The monumental seminar which we started last week with Terrence McKenna and
 Rhianne Eisler entitled "Man and Woman at the End of History." We worked our way up
 we did about a third, about a third of the seminar last week and we'll do
 another big chunk tonight as our Earth Tuesday program. "Man and Woman at the End
 of History" took place at the Ojai Foundation in June and the description
 of the seminar is thus, "This seminar examines how one of the most fundamental
 human relationships that between male and female shapes our relationship to
 technology and ultimately to culture and nature. We will look at the forms of
 relationships between women and men in the shift from a society based on
 domination to one based on partnership. This is an exploration of how feminism,
 technology, and the telling of a new story will contribute to rescuing us
 from history. Rhianne Eisler is an internationally known scholar, social
 activist, futurist, and author of "The Chalice and the Blade" which I add has
 been extolled by Terrence McKenna, Daniel Ellsberg, Helen Caldecott, and Ashley
 Montague among others. "The Chalice and the Blade." She is co-director of the
 Center for Partnership Studies and a member of the General Evolution Research
 Group, a multinational group of scientists concerned with the social
 relevance of new theories and discoveries. Terrence McKenna has spent 25
 years researching philosophy, shamanism, and ethno-pharmacology. He is co-author
 of "The Invisible Landscape" and co-founder of "Botanical Dimensions," a
 non-profit refuge for endangered and rare plant species. So we will get right
 to the seminar. There has been a break and the gang is gathering at the end of
 the first break. KPFK Los Angeles. Shall we take up where we left off or start
 somewhere else? Yes.
 Well as I recall at the close of the morning what we had come to was talking
 about the primacy of the shamanic experience and where it fell as a causal
 factor into the genesis of partnership society and its dissolution into
 dominator society. To me that's tied up with, and I indicated this at the end of
 the morning, with the issue of the primacy of personal felt experience and
 that this is what, this is the cultural domain over which the turf war is
 fought between the dominator and the partnership way of thinking about things.
 Empowering ourselves through immersion in the felt moment is the partnership
 way of being. It is immediate, it is emotional, it is translinguistic, and it
 feeds itself, it nourishes. The other way of relating to experience is through a
 set of canonical abstractions that are the unique property of a professional
 class that speaks a special language that the rest of us don't understand. And
 for millennia, at least beginning with classical Greece, this has been how we
 in the West have done it. The mistake you see was when the Greeks stopped being
 fishermen and pulled their boats up on the sand and began to talk philosophy.
 That cut them off from the felt presence of immediate experience. Are you
 agreeing? Do you need help?
 So partnership is revivifying immediate experience. Well then what are
 the limits of immediate experience? And this leads in my mind directly to the
 question of the psychedelic plant. It is possible to go from birth to the grave
 without ever having a psychedelic experience, but it's also to do make that
 same pilgrimage and never have a sexual experience. Well since the center of my
 ethos is empowering the felt presence of the immediate, 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. 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. The shamanically centered thousand-volt
 center of the mandala experience. And it doesn't, it isn't about who has taken
 drugs and who has not. I constantly talk to people who where by careful
 questioning you can satisfy yourself that though they've taken ten different
 kinds of drugs multiples of times they never actually touched the pith essence
 of the experience. Because it, the drugs, the plants are not a sine qua non. They
 are necessary but not sufficient. What is also necessary is good heart, clear
 intention and a setting which reinforces and focuses what is being attempted. But
 to me the big news, I wonder if the back will go now. Last time I didn't mention
 it and then I swore you know I should mention it. Your world is falling apart
 all around you and you just keep going.
 Anyway, to me the really big news is that this there is this dimension of
 reality that is accessible to 90% of everyone in some form or another but
 that is secret because of the need in this culture to preserve sort of this
 flat earth myth. It isn't a flat earth but a mute nature. That's the myth that
 the dominator culture must keep in place. Sartre actually said this. He said nature
 is mute therefore the world gives no compass for the formation of human
 ethics. This is psychosis, this kind of talk, because nature is not mute. You need
 only have ears to hear and the ears to hear the message of nature are the
 practices and techniques of ecstatic shamanism which is still alive and well.
