The complication comes from recognizing that your strategies were adopted long ago, perhaps even in childhood. And all the while – from then until now – you have found real examples in your life to serve as evidence to support the validity and necessity of maintaining your particular strategies. Your collection of evidence is so irrefutable that by now you have come to accept that your stories are not creative interpretations – rather, they are the truth. Unwinding your self-made puzzle involves your mind, body, heart and soul in a seven-step procedure that usually goes something like this:
Your first step is to experientially discover that just behind your strategy, and continuously propelling it forward, is an internal feeling such as anger, sadness or fear. When you detect which feeling it is that drives the words and actions of your strategy, shift your attention from focusing on the strategy to focusing on that feeling. Develop this as a habit.
Your second step is to decide to trust the feeling on its own merit, as if it had a message to deliver to you or a journey to take you on. The journey may be like a roller-coaster ride, but it is a true journey nonetheless, starting where you are now and ending at the place of origin of the strategy. Set aside time to trust the feeling and let it lead you to its source. This may occur stepwise over a period of weeks or months, or can occur more immediately in the company of a skilled guide. The way to let the feeling lead you will be to permit the feeling to get bigger and bigger until it is loud or tearful and brings you into contact with one or more of the times before now when you were experiencing this same feeling. Do not hurt yourself in this process and do not hurt anything else. When you arrive at a memory of a time, before now, where you experienced the same feeling that is driving your defense strategy, notice what was happening at that time. Decide if that is the first time you experienced this feeling or if there was another incident previous to then when you actually adopted your strategy. Keep following the feeling further and further back, until you arrive at the most dramatic memory of whatever was happening to you then. In that experience you made some decisions.
Your third step is to clarify the decision or decisions that you made in those dramatic moments. Often in such intense circumstances, the decision will feel and function more like a vow, something like, “I will never do that again!” Or “I will always be good!” Or, “I will never trust men (or women) again!” Or, “No one is there to take care of me so I must forever take care of myself!” Or, “This was so unspeakably horrible that no matter what else happens I dedicate my life to getting revenge!” Extract from your experience the two or three core decisions you made. The decisions are about yourself, about other people, or about how you will survive in a world like this with people like them.
Your fourth step is to ask yourself if these old decisions are still influencing your life today. Not surprisingly, and, at the same time, surprisingly, the answer will be a definite and extensive, “Yes.” Think of some specific examples of present day influence.
Your fifth step is to ask yourself if you would like to make a new decision? Have you been “good” long enough? Have you carried out your revenge long enough? Have you stayed alone and neurotically independent long enough? Are you ready to drop the certain warfare for a not so certain vulnerability that includes the possibility of more refined levels of relationship? Listen more to your body, your heart and your soul than to your mind. Whatever answer you get, respect it. The answer is not guaranteed to be, “Yes.” You may not be quite ready yet. But if you have successfully derived this much clarity about what has been going on for you it is probably confirmation that, deep inside, you have already decided to make a shift. If your answer is “No,” skip to step seven. If your answer is “Yes,” you are at step six.
Your sixth step is to define what the new decision or decisions would be; what specific new decisions would empower you? For example, with regard to being good… one possible new decision could be, “I break the rules about being good and I take responsibility for the consequences of being myself.” With regard to trust, “I trust myself to choose whom to trust, when, and how much, and I trust myself to take care of myself around them.” With regard to staying isolated and doing things all by yourself, “I can ask for help and let the help in.” Or, with regard to revenge, “I am finished with being a slave of revenge and violence. The contract is over. I take my life back and leave the past in the past.”
Your seventh step is to write down your old and your new decisions.
Women Raised in a Patriarchy by Patriarchal Women
It is enlightening to wonder why a woman or man living in a patriarchy would voluntarily train their own children to constrict themselves to fit into the patriarchy when that distortion is not absolutely necessary anymore. There are enough subcultures and parallel cultures already thriving within and around the patriarchy these days that full subservience to the patriarchy is no longer enforced by threat of death as it has been in the past. But modern parents and teachers still continue to promote patriarchal survival strategies. Why is that? What happened to the natural manifestations of the deep feminine? Where did men and women’s love of the Earth Mother go? How did such deep feminine roots get severed so permanently? A brief glance into history can provide quite an eye-opening if not downright chilling answer.
I am no historian so I suggest that you do your own research to confirm these stories, but from what I understand, during the era from roughly 1200 to 1800 the Christian church sponsored what have come to be called the Medieval, Spanish, Portuguese and Roman Inquisitions intended to rid European lands of so-called heretics. That is a 600-year period during which time several million “heretics” were killed and their money and property confiscated by the Church. In the middle of all this, from about 1450 to 1700, local governments created a similar opportunity to acquire land and wealth through implementing what became known as “witch hunts.” Modern historians find that the originally estimated number of people tortured and killed during the “great hunt” was based on false records and was exaggerated. Today’s historians estimate that the number of “witches” killed totaled between 60,000 and 100,000 individuals, 80 percent of whom were women, 10 percent children, and 10 percent men. The “burning times” lasted 250 years, and stretched from Ireland to Italy, from Scandinavia to Spain, and even to the Americas. All told, over 50,000 non-docile women were killed by the witch hunts, and an untold number but surprisingly high percentage of women were killed during the Holy Inquisitions.
