[00:00:00 - 00:00:09] The monumental seminar which we started last week with Terrence McKenna and Rianne Eisler [00:00:09 - 00:00:13] entitled "Man and Woman at the End of History." [00:00:13 - 00:00:20] We worked our way up to get about a third, about a third of the seminar last week [00:00:20 - 00:00:27] and we'll do another big chunk tonight as our Earth Tuesday program. [00:00:27 - 00:00:33] "Man and Woman at the End of History" took place at the Ojai Foundation in June [00:00:33 - 00:00:39] and the description of the seminar is, [00:00:39 - 00:00:46] "Thus, this seminar examines how one of the most fundamental human relationships, [00:00:46 - 00:00:55] that between male and female, shapes our relationship to technology and ultimately to culture and nature. [00:00:55 - 00:01:03] We will look at the forms of relationships between women and men in the shift from a society based on domination [00:01:03 - 00:01:06] to one based on partnership. [00:01:06 - 00:01:16] This is an exploration of how feminism, technology and the telling of a new story will contribute to rescuing us from history." [00:01:16 - 00:01:21] Rianne Eisler is an internationally known scholar, social activist, futurist [00:01:21 - 00:01:29] and author of "The Chalice and the Blade" which I add has been extolled by Terrence McKenna, [00:01:29 - 00:01:36] Daniel Ellsberg, Helen Caldecott and Ashley Montague among others. [00:01:36 - 00:01:39] "The Chalice and the Blade." [00:01:39 - 00:01:45] She is co-director of the Center for Partnership Studies and a member of the General Evolution Research Group, [00:01:45 - 00:01:54] a multinational group of scientists concerned with the social relevance of new theories and discoveries. [00:01:54 - 00:02:01] Terrence McKenna has spent 25 years researching philosophy, solanism and ethno-pharmacology. [00:02:01 - 00:02:06] He is co-author of "The Invisible Landscape" and co-founder of Botanical Dimensions, [00:02:06 - 00:02:13] a non-profit refuge for endangered and rare plant species. [00:02:13 - 00:02:18] So we will get right to the seminar. [00:02:18 - 00:02:25] There has been a break and the gang is gathering at the end of the first break. [00:02:25 - 00:02:29] KPFK Los Angeles. [00:02:29 - 00:02:34] Shall we take up where we left off or start somewhere else? [00:02:34 - 00:02:43] Yes. [00:02:43 - 00:02:55] Well, as I recall at the close of the morning, what we had come to was talking about the primacy of the shamanic experience [00:02:55 - 00:03:14] and where it fell as a causal factor into the genesis of partnership society and its dissolution into dominator society. [00:03:14 - 00:03:19] To me, that's tied up with, and I indicated this at the end of the morning, [00:03:19 - 00:03:38] with the issue of the primacy of personal felt experience and that this is the cultural domain over which the turf war is fought [00:03:38 - 00:03:44] between the dominator and the partnership way of thinking about things. [00:03:44 - 00:03:56] Empowering ourselves through immersion in the felt moment is the partnership way of being. [00:03:56 - 00:04:12] It is immediate. It is emotional. It is translinguistic. And it feeds itself. It nourishes. [00:04:12 - 00:04:27] The other way of relating to experience is through a set of canonical abstractions that are the unique property of a professional class [00:04:27 - 00:04:33] that speaks a special language that the rest of us don't understand. [00:04:33 - 00:04:45] And for millennia, at least beginning with classical Greece, this has been how we in the West have done it. [00:04:45 - 00:04:55] The mistake you see was when the Greeks stopped being fishermen and pulled their boats up on the sand and began to talk philosophy. [00:04:55 - 00:05:13] That that cuts them off from the felt presence of immediate experience. Are you agreeing? Do you need help? [00:05:13 - 00:05:27] So partnership is revivifying immediate experience. Well, then what what are the limits of immediate experience? [00:05:27 - 00:05:36] And this leads in my mind directly to the question of the psychedelic plans. [00:05:36 - 00:05:44] It is possible to go from birth to the grave without ever having a psychedelic experience. [00:05:44 - 00:05:51] But it's also to do make that same pilgrimage and never have a sexual experience. [00:05:51 - 00:05:59] Well, since the center of my ethos is empowering the felt presence of the immediate. [00:05:59 - 00:06:13] To me, those things are abomination. That withholding of involvement in the parameters of what one can know, but more importantly, what one can feel. [00:06:13 - 00:06:27] And this is a hard thing to put across in the present milieu, because believe it or not, very few people have had the psychedelic experience. [00:06:27 - 00:06:34] The shamanic Lee centered thousand volt center of the Mandela experience. [00:06:34 - 00:06:39] And it doesn't it isn't about who has taken drugs and who has not. [00:06:39 - 00:06:45] I constantly talk to people who were by careful questioning. [00:06:45 - 00:06:51] You can satisfy yourself that though they've taken 10 different kinds of drugs, [00:06:51 - 00:07:02] multiple times, they never actually touched the pith essence of the experience because it the drugs. [00:07:02 - 00:07:10] The plants are not a scene they call them. They are necessary, but not sufficient. [00:07:10 - 00:07:26] What is also necessary is a good heart, clear intention and a setting which reinforces and focuses what is being attempted. [00:07:26 - 00:07:33] But to me, the big news. I wonder if the back will go now. [00:07:33 - 00:07:40] Last time I didn't mention it, and then I swore, you know, I should mention it. Your world is falling apart all around. [00:07:40 - 00:08:02] You just keep going. Anyway, to me, the really big news is that there is this dimension of reality that is accessible to 90 percent of the world. [00:08:02 - 00:08:06] I have 90 percent of everyone in some form or another. [00:08:06 - 00:08:15] But that is secret because of the need in this culture to preserve sort of this flat earth myth. [00:08:15 - 00:08:24] It isn't a flat earth, but a mute nature. That's the myth that the dominated culture must keep in place. [00:08:24 - 00:08:33] Sartre actually said this. He said, Nature is mute. Therefore, the world gives no compass for the formation of human ethics. [00:08:33 - 00:08:44] This is psychosis, this kind of talk, because nature is not mute. You need only have ears to hear. [00:08:44 - 00:09:04] And the ears to hear the message of nature are the practices and techniques of ecstatic shamanism, which is still alive and well. [00:09:04 - 00:09:16] In the Amazon, in Indonesia, in Southeast Asia, it has only been lost to us as we've made this peregrination into a dominant fantasy about nature. [00:09:16 - 00:09:26] I mean, Rian mentioned this this morning, the conquest of space, smashing the atom, all of this. [00:09:26 - 00:09:37] Metaphors of violence and unrestrained domination, as though somehow nature has to be violated to be understood. [00:09:37 - 00:09:47] My brother, whom some of you know, I'm sure is a brilliant neurochemist and biochemist, said something to me once which has stuck with me. [00:09:47 - 00:09:58] He said, They build enormous atom smashers and instruments for studying high energy in nature. [00:09:58 - 00:10:08] But it's perfectly obvious that the most interesting things in nature go on at voltages considerably below that of a flashlight battery. [00:10:08 - 00:10:18] In leaves, in organs, in fertilized eggs and spurns and spores. And these are the subtle processes in nature. [00:10:18 - 00:10:30] What two thousand years of pursuing a dominator theory and trying to understand nature has brought us to is the potential for nuclear armageddon [00:10:30 - 00:10:44] and an inability to solve the three body problem, which means essentially we have remained in an extremely infantile situation with regard to the living state. [00:10:44 - 00:10:52] And the living state is the precondition of our being. This is why I think Rupert's work is so important. [00:10:52 - 00:11:05] He offers a new understanding of the living state. And upon that new biology, that new empowering of life to be perceived as what it is. [00:11:05 - 00:11:14] I think there will be a new sociology that will empower us to see ourselves as we are and as we can be. [00:11:14 - 00:11:24] So that's why I think the psychedelic experience is so important, because it sets the parameters of possible immediate experience. [00:11:24 - 00:11:34] And it's been sold back to us in vitiated form by every tin horn guru since the last glaciation. [00:11:34 - 00:11:46] But what they're what they're selling is, you know, their interpretations, their metaphors, their poetry imposed upon it. [00:11:46 - 00:12:00] And Rian has brought me close to seeing this, that the real news is that it is within us that we need not genuflect to these hierarchies, [00:12:00 - 00:12:05] which actually play havoc with the truth that is there to be perceived. [00:12:05 - 00:12:14] It's not a matter of seeking the answer. It's about facing, facing it. [00:12:14 - 00:12:28] And this means nature, which is the goddess, which is the feminine, which is the symbiotic and partnership ground out of which humanity comes, men and women. [00:12:28 - 00:12:33] You might respond to that. [00:12:33 - 00:12:44] I'm serious. You're like fireworks, like those of us today, you just illuminate so many things so quickly and then pass from one to the other. [00:12:44 - 00:12:52] But I will do it in my own nonlinear fashion. I guess since you ended with the goddess, I would like to begin with the goddess. [00:12:52 - 00:12:57] I had requested that somebody bring a book. Do we have it here, The Talisman, The Blade? [00:12:57 - 00:12:58] And I forgot. [00:12:58 - 00:13:09] Oh, you