122. When you end your relationship, make it your partner’s fault. (The asshole!) Live the rest of your life permanently scarred. Find evidence to prove that you were horribly betrayed. Take no responsibility. Learn nothing. Hate your partner for eternity. Distrust all men (or all women). Use lawyers, relatives, and the children to get all you can out of your partner just for spite. Tell incriminating stories to mutual friends before your partner can, especially to their family, and whenever possible to the media. Take a pound of flesh. Hit them wherever it hurts. How could they dare to do this to you? Teach them a lesson they will never forget so that this will never happen to you again. Then, arrange for it to happen to you again.
To make best use of this list read it carefully and slowly once a week for three months. Each time you read the list new insights will reveal themselves. Let each insight bubble up slowly into your experience. Let each realization hit you with the full intensity of its shocking message. As we noted at the beginning, people do not change until it hurts too much to keep doing things the old way. It may feel counterintuitive, but if you want to change, then let it hurt.
The above list is valuable because it allows you to acquire an exact “x” for locating where you are on the Map of Three Kinds of Relationship (see page 29). When you are enacting to any degree even one of the above listed behaviors then you prove your commitment (no matter what else you might be thinking) to creating ordinary human relationship. This is your “x” on the map.
Gaining an experiential “x” on the map is the purpose for studying the list over and over again. Study this list until you are nauseated. As painful as it might be, studying the list of ways to create ordinary human relationship gives you intellectual and emotional reference points that you can use for the rest of your life. These guidelines and hints will help you detect what you are actually up to when your mind may be telling you that you are up to something else entirely. Knowing what you are actually up to is clarity. Clarity provides alternative options in the exact moment when you can take a different action. Such options are priceless. The point is, if you do not know with accuracy what you are doing in this moment then you will have little success trying to do something different in the next moment.
For example, if you think that you are appreciating and respecting and you are actually instead being superior and manipulating, then you do not have an accurate “x” on the map. You are in reality lost. Trying new actions will change nothing because trying to reconcile what you are doing with the way people are reacting to you won’t make sense.
Think of it this way: If you have stopped your car at an intersection in a new city and you know where you want to go but you do not know where you are, then you will not know whether to go right, left, straight, backwards, or to park because you are already there. For finding where you are, you need landmarks that give you accurate feedback and a map that shows you where the landmarks are in relation to where you want to go. A map gets interesting when it also provides you with details that extend into new territory.
The next few chapters are about men and women; about the matriarchy and the patriarchy and how these contrasting world-views continue to affect our lives today and influence our relationships. It will be important to consider how we got our ideas of what a man is, what a woman is. Exploring these issues builds the foundation for entering new territories of relationship.
CHAPTER 3
Ordinary Man and Ordinary Woman
Section 3-A
Matriarchy and Patriarchy
Previous to 6000 years ago, cultures of the world were matriarchal. (This whole idea about a matriarchal past is conjectural. There is evidence to support the matriarchy story. There is also evidence to support other stories. Whether the matriarchy story is true or not does not so much matter. What matters is that hearing stories of the matriarchy can set the stage for a wider view of relationship possibilities than the limited view dictated by the pervasive patriarchal story we live in today.) So, let us begin again. Previous to 6000 years ago, cultures of the world were matriarchal. We do not even know what the term “matriarchy” means anymore. We think matriarchy is simply a role reversal with women replacing men in patriarchal power positions. This is not so. Matriarchy functions through a completely different paradigm than patriarchy, not even on the same game board.
Matriarchy was the original successful design of human organizations for 90,000 years. It was characterized by egalitarianism, mutuality, and love of life. Most matriarchal viewpoints are wildly unfamiliar to us today, as our minds have been shaped by a patriarchal framework (for example, from the matriarchal perspective it is crippling insanity to think that a person can own land or claim legal rights to natural resources; for another example, the concept of “profit” is a bizarre intellectual disease). After you read this book, do the experiments, and feel the results in your relationships, then having a conversation about matriarchy might begin making sense. At this point it is enough to consider that the ways of humanity were probably not always like they are now.
Some historians think that 6000 years ago, after the last ice age, severe climatic changes forced matriarchal cultures into desperate survival. Out of the chaos arose patriarchal world-views based on scarcity, competition, and the “I win, you lose” game plan. Patriarchal marauders seeking to irresponsibly benefit from the labors of others soon pillaged and subju-gated any remaining matriarchies.
Patriarchy
If you do your own research you may be surprised to discover that the patriarchy has not made independent contributions to civilization. The patriarchy exists as the negation of matriarchy. The “original” inventions of patriarchy consist mainly of different forms of violence: the invention of domination as a universal rule within organizations, the invention of private property, the invention of war, the valuation of abstract linear thought, the invention of exploitation and profit, the replacement of sharing with competition, and the invention of mechanization and machinery.
