by Dieter Duhm
Today the pain of failed love is imprinted as collective information into the code of life in all people. Many so strongly protect themselves from this pain returning that they even eradicate the memory of love from their inner life. One no longer knows what one speaks about when speaking about love. Here we touch a deep drama in human history. Perhaps it is even deeper in women than in men because the feminine soul is especially connected with suppressed life. Woman’s sexual hope could never be realized while the male world continued to abuse body and life. Through the research in our Healing Biotope we see how much the feminine begins to blossom when it is no longer forced into sexual hypocrisy.
The Hammer of the Witches
In order to institute its power in church and state, the patriarchal world needed to suppress sexuality and subjugate the woman under laws of male dominance. The obedience of woman was seen as a condition for male potency. A disastrous connection was formed between sex and power. Women that did not obey were punished or eliminated, like Hypatia of Alexandria and many others. In many countries the violence of man against woman took on unimaginable dimensions. The Hammer of the Witches, a book published in 1487, called for the murder of all women other than those necessary for reproduction. This book, written by two monks, soon became the second most read book in Germany after the Bible. One has to hear this a couple of times in order to actually believe it. As a consequence women who stood out for their attractiveness or intelligence, their independent will or courage, were slandered as witches and burned alive. Burned alive!
This is still happening in many countries today – stoning, burning, maiming, acid attacks. The victims are most often women.
Mary Magdalene
Suppressing female sexuality was and is a fundamental condition for patriarchal power and domination. All patriarchal cultures, no matter how different they otherwise might be, are consistent in their sexual suppression of women. When King Cecrops introduced monogamy in Greece in the middle of the second millennium BCE, it applied only to woman.1 It was a barbaric slash into woman’s sexual nature. Woman, by nature deeply connected to physical love, was meant henceforth to belong to only one man. What currently appears to many as the noble image of marriage is the result of an historical process that was forced upon women through the most atrocious means.
The magnitude of the male world’s need to assert its power over women – in order to affirm its own position – revealed itself in an event in Rennes-le-Château, a tiny mountain village in southern France. The story revolves around the village priest, Bérenger Saunière. While excavating beneath the altar of the village church, he found a treasure that brought him a lot of money. It supposedly consisted of centuries-old, original manuscripts that exposed a love relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene and the likelihood that they even bore a child together. This discovery so blatantly breached church doctrine that before long public dignitaries came to the priest to offer him a great sum in exchange for the documents. This developed into one of the most surreal crime stories of the past century, involving many deaths. Were it the case that Jesus did in fact have a sexual love relationship with Mary Magdalene, the entire ecclesiastic doctrinal system of chastity, fornication, and hell would collapse. When sensual love is allowed, the power of sexual taboo, as the most important means for taming and controlling, is neutralized. Were this development to lead toward free love (see Glossary), humanity would become completely ungovernable. This is what tyrants in state and church sensed, with their unmistakable instinct for power. Masonic fights, religious wars, the burnings of books and heretics, the legends relating to Leonardo da Vinci all revolved around the issue of the sexuality between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. It became a political matter, which perhaps had a greater impact on occidental religious culture than any other!
Thank You to the Women
Once one has perceived the suffering of women, one is astonished that there could still be women capable of love. This is a crucial point and here I would like to thank the entire female gender. The female half of humanity must possess a very stable and faithful heart, faithful to the male half, which abused and suppressed it for thousands of years.
Even today there is still a long way to go before we actually achieve so-called “equal rights.” In the sexual area in particular, very different standards apply; when a man in the public eye has a sexual escapade it is considered a trivial offence. When a female public figure does it, it is a scandal.
When we look back on our cultural history we can see the insanity in its entirety. Man has humiliated woman and thereby destroyed himself. He desecrated Eros and in doing so has driven himself over the edge. Generation after generation, century after century he has issued false propaganda demanding the demonizing of the flesh, the chastising of children, and the burning of witches. Originally designated for love and joy, physical lust became cause for ostracism and persecution. People began denying that which they had formerly loved. To this day our culture suffers from this perversion of values. The lust of the flesh has been denounced as fornication and eliminated through the cruelest of means. No truth has been possible since. It is not the lust of flesh, but its suppression which is humanity’s original sin.
Fulfilled Eros and fulfilled love (not cybersex) are conditions for human happiness, cornerstones of a concrete utopia, and indispensible foundations for a future without war. When sex and love remain unfulfilled, frustration develops; frustration leads to subliminal aggression, which eventually erupts. At the core of many marital conflicts we find the unacknowledged anger of the woman who for decades had to hide her sexual needs behind the disguise of love and service.