have a copy because on the cover is a picture and sometimes a picture can speak louder than a thousand words. [00:13:09 - 00:13:15] This is just one of thousands and thousands and thousands of figurines. Not all of them look like this. [00:13:15 - 00:13:17] I want to make that very clear. [00:13:17 - 00:13:27] But she happens to manifest something that I think is very important in terms of our conversation and our celebration here. [00:13:27 - 00:13:33] Because once she, if you look at her, I think you can see her because of the great, you know, contrast with the red. [00:13:33 - 00:13:39] If you first look at her, you can see, of course, the breasts. And that, you know, that's female. [00:13:39 - 00:13:45] But actually the shape is phallic, isn't it? So she's androgynous, isn't she? [00:13:45 - 00:13:52] And then the other thing that you see, if you look at her very closely, she has a beak. She's a bird goddess. [00:13:52 - 00:13:59] She's part animal. Of course, the angels are the descendants of the bird goddess. [00:13:59 - 00:14:01] Does she have leaves too? Is she part plant? [00:14:01 - 00:14:14] Not in this picture. And that's a very interesting thing because, as a matter of fact, there are many incisions on many of the early language, early writing, if you will. [00:14:14 - 00:14:23] I guess one of my favorites is the cross. I want to tell you about the cross because we're talking about different meanings of different things, [00:14:23 - 00:14:35] of different basic symbols, including the symbol of shamanism, depending on which of these two possibilities for us, these two models, which are abstracts, of course, we orient to. [00:14:35 - 00:14:41] And it's very interesting because many of the early figures of the goddess had incised in them the cross. [00:14:41 - 00:14:49] But it was in the, very often it was like the X form of the cross. And what it stood for, of course, was the unity. [00:14:49 - 00:14:55] The various points of the compass, because these people were very sophisticated astronomically, as you probably have surmised, [00:14:55 - 00:15:02] any of you who have looked at Stonehenge reproductions, for example. But even if you go back way into the Paleolithic 20,000 years ago, [00:15:02 - 00:15:12] they were already into some really remarkable record-keeping. Some of it may have been, as a matter of fact, begun with women's menstrual cycles. [00:15:12 - 00:15:27] I think that arresting fact that blood, the life-giving blood comes, must have really inspired some women to try to figure out when would this essentially supernatural event be experienced again. [00:15:27 - 00:15:37] But I want to stay with the cross. Then, later on, in Egyptian hieroglyphics, the cross is still a symbol of life. [00:15:37 - 00:15:45] But when you move into the Dominator era, which you begin to find, and you find it way before the Romans and way before the crucifixion, [00:15:45 - 00:15:51] you find that the Assyrians had this lovely habit of impaling people on crosses. [00:15:51 - 00:16:01] You see, you see Gleicphalia, the whole, you know, I mean this whole panorama of the whole city practically impaled. I mean, just brutality. [00:16:01 - 00:16:09] So the cross became what? It became not a symbol of life and regeneration, but it became a symbol of brutal death. [00:16:09 - 00:16:16] And of course then comes the early Christianity, Jesus, preaching a partnership spirituality, associating freely with women, [00:16:16 - 00:16:26] violating, even in the official gospels, you find this of course, his disciples marveling that he associates with women and with no one else present like the woman at the will. [00:16:26 - 00:16:38] You know, I mean, in Khomeini's Iran you can probably get killed for doing that. And so it was in this very rigidly male dominant, you know, very hierarchic, violent society that he was, you know, challenging. [00:16:38 - 00:16:49] And he broke those taboos and he preached partnership. And of course, what we do in these hybrid societies, the women are ignored basically and ridiculed and forget it, [00:16:49 - 00:17:04] but the men are usually crucified and canonized. And so, well, you kill them. And then you say, oh, weren't they wonderful? Martin Luther King, Gandhi, you know, I mean, all of, so that's, you know, so of course, you know, he gets crucified on a cross. [00:17:04 - 00:17:17] But early Christianity tries to again revive the old symbolism, doesn't it, of the cross as a symbol not only of dying on this awful thing, but the old symbolism of life and regeneration, rebirth, the rebirth. [00:17:17 - 00:17:33] And of course, Christianity obviously is a very direct descendant of the old religion. Only a very interesting thing happened along the way, folks, which is that the great mother, you know, the goddess, well, at first she was dropped completely. [00:17:33 - 00:17:47] And then when the Troubadour movement, this was a time of tremendous partnership resurgence. And we don't have time for it, but it's very, very fascinating because the Troubadour courtly love has some relationship to tantric yoga and we won't go into that. [00:17:47 - 00:17:58] But I mean, I just want to leave you with that because it's really extraordinary, the commonalities we begin to see. But the Troubadour introduced this thing called neriology, which the church authorities say this is unheard of. [00:17:58 - 00:18:11] It's never been heard of. Well, not since it was a revival of the ancient worship of the goddess and the people danced in the streets of Lyon, you know, when the church finally co-opted it and said, okay, folks, we'll accept it. [00:18:11 - 00:18:26] But she is now the only mortal figure in the Holy Family. So we've got this real absurdity of the Holy Family with a divine father and a divine son and some parvenu, you know, this woman who just happens to come along. [00:18:26 - 00:18:37] Right. So we maintain the dominator character. And of course, that went along with what then the cross again becomes the cross as a symbol of the crusade of the Inquisition. [00:18:37 - 00:18:49] It again really, truly becomes a symbol not of life and the love of life and of regeneration, but of death. And the Cooks of the Sun with its white cross is a very, very good modern illustration. [00:18:49 - 00:19:05] And the reason I think I went through this with you is not only because intrinsically it's so interesting to really reclaim some of our basic and ancient symbols, because all of these symbols can have so many meanings is what I'm really trying to say, depending on what prism we use for it. [00:19:05 - 00:19:20] But to really need into perhaps to look at shamanism from that perspective, because I have sort of a sense about the shamanic experience that we're talking about a number of experiences. [00:19:20 - 00:19:35] And I feel sort of a need to say again that I feel that there are many paths to what I don't even know that we need to call it the shamanic experience because shamanism per se, as you pointed out, is the healer. That is the healing function. [00:19:35 - 00:19:42] And it may mean not only physical healing, the spiritual healing, which we are now rediscovering, folks. It's related. [00:19:42 - 00:19:53] You know, the ancients kind of understood that. But now we're beginning to understand, you know, with holistic medicine that, you know, that the two go together, that, you know, nature and spirituality are related. [00:19:53 - 00:19:59] Perhaps we can speak about it as the ecstatic experience, the experience of gnosis. [00:19:59 - 00:20:18] And I would say that there are many paths to the experience of gnosis, that the use of nature involves not only the use of plants, but the use of even our own breath, which is a way, you know, through meditation. [00:20:18 - 00:20:29] It involves sexual, you know, tantric yoga has the remnants of what I think was a view of sex as sacrament still in it. But of course, it's become very male centered. [00:20:29 - 00:20:41] You know, everything is he gets access to the to Shakti, which is, of course, you know, the creative force, the goddess through the woman. But somehow she's become this passive agent of the whole thing. [00:20:41 - 00:20:46] Go ahead. I'm very little. The guy was very big. There's a tiny little woman on it. [00:20:46 - 00:20:51] And isn't that amazing? Because you see Shakti, of course, is if the whole concept is that you have access. [00:20:51 - 00:20:59] Well, look, I mean, the vulva, the vagina was sacred in the Paleolithic. You see the what we call the inverted triangle and it's sacred. [00:20:59 - 00:21:15] And you see that in Indian iconography. So, yes, I mean, this was, you know, the idea that this is a cunt, you know, our worst and most contemptuous swear word would have been such blasphemy as it should be again to us. [00:21:15 - 00:21:26] We have to reclaim really the spirituality of our sexuality. But I think the sexual experience can be not always, you know, I mean, it doesn't mean that there is going to be very serious and fallen all the time either. [00:21:26 - 00:21:33] But it can also be another avenue that is a natural avenue. So I would like to perhaps put this in the context of larger paths. [00:21:33 - 00:21:45] And of course, we all know about the path of having that experience of the oneness through fasting, through chanting, through all kinds of hypnotic things. [00:21:45 - 00:21:54] But there's no question in my mind that the plant experience is one of the quickest and one of the most powerful avenues. [00:21:54 - 00:22:07] But the real issue, and I want to really talk about it, I was talking to you earlier, I want to put it in the modern context in the 60s because that's a very important case history for us. [00:22:07 - 00:22:12] We must learn. If we don't want to learn from the past, we really