These numbers boggle the mind, too massive to comprehend. But imagine for a moment what this must have been like. For a quarter millennium it was common knowledge and common practice that any woman who behaved in ways forbidden by the combined church and state patriarchies would be ripped from her home, tortured in the most obscene ways, and killed before the eyes of her own children, family and friends.
In those days people knew their neighbors. In those days, people did not move around in anonymity like we do now. Most people spent their entire lives within a ten-mile radius, in the company of relatives and neighbors who intimately knew the ins and outs of each other’s lives. Today if the police arrest someone three houses down the street we don’t even know who it is, and we certainly don’t miss them. The whole thing is their problem. But back in the Middle Ages when the inquisitors and witch hunters came to town, everybody knew and were perhaps even related to the victims, and everybody was shown what behavior or attitudes resulted in a most hideous public death. Consistently, for ten generations, this memetic-weeding process continued unimpeded. What do you think the result is?
We are looking at the results today. The weeding process worked. Whoever survived got the message and passed it on to their children: if you offend the patriarchy you die. The possibility for women to become what adult and Archetypal Woman is capable of becoming has, in this graphically violent way, been eliminated from Western civilization. Women could not even think of enlivening the Great Mother in their daily lives anymore because t
hree hundred years ago those thoughts were exterminated by the patriarchy.
Adult and Archetypal possibilities for men and women do not ever vanish. They have always been there and they will always remain, at least as a potential. Bringing the potential to life is a different story entirely. Since the late 1800s the feminine potential has been rumbling in women’s souls. After long years of struggle women gradually gained the legal right to vote and hold office in patriarchal political systems. Although noteworthy and important, the right to vote does not bring life to what woman is. I am speaking about something else entirely.
Since the 1960s and 1970s the “women’s liberation movement” has opened doors to women educating themselves and creating new dimensions for their lives in workshops, seminars, trainings and meetings. Contrary to the lack of coverage by popular media, the women’s liberation movement never ended; it continues deepening and expanding itself further, bigger, and stronger than ever before. In comparison to the women’s liberation movement, the “men’s liberation movement” has not even begun. As truly noble-minded and magnificent as the human rights and human potential movements have been, they lack the level of ruthless clarity and brutal honesty necessary to bring psychological defense strategies into enough flux that they have a chance of coming back together in a more comprehensive and mature form. Our culture still arrogantly refuses to take responsibility for the messes it is creating.
One man, after years of personal development work, recently confessed, “I hate women. I used to think that I appreciated women, that I understood women, and that I could listen to women. The first thing I think when I meet a woman is how can I have sex with her? I thought this came from my love of women. Now I see that it all comes from one thing. I hate women. What can I do to get out of this?” I have heard the same sentiments from women regarding men. What we can do to get out of our hatred is to figure out exactly how we got into it. Therein lies the key.
SECTION 3-E
A Rite of Passage
Our culture does not promote the idea of individuals going outside of the culture to learn things that the culture itself does not provide for us. Our culture is “synclastic.” Synclastic means that our culture structurally turns in on itself, like a Möbius strip or a Klein bottle. Western culture has only one surface, and therefore has no way out. Through planet-wide media coverage and profit-oriented corporate strategies, the noway-outness seeks to subsume all remaining outposts of diversity.
Western culture does not have to be designed this way. Western culture could be designed so as to promote its members going outside of the culture to learn more than the culture has to offer, and bringing what was learned back into the culture to enhance cultural diversity. Instead, Western culture is designed to be synclastic as a way of defending itself. You cannot get out. You may try going to the edges of our culture to get out, but by stepping over what you imagine to be the edge of our culture you will find yourself right back in its center.
Take, for example, army surplus clothing or faded blue jeans. Hippies used to wear army surplus clothing and tattered blue jeans as a way of being counter-culture. At first the hippie clothing was distinguishing and offensive. But our culture subsumes revolutions by transforming them into marketing trends. Army surplus clothes and stonewashed tattered jeans are now manufactured in third world sweathouses and accepted in the highest fashion circles worldwide. What was once a revolutionary idea has become an institution that defends itself against revolutionary ideas. We are trapped in ways far more perniciously than we can imagine.
This makes becoming authentically masculine (or feminine) within a patriarchy particularly tricky. The proposed method for accomplishing our aim will be nonlinear.
If you research the process of becoming a man or a woman in other cultures, in other ages, sooner or later you will encounter the idea of a “rite of passage.” Traditional older cultures provided their people with a clearly defined and formidable, sometimes horrific (as is the case with scarification or female circumcision) rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. Our modern culture does not. (For a clear personal story of the conflict between the rite of passage tradition and Western civilization read Malidoma Patrice Somé’s inspiring book Of Water and the Spirit.) The closest thing we have to a rite of passage in our culture is getting your ears pierced or getting your driver’s license. And if you ever commute during rush hour you will observe that successfully obtaining a driver’s license does nothing to increase a person’s adult behavior.