 This is and techniques of ecstatic shamanism which is still alive and well
 in the Amazon, in Indonesia, in Southeast Asia. It has only been lost to us as we
 have made this paragonation into a dominant fantasy about nature. I mean
 Rian mentioned this this morning, the conquest of space, smashing the atom, all
 of these metaphors of violence and unrestrained domination as though
 somehow nature has to be violated to be understood. 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. He said they build enormous
 atom smashers and instruments for studying high energy in nature but it's
 perfectly obvious that the most interesting things in nature go on at
 voltages considerably below that of a flashlight battery. In leaves, in organs,
 in fertilized eggs and sperms and spores and these are the subtle processes in
 nature. What 2,000 years of pursuing a dominator theory and trying to
 understand nature has brought us to is the potential for nuclear Armageddon 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 and the living state is the precondition of our being. This is why I
 think Rupert's work is so important. 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, I think there will be a new sociology that will empower us to see
 ourselves as we are and as we can be. So that's why I think the psychedelic
 experience is so important because it sets the parameters of possible
 immediate experience and it's been sold back to us in vitiated form by every
 tin horn guru since the last glaciation. So what they're what they're selling is
 you know their interpretations, their metaphors, their poetry imposed upon it
 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 which actually play
 havoc with the truth that is there to be perceived. It's not a matter of
 seeking the answer, it's about facing, facing it 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. You might respond to that. You're like fireworks, I told you that yesterday. You just illuminate so many things so quickly and then pass from one to the other 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. I had requested that somebody
 bring a book. Do we have it here, the Talisman, the Blade? You have a copy because on the cover is a picture and sometimes a picture can speak louder than a thousand words. This is just one of thousands and thousands and thousands of figurines. Not all of them look like this. I want to make that very clear. But she happens to
 manifest something that I think is very important in terms of our conversation
 and our celebration here because what she, if you look at her, I think you can
 see her because of the great you know contrast with the red. If you first look
 at her you can see of course the breasts and that you know that's female but
 actually the shape is phallic isn't it? So she's androgynous isn't she? And then the
 other thing that you see if you look at her very closely she has a beak. She's a
 bird goddess. She's part animal. Of course the angels are the descendants of the
 bird goddess. Does she have leaves too? Is she part plant? 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, an early language, early writing if you will. 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 of different basic
 symbols including the symbol of shamanism depending on which of these two
 possibilities for us, these two models, which are abstractions of course we
 orient to. It's very interesting because many of the early figures of the goddess
 had incised in them the cross 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. The various points
 of the compass because these people were very sophisticated astronomically as
 you probably have surmised 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 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. I think that's that arresting fact that blood, the life-giving
 blood comes must have really inspired some women to try to figure out when was
 this, when would this essentially supernatural event be experienced again.
 So but I want to stay with the cross. Then later on, in Egyptian hieroglyphics
 the cross is still you know a symbol of life 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 you find that the Assyrians had this lovely
 habit of impaling people on crosses. You see Siglat Pelliesa, whole you know
 I mean this whole panorama of the whole city practically impaled I mean just
 brutality. So the cross became what? It became not a symbol of life and
 regeneration but it became a symbol of brutal death and of course then comes
 the early Christianity Jesus preaching a partnership spirituality associating
 freely with women, 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 well. You know I mean how many 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 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 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 but he gets crucified on a cross 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 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 and then when the Troubadour movement and
 this was a time of tremendous partnership resurgence and I 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
 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 Mariology which the church authorities say this is unheard of it
 has never been heard of well nonsense 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 but she is now the only
 mortal figure in the holy family so we've got this real absurdity of a holy
 family with a divine father and a divine son and some parvenu you know this woman
 who just happens to come along right so we maintain the dominator character and
 of course that went along with what then the cross again becomes the the cross as
 a symbol of the crusades of the Inquisition it again really truly
 becomes a symbol not of life and the love of life and of regeneration but of
 death and the cuckoo's son with its white cross is a very very good modern
 illustration 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
 but to really lead into perhaps a 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 and I feel sort of the 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 you know that is the healing function and it may mean not only
 physical healing but spiritual healing which we are now rediscovering folks
 it's related 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 perhaps we can
 speak about it as the ecstatic experience the experience of gnosis 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 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 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 go ahead I'm sorry very little the God is very big and has
 a tiny little woman on it and isn't that amazing because you see Shakti of course
 is if the whole concept is that you have access 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 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
 contentious were word would have been such blasphemy as it should be again to
 us 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's gonna be very serious and solemn all the time either but it can
 also be another avenue that is a natural avenue so I would like to perhaps put
 this in the context of a larger path and of course we all know about the path of
 having that aha experience of the oneness through fasting through chanting
 through all kinds of hypnotic things but there's no question I might that the
 plant experience is one of the quickest and one of the most powerful avenues but
 the real issue and I want to really talk about it I was talking to 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 we must learn if we don't if we don't want to
 learn from the past we really are in deep trouble 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 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 the politics the true
 politics in the sense of transformation not Republican Democrat or you know or