are in deep trouble. [00:22:12 - 00:22:20] What happened in the 60s, as you know, was that, yes, that the use of hallucinogens was part of this awakening, you know, the flower children, the counterculture. [00:22:20 - 00:22:32] But then some really dreadful things happened. And what happened, of course, was the co-option of the drug culture as, again, the opiate of the people. [00:22:32 - 00:22:42] The politics, the true politics in the sense of transformation, not Republican, Democrat, or, you know, or Reagan or, you know, whatever. [00:22:42 - 00:22:52] But the true politics of transformation from the dominators to the partnerships, society got completely co-opted, didn't it, through the drug experience. [00:22:52 - 00:23:11] And historically, the use of opiates, for example, in China is a very vivid example, but hashish, you know, you name it, you've got it, has literally been a way to get people to accept the most miserable, the most virulent, the most brutal of oppression from their overlords. [00:23:11 - 00:23:23] So I think that it's so important, if we're talking about this as a technology, that it can be a technology of domination just as easily as it can be a technology of actualization. [00:23:23 - 00:23:31] And I'm not going to dispute it, what you're saying, that some of the natural plants are less likely to be used that way, that it's mostly the chemical ones. [00:23:31 - 00:23:35] But I'm not 100% sure, because look at the opiates. [00:23:35 - 00:23:47] Well, I don't think opium was really a problem, number one, until the British, as a matter of state policy, manipulated opium production in the Far East. [00:23:47 - 00:23:53] And then secondly, until the invention of morphine and the family of synthetics. [00:23:53 - 00:24:00] I mean, opium use, as you mentioned, goes back to Minoan times and probably earlier. [00:24:00 - 00:24:13] No, we have a remarkable ability to pervert. And I think it was Ludwig von Bertlansky, one of the founders of general systems theory, who said, [00:24:13 - 00:24:22] "People are not machines, but in every situation where they are offered the opportunity to behave like machines, they will so behave." [00:24:22 - 00:24:29] We have to be, this maybe brings up something we should talk about because it was requested and it seems germane here. [00:24:29 - 00:24:40] And this is the problem of addiction and habit. And addiction is merely a special type of habit. [00:24:40 - 00:24:50] And I think we can agree that habit in all forms kills what we want to bring to flower in life. [00:24:50 - 00:25:02] Because as a habit sets in, attention can go elsewhere. And then that part of life is somehow on automatic. It has become a machine like function. [00:25:02 - 00:25:14] So we are now being told that we're in the midst of a tremendous political crisis that goes under the banner of the drug problem. [00:25:14 - 00:25:27] But the drug problem is an addiction problem. And the addiction is, in my mind, the addiction of intelligence agencies to vast amounts of untraceable money. [00:25:27 - 00:25:39] This is the addiction which drives the global drug problem. But of course it is true that there are chemical dependencies. [00:25:39 - 00:25:47] And this is a very interesting thing about human beings. Something, and I'll talk about this a bit more tomorrow, [00:25:47 - 00:26:02] but something about our ability to be omnivorous, to eat all kinds of things, has lain us open to, perhaps manipulation is too strong a word, [00:26:02 - 00:26:16] but certainly to evolutionarily selective pressures that are not ordinarily present. Because most animals eat a few foods. Many animals eat only one food. [00:26:16 - 00:26:29] Our ability to be omnivorous has exposed us over the last four or five million years to a vast number of mutagenic and synergistic compounds [00:26:29 - 00:26:41] that may have been responsible for such things as the prolongation of adolescence in our species, the way in which lactation occurs. [00:26:41 - 00:26:53] A number of physiological factors in our makeup that we take for granted may be fairly recent acquisitions having to do with our omnivorous diet. [00:26:53 - 00:27:05] And drugs come into this at some point too because, for instance, in the case of psilocybin, very small amounts of psilocybin in the diet [00:27:05 - 00:27:20] are not detectable at all as a psychological impression. But tests have shown that very small amounts of psilocybin in the diet confer increased visual acuity. [00:27:20 - 00:27:33] Well, you don't have to have studied too much evolutionary biology to know that if you have a population of animals and something in the food chain is increasing the visual acuity of some of them, [00:27:33 - 00:27:42] those animals are going to have a more successful reproductive strategy than their competitors, and that trait will be reinforced and strengthened. [00:27:42 - 00:27:55] So we have been sculpted by nature through our foraging habits, and Rian stressed the notion of template, and I think that's very important. [00:27:55 - 00:28:10] Human beings are templated out of nature. We have been shaped by unusual evolutionary forces, and when you look at us, we clearly play an unusual evolutionary role. [00:28:10 - 00:28:20] We are some kind of trigger species for mode shifts that affect the entire planet. [00:28:20 - 00:28:37] And if you take the notion of Gaia seriously and don't simply think of Gaia, if you don't simply replace the old man with the long white beard with a beautiful young woman as an abstraction, [00:28:37 - 00:28:55] but actually try to, what is Gaia? Gaia is the set of integrated informational control systems which regulate and maintain and stabilize all life and all biological processes on this planet. [00:28:55 - 00:29:15] And the way this is done is through chemical messengers, enzymes, stimulants, depressants, enhancers, all of these things push and pull on the morphogenetic field in which everything on the planet is bound. [00:29:15 - 00:29:22] To me, the great miracle on this planet is us. We are the great unlikelihood. [00:29:22 - 00:29:41] If this planet were as it was even five million years ago, Darwinian mechanics properly modified would be sufficient to account for what was present, natural ecosystems, animals, and competitive and adaptive relationships. [00:29:41 - 00:29:50] But we really are as alien as an alien spacecraft would be. We are the great imponderable here. [00:29:50 - 00:30:07] And I think that nature is at play with itself and is calling out of the primates a gene swarm that is in self-reflection of what is otherwise a planetary intent. [00:30:07 - 00:30:27] And that's why we feel why our hearts are so open to these ineffable emotions about destiny and transformation. And someone this morning asked about history and what was it good for. [00:30:27 - 00:30:44] It's the long term of the spiral. You know, the prodigal son is somehow in a better position for having made the peregrination, the journey into alienation, and then returns enriched to the tribal encampment. [00:30:44 - 00:31:01] I think of European civilization as a prodigal phenomenon, but a prodigal phenomenon that will be returned, redeemed when we return to the tribal societies we split away from six, seven thousand years ago. [00:31:01 - 00:31:11] But return now with a tremendous empowering knowledge of how to realize the shamanic dream. [00:31:11 - 00:31:23] But I don't see this as a product of ego, of decisions made by far-seeing men and women. It's much more like a dance. [00:31:23 - 00:31:33] It is a dance to which we respond in our souls. And often we don't understand why we do the things that we do. [00:31:33 - 00:31:46] But ultimately, as Rian said, it's the unweaving and reweaving of a tapestry into a finer, clearer pattern. [00:31:46 - 00:32:01] And to return this to the subject of addiction and how it fits in, addiction is falling away from clarity, falling away from the felt presence of the moment. [00:32:01 - 00:32:11] And everything addicts and everything must therefore be viewed with a certain amount of rye suspicion. [00:32:11 - 00:32:18] I think we didn't get where we were by making unfounded assumptions. [00:32:18 - 00:32:25] We got to this place by being very careful where we put our attention. [00:32:25 - 00:32:31] And I think we've done rather well. There's the kind of denigration of the historical process. [00:32:31 - 00:32:35] But that's if you come from the school that believes we're fallen angels. [00:32:35 - 00:32:46] If you come from the school that believes we're risen apes, then we haven't done too badly. [00:32:46 - 00:32:58] I guess to go a little further on addiction, what I've noticed in working with that is that addiction keeps us away from registering necessary feedback and does correctly. [00:32:58 - 00:33:03] That's right. That's exactly it. And culture is an addiction. [00:33:03 - 00:33:10] That's why I maintain in the question of the psychedelics, we have to define these things operationally. [00:33:10 - 00:33:28] And really, the psychedelics are the enzymes which dissolve habitual behavior patterns and return us to a tabla rasa where then new instructions can be etched in and new pathways explored. [00:33:28 - 00:33:38] That's the reason that the psychedelics are so unsettling to the establishment, because they are not part of the quote unquote drug problem, [00:33:38 - 00:33:52] because they involve very small numbers of people and very small amounts of money, but very big ideas and very large willingness to question the idols of the tribe. [00:33:52 - 00:33:59] And that's much more unsettling than a few illicit millionaires. [00:33:59 - 00:34:09] I'm just interested because you started out by talking about the importance of context and the importance of the proper, whatever proper