their vulnerabilities without fear, there may come a time when five or six of them feel a special kind of bond—one they have never felt before, except perhaps years ago on school playgrounds—the kind that tells them that if they stick together, things will be okay, no matter what hardships they must overcome. It is the feeling Taraji Henson described when speaking about making the Movie, The Color Purple: “It reminded me of how powerful we are as women when we stick together.”
Then she added something even more revealing: “That does not mean that we are coming after you men. If we stick together, you’ll be taken care of. You will benefit. Trust me.”
Henson recognized a wisdom far older than civilization—an instinctive truth that arises not from intellect but from the human spirit—that when women stand together, men remember what feels right to them—offering their strength in protection and support, not in ownership or control.
The source of the emotional connections women feel when free to be honest with each other about how they really feel is an inner guidance system that speaks through feeling. So don’t ignore it. But don’t force it either—don’t let your thinking outrun your feelings. That is how humanity got hooked on rules.
Trust that if such a bond forms and you are part of it, you will know. And if the bond becomes so strong that the relationships become emotionally indispensable, you may find yourselves living together informally—without promises, long-term plans, record keeping, or legal arrangements, no paperwork of any kind. Then, by the authority of your spirits, you will have become a sisterhood. And as a sisterhood, you will no longer feel subject to the authority of any king.
Prescribed rules are imposed to control the imagined future. The spirit’s wisdom, revealed through inborn feelings, applies only to the moment being experienced. Because rules trump feelings, when we rely on rules for guidance, we lose access to the wisdom of our souls—the only guidance that can sustain a living community. In that emotional vacuum, words do not merely run the show—they become the show, transforming reality into a world where imagination replaces lived experience, abstraction replaces presence, and prescribed obligations replace living bonds.
The grandmother of all reality transformations occurred during oft-repeated meetings thousands of years ago, when groups of men decided among themselves to grant one another the right to claim women as personal property, believing, I trust, that it would somehow make the world a better place. By that decision, they subjected the authority of the human spirit—male and female alike—to the presumed truth of the written word. From that moment forward, the human brain began emulating a form of intelligence that is disembodied, rule-bound, and artificial in every sense except that it is carried out by living bodies. And yet, because a living being can experience only one reality at a time, people could not recognize that anything of significance had changed, nor has humanity since.
To grasp how simple, seemingly innocent decisions—such as men granting each other the right to own women—could alter our personal and collective emotional foundations, and thus our species’ fate, consider an airliner cruising through the darkness of a moonless night when the artificial horizon indicates the aircraft is thirty degrees off level. In that darkness, the instrument panel is the pilot’s only reference for reality. Because of a fault in one instrument, he will, with his own hands, put the aircraft into an unrecoverable spin, dive, or stall, sensing that something is desperately wrong but, unable to see the real horizon, having no idea what the problem is. My concern is that once social contracts became the basis for social order, the imagined futures those contracts were created to realize replaced experienced reality as our reference point. And when imagined futures become our reference for reality, they also become our reference for what feels right or wrong to do—in other words, our reference for good and evil.
Like the airline pilot, we sense that something is very wrong, yet because our survival depends on being good—on honoring contracts—our minds cannot entertain even the possibility that the belief-based feelings through which we uphold those contracts are compelling us to ignore the instinctive feelings that would otherwise reward us with contentment for serving life. Thus, our suffering goes unaddressed, and our capacity to endure the pain of spiritual repression becomes the measure of our virtue, even as we search for salvation in progress—enhancing our ability to control the Natural world.
But, as with the pilot, we do not suffer from lack of control; we suffer from lack of access to the wisdom-based reality that inspires the behavior required for humans to sustain the emotionally grounded community life for which we evolved.
From the moment social contracting began, the reality experienced by people living under written law—our sense of what is good and what is evil—not only ceased to reveal our species’ needs, but became unstable: it could be instantly and radically changed by the words of a high priest or by the mere raising or lowering of a legislator’s hand. In that shift, the wisdom of the human spirit—now felt mostly as anxiety, loneliness, or depression—has gone unheeded ever since.
