Misidentification
Similar questions are pondered in the field of exopsychology, the study of the origin and evolution of psychology in the universe. Don’t conclude that psychology is unique to human beings! Any species of creature on any planet that identifies itself within a single body – i.e., not like an anthill – and that evolves a neurological system complex enough to sustain self-awareness will naturally start off with a psychology that functions just like ours.
How has the patriarchy been tolerated? One of the mechanisms is through misidentification. We adopt the classic rituals of the patriarchy, including scarcity-based competition and hierarchical structures, through two basic misidentifications – first with the body, next with the mind.
As babies we notice physical sensations. We feel warm, cold, pain, and pleasure. We see sights, hear sounds, smell smells, taste flavors, and feel textures. We wish to move and our body moves. We drink, eat, fart, pee and poop. Without question or doubt we make our first unconscious misidentification: “I am my body.” Identifying with our body orients us toward fighting to compete for any resources that the body needs.
Months and years pass. Our certainty about who we are is not shaken. Then we notice that we also have thoughts and feelings. We acquire language. We take on opinions and start to figure things out. We give and ask for reasons and communication starts working. We get offended and our body responds emotionally. Experiencing our own thoughts, feelings and reactions catalyzes our second unconscious misidentification: “I am my mind.” Identifying with our mind orients us toward rigid structures for organizational power, such as in hierarchies.
The purpose of the misidentification is originally noble: our own survival. Self-preservation. Using our mind to defend our body obviously helps to keep us alive. What is not so evident is that in order to accomplish its most obvious purpose – our physical survival – the misidentification must first accomplish its most fundamental purpose – its own continued survival. The unseen primary objective of misidentification is to continue our misidentification.
As a result of thinking that we are our body and our psychology, we conclude that consciousness comes from us. Extricating ourselves from this conclusion is not promoted by the patriarchy. In fact, the opposite is true. The patriarchy orients us toward fulfilling physical and psychological needs instead of opening to Archetypal realities that exist around us all of the time.
In the process of exploring radiant joy and brilliant love we will venture beyond patriarchal limitations. The journey may involve some struggle. That we do not gracefully extricate ourselves from our misidentifications confirms the power of the patriarchy.
And yet it is possible. The journey starts exactly where we are right now, face to face with some level of commitment to a defensiveness that regards the self that it is defending as a physical body and a psychological construct. Being thus occupied with defending our misidentifications we are distracted from the bigger possibilities of realizing our true abilities as a man or a woman.
A Special Appeal to Men
I hope that many men read this book. We men are handicapped by the patriarchy in profound ways that we do not realize. This chapter especially addresses our responsibilities and our possibilities. Fully discovering and enlivening our expansive birthright as men may include striving to make efforts beyond our fathers’ reach. Reading this book is an effort we can make. I hope that many men read this book, do experiments and teach what they learn to their sons. We have so much to gain from starting over again. I hope many men read this book.
SECTION 3-C
Ordinary Man
Being a man in a patriarchy is like being a child in a daycare center, not knowing that just outside the nursery door lies a vast world waiting for you to grow up into.
This section addresses both men and women about the special circumstances of being a man raised in a patriarchy. Please understand that these ideas are not about Archetypal Man. Investigating what it is to become Archetypal Man will come later in this book and later in our evolution as men. We must first become a responsible adult man before we can begin exploring the delicacies of becoming Archetypal Man. Our present condition as so-called men in Western civilization is much worse than we think.
Men in a patriarchy do not have to grow up. Men in a patriarchy are not shown how to become authentically powerful by aligning themselves with the forces of evolution. In a patriarchy, men are protected (read that as imprisoned) in their infancy by the same arrogance that the patriarchy uses to protect itself. Even the men holding power positions in the government, the military, religion, education, science, or business (including the entertainment industry and the media) are handicapped with certain immaturities because the patriarchy does not initiate men into their own proper manhood. The patriarchy leaves men as intellectually educated, self-centered little boys with underdeveloped emotions and small-minded visions in adult male bodies.
This is a harsh generalization. If you are a man, see if you can let your heart rather than your mind digest the assessment to figure out if any parts of it are true. If you are a woman, ask yourself if you agree with the assessment or not.
Not so long ago, incomplete masculine development made little difference in the big-picture existence of humanity on planet Earth. These days the consequences have changed. For example, there is a gap between our present use of technology and the skills needed for living naturally on the Earth. That gap is now so big that without our technology we don’t know how to live. Beneath our shallow bravado is a deep fear of losing the use of technology (“technopenuriaphobia” or TPP, see Section 7-C) that unconsciously but seriously constrains our behavior. We think that we own technology because we created it, but, because of our dependency on it, the technology owns us. We can’t live without our technology, but we also can’t live with it. Due to the toxicity of our technological byproducts, and the impact of modern weaponry, our immaturity as men threatens to annihilate the human race if not the entire planet.