means, [00:34:09 - 00:34:22] but in order to have that gnosis experience and if we're living in the midst of because I don't know about whether or not the partnership ever existed in purity. [00:34:22 - 00:34:30] You were saying it was an ideal and there was probably my sense of it because I've done that much reading, but my sense based on what I know about myself and what I've seen around me, [00:34:30 - 00:34:36] the way people are, there was probably, I think, always a mixture of dominance relationships and partnership relationships. [00:34:36 - 00:34:42] And if you could have a balance that was predominantly partnership and a balance that was predominantly something else. [00:34:42 - 00:34:47] And I don't know because I've never seen it, you know, where people were exclusively working in partnership. [00:34:47 - 00:34:57] But to get back to context, how can you, the co-op thing seems such a natural thing because we live in a dominant paradigm. [00:34:57 - 00:35:06] So that if you're going to do psychedelics and dissolve, say, your own your own ego and defenses and stuff like that, [00:35:06 - 00:35:10] what are you going to put in its place without having seen the model? [00:35:10 - 00:35:16] What kind of context can you construct for yourself so that you're doing that and you can be pretty safely? [00:35:16 - 00:35:24] And the reason I'm asking is because I've seen people, well intentioned people who intended only to dissolve their ego so that they could be something better, [00:35:24 - 00:35:29] become something very dysfunctional. And so that's why I'm asking the question. [00:35:29 - 00:35:32] And I wonder if you would address that context issue. [00:35:32 - 00:35:33] Is it to me? [00:35:33 - 00:35:36] Whoever would like to talk about it. I think it needs to be brought up. [00:35:36 - 00:35:39] Well, maybe we both have something to say. [00:35:39 - 00:35:46] Leon mentioned the 60s as a less than ideal situation, as it turned out. [00:35:46 - 00:35:55] If you look back at the literature of the underground in the 60s, certain things that we take completely for granted are totally absent. [00:35:55 - 00:36:03] One of them is any sense of the historical context of hallucinogenic and shamanic ecstasy. [00:36:03 - 00:36:06] There is no talk of shamanism. [00:36:06 - 00:36:16] There is a little bit of talk about peyote, but no real awareness that those people in the 1960s thought they were discovering something brand new, [00:36:16 - 00:36:19] not the oldest religion in the world. [00:36:19 - 00:36:26] The way we create a context to address your question is by creating a community. [00:36:26 - 00:36:32] We can advance no faster than the envelope of language in which we are embedded [00:36:32 - 00:36:41] and the material manifestation of our linguistic sphere is our affinity group, our community. [00:36:41 - 00:36:52] That's why I think one of the most important things about these kinds of get togethers is for you people to see and recognize each other [00:36:52 - 00:37:00] because the awareness of these things is still a very closely held thing. [00:37:00 - 00:37:05] You should recognize in each other your affinity group. [00:37:05 - 00:37:09] You are self-selected by yourselves to be here today. [00:37:09 - 00:37:23] In the spirit of the partnership and ignoring the hierarchy, I abhor all this guru worship and all this stuff because it's just a bunch of crap. [00:37:23 - 00:37:26] Nobody knows anything more than anybody else. [00:37:26 - 00:37:32] Transformation is a community project. It can't be anything else. [00:37:32 - 00:37:35] Oh, I get it now. [00:37:35 - 00:37:38] But Rian, you might want to say something about that. [00:37:38 - 00:37:44] Yes, I do want to say, well, I of course agree with you completely that the creation of community is essential, [00:37:44 - 00:37:55] but I would define community more broadly in the sense that it is not enough that we have our little island, if you will, [00:37:55 - 00:38:10] because in order to survive in the "real world," we either change that world or we're constantly being pulled into dominator modes of thinking [00:38:10 - 00:38:13] and of rationalizing what we do and of behaving. [00:38:13 - 00:38:15] So that's the first point. [00:38:15 - 00:38:21] I would like to say that there are some very clear strategies that I think are very, very important. [00:38:21 - 00:38:29] One of them has been until now generally sort of been thought of as being perhaps impractical. [00:38:29 - 00:38:35] It relates to this whole idea of education, but education on a far deeper level than what we've often talked about it, [00:38:35 - 00:38:46] and of course it also relates to this whole notion of morphogenetic fields of a kind of telepathic kind of thing that happens with images. [00:38:46 - 00:38:52] Now, I think that one of the most important tasks that we have before us now, and we are all creative people, [00:38:52 - 00:38:57] I mean our creativity really, the dominator model and creativity are antithetical to each other, [00:38:57 - 00:39:03] so the image of the starting artist is very appropriate for the dominator model. [00:39:03 - 00:39:10] It's very inappropriate for a society that values the creativity that would be more of a partnership society. [00:39:10 - 00:39:18] It's for us to create images that are not just, I think the age of protest, you know, of being against. [00:39:18 - 00:39:23] I met a lovely young woman, a 16-year-old young woman, and she said, [00:39:23 - 00:39:27] "When I read The Chalice in the Glade, I go to a school where the kids are always protesting against everything, [00:39:27 - 00:39:31] and I suddenly realized that what they're protesting against is the dominator system, [00:39:31 - 00:39:39] and that what we really have to do is to move beyond that and to begin to create the images that are appropriate to a partnership society." [00:39:39 - 00:39:48] So I'm talking in terms of ideas, in terms of visual images, in terms of course of media, the arts, to begin to replace, [00:39:48 - 00:39:55] because if you go into, this is one of the things with the use of, you know, what is in your imagination? [00:39:55 - 00:40:06] If your imagination is so overcrowded with dominator images, are you really going to be able to surface, you know, and have this confirmation? [00:40:06 - 00:40:12] So I think that's a very practical thing. Those of you who are in the media, take it very, very seriously, please. [00:40:12 - 00:40:16] And it's fun, anyway, to work this way, and I think if some of you are in the media, [00:40:16 - 00:40:19] I spent an evening with some of the Hollywood people recently. [00:40:19 - 00:40:24] Basically what we were talking about was this idea that now is the time, [00:40:24 - 00:40:32] because people at a certain point of addiction get to saturation, and the addiction to violence, and to depersonalized, you know, mechanical sex, [00:40:32 - 00:40:38] and I think we've gotten to the point where people are just sort of like, "Oh my God, they're hungry for something else." [00:40:38 - 00:40:43] This is our moment. This is our opportunity. So images are extremely important. [00:40:43 - 00:40:48] And I don't mean, because we live by stories, that's another thing. People live by stories. [00:40:48 - 00:40:57] I mean, science tells us stories, too. And the selfish gene story, which is an upstate, of course, of original sin, you know, I mean, what else is new? [00:40:57 - 00:41:04] Now it isn't us, but it's the gene somehow, the selfish thing. We live by these stories. [00:41:04 - 00:41:08] So it's up to us to bring out new stories, and the stories can be from science. It's very important that they be from science. [00:41:08 - 00:41:16] Stories from biology that are showing us that in the body, for example, there's, if you will, much more partnership, much more cooperation going on, [00:41:16 - 00:41:23] than there is hierarchy, you know, for the liver and the heart. I mean, they're not just by themselves. It all sort of interconnects and interrelates. [00:41:23 - 00:41:27] But the brain is in charge now. All the oxygen goes to the brain. [00:41:27 - 00:41:37] Well, the oxygen goes to the brain, but is the brain in charge, or is the brain part of a larger neurological system that really is a transmitter and also an imager for us? [00:41:37 - 00:41:44] I mean, I think that there's much more than the brain being, you know, the general in charge here. That's the picture we've been given, of course, right, because it fits with the pyramid model. [00:41:44 - 00:41:54] But is it the brain, or just the, I mean, we've been talking about really gnosis, knowledge. Is that really coming from the brain, or is that something else, some other receptor that we have? [00:41:54 - 00:42:03] Is the brain perhaps a receptor, a transmitter, a converter, a creative agent, rather than a general? I prefer that image, and I think it's more accurate. [00:42:03 - 00:42:11] And I think if you talk to people today who are doing the work with the brain, they'll probably move more towards, you know, the reality of that second image. [00:42:11 - 00:42:16] And the other thing, I hate to say it to you people, but we do have to talk about economics. [00:42:16 - 00:42:25] I mean, it's all very well to talk about the, you know, about the mystical experience and about imagery, but we have to restructure. [00:42:25 - 00:42:33] We have to restructure, and we have to restructure the whole darn planet so that it's more of a partnership. [00:42:33 - 00:42:45] And that doesn't mean that there won't be some people who have more and some people who have less, but it's absolutely inexcusable with our level of technological development, including birth control technologies, to have the kind of idiocy. [00:42:45 - 00:43:02] But you see, the lunacy is part