Yet beneath the shifting sands of that artificial reality, the order that has always sustained life silently waits.
In spiritual freedom, nothing governs from above; what we call “governance” is simply the natural order that emerges when each person acts on instincts shaped by evolution, not only to order our communal life, but also to reward us for participating in it—including its conflicts, whether within or between groups. Conflict is not a deviation from natural order but inherent to life’s process.
Spiritually free people serve life by resolving feelings rather than pursuing happiness. When feelings are resolved, happiness is experienced. Happiness is the reward for serving life, not a goal. To make it a goal is to try to harvest the fruit while overlooking the need to tend the tree.
Spiritual freedom does not begin with intent but with the spontaneous bonds that form when emotional honesty among women becomes possible—whenever their sense of wellbeing depends more on their relationships than on their promises, long-term plans, or contracts. When functioning as a sisterhood, those women become the nucleus of an informal human family. By supporting one another in creating a safe home to bear and raise their children, the sisterhood—together with their children and the men who, by the authority of the male spirit, show up to protect and support them—becomes the foundation of family life. From this foundation arises the village that virtually everyone agrees is needed to raise a child.
And that village is governed by the same thing that governed all human life before the first empire existed: everyone’s internal GPS—including the children’s.
What will happen when an agent of the state, or an agent of any other mindless entity—an entity whose directives serve the imagined future—arrives to inform the villagers that they cannot live there unless their relationships are formalized, unless their responsibilities to one another, and to the authority itself, are acceptable to it and authorized by its laws? A sisterhood can not only recognize mindlessness but also has the spiritual authority to address it. If, in their hearts, the women feel they are not subject to any king’s authority, they will be inspired to demonstrate it, regardless of what the state threatens to do. For instance, the matriarch—yes, there is a natural hierarchy even within innately guided relationships—might reply: “You have no business here. If you insist that you do, then imprison us all and institutionalize our children. Otherwise, leave us alone.”
What are the leaders going to do while still hoping to maintain the illusion that the state is capable of serving anyone? I am not saying there won’t be any sacrifices along the way. But having to institutionalize children inflicts on the state spiritual wounds that, though it possesses no spirit of its own, it cannot long endure under the judgment of ours—or possibly of greater significance, the judgment of the leader’s spirits.
A woman feels spiritually empowered to face down a state only when she is part of a sisterhood. Informal relationships—the kind that serve life—are guided and empowered by feeling, not law. All laws—externally imposed order—destroy informalities by replacing feeling with prescribed obligations, and with them the living fabric of life itself. This not only endangers the species’ survival but also flattens the spiritual lives of the living.
But the women may not need to face down the state at all. If they create a home that truly nurtures children—something the state’s formalized family can rarely, if ever, do—the state will not dare interfere.
Wouldn’t that be something? If sisterhoods realized that simply by being true to their hearts—by living together—they stand beyond any king’s authority, the state might be forced to confront something it has never considered: that the authority through which it claims to maintain order is not what holds human life together. Sisterhoods embody the spiritual authority that allows life to organize itself; the state’s authority is not the foundation of life-sustaining social order, nor has it ever been.
Some women may wonder why, if natural order is to be restored, the burden must fall on them. I cannot offer proof; I can only note something that applies to every social primate species, and surely to ours as well: when mating is not restricted, paternity cannot be known. This does not mean that informal relationships lack structure; it means the feelings that guide mating—romantic attraction, which fades within months of conception, well before a child is born—as with all other natural activities, arise from inherited wisdom rather than social contracts. In natural primate groups, where paternity is unknown, males cannot evolve the emotional sensibilities for direct parental caregiving. And because no female could raise her young alone, the survival of the next generation depends on bonds of mutual support among females. From an evolutionary perspective, the needs of the sisterhood—and thus its authority to secure them—are essential to species survival. Informally bonded family groups—not isolated individuals nor nation states—are the survival unit for any social species.