 Reagan or you know whatever but the two politics of transformation from the
 dominator to the partnership society got completely co-opted didn't it through
 the drug experience 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 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 and I'm
 not going to dispute it but you're saying that some of the natural plants
 are less likely to be used that way that it's mostly the chemical ones but I'm
 not a hundred percent sure because look at the opiate 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 and then secondly until the
 invention of morphine and the family of synthetics I mean opium use as you
 mentioned goes back to Minoan times and probably earlier now we have a
 remarkable ability to pervert and I think it was Ludwig von Bertalancy
 one of the founders of general systems theory who said people are not machines
 but in every situation where they are offered the opportunity to behave like
 machines they will so behave we have to be this maybe brings up something we
 should talk about because it was requested and it seems germane here and
 this is the problem of addiction and habit and addiction is merely a special
 type of habit and I think we can agree that habit in all forms kills what we
 want to bring to flower in life 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 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 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 this
 is the addiction which drives the global drug problem but of course it is true
 that that there are chemical dependencies and this is a very
 interesting thing about human beings something and I'll talk about this a bit
 more tomorrow but something about our our ability to be omnivorous to eat all
 kinds of things has lain us open to perhaps manipulation is too strong a
 word but certainly to evolutionarily selective pressures that are not
 ordinarily present because you know if you most animals eat a few foods many
 animals eat only one food 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 that may have been responsible for such things as the prolongation of
 adolescence in our species the way in which lactation occurs 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 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 are not detectable at all as a psychic as a
 psychological impression but tests have shown that very small amounts of
 psilocybin in the diet confer increased visual acuity 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 those animals are going to have a more successful
 reproductive strategy than their competitors and that trait will be
 reinforced and strengthened so we have been sculpted by nature through our
 foraging habits and in and Rian stressed the notion of template and I think
 that's very important 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 we are some kind of trigger species for mode shifts
 that affect the entire planet 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 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 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 to me the great miracle on this planet is us we are the
 great unlikelihood 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 in competitive and adaptive relationship
 but we really are as alien as an alien spacecraft would be we are the great
 imponderable here 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 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 it's a long turn 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 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
 but return now with a tremendous empowering knowledge of how to realize
 the the shamanic dream but I don't see this as the product of ego of decisions
 made by far-seeing men and women it's much more like a dance 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 but ultimately as Rian said it's the unweaving and reweaving of a
 tapestry into a finer clearer pattern 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 and everything addicts and
 everything must therefore be viewed with a certain amount of wry suspicion I
 think we didn't get where we were by making unfounded assumptions we got to
 this place by being very careful where we put our attention and I think we've
 done rather well and there's the kind of denigration of the historical process
 but that's if you come from the school that believes we're fallen angels if you
 come from the school that believes we're risen eight we haven't done too badly
 a little further on addiction what I've noticed in working with that is that addiction keeps us away from registering necessary feedback and just correcting it.
 that's right that's exactly it and culture is an addiction that's why I
 maintain in this the question of the psychedelics we have to define these
 things operationally and really the psychedelics are the enzymes which
 dissolve habitual behavior patterns and return us to a tabula rasa where then
 new instructions can be etched in and new pathways explored that's the reason
 that the psychedelics are so unsettling to the establishment because they are
 not part of the quote-unquote drug problem 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 and that's much more
 unsettling than a few illicit millionaires. I'm just interested because you started out by talking about the importance of context and the importance of the proper whatever proper means but in order to have that
 notice 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 you were saying it's 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 the
 way people are there was probably I think always a mixture of dominance
 relationships and partnership relationships and if you could have a
 balance that was predominantly part of the partnership and a balance that was
 predominantly something else and it's I don't know because I've never seen it
 you know where people were exclusively working in partnership but to get back
 to context how can you the co-opting seems such a natural thing because we
 live in a dominant paradigm so that if you're going to do psychedelics and
 dissolve say your own your own ego and defenses and stuff like that what are
 you going to put in its place without having seen the model what kind of
 context can you construct for yourself so that you're doing that and you can be
 pretty safely 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 become something very dysfunctional and so that's why I'm
 asking the question I wonder if you would address that context issue. Is it to me?
 Whoever would like to talk about it. Well maybe we both have something to say
 Rian mentioned the 60s as a less than ideal situation as it turned out if you
 look back at the literature of the underground in the 60s certain things
 that we take completely for granted are totally absent one of them is any sense
 of the historical context of hallucinogenic and shamanic ecstasy the
 there is no talk of shamanism 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 not the oldest religion in the world the way we create
 a context to address your question is by creating a community we can advance no
 faster than the envelope of language in which we are embedded and the material
 manifestation of our linguistic sphere is our affinity group our community
 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 because it's
 the awareness of these things is still a very closely held thing and you should
 recognize in each other your affinity group you are self-selected by
 yourselves to be here today and in the spirit of the partnership and ignoring
 the hierarchy it is not I mean I abhor all this guru worship and all this stuff
 because it's just a bunch of crap you know nobody knows anything more than
 anybody else transformation is a community project it can't be anything
 else
 Oh, give him a chance.
 But Rian, you might want to say something about it.