This book has nothing to do with history, economics, science, politics or religion. This book is about you discovering greater possibilities for yourself and your relationships. Toward that end I invite you to consider the idea that what could be happening in the world right now is the last rampage and the predictable failure of patriarchy through the introduction of worldwide capitalism. Divide the resources by the population count and you discover that not everybody in the world gets to have an air-conditioned apartment and a gas-guzzling car. When you add up the numbers they cannot work out. At some point the house of cards falls down.
Identify the Patriarchy
As you think over what you are reading in this chapter and start identifying specific, detailed manifestations of the patriarchy in your daily life (like the fact that children play in the street, most buildings are angled instead of rounded and their design makes minimal or no use of an abundance of free solar energy) you may be surprised that a condition you either never noticed before or that you assumed was naturally true and ordinary could only exist in a patriarchy. It becomes even more astonishing when that thing is happening inside of you! For example, when you shut down your intuition, numb your feelings, and pass responsibility for conducting rituals of death, birth or transition over to priests and doctors instead of priestesses and midwives because of fears of reprisal from the culture. You can experience how deeply the patriarchy possesses you by wrestling to change a particular opinion, reaction, assumption or generalization and finding that it careens through your mind and emotions, forcibly driven by an unseen patriarchal engine.
Consciousness creates freedom from that possession.
A practice that awakens consciousness within you is to name what is happening. For example, you could say to yourself, “What is happening right now inside of me is a manifestation of the patriarchy. It is not authentically me.” Unfettered by the patriarchal world-view you suddenly gain freedom of movement. You can begin to take actions that are more authentically your own, even if they are not sanctio
ned by the patriarchy. Having options that are outside the boundaries of the patriarchy is essential for finding your way into something other than ordinary human relationship.
How Patriarchy Shapes Our Culture
Patriarchy shapes our culture like this:
• Our culture is dominated and controlled by men.
• Our culture is designed to serve the purposes of men. Men make the important decisions.
• Men design our government, police force, military, and our school systems.
• Men make and enforce the laws.
• Men specify and approve the design of our cities, streets, buildings, transportation systems, communication systems, entertainment, and clothes. Even kitchen appliances are designed and marketed by men, with unusable instructions written by technicians for technicians.
• Men define women’s beauty ideals and “saturation bomb” the female mind with these definitions through multiple media channels.
• Men use the female body in advertisements as a sex object for manipulating other men’s minds. What this does to women is not even considered.
• For men, women are just a market niche.
• Women are told they are free within the patriarchy but this is a false and ridiculous freedom more like having a prison cell enlarged. The freedom is without responsible consequence except to make monthly payments on the credit card bills. Women are free and disallowed to take responsibility.
• Women were recently given the right to vote in the patriarchy, but this is a total illusion of empowerment because voting itself is a masculine form of decisionmaking. Women do not make decisions by fifty-one percent vote. Women naturally make decisions through consensus. Men do not even know what consensus is.
• If women want power in the patriarchy they must first subvert their femininity and play the men’s game. To gain power or recognition the women have to become better “men” than the men.
• To succeed in the patriarchy women give up their pride, self-confidence, dignity, and their direct connection to the source of the living Goddess.
• Women’s culture is directed by men toward children, laundry, housekeeping, shopping, entertaining men, and so on; whatever the men do not want to do.
• Women are not empowered as top managers in trade and business. There is no women’s management culture.
• Men dominate religion. Women’s spiritual problems are “solved” by men, e.g. the pope.
• The patriarchy replicates itself by educating our children in the patriarchal context through all forms of media, and even, unconsciously, through women themselves.
• In the patriarchy there is no place for women to live their authentic power. So, they offer their bodies to get a little of what they want and to be accepted by men.
• Sexual abuse of women and children is understood as normal in the patriarchy and often unobstructed.
• Women compete with other women to survive in the patriarchy and for the love and acceptance of men. There is an ongoing war amongst women who could instead nourish and empower each other in a woman’s culture.
• The patriarchy creates wars on the planet because the patriarchy is not round: love is missing. Women know how to prevent war, but do not do it in order to demonstrate the little power that they do have, letting the boys go kill each other as a subtle form of feminine revenge.
• Women have forgotten that they ARE love.
It is important to remember that there is nothing bad or wrong about the patriarchy. The patriarchy works as a patriarchy works. Human beings live, work and play in virtual reality “gameworlds,” life stories that we agree to create together. We could continue to live in a patriarchal gameworld for all of eternity and no one could blame us. It is just a patriarchy.
A New Solution
Patriarchy is not the only solution to life, just like steak and potatoes is not the only solution to what to have for dinner. The real question here is: how have we lost our personal ability to choose and live out a wider variety of alternatives than are allowed by standard Western culture?