In the evolution of social primates, males contribute to species survival not through direct parental caregiving, but through protection, provisioning, and devotion to the group’s wellbeing. When risking their lives for others, social primate males, by instinct, not by free choice, place greater value on the lives of those they love than on their own. It is through that love that evolution protects the lives of all social primate species, including our own.
As for why the burden of returning to natural social order begins with women, the short answer is: being true to one’s wisdom is never a burden. When a person, male or female, is free to resolve their inborn feelings—rooted in genetic wisdom rather than belief—life is served, and the individual is rewarded with contentment for that service. Being true to ourselves is never wasted effort; it returns as a quiet sense of alignment within—the feeling of being where one is needed, and therefore where one belongs.
Civilization deprived women of their sisterhoods when family relationships were formalized through social contracts. That single act placed the authority of the rational mind—the brain’s adaptive element—above the emotional mind, which rewards us for serving life. Emotions may appear irrational, since there is no evidence to justify hunger, romance, anger, joy, or aggression except for the feelings themselves. Yet whether they appear irrational or not, they are expressions of wisdom evolved to guide us in serving life; they must not be ignored if our species is to thrive. Knowledge, on the other hand, is learned from experience. It is essential to the rational mind’s ability to resolve feelings. The rational mind’s role is not to decide what feelings to resolve and which to ignore, but to know the habitat well enough to act on what we feel. We can’t satisfy thirst if we don’t know where the water is.
However, there is one caveat. All values—and therefore consciousness itself—are experienced through feelings. For us language-using beings, the crucial question is: Is how I feel rooted in innate wisdom or in a language-based belief? If a feeling is rooted in innate wisdom, it cannot be argued with and therefore serves life. Can one argue with hunger, romance, or grief? If a feeling is rooted in a belief, however, it can be endlessly argued with because the future promised by any belief does not exist. For that reason, belief-based feelings cannot pass the test of critical thinking — much less serve life.
So, if the languaged mind wants to experience the contentment through which evolution rewards it for serving life, it must find circumstances in which it is free to ignore belief-based feelings—the ones that can be argued with.
Cognitive scientist Jonathan Barenholtz shows that language is a self generating predictive system. His research—drawing on what we learn from LLMs (Large Language Models)—reveals that meaning can arise entirely from language itself. The meaning we take from the promise of religious or secular beliefs, including the promise of constitutions, is an example: Without language, beliefs and governments would not exist, much less our devotion to them.
Once humans began social contracting under prescribed laws, the rational mind followed linguistic projections rather than inborn wisdom honed by evolution. LLMs are revealing the mechanism that has shaped our cultures since the written word first defined moral truth, which gained its authority only because social contracting required it. Mankind’s desire to control the world toward imagined ends through social contracting is how disembodied language became the authority structure of civilization.
Language evolved so we could instruct each other in how to navigate our habitat, share experiences, and make short-term plans—all of which supported our survival and happiness for tens of thousands of years. Only under social contracting did language become the authority structure of civilization. Once social contracting required us to choose against the feelings through which life directs us to serve it, we entered a world created by our imaginations—inhabited by paper identities and sustained by belief systems that promise a future reward for collective obedience to every law. It is the Matrix, not because it is technological, but because it is artificial—and being artificial, it is not grounded in the wisdom on which human life depends. The question is not how to get rid of it; given time, the Matrix will do itself in. The question is what we do now.
In concept, escaping the Matrix is simple: cease social contracting. Without a mechanism for making claims on the distant future, there is no reason to imagine, much less value, the image of a promised land. The only concerns to manage would be those at hand. This would leave individuals free to resolve their inborn feelings, through which evolution rewards us with contentment for serving life. The Matrix’s vulnerability is that it feeds exclusively on fear of the imagined future. That fear is what locks us into maintaining our legally prescribed stations in life, no matter how painful staying there is. Without imagined futures to worry about— and the social contracting that creates them— the Matrix has nothing to feed on, and it evaporates.