 Yes, I do want to say, well I of course agree with you completely that the creation of community is essential but I would define
 community more broadly in the sense that it is not enough that we have our
 little island if you will because in order to survive in the quote real world
 we either change that world or we're constantly being pulled into dominator
 modes of thinking and of rationalizing what we do and of behaving so that's the
 first point I would like to say that there are some very clear strategies
 that I think are very very important one of them it has been until now generally
 sort of been thought of as being perhaps impractical it relates to this whole idea
 of education but education on a far deeper level than what we often talked
 about it and of course it also relates to this whole notion of morphogenetic
 fields of a kind of a telepathic kind of thing that happens with images now I
 think that one of the most important tasks that we have before us now and we
 are all creative people I mean our creativity really the dominator model
 and creativity are antithetical to each other so the image of the
 starving artist is very appropriate you know for the for the dominator model
 very inappropriate you know for a society that values you know the
 creativity that would be more of a partnership society is for us to create
 images that are not just I think the age of protest you know of being against
 I met a lovely young woman 16 year old young woman and she said when I read the
 Charleston of late I go to a school where the kids are always protesting
 against everything and I suddenly realized that what they're protesting
 against is the dominator system 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 so I'm turning in terms of ideas in terms of visual images
 in terms of course of media the art to begin to replace to because if you go
 into one of the things with the use of you know what what is in your
 imagination if your imagination is so overcrowded with dominator images are
 you really going to be able to surface you know and have this transformation so
 I think that's a very practical thing those of you who are in the media take
 it very very seriously please and it's fun anyway to work this way and I think
 if some of you are in the media I spent an evening with some of the Hollywood
 people recently basically what we were talking about was this idea that now is
 the time because people at a certain point of addiction get to saturation and
 the addiction to violence and to depersonalize you know mechanical sex
 and you know I mean I think we've gotten to the point where people are just sort
 of like oh my god they're hungry for something else this is our moment this
 is our opportunity so images are extremely important and I don't mean
 because we live by stories that's another thing people live by stories we
 don't 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 you know
 now it isn't us but it's good you know it's the gene somehow the selfish thing
 we you know we live by these stories 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
 science 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 then there is
 hierarchy you know for the organism you know you can deliver and the heart I
 mean they're not just by themselves it all sort of interconnects and
 interrelate the brain is in charge well the oxygen goes to the brain but is the
 brain in charge or is the brain part of a large neurological system that really
 is a transmitter and also an imager for us 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
 but is it the brain or does that 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 is the brain perhaps a receptor a transmuter a
 converter a creative agent rather than a general I prefer that image I think it's
 more accurate 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 and the other thing I hate to say it to you people but we do have
 to talk about economics 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 we
 have to restructure and we have to restructure the whole darn planet so that
 it's more of a partnership 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 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 who are
 so rabidly against any other role for women any other definition for women
 other than basically male control technologies of reproduction you know
 breeders breeders preferably of men's sons I mean that's that doesn't have to
 be right so it's really using the most advanced technology to move into and
 partnership era is one of the most extraordinary challenges 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 and putting out
 important ideas is very important too I'm not that's part of the action I'm
 sorry yes I just want to go back to the 60s for a minute you uh you said that
 you thought that drugs the drug culture got co-opted or yes that culture got
 co-opted by drugs it seems to me that in the 60s the certain drugs again to not
 to talk about drugs generically but certain drugs have more to do with
 creating a sense of partnership and anything that I know of at least in my
 lifetime to my own direct experiences study reading anything direct drug
 experiences seem to lead to a very radical change of mentality of a massive
 group of people and I think it's a mistake to think that those drugs that
 there was anything wrong or anything really weird happened regarding those
 particular drugs there were new drugs that came in cocaine came in which is
 interesting to me because it seemed to change it became a very that seemed very
 much in that dominant model but marijuana and the mushrooms LSD they
 seem very much in the partnership model and seem to perpetuate that and I'm glad
 to make 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 it was really to a very large extent the building of partnership and
 that is not what I meant what I meant was that but part of it was the cocaine
 coming in but part of it was also LSD I think 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 addictive which is to keep you right there without taking any action
 that is what I meant and I'm glad you clarified that yes I think what reared
 its ugly head and shot down the 1960s was profit and the fact that the 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 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 and 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 and immediately the
 possibility of keeping things from getting out of hand is I think really
 diminished the key is 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 and everything then the mystery stays
 this is the plants are like this and this keeps them going 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 how context works and how dominators
 society both insidiously invades our conception of things and also might be
 equally insidiously plotted against one of the things that we take utterly for
 granted I think is the calendar we live in a calendar of 365 days it's a solar
 calendar that means that relative to the fixed stars the equimox deal and so
 stifle points are fixed and this is a lie or it perpetuates a misconception it
 perpetuates the conception that things endure and that flux is an illusion it
 the solar calendar has built into it deep propagandistic assumptions in favor
 of the dominator model 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
 so that our year was 13 lunations and had 19 more days in it than the solar