of the dominator system, because it's not by accident that the most rigidly dominator systems are the ones who are so rabidly against family planning, who are so rabidly against reproductive freedom for women, [00:43:02 - 00:43:14] who are so rabidly against any other role for women, any other definition for women, other than basically male-controlled technologies of reproduction, you know, breeders, breeders preferably of men's sons. [00:43:14 - 00:43:17] I mean, that doesn't have to be, right? [00:43:17 - 00:43:26] So it's really using the most advanced technology to move into a partnership era is one of the most extraordinary challenges. [00:43:26 - 00:43:36] And I think that that's really what this is about. It is not just to sit and contemplate ourselves, but to actually use this in an action mode, too. [00:43:36 - 00:43:42] And putting out important ideas is very important, too. That's part of the action. I'm sorry, yes? [00:43:42 - 00:43:45] I just want to go back to the '60s for a minute. [00:43:45 - 00:43:52] You said that you thought that drugs, the drug culture got co-opted. [00:43:52 - 00:43:53] Yes. [00:43:53 - 00:43:57] The drug culture got co-opted by drugs. [00:43:57 - 00:44:02] It seems to me that in the '60s, certain drugs, again, to not just talk about drugs generically, [00:44:02 - 00:44:14] but certain drugs had more to do with creating a sense of partnership than anything that I know of, at least in my lifetime, through my own direct experiences, study, reading, anything. [00:44:14 - 00:44:21] Direct drug experiences seem to lead to a very radical change of mentality of a massive group of people. [00:44:21 - 00:44:22] That's right. [00:44:22 - 00:44:31] And I think that's a mistake to think that those drugs, that there was anything wrong or anything really weird happened regarding those particular drugs. [00:44:31 - 00:44:36] There were new drugs that came in. Cocaine came in, which is interesting to me because it seemed to change. [00:44:36 - 00:44:40] It became a very -- that seemed very much in that dominant model. [00:44:40 - 00:44:41] Yes. [00:44:41 - 00:44:49] But marijuana and the mushrooms, LSD, they seemed very much in the partnership model and seemed to perpetuate that. [00:44:49 - 00:45:00] And I'm glad you made that distinction because clearly all of us who lived through the '60s knew that the use of grass and the use of the hallucinogens, it was a community building. [00:45:00 - 00:45:03] It was really, to a very large extent, a building of partnership. [00:45:03 - 00:45:05] And that is not what I meant. [00:45:05 - 00:45:14] What I meant was that -- well, part of it was the cocaine coming in, but part of it was also LSD, I think. [00:45:14 - 00:45:30] I mean, it was just the whole idea of shifting from drug as a revelation experience, as a transformation experience, to one that has a terrific function in the dominator society, which is the addictions, which is to keep you right there without taking any action. [00:45:30 - 00:45:34] That is what I meant, and I'm glad you clarified that. [00:45:34 - 00:45:35] Yes. [00:45:35 - 00:45:44] I think what reared its ugly head and shot down the 1960s was profits. [00:45:44 - 00:46:03] And the fact that -- I don't -- I have no problem with LSD per se, but it has one quality which really flaws this, and that is that a single chemist in his basement can produce millions and millions of doses. [00:46:03 - 00:46:17] That immediately raises it to the level of a social menace, because when you talk about millions of doses of a deconditioning agent, it means you're going head to head with the tough guys. [00:46:17 - 00:46:26] And also when you're talking about being a single person, being able to make millions of doses, then you're talking about multiple millions of dollars. [00:46:26 - 00:46:34] And immediately the possibility of keeping things from getting out of hand is, I think, really diminished. [00:46:34 - 00:46:50] The key is plant compounds and substances which have inherent trickle factors in them, where you can never get too much together at any one time, and nobody can ever get too rich. [00:46:50 - 00:46:58] And then the mystery stays -- the plants are like this, and this keeps them going. [00:46:58 - 00:47:16] But I wanted to say something more about this context, and sort of not in great detail and semi tongue-in-cheek, but to show you how context works and how dominators, society both insidiously invades our conception of things [00:47:16 - 00:47:23] and also might be equally insidiously plotted against. [00:47:23 - 00:47:29] One of the things that we take utterly for granted, I think, is the calendar. [00:47:29 - 00:47:34] We live in a calendar of 365 days. It's a solar calendar. [00:47:34 - 00:47:48] That means that relative to the fixed stars, the equinoctial and sosticeal points are fixed, and this is a lie, or it perpetuates a misconception. [00:47:48 - 00:47:56] It perpetuates the conception that things endure and that flux is an illusion. [00:47:56 - 00:48:06] The solar calendar has built into it deep propagandistic assumptions in favor of the dominator model. [00:48:06 - 00:48:20] And to see what I mean, just imagine, however seriously you care to, that we change the calendar to a calendar with a day length of 384 days [00:48:20 - 00:48:30] so that our year was 13 lunations and had 19 more days in it than the solar year. [00:48:30 - 00:48:39] If we were to adopt a calendar like this, all holidays and great festivals would do what is called precessing. [00:48:39 - 00:48:46] They would move 19 days a year so that when you were a child, you would recall Christmases in winter, [00:48:46 - 00:48:51] but you would recall that in your adolescence, Christmas fell in summer and so forth. [00:48:51 - 00:49:00] And every 19 years, the great festivals would return to where they had been relative to the fixed stars. [00:49:00 - 00:49:07] Well, this may seem fairly abstract and removed from common experience, [00:49:07 - 00:49:16] but in fact, because this is sort of the great frame in which all the other little frames are suspended, [00:49:16 - 00:49:24] we operate at a tremendous disadvantage because we are embedded in a patriarchal solar calendar [00:49:24 - 00:49:29] which reinforces the false notion of permanence and stability. [00:49:29 - 00:49:42] The I Ching hexagram 49 is the hexagram revolution, and you might turn to it expecting a treatise on courtly politics or something like that, [00:49:42 - 00:49:50] but what you actually read there is the news that the magician is a calendar maker. [00:49:50 - 00:49:56] A strange notion, but it precisely addressing what I'm trying to say, [00:49:56 - 00:50:05] this is one of the ways in which we might revision our world to accentuate flux and flow and change [00:50:05 - 00:50:17] and the transience and the coming to be and the falling away rather than this constipated, death-denying, paternalistic, solar kind of point of view. [00:50:17 - 00:50:21] So that's one notion of how context might change. [00:50:21 - 00:50:29] And it's an interesting idea. It's not illegal to advocate calendrical reform. [00:50:29 - 00:50:37] It's probably not ever occurred to anyone, but believe me, in prehistory and in early Chinese history, [00:50:37 - 00:50:47] tremendous battles were fought and these were issues of great importance because the founders of new dynasties understood [00:50:47 - 00:50:55] that the way to establish their reigns was to sweep away all previous calendrical conceptions and establish a zero year [00:50:55 - 00:51:02] and then create in that context all the subcontexts of their political agenda. [00:51:02 - 00:51:07] So it's the new order. And I think that that's so interesting because we are, of course, [00:51:07 - 00:51:12] well many of us and I'm sure many of us here are going back to the celebration of some of the most ancient festivals, [00:51:12 - 00:51:20] the nature festivals, the solstices, the equinoxes, the full moon, the young moon. [00:51:20 - 00:51:25] These were the most ancient holy days because they were congruent with the rhythm of nature. [00:51:25 - 00:51:34] And I think you're quite right. What the solar calendar does, it sort of nullifies that whole cyclic spiral quality of life. [00:51:34 - 00:51:40] But I want to get back for a moment in that context to the issue of the use of psychedelics [00:51:40 - 00:51:49] because the use of them as a medium through carefully thought through and reconstituted, [00:51:49 - 00:51:54] certainly going back to some of its ancient roots as we're doing here with some of the music, [00:51:54 - 00:51:57] but also adapting it for today and for tomorrow. [00:51:57 - 00:52:02] That and also that really relates to the whole issue of calendar too. [00:52:02 - 00:52:07] I mean to the issue of when. When are the times of the year when you do this? [00:52:07 - 00:52:17] Because regardless of anything else, if we are to engage in this practice on a random and very frequent basis, [00:52:17 - 00:52:21] we're not going to have a very productive economy. [00:52:21 - 00:52:30] I mean it's just a very simple equation, you know, because it's sort of easy to walk away then and to really not be creative. [00:52:30 - 00:52:34] So it's an issue. I think we have to address that issue, don't we? [00:52:34 - 00:52:38] And it goes with the issue of calendar, it goes with the issue of rituals. [00:52:38 - 00:52:40] I mean these things are all interconnected. [00:52:40 - 00:52:47] Yes, your remarks make me think of something Omar Stewart said who was a botanist and anthropologist. [00:52:47 - 00:52:55] And I don't know how serious he was, but he felt that the great transition in plant consciousness [00:52:55 - 00:53:03] came with the invention of agriculture, that the hunting peoples could take the ecstatic hallucinogens [00:53:03 - 00:53:06] because you could sleep in the next day. [00:53:06 - 00:53:14] But once you got into agriculture, corn became the important plant and there was no more getting stoned [00:53:14 - 00:53:20] because everybody had to get up early and get out there and hoe the corn. [00:53:20 - 00:53:24] Oh, but we don't have to get up early and hoe the corn today. [00:53:24 - 00:53:26] Does that mean we can get stoned? [00:53:26 - 00:53:33] (laughter) [00:53:33 - 00:53:35] No, I agree. [00:53:35 - 00:53:44] And that really relates to holy days and to this whole notion of it being done within a context that we have to create. [00:53:44 - 00:53:47] I mean we have to do nothing more or less than to create a culture. [00:53:47 - 00:53:51] But fortunately we have a lot of the strands to work with. [00:53:51 - 00:54:00] And a successful psychedelic trip absolutely kills the desire to do it again very soon. [00:54:00 - 00:54:02] So it's a self-limiting experience. [00:54:02 - 00:54:04] Yes, it's a self-limiting experience. [00:54:04 - 00:54:12] And the way to know whether you're doing it correctly or not is if what you're doing doesn't make you afraid, [00:54:12 - 00:54:14] you're not doing it right. [00:54:14 - 00:54:20] On that note, we might want to think about the ten-minute stretch and... [00:54:20 - 00:54:22] Wonderful, wonderful. [00:54:22 - 00:54:31] (laughter) [00:54:31 - 00:54:34] Thank you. [00:54:34 - 00:54:42] So we thought for this closing session this afternoon that we would hope to hear from you. [00:54:42 - 00:54:47] And I vow to give shorter answers. [00:54:47 - 00:54:50] We made a pact here. The two of us just go on. [00:54:50 - 00:54:52] So we want to hear from you. [00:54:52 - 00:54:56] I just want to make one quick suggestion to hear it addressed at some point [00:54:56 - 00:54:58] because I know that some people are curious about this. [00:54:58 - 00:55:04] And that is not everybody may know that both of you are involved in wonderful relationships, [00:55:04 - 00:55:07] probably modeled for marital. [00:55:07 - 00:55:10] (laughter) [00:55:10 - 00:55:17] And there might be a few words you could say about just the... certainly the issue of dominator versus partnership [00:55:17 - 00:55:20] comes up in marriages and relationships constantly, [00:55:20 - 00:55:26] and how we can take some of these really wonderful ideas in terms of how we define guy and consciousness [00:55:26 - 00:55:29] and bring it down to how we get out of an argument. [00:55:29 - 00:55:31] (laughter) [00:55:31 - 00:55:36] How you both deal with it must be terribly illuminating for all of you. [00:55:36 - 00:55:38] (laughter) [00:55:38 - 00:55:41] I'll start. [00:55:41 - 00:55:46] I am in a committed long-term relationship. [00:55:46 - 00:55:50] Many of you know my partner, Kat. [00:55:50 - 00:55:54] We've been together since 1975. [00:55:54 - 00:55:59] We met in 1967 in Jerusalem, actually. [00:55:59 - 00:56:04] But we were on different paths and didn't really see each other for nine years. [00:56:04 - 00:56:13] And we have two children, Finn, a boy, ten, and Clea, a girl, seven. [00:56:13 - 00:56:20] And Rian said yesterday that partnership is preferable because it's fun. [00:56:20 - 00:56:21] It certainly is fun. [00:56:21 - 00:56:22] It's also a great challenge. [00:56:22 - 00:56:28] It is the challenge, I think. [00:56:28 - 00:56:36] There's a wonderful saying that addresses the problem of ego in the dominator situation. [00:56:36 - 00:56:43] It's Uzbekistani, this saying. [00:56:43 - 00:56:49] It's that a man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he's married. [00:56:49 - 00:56:55] (laughter) [00:56:55 - 00:57:10] So partnership is a wonderful opportunity for humility and for seeing oneself as others see them. [00:57:10 - 00:57:14] And, well, it's everything. [00:57:14 - 00:57:15] I can't say enough about it. [00:57:15 - 00:57:16] It's the coniunctio. [00:57:16 - 00:57:18] It's the great challenge. [00:57:18 - 00:57:20] It drives one to distraction. [00:57:20 - 00:57:31] It is perhaps the transcendental object that is most personally experienced by each of us. [00:57:31 - 00:57:44] I think it's fair to say that in our individual lives where magic is most present is in the matter of forming partnerships and bonding. [00:57:44 - 00:57:56] I mean, you know, a typical example is that you can see a woman across a crowded room speaking as a man, [00:57:56 - 00:58:06] and something passes between you, and then later you find out that, well, she's the daughter of the corporation president or the university chancellor [00:58:06 - 00:58:13] and doesn't speak English and is already married to a French count and so forth and so on. [00:58:13 - 00:58:20] But, lo and behold, circumstances evolve and she divorces the French count. [00:58:20 - 00:58:22] She learns to speak English. [00:58:22 - 00:58:32] She gets an apartment across the hall, and this falls into place, like magic, in fact, magic. [00:58:32 - 00:58:39] And so we can summon this power to the things we care about most. [00:58:39 - 00:58:46] And what we care about most is, I think, falling into this, the dyad. [00:58:46 - 00:58:54] I really think that people come in two pieces, and you sort of have to put the pieces together, [00:58:54 - 00:59:01] and then you get a curious beast indeed that can maybe ride a longer distance. [00:59:01 - 00:59:03] I'm not sure. [00:59:03 - 00:59:05] What's your story? [00:59:05 - 00:59:10] Well, my story I'd like to share with my partner, with David. [00:59:10 - 00:59:13] Do you want to go first, David, or should I? [00:59:13 - 00:59:15] Why don't you? [00:59:15 - 00:59:17] Okay, I'll go first. [00:59:17 - 00:59:18] I'll come on down. [00:59:18 - 00:59:21] Okay. [00:59:21 - 00:59:34] I started out my partnership with David only 11 years ago, and it was a miracle is what it was. [00:59:34 - 00:59:42] I had a friar at marriage, and that was really a terrific learning experience, I guess one says, [00:59:42 - 00:59:46] about these unpleasant things. [00:59:46 - 00:59:51] But it was a classic dominator relationship, and we were both miserable. [00:59:51 - 00:59:57] I mean, I was really getting pretty good at manipulating, actually, which is what you have to get to [00:59:57 - 01:00:01] if you're in a dominator relationship, and it really brings out the worst in everybody. [01:00:01 - 01:00:05] The guy who's supposed to be the -- he never apologizes. [01:00:05 - 01:00:09] He always -- he knows, by golly, his ego. [01:00:09 - 01:00:14] And of course he knows that this isn't working, and so he's very tense about the whole thing, [01:00:14 - 01:00:17] and he needs his laundry for you to pick up on the floor. [01:00:17 - 01:00:22] And you hate it, and you begin to hate him, and so you start manipulating. [01:00:22 - 01:00:25] And so after a while, you're both miserable. [01:00:25 - 01:00:28] I mean, that's really the classic pattern, isn't it? [01:00:28 - 01:00:36] And people stay -- and the whole difference between dominator relationships, as far as, you know, [01:00:36 - 01:00:42] heterosexual long-term relationships and partnership relationships is that the bonding in one is really coercion. [01:00:42 - 01:00:46] I mean, well, it used to be, you know, the story of Don Jose killing Carmen. [01:00:46 - 01:00:49] I mean, if you dare leave this guy for somebody else, he'll kill you. [01:00:49 - 01:00:52] That's a pretty good motivation not to go right there. [01:00:52 - 01:00:57] But a lot of it, of course, more recently, has been economic, you know, especially for the women, you know. [01:00:57 - 01:01:02] They just couldn't get out of this rotten situation, so they kidded themselves and everybody else. [01:01:02 - 01:01:04] So now we're starting from scratch, right? [01:01:04 - 01:01:08] And we're all saying, wait a minute, this old stuff has made everybody literally ill. [01:01:08 - 01:01:11] And so I was so blessed. [01:01:11 - 01:01:18] I found David, and David found me, and we met, and he came over for lunch, and he never went home. [01:01:18 - 01:01:20] [laughter] [01:01:20 - 01:01:24] But actually, he did go home, because I had an appointment with an accountant that afternoon, [01:01:24 - 01:01:29] and I had told him that I was going to go to a movie that evening, and he said to me, [01:01:29 - 01:01:31] "You really have to go to that movie?" [01:01:31 - 01:01:33] And I said, "No, I don't have to go to that movie." [01:01:33 - 01:01:35] [laughter] [01:01:35 - 01:01:39] So he came back, and I have to share something with you, which is sort of funny. [01:01:39 - 01:01:43] I was so scared of getting married again, because getting married, you know, [01:01:43 - 01:01:50] especially in my generation, you carry that dominator luggage of wife, husband, you know, and that programming. [01:01:50 - 01:01:54] So we waited ten years, and we finally got married. [01:01:54 - 01:01:57] And it was wonderful, because it was the three of us. [01:01:57 - 01:02:01] We were married by a woman, which was really terrific experience. [01:02:01 - 01:02:07] I mean, just the three of us, and she was a gorgeous, wonderful woman, wearing this beautiful robe, [01:02:07 - 01:02:12] these colorful robes, and we all cried, and David read me his poetry, and I read him my vows, [01:02:12 - 01:02:15] and it was a sacred moment for us. [01:02:15 - 01:02:19] And so we do have arguments, I mean, in case you're interested. [01:02:19 - 01:02:21] Partnership doesn't mean perfect, either. [01:02:21 - 01:02:26] But we also have developed some techniques for working them out, sometimes. [01:02:26 - 01:02:28] [laughter] [01:02:28 - 01:02:34] Why don't I tell you real quickly of the techniques that we use, and then let me share with you [01:02:34 - 01:02:41] two or three sort of interesting stories to me, centering around how we met, [01:02:41 - 01:02:45] because they seem to have various morals, various dimensions of meaning. [01:02:45 - 01:02:52] But the technique first, I really found this tremendously useful, and it was Rian's idea, [01:02:52 - 01:02:58] and it was her reinterpretation or reworking of an idea out of co-counseling. [01:02:58 - 01:03:01] And the idea is simply this. [01:03:01 - 01:03:09] Contrary to the image that people might like to believe, we do have tremendous conflict, [01:03:09 - 01:03:16] because we both only reach the place we are by being, developing really strong egos. [01:03:16 - 01:03:20] Strong, but more than strong egos, strong identities. [01:03:20 - 01:03:22] I think there's a difference between ego and identity. [01:03:22 - 01:03:24] Yeah, let's say strong identities, strong identities, and... [01:03:24 - 01:03:37] [laughter] [01:03:37 - 01:03:39] Now, this is important contextually. [01:03:39 - 01:03:42] This is what I wasn't going to get into, because I was thinking to myself, [01:03:42 - 01:03:44] I'm working on an article right now. [01:03:44 - 01:03:46] Rian has written her half. [01:03:46 - 01:03:51] It's called "The Partnership Society, Social Vision and Personal Practice." [01:03:51 - 01:03:55] She's done social vision, and you've heard parts of it. [01:03:55 - 01:04:00] I'm working right now on personal practice and thinking all this through, and I thought to myself, [01:04:00 - 01:04:01] "Shall I share any of this?" [01:04:01 - 01:04:04] And I thought, "I don't have it thought through well enough." [01:04:04 - 01:04:15] But I feel I should add this to what I was going to say on this conflict of strong identities, not egos. [01:04:15 - 01:04:21] We're going through this period, see, where there's been this traditional male-dominant, [01:04:21 - 01:04:28] female-submissive relating of the sexes, and trying to get out of it, [01:04:28 - 01:04:35] there's an awful lot of role reversal, where the women are becoming strong, forceful, and talk a lot. [01:04:35 - 01:04:37] [laughter] [01:04:37 - 01:04:43] And the men are becoming more submissive, and sitting back, and taking it, and so on. [01:04:43 - 01:04:44] [laughter] [01:04:44 - 01:04:49] Now, this is actually, if you look it over, this is the necessary part of the transition, [01:04:49 - 01:04:53] but the transition only, because if that pattern prevails, then we're lost, [01:04:53 - 01:04:56] because all you've got is the flip side of the coin once again. [01:04:56 - 01:05:01] You've got the woman, too dominant, talking, calling the shots too much, feeling guilty about it, [01:05:01 - 01:05:04] and that makes her more, do it even more. [01:05:04 - 01:05:09] You've got the man, sitting there silent, and seizing, and seizing, until he explodes, [01:05:09 - 01:05:13] and this leads to actual violence, physical violence in some cases, [01:05:13 - 01:05:16] because the men are more muscular, and so on. [01:05:16 - 01:05:18] [laughter] [01:05:18 - 01:05:20] No, but it hasn't been my case. [01:05:20 - 01:05:22] [laughter] [01:05:22 - 01:05:26] No, no, but I'm looking out at the general picture. [01:05:26 - 01:05:27] [laughter] [01:05:27 - 01:05:30] But so, what I see that we must be moving towards, [01:05:30 - 01:05:34] is not this situation where you've got one partner or the other, [01:05:34 - 01:05:37] it's the dominant one and the other one who submits this thing. [01:05:37 - 01:05:42] The tip-off to what's wrong here is when it becomes an inflexible, invariant pattern. [01:05:42 - 01:05:45] Once you get into it, as a bunch of you already know, [01:05:45 - 01:05:50] I'm just trying to articulate what's gone through the heads of a lot of you in relationships. [01:05:50 - 01:05:56] You discover, progressively, that there are certain situations where one party should be dominant, [01:05:56 - 01:06:02] because that particular party knows a hell of a lot more about whatever it is in that situation than you do. [01:06:02 - 01:06:06] And there's other situations where you've got the expertise, and you've got the contacts, [01:06:06 - 01:06:09] and you're down with the secret things to be, the flexibility, [01:06:09 - 01:06:13] and knowing each other well enough to know when to flip it to the other one, [01:06:13 - 01:06:15] and let the other one take over, and so on. [01:06:15 - 01:06:23] But we've got to move toward this situation where you've got not strong and weak, or weak and weak. [01:06:23 - 01:06:27] Another one of these patterns is the weak and the weak. [01:06:27 - 01:06:31] And that's not so bad, you know, where people actually admit, you know, [01:06:31 - 01:06:37] I've got imperfections, you've got imperfections, let's work together to perfect ourselves. [01:06:37 - 01:06:39] It doesn't always work, as you know. [01:06:39 - 01:06:45] But we've got to work toward the partnership society model, to me, is strong and strong, [01:06:45 - 01:06:52] where you've got two strong identities, and they work out this, you know, thing according to the situation, [01:06:52 - 01:06:58] and their relationship with nature, with all of nature and all of life is strong, too. [01:06:58 - 01:06:59] Anyway, enough of that. [01:06:59 - 01:07:05] That's sort of an overall thing. [01:07:05 - 01:07:06] There was something else there. [01:07:06 - 01:07:07] Co-counseling. [01:07:07 - 01:07:08] Technique. [01:07:08 - 01:07:11] Co-counseling, yeah, because this is something very practical. [01:07:11 - 01:07:18] Okay, you've got these two strong identities, and they come to the front, go, go, go. [01:07:18 - 01:07:24] Both of them are very tempted, and they've already regressed, already regressed partly into that monstrous situation, [01:07:24 - 01:07:27] the dominator system that's got them. [01:07:27 - 01:07:30] Now, what we do, well, actually, it isn't what we do. [01:07:30 - 01:07:35] It's almost invariably Rianne says, in effect, now, look, let's have a session. [01:07:35 - 01:07:42] And that's my cue to get out of my defensive, withdrawal, seething, "Argh!" type thing, too. [01:07:42 - 01:07:52] The routine we both go through is, first you say, you're forced to say, "Uh, what is it?" [01:07:52 - 01:07:55] I always forget what it is. [01:07:55 - 01:07:59] It comes out of reevaluation, co-counseling, and you start off by saying, "What's new and good?" [01:07:59 - 01:08:00] Yeah, yeah, okay. [01:08:00 - 01:08:01] Which really brings you to the here and now. [01:08:01 - 01:08:06] Yeah, so you're forced to say, "What's new and good?" [01:08:06 - 01:08:09] And you may say, "There's absolutely nothing new and good." [01:08:09 - 01:08:13] And the other party says, "Uh-uh, you must think of something new and good." [01:08:13 - 01:08:19] So then you think, "Well, it's a beautiful day." [01:08:19 - 01:08:21] That's what builds that function. [01:08:21 - 01:08:24] Then you have to think of, "What's good about myself?" [01:08:24 - 01:08:27] And you say, "I don't feel that there's anything good about myself." [01:08:27 - 01:08:30] And once again, you must think about something good about yourself. [01:08:30 - 01:08:35] And then you say, "Well, I can play a good harmonica." [01:08:35 - 01:08:40] And then comes the difficult one in these choral situations. [01:08:40 - 01:08:43] What's new and good about the other person? [01:08:43 - 01:08:47] And then you come up with, "Well, I think you're pretty," or something like that. [01:08:47 - 01:08:48] And that fulfills it. [01:08:48 - 01:08:53] Then you go into your deep session where you unload, and you just unload everything. [01:08:53 - 01:08:59] And the sacred rule here, the key to this whole method working, the other party cannot interrupt. [01:08:59 - 01:09:02] There's no defensive feedback. [01:09:02 - 01:09:08] Because once there is the slightest defensive feedback in this situation, you're right in that argument cycle. [01:09:08 - 01:09:11] You know, you said this, and I said this, and so on. [01:09:11 - 01:09:17] Each party unloads, and the other one can't say a thing until the windup. [01:09:17 - 01:09:20] Then your windup is, "Isn't it what we're looking forward to?" [01:09:20 - 01:09:21] Yeah. [01:09:21 - 01:09:24] The windup is, "Something I'm looking forward to." [01:09:24 - 01:09:28] Oddly enough, by the time you reach that point, you say, "Well, something I'm looking forward to." [01:09:28 - 01:09:34] And usually you feel much better, and you can really legitimately look forward to something. [01:09:34 - 01:09:36] And both parties do this. [01:09:36 - 01:09:43] And if you do this, you'll be absolutely astounded at how it will improve your relationship, [01:09:43 - 01:09:50] and how much you will actually be helping to build the floor of the partnership society in a very practical way. [01:09:50 - 01:09:52] How do you figure out who starts? [01:09:52 - 01:09:53] Usually you know. [01:09:53 - 01:09:55] Who starts the unloading? [01:09:55 - 01:10:00] Usually you know, because it's the person who's really ready to, "Ugh!" [01:10:00 - 01:10:05] Yeah, it's the one with the biggest buildup that should start. [01:10:05 - 01:10:08] Thank you, David, for sharing that with us. [01:10:08 - 01:10:17] Let me just share one of them, which was centering around how we met. [01:10:17 - 01:10:23] Terence was talking about seeing across the crowded room, that phenomenon. [01:10:23 - 01:10:32] And the interesting thing that happened to me was I had left my first wife after a typically dominator, [01:10:32 - 01:10:35] unsatisfactory type relationship and so on. [01:10:35 - 01:10:40] And I was lonely and wandering in Los Angeles and dating women and thinking, [01:10:40 - 01:10:45] "Gosh, there's got to be some simpler way of going through this process." [01:10:45 - 01:10:50] Because I'm a psychologist, and I'd had years with ETS and involved in test development and so on. [01:10:50 - 01:10:53] So I figured, "There