Change of Thinking
When we understand the extent to which human society has succumbed to collective trauma in the area of sexual love it becomes clear why, in the name of global healing, the founders of our project needed to focus so much attention on “issue number one.” This provoked the most terrible slander against us from the German public – accusations of “sexism,” being a “sex-cult,” “misogyny,” “pornography,” and even “child abuse.” The defamations in the media were limitless. One alleged the exact opposite of what we actually said and did – “Dieter Duhm preaches violence against children,” was the headline in a Protestant church bulletin. All of our project leaders were banned from speaking at public events. Engagements, which had already been confirmed, were cancelled on short notice; posters were defaced with fascist slogans and journalists who wanted to make positive reports about us were blocked by their editors. We had no chance to stand up for ourselves. I had not known that something like this was still possible in Germany. We had to persevere until the first walls of resistance and slander were brought down. Now, as the whole world faces collapse, our work can re-emerge in a new light.
At the end of the 1960s I was one of the activists in the German students’ movement, until I ultimately saw that we could no longer change the world with Marxist concepts. I realized that the destruction within human relationships was stronger than the external constraints. One night a comrade of ours collapsed in the pub while drinking a beer; he had been poisoned by friends who regarded him as a traitor. This was the moment I jumped from this train. In the early seventies countless apartment shares and communes broke apart under the burden of unresolved human conflicts. These fights centered mostly on sex and love, authority and money. It was not political but basic human problems that led to the failure of these groups. The conclusion was clear: we need a new direction of thinking that can give an answer to the external and internal devastation. The private issue must become a political one. The most intimate questions of sex, love, and partnership, of faithfulness, trust, and community, of jealousy, competition, and fear of separation are political questions with global implications. The switch to our private decisions, which we hold in our hand, is now no longer a private switch but is connected with all of humanity. The way we deal with our anti-authority, social, and sexual problems is of political importa
nce. Political engagement for peace is unquestionably linked with new ethical decisions in our human relations. There can be no peace in the world so long as we conduct secret wars among each another for power and sex. Vibrant communities are necessary for effective peace work, communities that rediscover and manifest fundamental human values such as truth, trust, solidarity, and mutual support. For those who seek a humane association for the term “socialism,” this acknowledgement transforms the concept of socialist revolution. It was insights such as these that eventually, after many steps, led to the establishment of the Tamera project.
A deep change occurred in our consciousness. The goals of a socialist society that we had propagated in the New Left of the sixties could not be achieved without thoroughly overcoming humanity’s traumatic core. The war raging in the outer world could not end so long as an inner war continually destroyed our solidarity and love relationships. When the heartache is stronger than the revolutionary goal, one remains attached to one’s problems instead of solving them. So long as the inner conflicts remain unresolved, no sustainable success will be achieved externally. In order to reach something of a sustainable global and individual healing, we needed to discover pathways for ending the inner war. This was a critical insight but the attempt to integrate the healing of our inner world into political work was so new that there were no role models to guide us. Karl Marx did not have this work in sight. He did not know how he could give a political interpretation to his desire for his housekeeper.2 The global political stage is full of such episodes, for it is enacted by people and all people share the same basic topics. Perhaps it is still the case today that the big political decisions of the world are steered more by small sexual episodes and wishes than by reason. Putin, who scorns sexual perversions of all kinds, gifted his Italian friend Berlusconi an expensive double bed. What an endorsement between men and what cheeky hypocrisy to say one thing and do another!
During the German students’ revolution, I coined the phrase, “Revolution without emancipation is counterrevolution.”3 It was published in 1968 as the headline of a widely distributed pamphlet. Everyone spoke about it but hardly anyone knew what implications it would hold for one’s private and political way of life. The members of our community needed to risk a lot and make many mistakes in the first years of the project until a convincing path became clear. We needed to work through our own resistances and through the fore mentioned public slander, cult accusations, and sanctions. I myself abandoned love through this. At this point I want to ask for forgiveness from all of my former companions who were hurt due to my anger and my own deep-rooted fear structure. It is unbearable how many injuries we inflict upon each another – often with the best intentions – due to the subconscious interpretation of our surroundings as hostile. This interpretation becomes self-perpetuating, a self-fulfilling prophecy, if we do not recognize and correct it. The hologram (see Glossary) of hostility and fear projections has to vanish from the emotional bloodstream of future peace workers if we are to create a social platform that will assure success. This platform consists of the unconditional solidarity among all those who are fully committed to achieving peace.