 year if we were to adopt a calendar like this all holidays and great festivals
 would do what is called precessing they would move 19 days a year so that when
 you were a child you would recall Christmases in winter but you would
 recall that in your adolescence Christmas fell in summer and so forth
 and every 19 years the great festivals would return to where they had been
 relative to the fixed stars well this may seem fairly abstract and removed
 from common experience but in fact because this is sort of the great frame
 in which all the other little frames are suspended we operate at a tremendous
 disadvantage because we are embedded in a patriarchal solar calendar which
 reinforces the false notion of permanence and stability 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 but what you
 actually read there is the news that the magician is a calendar maker a strange
 notion but it precisely addressing what I'm trying to say that this is one of
 the ways in which we might revision our world to accentuate flux and flow and
 change 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 so that's one notion of how context might change and it's an interesting
 idea it's not illegal to advocate calendrical reform and it's probably not
 for occurred to anyone but believe me in prehistory and in early Chinese history
 tremendous battles were fought and these were issues of great importance because
 the founders of new dynasties understood that the way to establish their reigns
 was to sweep away all previous calendrical conceptions and establish a
 zero year and then create in that context all the subcontexts of their
 political agenda it's the new order and I think that that's so interesting
 because we are of course 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 the nature
 festivals the solstices the equinoxes the full moon the young moon these were
 the most ancient holy days because they were congruent with the rhythm of
 nature and I think you're quite right what the solar calendar does it sort of
 nullifies that whole cyclic spiral quality of life but I want to get back
 in it for a moment in that context to the issue of the use of psychedelics
 because the use of them as a medium through carefully thought through and
 reconstituted certainly going back to some of its ancient roots as we're doing
 here you know with some of the music but also adapting it for today and for
 tomorrow that and also that really relates the whole issue of calendar too
 I mean to the issue of when when are the times of the year when you do this
 because I regardless of anything else if we are to engage in this practice on a
 random and very frequent basis we're not going to have a very productive economy
 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 in you know so it's an issue I
 think we have to address that issue don't we and it goes with the issue of
 calendar it goes with the issue of ritual I mean these things are all
 interconnected yes your remarks make me think of something Omar Stewart said who
 was a botanist and anthropologist and I don't know how serious he was but he
 felt that the great transition in plant consciousness came with the invention
 of agriculture that the hunting peoples could take the ecstatic hallucinogens
 because you could sleep in the next day but once you got into agriculture corn
 became the important plant and there was no more getting stoned because everybody
 had to get up early and get out there and hoe the corn. Oh but we don't have to get up early and hoe the corn today.
 Does that mean we can get stoned?
 [Laughter]
 There is something to it being a holy thing.
 No I agree.
 And a sacramental thing and that really relates to holy days and to this whole notion of it being done within a context that we have to create I mean we have to do nothing more or less than to create a culture but fortunately we have a lot of the strands to work with.
 Yes a successful psychedelic trip absolutely kills the desire to do it again very soon.
 [Laughter]
 So it's a self-limiting experience.
 Yes it's a self-limiting experience and the way to know whether you're doing it correctly or not is if what you're doing doesn't make you afraid you're not doing it right.
 [Laughter]
 On that note we might want to think about the 10 minute stretch.
 Wonderful.
 [Laughter]
 Thank you.
 So we thought for this closing session this afternoon that we would hope to hear from you and I vow to give shorter answers.
 We've made a pact.
 The two of us just go on.
 So we want to hear from you.
 I just want to make one quick suggestion for to hear it addressed at some point because I know that some people are curious about this and that is not everybody may know that the both of you are involved in wonderful relationships.
 Probably modeled for marital.
 [Laughter]
 And there might be a few words you could say about just the certainly the issue of dominator versus partnership comes up in marriages and relationships constantly and how we can take some of these really wonderful ideas in terms of how we define guy and consciousness and bring it down to how we get out of an argument.
 [Laughter]
 How you both deal with it must be terribly illuminating.
 [Laughter]
 Well, I'll start.
 I am in a committed long term relationship.
 Many of you know my partner Kat.
 We've been together since 1975.
 We met in 1967 in Jerusalem, actually.
 But we were on different paths and didn't really see each other for nine years.
 And we have two children, Finn, a boy, 10, and Clea, a girl, 7.
 And Rian said yesterday that partnership is preferable because it's fun.
 It certainly is fun.
 It's also a great challenge.
 It is the challenge, I think.
 There's a wonderful saying that addresses the problem of ego in the dominator situation.
 It's Uzbekistani, this saying.
 It's that a man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he's married.
 [Laughter]
 So partnership is a wonderful opportunity for humility and for seeing oneself as others see them.
 And, well, it's everything.
 I can't say enough about it.
 It's the coniunctio.
 It's the great challenge.
 It drives one to distraction.
 It is perhaps the transcendental object that is most personally experienced by each of us.
 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.
 I mean, you know, a typical example is that you can see a woman across a crowded room speaking as a man.
 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
 and doesn't speak English and is already married to a French count and so forth and so on.
 But lo and behold, circumstances evolve and she divorces the French count.
 She learns to speak English.
 And she gets an apartment across the hall.
 And this falls into place.
 Like magic.
 In fact, magic.
 And so we can summon this power to the things we care about most.
 And what we care about most is, I think, falling into this, the dyad.
 I really think that people come in two pieces and you sort of have to put the pieces together.
 And then you get a curious beast indeed that can maybe ride a longer distance.
 I'm not sure.
 What's your story?
 Well, my story I'd like to share with my partner, with David.
 Do you want to go first, David, or should I?
 Okay, I'll go first.
 Okay.
 I started off my partnership with David only 11 years ago.
 And it was a miracle is what it was.
 I had a friar at marriage.
 And that was really a terrific learning experience, I guess one says without being unpleasant.
 But it was a classic dominator relationship.
 And we were both miserable.