Men in a patriarchy make an erroneous assumption. We assume that having an adult male body automatically makes us adults. Our culture tells us nothing different. But, in fact, there is a world of difference between having an adult male body and being an adult man. If you, as a man, some day wish to learn the difference, you can easily do so by asking fifteen or twenty strong, centered, clear-minded, vocal adult women to explain it to you personally, specifically and directly, en masse, for about an hour. You must promise to stand there and only listen. The avalanche of pure anguish, the torrent of feminine fury, the incisive clarity of the accusations, the simple beauty of what women desire, and the profound sorrow over unattained possibilities will bury you in self-reproach with no way to dig your way out while retaining any integrity. I strongly recommend that you do this for yourself (or come to one of my men’s trainings). The impact of women’s unrestricted voices speaking in harmony, the look in their eyes, the stoop of their weight-bearing shoulders and the cry of their still-aching hearts will be an experience you will never forget for the rest of your days.
Men Raised in a Patriarchy by Women
The situation of present day men is worse than simply being raised in a patriarchy. Men are raised in a patriarchy by women. We have no idea what this does to the possibility of becoming a man. In our neurotic, technological, time-stressed, entertainment-oriented, comfort-pandering culture men do not do the child raising. Men are “at work.” Men are out of the house doing whatever men do in a patriarchy to stay out of the house. It is women who raise the children. Boys are raised by women who are living in a patriarchy. This is very bad news for any man hoping to authentically grow up.
Think for a moment. Consider the unconscious mechanisms that must be cooking in a familial stew pot. Women in any culture want (and deserve) to be respected as equal citizens without reason, just as the men want (and deserve). But in a patriarchy, feminine ways of being are seldom given the same respect as masculine viewpoints. This subtle imba
lance insinuates women into a slave class, and rage over the degradation unconsciously infiltrates a mother’s relationship with her boy children. Strong, withheld feelings and serpentine female thoughts cook together in the bowels of a patriarchy. Some of the twists do not even come from a woman’s own experience – they are passed down from her mother.
A mother’s womanly disgust as well as her hopes, her outrage as well as her justifications, produce two unrecognized strategies in her relationship to her son. Either she tries to sensitize (feminize) the boy so that he will not grow up to disrespect, hurt and abandon women the way she may have been treated by men in the patriarchy. Or, she dominates, invades and controls the boy so he can never acquire enough power to abuse. Either of these strategies may deform a boy’s self-experience for a lifetime, and by making such privacies her business, the mother may end up feeling closer to the boy than she does to her own husband.
In addition to the mother’s influence, most of a boy’s teachers during twelve years of schooling are also women. What happens when a boy grows up with the vast majority of his instructors, authority figures and adult role models being women? A woman trying to feminize or dominate a boy generates deep distortions in his future relationships with women that are at least as disruptive as a woman being too distant. We would be naïve to think that these distortions are self-correcting.
Who Is Dad?
Boys do not know who Dad is. A modern dad is often not around. Modern life pulls him away from home and away from his children. He is out there somewhere, “working,” leaving a vacuum where a child’s role model for human manhood should be. To see our dad for an hour or so on Saturday afternoon, mowing the grass or reading the newspaper is pitifully insufficient. Boys need a man as a role model day in and day out for years – a man to stand with, to imitate, to wrestle with, to smell and to be confirmed by. And girls need to see a dad teaching the boys about manhood.
What boys learn about manhood in our present culture is how to be absent. We imitate our absent dads. We continue being absent when we avoid challenging responsibilities rather than grabbing them by the horns. We exhibit absenteeism when we ignore our profound desires to make our lives about what truly matters to us and to make the world a better place to live, and instead limit our creations to what is defined by the culture as normal and expected. This is how we are absent from ourselves. Then we pass on the tradition of absenteeism by being absent from our sons.
As a modern man lies alone on his sterile hospital deathbed, aching from some unfathomable disease, he wonders what life was supposed to be all about. Where did his life go? What was the purpose of all that?
Life was there. We weren’t. We were obediently absent.
Why are we talking about all of this?
Because consciousness creates freedom.
By gaining additional perspectives about what transpires during the course of our lives we gain the possibility of creating something different. Since we are not trained to be conscious of the patriarchy in which we live, we are not free of the patriarchy. Without consciousness we have no freedom. In other words, without our realizing it, the patriarchy owns our body, mind, heart and soul, and dictates our destiny. When the patriarchy does not move, we men (and women) do not move. Where the patriarchy cannot go, we men (and women) cannot go. What men once created as a refuge has turned out to be our prison. We are indeed asleep with poop in our pants.