What is a rite of passage? A rite of passage is the activation process for bringing a human being into the wisdom of responsibility and consequence. As children we are accustomed to making messes and not having to clean them up. Western civilization is significantly irresponsible. We are a culture of children because we make messes (for example, nuclear waste, depleted natural resources, the national debt, greenhouse gasses, children on Ritalin, plastic packaging materials, and so on) and think that somebody else will clean them up.
When human beings are approximately fifteen years of age we are structurally capable of taking responsibility. The child part of us wants to avoid responsibility and to keep making messes without facing the consequences. If nothing is done to change this, then the child part of us will remain in control for our entire lives. A rite of passage is the formal, irrevocable procedure through which the child part of us is permanently taken out of power. During this process a boy takes his balls back from his mother to become an adult man and a girl takes her center back from her father to become an adult woman. If a person survives the rite of passage, a newly formed adult steps back into the world as a force of “radical responsibility.”
Radical responsibility is an Archetypal term that means to take responsibility for sourcing responsibility. You do not have to understand this right now. We will investigate radical responsibility in later chapters when we explore Archetypal domains. What you do need to know is that a true rite of passage is of necessity almost incomprehensibly formidable, and, without a formal rite of passage into adulthood, we are doomed to the neurotic mediocrity that is all too familiar in our modern world. For 40,000 years human beings knew that children do not become adult except through a formidable rite of passage. We seem to have forgotten.
I am not suggesting that we revert to tribal customs and start living like they did in the bad old days before telephones and running water. I have lived in pretechnical villages in Fiji, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines and I have seen first-hand what can go on there: nepotism, bigotry, inbreeding, adultery, jealousy, revenge – the worst kind of territorial terrorism. In contrast to the verbiage in travel agency brochures, it takes more than palm trees to make paradise. The demand is to create a new rite of passage that is effective for modern needs. Permanently forsaking modern amenities is not necessary.
A modern rite of passage differs from a traditional rite of passage through what is done with the “assemblage points.” I borrow the term “assemblage points” from Carlos Castaneda’s writings about Don Juan Matus’ Yaqui Indian teachings. Assemblage points are core reference frames out of which a human mind and psychology constructs its world-view. During a rite of passage a person’s assemblage points are brought into serious disorganization and then are resolidified into a new relationship to each other and to the energetic world.
In an ancient rite of passage the assemblage points are welded into complete identification with the village’s traditional world-view and customs. This strategy constrains the young man or woman to think, feel and behave within strict norms of men or women of that tribe. When each new adult does things the way they have always been done, this assures the continued survival of the villagers. Traditional rites of passage have duplicated this strategy for thousands of years and succeed marvelously in cultures that change only gradually if at all.
In Bali, for example, in the North Philippines, and in Southern China, probably all over Southeast Asia, there are gigantic cascades of emerald gre
en rice terraces that have been painstakingly hacked out of the sides of mountains using only primitive hand tools. For 3000 years, these terraces have grown through careful planning in how the water flows from rice paddy to rice paddy so that all rice paddies are equally flooded. A different family owns each section of rice paddies. The man at the bottom rice paddy is in charge of water flow through all of the rice paddies. Because he is the last man in line for water he will make sure that, after everybody else gets water, he also gets water in his paddy. The culture must keep doing what it has always done so that villagers’ long-proven terracing system continues to grow enough rice to eat. To slow down evolution, the village culture uses a rite of passage to lock new adults into the belief systems and worldviews of their traditional culture and times. For a village culture, this traditional form for a rite of passage makes good sense. For our culture it does not.
Initiating a boy or a girl into their fully functional adult potential in modern hyper-evolving Western civilization requires rites of passage with a different strategy. The modern rite of passage must be just as formidable as the traditional rite of passage because the shock of groundlessness is needed to loosen our assemblage points from their original childhood formations. But, rather than welding a young person’s liquefied assemblage points back into the culture’s traditional limits, the modern rite of passage establishes the new assemblage points in the evolutionary possibilities of Archetypal Man or Archetypal Woman. We only vaguely know what this means.
The difficulty of continuing this discussion is that any rite of passage created within a patriarchy will avoid providing irrefutable clarity that the patriarchy is itself childish. The patriarchy promotes the patriarchy, not the transformation of the patriarchy. We are in a delicate time in which the habits of present Western civilization are not sustainable. It is crucial for the world’s survival that the patriarchy itself goes through a rite of passage into adulthood. That transformation happens only when you – an individual male or female member of the patriarchy – take personal responsibility and arrange for yourself to go through your rite of passage. The culture will not arrange this for you. Revolutions are not commonly started by the aristocracy.
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 11