 I mean, I was really getting pretty good at manipulating, actually,
 which is what you have to get to if you're in a dominator relationship.
 And it really brings out the worst in everybody.
 You know, the guy who's supposed to be the -- who never -- you know, I mean, he never apologizes.
 He always -- you know, he knows, I mean, by golly, you know, his ego.
 And of course, you know, he knows that this isn't working.
 And so he's very tense about the whole thing, you know.
 And he leaves his laundry for you to pick up on the floor.
 And you hate it and you begin to hate him.
 And so you start manipulating.
 And so after a while, you know, you're both miserable.
 I mean, that's really the classic pattern, isn't it?
 And people stay -- and the whole difference between dominator relationships,
 as far as, you know, heterosexual long-term relationships and partnership relationships,
 is that the bonding in one is really coercion.
 I mean, well, it used to be, you know, the story of Don Jose killing Carmen.
 I mean, if you dare leave this guy for somebody else, he'll kill you.
 That's a pretty good motivation not to go right there.
 But a lot of it, of course, more recently, has been economic, you know, especially for the women.
 You know, they just couldn't get out of this rotten situation,
 so they kidded themselves and everybody else.
 So now we're starting from scratch, right?
 And we're all saying, "Wait a minute. This old stuff has made everybody literally ill."
 And so I was so blessed.
 I found David. And David found me.
 And we met. And he came over for lunch.
 And he never went home.
 Actually, he did go home because I had an appointment with an accountant that afternoon.
 And I had told him that I was going to go to a movie that evening.
 And he said to me, "You really have to go to that movie?"
 And I said, "No, I don't have to go to that movie."
 So he came back.
 And I have to share something with you, which is sort of funny.
 I was so scared of getting married again.
 Because getting married, you know, especially in my generation,
 you carry that dominator luggage of wife, husband, you know, and that programming.
 So we waited 10 years.
 And we finally got married.
 And it was wonderful because it was the three of us.
 We were married by a woman, which was really a terrific experience.
 I mean, just the three of us.
 And she was a gorgeous, wonderful woman wearing this beautiful robe,
 these colorful robes.
 And we all cried.
 And David read me his poetry.
 And I read him my vows.
 And it was a sacred moment for us.
 And so we do have arguments, I mean, in case you're interested.
 And partnership doesn't mean perfect either.
 But we also have developed some techniques for working them out.
 Sometimes.
 [laughter]
 Why don't I tell you real quickly of the techniques that we used.
 And then let me share with you two or three sort of interesting stories to me,
 centering around how we met,
 because they seem to have various morals, various dimensions of meaning.
 That would be fair.
 But the technique first.
 I really found this tremendously useful.
 And it was Rian's idea, and it was her reinterpretation
 or reworking of an idea out of co-counseling.
 And the idea is simply this.
 Contrary to the image that people might like to believe,
 we do have tremendous conflict.
 Because we both only reach the place we are by developing really strong egos.
 Strong, but more than strong egos.
 Strong identities.
 I think there's a difference.
 Yeah. Let's say strong identities.
 [laughter]
 Now this is important contextually.
 This is what I wasn't going to get into, because I was thinking to myself,
 I'm working on an article right now.
 Rian has written her half.
 It's called "The Partnership Society, Social Vision and Personal Practice."
 She's done social vision, and you've heard parts of it.
 I'm working right now on personal practice and thinking all this through.
 And I thought to myself, "Shall I share any of this?"
 And I thought, "I don't have it thought through well enough."
 But I feel I should add this to what I was going to say.
 On this conflict of strong identities, not egos.
 We're going through this period, see,
 where there's been this traditional male-dominant, female-submissive relating of the sexes.
 And in trying to get out of it, there's an awful lot of role reversal,
 where the women are becoming strong, forceful, and talk a lot.
 [laughter]
 And the men are becoming more submissive, and sitting back and taking it, and so on.
 [laughter]
 Now, this is actually, if you look it over, this is a necessary part of the transition,
 but the transition only.
 Because if that pattern prevails, then we're lost.
 Because all you've got is the flip side of the coin once again.
 You've got the woman, too dominant, talking, calling the shots too much,
 feeling guilty about it, and that makes her do it even more.
 You've got the man sitting there silent and seething and seething until he explodes.
 And this leads to actual violence, physical violence in some cases,
 because the men are more muscular, and so on.
 [laughter]
 No, but it hasn't been my case.
 [laughter]
 Is that one situation?
 No, no, but I'm looking at the general picture.
 [laughter]
 So what I see that we must be moving toward
 is not this situation where you've got one partner or the other,
 it's the dominant one and the other one who submits it.
 The tip off to what's wrong here is when it becomes an inflexible, invariant pattern.
 Once you get into it, as a bulk of you already know,
 I'm just trying to articulate what's gone through the heads of a lot of you in relationships.
 You discover progressively that there are certain situations where
 one party should be dominant because that particular party knows a hell of a lot more
 about whatever it is in that situation than you do.