But in practice, it is not so simple. Once we began social contracting, we became universally dependent on legal arrangements for material survival and on the promises of beliefs that undergird those arrangements to survive emotionally. Relieving ourselves of those dependencies cannot be done quickly, for without them, the world that supports our present identity—and thus virtually everything we presently value—would cease to exist. It is a problem of enormous proportion—one for which I have no answer. But if we were to regain access to the wisdom of our souls by trusting our family relationships to each other’s spirits rather than to legal arrangements, a new, but ancient reality, one civilized people have never experienced, would begin coming into being.
It is a place where our sense of who we are has nothing to do with personal accomplishments or how rigorously we follow the rules—in spiritual freedom, there are no rules, because even one rule implies spiritual distrust. Because no living spirit—human or animal—wants to remain where it is not wanted, the members will drift apart without even knowing why. And worse yet, if, when trust is lost, order is maintained by imposing ever more rules, the community will become a mindless herd—like a state—held together by rules rather than by the collective wisdom of its members’ souls.
In legally bonded relationships, the kind imposed by social contracting, the consequences of rules are even more severe. When two people are bound together in a way that gives them nowhere to drift, rules do not merely create emotional distance—they prevent the individuals from resolving their feelings in ways that serve life. The spirit, unable to act freely, is forced into a state of discord that, given time, often erupts as rage. This rage is never personal; it is directed not at the other’s spirit, but at the circumstances that prevent both spirits from serving life. What we call ‘abuse’ is nothing more than the spirit’s desperate protest against a relationship structure that denies it the freedom it needs to remain whole—or, as Thoreau put it, to avoid living in a state of quiet desperation.
In the new reality, the one we cannot presently experience, our sense of wellbeing would be based on how emotionally grounded we feel in our relationships with the people around us and in the land that sustains us. In such a reality, the formal dependencies that sustain the Matrix would lose all meaning, and the Matrix itself would cease to exist.
As for how we return to the reality created by our collective spirits from the reality we now experience, which is a construct of our collective imaginations, I do not know, nor will I argue that it is even possible. I will say, however, that if women begin to experience sisterhood and, out of that experience, the relationships of sisterhood become indispensable to them, the reality that once regulated human behavior in ways that supported species continuity might reemerge.
Nature does not concern itself with the Matrix; from its perspective, the Matrix will soon be gone, one way or another. Life has endured far greater disasters. The real question is whether the Matrix will take the human species with it—and that depends on how soon we begin telling the truth, to ourselves and to one another, about how we really feel.
Spiritual honesty is not a virtue; it is circumstantial. Before social contracting, everyone was spiritually free. We were honest about how we felt because our only objective was to satisfy the inborn feelings through which life rewards us with contentment for serving it. After social contracting, contentment ceased to matter. Survival no longer depends on being true to ourselves—on what Nature made us—but on realizing personal ambitions. Suddenly, spiritual dishonesty became essential to survival. That is why, though we generally manage to survive materially, most of us are poor in spirit—even the privileged and the devout.
And yet, there are places where emotional truth breaks through. This is where the women in abuse shelters come in. Their circumstances may inspire a level of honesty that the rest of us are not free to practice. If sisterly bonds begin to form out of that honesty, and if those relationships are experienced as directives from Nature—superseding any contrived authority—those women might become the cores of real communities—villages.
For the human spirit, that would mark a breakout from the cloud of institutional subjugation, perhaps the first since social contracting began. And if that shift set off a chain reaction of spiritual honesty spreading from one circle of women to another, the implications would be profound. Each sisterly bond is the seed of a community. It is through community, you see, that the human species organizes itself to fulfill its greatest need: to bring the next generation into the world. Without a sisterly bond to serve—the women who bear and nurture that next generation—a community has no emotionally grounded reason to exist. This is why, like all the rational mind’s attempts to artificially organize human life, its attempts to construct community are predisposed to fail. But if the seeds of naturally forming communities—sisterhoods—were to increase dramatically in number, whether through a chain reaction or by any other means, it would transform the reality of human existence from titles to bonds, from roles to relationships. Then, not as Misters and Misses but as sisterhoods and brotherhoods, we may once again be celebrating life on this planet long after the Matrix is gone.
Community cannot be formed by intention; it can only emerge from bonds that become emotionally indispensable.