You have the power to answer that question in an interesting way: by actually choosing attitudes and actions that are not offered by our present culture. You could do this in thousands of ways. You could, for example, love your wife and children more than anything else. You could define your neighborhood or your part of the apartment building as your village and hold village meetings once a week divided into men’s culture, women’s culture and children’s culture, with village-wide festivals four times a year. You could start a school for children (or adults) that teaches from this or other non-belief-centered books. You could empower and organize men and women to provide rites of passage for your teenagers so they have a foundation that is broader and deeper than our culture can offer them to use for the rest of their lives. You could give up trying to meet economic standards set for you by the culture and instead figure out who you are and how to make best use of your time while you are alive.
You could reclaim your power to take non-ordinary actions right here, right now, while reading this sentence, and then you could exercise that power again and again – every three seconds or so – from now on.
How do you actually reclaim your power to choose something that is not offered on the menu? It is an astonishing question, because such power is inalienable. Such power is not something that can be taken away from you. How you reclaim the power to choose from all options rather than only from the options presented is to specifically and exactly figure out how you are right now pretending that you do not have that power. This answer gives you the key to get through all patriarchal defenses.
Your Job
Your job is to personally rediscover and implement the knowledge of the interrelationship of all beings as the basis of your feeling, thinking and acting. Through your personal experimentation, matriarchal egalitarianism, mutuality and love of life can regain a foothold all over the world as viable alternatives to Western globalization. This cannot happen by decree. There will be no mass awakening. This is not theoretical. Evolution happens one person, one experiment, one insight at a time. Doing these experiments is your job.
Because matriarchal concepts are so shocking and foreign it is beyond the scope of this book to create an understanding in the reader about matriarchal values. You can learn more about matriarchy and matriarchal values from Riane Eisler’s book The Chalice and the Blade. What is important is to know that although we do not presently see it, our patriarchal viewpoint completely imprisons our thinking through perceptual distortions. Your job is to start carefully observing the steel-bar certainties of the patriarchal story until the certainties go fuzzy around the edges and dissolve under the heat of your inquiry. Studying the patriarchal worldview and persistently asking “why?” reveals through experience that patriarchal boundaries are imaginary.
Objectively scrutinizing the patriarchy unfolds realizations in you that consciously and responsibly subvert the patriarchy. Subverting the patriarchy is different from overthrowing the patriarchy. For example, you subvert the patriarchy when you use the patriarchy itself for a purpose other than that for which it was originally intended. Rather than regarding patriarchal assumptions as barriers to your development, you can interact with patriarchal assumptions as your personal jungle gym for developing a fluidity of being. Then you are using the patriarchy rather than the patriarchy using you. As spiritual teacher Lee Lozowick puts it, “Be that which nothing can take root in.” That is, through practice you can become that in which a rigid reaction to the patriarchy cannot take root. The patriarchy’s grip on your personal convictions loosens because through practice your convictions evolve into something nongrippable.
This writing is not a call to revolution. This writing is a call to evolution. Your evolution. Overthrowing the patriarchy is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is you waking up to who you are.
Section 3-B
Getting Through Patriarchal Defenses
Questioning the patriarchy from within the patriarchy is not allowed by the rules of the patriarchy. Slipping outside the thought-control of those rules is not impossible, but also not very likely. It requires that you look at what you are looking with.
As a daily experiment you can begin simply noticing the ordinary details of your life with a different set of eyes. Shift your intention so that instead of observing things from the normal perspective as if you are the patriarchy, use the subversive perspective of noticing the insinuations of the patriarchy itself.
This experiment is simple and yet deceptively difficult. Self-ratifying patriarchal assumptions are the patriarchy’s first defense. It is shocking to recognize how thoroughly our perceptions are captured when we are born into a worldview beyond which our parents cannot see. We receive the patriarchy’s assumptions at the same time that we receive breast milk (or whatever the patriarchy is selling to mothers for baby food these days). Patriarchal attitudes come so early and are integrated so tightly into our identity that we forget our ability to seriously question the patriarchy. We have been hypnotized. Your experiment is to wake yourself up.
The practice of simply noticing holds within it the motionless and inescapable power of awareness, but only if the noticing is neutral, completely without judgment. Simply noticing the patriarchy’s intimate influence in your life, step by step, loosens its personal grip on you. Over time you gain the sensitivity to distinguish between unconscious patriarchal habits and an abundance of alternative options. In the moment that you can actually take actions that are outside the patriarchal framework, the patriarchy becomes irrelevant.
The fact that questioning patriarchal assumptions is unlikely does not mean that you should not try to do it. To establish and maintain an extraordinary life and profound intimacy with your partner, some new ideas can be very helpful, including ideas that lie outside the reality boundaries of the patriarchy. But asking after such ideas may produce surprising consequences. For example, your inquiries may attract answers, and the answers are not guaranteed to be pain free. How has it come to pass that the patriarchy dominated our thinking? What other kinds of thinking are there? How has the patriarchy been allowed to continue? And why have we impoverished ourselves by handing our creative authority over to the patriarchy?
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 9