 And there's other situations where you've got the expertise,
 and you've got the contacts, and you're down with the secret things to be,
 the flexibility, and knowing each other well enough to know when to flip it to the other one
 and let the other one take over, and so on.
 But we've got to move toward this situation where you've got not strong and weak,
 or weak and weak.
 Another one of these patterns is the weak and the weak.
 Not so bad, you know, where people actually admit, you know,
 I've got imperfections, you've got imperfections, let's work together to perfect ourselves.
 It doesn't always work, as you know.
 But we've got to work toward the partnership society model to me is strong and strong.
 Where you've got two strong identities, and they work out this thing according to the situation,
 and their relationship with nature, with all of nature and all of life is strong too.
 Anyway, enough of that.
 That's sort of an overall thing.
 Co-counseling.
 Technique.
 Oh, co-counseling, yeah, because this is something very practical.
 Okay, you've got these two strong identities, and they come to the, "Oh, God!"
 Both of them are very tempted and have already regressed,
 already regressed partly into that monstrous situation, the dominator system that's got them.
 Now, what we do, well, actually isn't what we do, it's almost invariably what Rheon says, in effect.
 "Now, look, let's have a session."
 And that's my cue to get out of my defensive, withdrawal, seething, "Rrrr!" type thing too.
 The routine we both go through is, first you say, you're forced to say, "Oh, what is it?"
 I always forget what it is.
 It comes out of re-evaluation co-counseling, and you start off by saying, "What's new and good?"
 Yeah, yeah, okay.
 Which really brings you to the here and now.
 Yeah, yeah, so you're forced to say, "What's new and good?"
 And you may say, "There's absolutely nothing new and good!"
 And then somebody says, "Uh-uh, you must think of something new and good."
 So then you think, "Well, it's a beautiful day."
 That's what builds that function.
 Then you have to think of, "What's good about myself?"
 And you say, "I don't feel that there's anything good about myself."
 And once again, you must think about something good about yourself.
 And then you say, "Well, I can play a good harmonica."
 And then comes the difficult one in these quarrel situations.
 "What's new and good about the other person?"
 And then you come up with, "Well, I think you're pretty," or something like that.
 And that fulfills it.
 Then you go into your deep session where you unload, and you just unload everything.
 And the sacred rule here, the key to this whole method working,
 the other party cannot interrupt.
 No defensive feedback.
 Because once there is the slightest defensive feedback in this situation,
 you're right in that argument cycle.
 You know, "You said this, and I said this," and so on.
 You set--each party unloads, and the other one can't say a thing until the wind-up.
 Then your wind-up is, "Isn't it what we're looking forward to?"
 Yeah, the wind-up is, "Something I'm looking forward to."
 Oddly enough, by the time you reach that point, you say,
 "Well, something I'm looking forward to."
 And usually you feel much better, and you can really legitimately look forward to something.
 And both parties do this.
 And if you do this, you'll be absolutely astounded
 at how it will improve your relationships
 and how much you will actually be building,
 helping to build the floor of the partnership society in a very practical way.
 How do you figure out who starts?
 Usually you know.
 Who starts the unloading?
 Usually you know, because it's the person who's really ready to go.
 Yeah, if the one with the biggest build-up is who starts.
 [laughter]
 Thank you, David, for sharing that with us.
 Let me just share one other thing with you,
 which was centering around how we met.
 Terrence was talking about seeing across the crowded room that phenomena.
 And the interesting thing that happened to me was I had left my first wife
 after a typically, you know, dominator, unsatisfactory-type relationship and so on.
 And I was lonely and wandering in Los Angeles and dating women and thinking,
 "Gosh, there's got to be some simpler way of going through this process."
 Because I'm a psychologist, and I'd had years with ETS and all the test development and so on.
 So I figured there ought to be some simple test I can develop.
 [laughter]
 So actually, you know, I went through the standard way of thinking, you know,
 the list of 300 questions, and then it sunk in on me.
 I can't go out on a date and say, "Don't listen."
 [laughter]
 So I boiled it all down.
 Within psychology--is there a psychologist here?
 Well, maybe there's somebody out there who knows about the guy named Webb's unobtrusive measures.
 I thought, "Ah, this is something for Webb's unobtrusive measures."
 An unobtrusive measure is something seemingly innocuous
 that tells you an awful lot about the person without a lot of questions.
 So I boiled it all down to, without going into the reasons, I had two questions.
 One was--or the ideal one was, "Did you love your father?"
 And if the answer was yes--
 But say why, because you had a relationship where they were discussed on both sides.
 Ambivalence towards the mother from David.
 Yeah. Now, the reason why this was a profoundly well-grounded question was,
 in my own case, I had an ambivalent mother,
 and so I had grown up with a very leery sense toward women.
 I was married first to a woman who had had a very awful father,
 and she grew up very, very leery of men.
 So that when we had an argument, we'd both depart.
 The message from below was, "You made a mistake hooking up with that opposite sex."
 And so I thought to myself, "Because that's my background,
 I must find a woman who had a good relationship and loved her father.
 Then, when we get in an argument, I'll withdraw, but she will follow."