ought to be some simple test I can develop." [01:10:53 - 01:10:57] [laughter] [01:10:57 - 01:11:03] So actually, I went through the standard way of thinking, [01:11:03 - 01:11:06] the list of 300 questions and then it sunk in on me. [01:11:06 - 01:11:09] I can't go out on a date and say, "Fill this in first." [01:11:09 - 01:11:12] [laughter] [01:11:12 - 01:11:14] So I boiled it all down. [01:11:14 - 01:11:20] Is there a psychologist here? [01:11:20 - 01:11:25] Well, maybe there's somebody out there who knows about the guy named Webb and unobtrusive measures. [01:11:25 - 01:11:28] I thought, "Ah, this is something for Webb's unobtrusive measures." [01:11:28 - 01:11:33] An unobtrusive measure is something very seemingly innocuous that tells you an awful lot about the person [01:11:33 - 01:11:35] without a lot of questions. [01:11:35 - 01:11:41] So I boiled it all down to, without going into the reasons, I had two questions. [01:11:41 - 01:11:46] One was, or the ideal one was, "Did you love your father?" [01:11:46 - 01:11:48] And if the answer was yes-- [01:11:48 - 01:11:53] But say why, because you had a relationship where there was disgust on both sides, you know? [01:11:53 - 01:11:55] Ambivalence towards the mother from David. [01:11:55 - 01:12:02] Now the reason why this was a profoundly well-grounded question was, in my own case, [01:12:02 - 01:12:09] I had a head of ambivalent mother, and so I had grown up with a very leery sense toward women. [01:12:09 - 01:12:17] I was married first to a woman who had had a very awful father, and she grew up very, very leery of men, [01:12:17 - 01:12:20] so that when we had an argument, we'd both depart, you know? [01:12:20 - 01:12:25] The message from below was, "You made a mistake hooking up with that opposite sex." [01:12:25 - 01:12:33] And so I thought to myself, "Because that's my background, I must find a woman who had a good relationship [01:12:33 - 01:12:35] and loved her father. [01:12:35 - 01:12:40] Then, when we get in an argument, I'll withdraw, but she will follow." [01:12:40 - 01:12:44] Simple as that, but very good. [01:12:44 - 01:12:47] Anyway, so that was one of my questions, "Did you love your father?" [01:12:47 - 01:12:53] And the other one, I clapped literally everything else, and "Who is your favorite composer?" [01:12:53 - 01:12:56] And the answer had to be Mozart. [01:12:56 - 01:13:04] So I met Rian, and we fell in love almost immediately. [01:13:04 - 01:13:09] And then I thought, "I've got to try the test." [01:13:09 - 01:13:12] I thought to myself, "What if she fails?" [01:13:12 - 01:13:19] I'm madly in love with her. I can't bear to give her up, but what if she fails my test? [01:13:19 - 01:13:25] And so I held off a week. [01:13:25 - 01:13:30] And finally, she happened to mention, just spontaneously, something about her father, [01:13:30 - 01:13:34] and I thought, "Oh, here it comes, I've got to ask." [01:13:34 - 01:13:41] And I said, "Tell me this, Rian. [01:13:41 - 01:13:44] How do you feel about your father?" [01:13:44 - 01:13:48] And she says, "Well, I love my father." [01:13:48 - 01:13:51] And I thought, "Boy, 50 percent." [01:13:51 - 01:13:55] And then about another week went by, and we were talking about classical music, [01:13:55 - 01:13:57] and I thought, "Oh, here it goes." [01:13:57 - 01:14:01] And I thought to myself as I started to ask the question, [01:14:01 - 01:14:06] "What if she says Sibelius, who happened to be my least favorite composer?" [01:14:06 - 01:14:10] And I said, "Oh, by the way, who is your favorite composer?" [01:14:10 - 01:14:14] And she said, "Mozart, of course." [01:14:14 - 01:14:19] If I had known that I was being tested, I had not a clue. [01:14:19 - 01:14:23] Anyway, that's not only how we met, but that's what locked us all in. [01:14:23 - 01:14:29] [applause] [01:14:29 - 01:14:32] It was a choice of the heart completely legitimized by science. [01:14:32 - 01:14:39] [laughter] [01:14:39 - 01:14:45] Just a comment on monogamy in terms of the dominators, the partnership models. [01:14:45 - 01:14:46] Love you, sir. [01:14:46 - 01:14:48] I love you, just the thought of it. [01:14:48 - 01:14:57] Well, you know, I think that the issue really relates to this whole question of coercive versus voluntary bonding. [01:14:57 - 01:15:02] The dominator model, it's--well, think of the whole idea, you know, [01:15:02 - 01:15:07] of the first form of slavery that we have archaeologically documented [01:15:07 - 01:15:11] was actually the enslavement of women from conquered communities. [01:15:11 - 01:15:14] Even in the Bible, you know, it says that these wonderful directions, [01:15:14 - 01:15:18] always supposedly from Jehovah, kill all the women who have known a man, [01:15:18 - 01:15:20] but, you know, kill everybody, as a matter of fact, [01:15:20 - 01:15:24] but only those girl children who have not known a man you keep for yourself, right? [01:15:24 - 01:15:26] I mean, it's supposed to be God's command to you. [01:15:26 - 01:15:30] But anyway, so it was a very coercive kind of situation, [01:15:30 - 01:15:32] if you look at it, you know, from that perspective, [01:15:32 - 01:15:34] as women are seen as property. [01:15:34 - 01:15:37] And a lot of what we've seen has been the coercive bonding. [01:15:37 - 01:15:42] But I'm also convinced that given the tremendous bonding [01:15:42 - 01:15:47] that comes from mutually satisfying affection through sexual relationships, [01:15:47 - 01:15:51] the sharing of the peace experience, and the friendship, that it's impossible. [01:15:51 - 01:15:53] I mean, how can you have friendship, as a matter of fact, [01:15:53 - 01:15:58] in a mausoleum dominator marriage where you live--the women live in complete apartheid? [01:15:58 - 01:16:01] I mean, good morning, you know, let's go and, you know, do it for a few minutes. [01:16:01 - 01:16:05] Maybe you'll give me a son, and then goodbye. [01:16:05 - 01:16:09] I mean, that's not very conducive to voluntary bonding, is it? [01:16:09 - 01:16:13] So I'm very convinced that this whole issue of monogamy or not monogamy [01:16:13 - 01:16:19] really can only be looked at, you know, in terms of these two situations. [01:16:19 - 01:16:23] That's not to say that that kind of positive reinforcement, you know, [01:16:23 - 01:16:28] as Skinner would say, you know, of the sexual bonding, of the affection, of the friendship, [01:16:28 - 01:16:35] that would motivate you to want to stick around, you know, with that one person, you know, quite a lot. [01:16:35 - 01:16:38] That that would necessarily be an exclusive union. I don't know that. [01:16:38 - 01:16:42] But I think that there's a lot that in a partnership kind of relationship [01:16:42 - 01:16:48] would really bring people to want to stick around with each other because it's just more fun [01:16:48 - 01:16:53] and because there are advantages to a partnership for all kinds of reasons, you know, bringing up children. [01:16:53 - 01:16:59] But again, if we have more of a clan situation where there are, you know, more parents for each child, so to speak, [01:16:59 - 01:17:03] that exclusivity no longer, you know, becomes the issue. [01:17:03 - 01:17:10] I think it's a very complex issue and the issue is becoming a very real one today with the AIDS epidemic. [01:17:10 - 01:17:13] And I want to say something about AIDS which may strike you as being rather strange. [01:17:13 - 01:17:21] But if you think about it, it's very much a product of traumatic, trauma, traumatization, a tearing of tissue, [01:17:21 - 01:17:23] which is really a dominator form of sex. [01:17:23 - 01:17:28] And the rapid spread of it through the homosexual community, of course, was largely due to this. [01:17:28 - 01:17:31] And the fact that it's spreading like wildfire in certain parts of Africa, [01:17:31 - 01:17:37] it has to be related to the genital mutilation and the scarring and the weakness of the tissue, you know, [01:17:37 - 01:17:41] that that builds in as well as some of the really brutal kind of sexual practices. [01:17:41 - 01:17:48] So it's almost like nature giving us some feedback here that what the sexual revolution is about is not brutal, [01:17:48 - 01:17:54] mechanical, you know, screw everybody and everything inside, that it's about something about maybe beginning [01:17:54 - 01:17:58] to reclaim sex with sacrament a little bit and friendship and bonding. [01:17:58 - 01:18:05] And that's not a moral position. It's just simply a way of looking at it from a perspective that may be more congruent [01:18:05 - 01:18:10] with what we all kind of would enjoy. So that's my answer. It's not an absolute answer. [01:18:10 - 01:18:18] [Laughter] [01:18:18 - 01:18:27] Well, naturally, I think like everyone who's in a committed relationship, I've given this considerable thought. [01:18:27 - 01:18:39] And it seems to me what the tension about monogamy in modern society can be traced to, [01:18:39 - 01:18:50] or the sense of perhaps dissatisfaction with monogamy, can be traced to a distortion and betrayal of adolescence. [01:18:50 - 01:18:57] And that the problem begins in adolescence by repressing adolescent sexuality. [01:18:57 - 01:19:10] And this then creates a sense of irrecoverable loss and this weird sort of haunting feeling that you didn't get it right, [01:19:10 - 01:19:22] and so life is not being fair to you, and then a multitude of sexual encounters is looked to as an answer to this. [01:19:22 - 01:19:35] But I think that monogamy represents a deepening of bonding into a kind of lifelong project that is entirely spiritual. [01:19:35 - 01:19:45] Not that it doesn't have a physical and an ecstatic and an erotic side, but it all goes together to create something [01:19:45 - 01:19:54] that should not be expected of adolescence and should not be preached as the ideal at all stages of life.