WORKS CITED
1. Craig S. Barnes, In Search of the Lost Feminine: Decoding the Myths That Radically Reshaped Civilization (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2006). Back to reading
2. Saul Padover, “Introduction: Marx, the Human Side,” The Karl Marx Library Vol. VI: On Education, Women, and Children. trans. and ed. Saul Padover (New York: McGraw Hill Book Co., 1975). Back to reading
3. Dieter Duhm, Angst Im Kapitalismus (Lampertheim: Kübler, 1975). Back to reading
Chapter 5: The Birth of a New Era
Back to the Table of Contents
We live not only in a world of increasing barbarism, but also in times of change in which more and more powers of renewal become visible. It is with astonishment and joy that we learned that even Pope Francis no longer attacks individual aspects of capitalism but the entire system, declaring the dominant economic model to be “unjust from its roots,”1 emphasizing “such an economy kills.”2 As the message of revolution has now reached even the Vatican, other elites could also start to rethink their position.
The dream of a new world is not only a subjective wish, but also an authentic matrix for a different life, anchored in the structures of reality; it is an objective necessity and a possibility. The concrete utopia is a latent reality within the universe, just as the butterfly is a reality latent within the caterpillar. It lies in the structure of our physical and biological world, in our genes, and in our deeper ethical orientation. Within the context of committed peace work is not the fixing of individual defects within existing structures that is required; what is required is a fundamental system change. Today’s societal machine will not be rectified by changing individual components, because the whole machine was wrongly constructed in the first place.
To reverse from this dead-end we do not need megacities or trillion dollar technologies to enable the colonization of Mars, as interesting as this might be; we need intelligent concepts for cohabitating planet Earth anew. We do not need reform; we need a new direction for human evolution. We are likely at the beginning of the greatest revolution in history. It is a planetary process, the outcome of which is still uncertain. As humankind sent a fully functioning shuttle, equipped with a digital laboratory, to Mars, it could also develop a new concept for a nonviolent planetary existence. In the following chapters components of such a concept will be proposed.
An initial, fundamental, and universally applicable condition for a humane future can be stated immediately: the new way requires the reintegration of human existence into the basic laws of life, community, love, and the Earth. To this also belong ethical, social, and ecological laws. Any violence we inflict upon fellow beings will, in the long run, return to us as disease or insanity. The coming civilization is free of any cruelty. Plants and animals are our cooperation partners for creating a new way of living on Earth. The laws of societal life and the laws of creation need to unite in order for global healing to occur. There is the world that we create and there is the world that has created us. These two worlds must come together. That is the goal of the journey.
To enable us to do the work of global healing we above all require two sources of life: healthy water and vibrant love. Water is to nature what love is to the human being. Through healing water, we cure nature; through healing love, we cure humankind. The healing of water and the healing of love equally demand that existing societal systems be turned upside down (Latin root: “revolution”). In both areas we observe that the same basic laws of life are in contradiction with the basic laws of capitalism. The new era develops to the degree that the basic laws of life are discovered, perceived, and followed by humanity.
To enable us to pave the way to a humane future, we need convincing models. These would show how human coexistence could be anchored in the universal energy fields of life. Once a functioning model is set up somewhere – a living model for ending the war between the genders, for the healing of love, for the cooperation with nature, and the solidarity with all fellow beings – a new reference point becomes available in the international discussion. The peace projects around the world have a new basis to think and speak from. It is like a quantum leap in political thinking. To enable this we must increase our concentration on the inner work, for it is the inner human world from which conflict and war originates. The more deeply we understand the global issues, the more deeply we recognize our own part in them. The rudiments of everything that we lament in the world can be found within ourselves, in our own lifestyle and community, even among friends. So long as the inner structures are not cleansed of the barbarism of the past, we will continue to reproduce the barbarism externally. To put it bluntly, so long as there is lying, betrayal, fear, and violence in love, militaries, the arms industry, and trade in weaponry will continue to exist. We are incongruent when we join protests for peace while we are full of (
secret) hatred. When we begin to love the community we live in, we will find this community changed and more beautiful the very next day. Whether the external world reacts peacefully or violently toward us largely depends on the thoughts and feelings with which we meet it. Thoughts of loathing or revenge – no matter how subtle and secret – generate fear, violence, and war. With every thought of hope and reconciliation we deprive war of its fuel. In this way we participate every day in the birth of a new era. We have to create ways of living whereby we are ready and willing to achieve this transformation in ourselves.
Marx was right when he said that it is societal conditions that determine consciousness; he failed however to see that exactly these societal conditions were created by human consciousness. What else could have created them? It is the “subjective factor” – the inner world of thoughts, images, and impulses – which generates everything that we then see as a finished product in front of us. It is logical then that if we want to change these results we need to change consciousness, i.e. the inner world. Healing Biotopes are centers for this change of consciousness, nuclei of crystallization for global transformation.