In order to grow up, we men are challenged to intelligently and effectively deal with the special condition of being a man raised in a patriarchy. Our culture does not train us how to grow into our true maturity. As a result, our culture is left largely without grown-up men, and almost no men realize the loss.
If as either man or woman you are moved to explore and expand into the possibilities inherent in the human form, then you are quite likely to be far more successful if you research outside of our Western culture to encounter those possibilities.
SECTION 3-D
Ordinary Woman
Being a woman in a patriarchy is like being a black person in a white person’s society. The white people have no idea…
As the subservient class, it is the women’s responsibility to create a cultural game that is played by a more interesting set of rules, because the “white people” ain’t a gonna do it for you. Responsibly creating a new game is far more complex and involved than the common practice of blaming men. No amount of blame, regardless of how true it seems, will make the slightest change. The world is not reinvented by complaining victims. The world is renewed by individuals responsibly changing their own behavior, one word at a time.
This section addresses both women and men about the special circumstances of being a woman raised in a patriarchy. Again, these ideas do not pertain to Archetypal Woman. One must first acquire the skills of becoming a responsible adult woman before she can begin exploring Archetypal Woman’s radiant dimensions. Her handicaps may take more effort to abandon than she may at first imagine.
Women’s handicap in a patriarchy is conflict with a lifelong enemy. The enemy of women raised in a patriarchy is men. The enemy is not a true enemy, but the circumstantial evidence supporting the story that the enemy exists is so pervasive, and the psycho-emotional payoff for being a victim of such an enemy is so big, that recognizing the “enemy” story as false is almost inconceivable. When women look to other women about this issue there is no dissension. Every woman subtly or overtly agrees, men are the unspoken enemy.
The way women relate to men in the patriarchy cannot be neutral or clean because men are perceived as the enemy. Just beneath the surface of her ordinary-looking interactions are each woman’s perfected strategies for how to survive in a patriarchy where women have no overt power. The strategies are as varied as clothing styles. Here are a few standard strategies that women use. Compare them to yours. Women typically:
• Regard men as little boys. Everything you do for men you do with the attitude of being a resentful mother. Either coddle or scold men into doing what you want. When a man does something wrong, punish him by withholding sex or intimacy. Never respect him as an adult.
• Regard men as police. Represent yourself as a “good” housewife or worker and then behind the men’s backs sneak out and do whatever you really want to do. If caught, deny everything, confuse the facts, and cover your tracks by creating a different problem, such as attacking the “police” man for the way he speaks to you.
• Regard men as a prize to win. Compete with other women to hypnotize men with your beauty, sexuality, intelligence or charm. Never actually deliver the beauty, sexuality, intelligence or charm to the man. Instead keep it just out of reach so you can dangle your prized man in front of the other women to show off how powerful you are. Keep a couple of other men on the side, in reserve.
• Regard men as stupid animals. Communicate with men through commands; tell them what you want and what they should do about it. Continuously criticize men in public to prove to them they are stupid. Then you never have to take what they say seriously. Being disgusted about men’s brutishness keeps you from feeling the pain of not being in the kind of relationship your heart aches for.
• Regard men as possessions, no different from your car or your house. The man needs maintenance now and then so you take him out to a few places, but since he cannot feel anything and is not really alive anyway, you leave him to take care of himself, including sexually. Use him whenever it suits you.
• Regard men as dangerous and abusive adversaries. Be proactively abusive toward men as a general policy, to make men keep their distance. Your unprovoked spitefulness protects you. Besides, men are the enemy, so expressing aggression toward men any way that you can is already justified.
• Regard men as rescuers and bank accounts. Play-act being a sweet victim and a sexy partner to your present sugar daddy so he keeps rescuing you and providing an abundance of cash. After he dies you will have time to be yourself. Through your sacrifice you have earned th
e right to inherit his money and the power of his name.
These are harsh generalizations. If you are a woman, see if you can let your heart rather than your mind digest these descriptions to figure out if any parts of them are true. If you are a man, review your experiences from these new perspectives to see what is accurate or not about these descriptions.
Establishing Another Way
Women in a patriarchy do not have to grow up because there are no men in the patriarchy to demand that of them. Men’s attention is involved in power politics, money making, sports, and consumer sex (how many can I get?), so women do not receive the special attention required to shift into who they can potentially become as adult women. There is a deep brokenheartedness about this lack of opportunity to grow into the vastness of true womanhood. Rather than feeling the sorrow of this loss and using the wisdom of this pain to behave outside the restraints of the patriarchy, women tend to continue blaming men, and through this behavior prove themselves to be just as committed to supporting the patriarchy as the men are.
Both women and men may regularly play into one or more of the survival strategies mentioned above. Along your path of development there may come a time when you are ready to find another way of interacting that permits you to more intimately enter the delicate moments of life. Shifting strategy is possible but far more complex a process than just thinking about it.
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 10