 Simple as that, but very, very good.
 Anyway, so that was one of my questions, "Did you love your father?"
 And the other one, I clapped literally everything else,
 "Who is your favorite composer?"
 And the answer had to be Mozart.
 So I met Rian, and we fell in love almost immediately.
 And then I thought, "I've got to try the test."
 I thought to myself, "What if she fails?"
 I'm madly in love with her. I can't bear to give her up.
 But what if she fails my test?
 And so I held off a week.
 And finally, she happened to mention, just spontaneously, something about her father.
 And I thought, "Oh, here it comes. I've got to ask."
 And I said, "Tell me this, Rian.
 How do you feel about your father?"
 And she says, "Well, I love my father."
 And I thought, "Boy, 50 percent."
 And then about another week went by, and we were talking about classical music,
 and I thought, "Oh, here it goes."
 And I thought to myself, as I started to ask the question,
 I said, "What if she says Sibelius, who happened to be my least favorite composer?"
 And I said, "Oh, by the way, who is your favorite composer?"
 And she said, "Mozart, of course."
 That's not only--
 If I had known that I would be tested, I had not a clue.
 That's not only how we met, but that's what locked it.
 It was a choice of the heart completely legitimized by science.
 Can you just comment on monogamy in terms of the dominators, the partnership?
 What do you say?
 I love you, Sibelius.
 Love you.
 Well, you know, I think that the issue really relates to this whole question
 of coercive versus voluntary bonding.
 The dominator model, it's--
 Well, think of the whole idea, you know,
 of the first form of slavery that we have archaeologically documented
 was actually the enslavement of women from conquered communities.
 Even in the Bible, you know, it says that these wonderful directions,
 supposedly from Yehovah, kill all the women who have known a man--
 No, kill everybody, as a matter of fact,
 but only those girl children who have not known a man you keep for yourself, right?
 I mean, this is supposed to be God's command to you.
 But anyway, so it was a very coercive kind of situation,
 if you look at it from that perspective,
 if women are seen as property.
 And a lot of what we've seen has been the coercive bonding.
 But I'm also convinced that given the tremendous bonding
 that comes from mutually satisfying affection through sexual relationship,
 the sharing of the peak experience, and the friendship,
 that it's impossible--
 I mean, how can you have friendship, as a matter of fact,
 in a Muslim dominator marriage
 where you let the women live in complete apartheid?
 I mean, good morning, you know, let's go and do it for a few minutes,
 maybe you'll give me a son, and then goodbye.
 I mean, that's not very conducive to voluntary bonding, is it?
 So I'm very convinced that this whole issue of monogamy or not monogamy
 really can only be looked at in terms of these two situations.
 That's not to say that that kind of positive reinforcement,
 as Skinner would say, of the sexual bonding, of the affection, of the friendship,
 that would motivate you to want to stick around with that one person quite a lot,
 that that would necessarily be an exclusive union.
 I don't know that.
 But I think that there's a lot that in a partnership kind of relationship
 would really bring people to want to stick around with each other
 because it's just more fun,
 and because there are advantages to a partnership for all kinds of reasons,
 you know, bringing up children.
 But again, if we have more of a clan situation
 where there are more parents for each child, so to speak,
 that exclusivity no longer becomes the issue.
 I think it's a very complex issue,
 and the issue is becoming a very real one today with the AIDS epidemic.
 And I want to say something about AIDS, which may strike you as being rather strange,
 but if you think about it, it's very much a product of traumatic trauma, traumatization,
 a tearing of tissue, which is really a dominator form of sex.
 And the rapid spread of it through the homosexual community, of course,
 was largely due to this,
 and the fact that it's spreading like wildfire in certain parts of Africa,
 it has to be related to the genital mutilation and the scarring and the weakness of the tissue,
 you know, that that builds in,
 as well as some of the really brutal kind of sexual practices.
 So it's almost like nature giving us some feedback here
 that what the sexual revolution is about is not brutal, mechanical,
 you know, screw everybody and everything inside,
 that it's about something,
 about maybe beginning to reclaim sex as sacrament a little bit,
 and friendship and bonding.
 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
 with what we all kind of would enjoy.
 So that's my answer. It's not an absolute answer.
 Well, naturally, I think like everyone who's in a committed relationship,
 I've given this considerable thought.
 And it seems to me what the tension about monogamy in modern society can be traced to,
 or the sense of perhaps dissatisfaction with monogamy,
 can be traced to a distortion and betrayal of adolescence,
 and that the problem begins in adolescence by repressing adolescent sexuality.
 And this then creates a sense of irrecoverable loss,
 and this weird sort of haunting feeling that you didn't get it right,
 and so life is not being fair to you.
 And then a multitude of sexual encounters is looked to as an answer to this.
 But I think that monogamy represents a deepening of bonding
 into a kind of lifelong project that is entirely spiritual.
 Not that it doesn't have a physical and an ecstatic and an erotic side,
 but it all goes together to create something that should not be expected of adolescence,
 and should not be preached as the ideal at all stages of life.


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