wildfire/13_chap7.html

<h1>CHAPTER 7</h1>
<h2>The Otters of the Universe</h2>
<p>I often hear women say something like this: "I came back this time around to learn patience (or forgiveness, or tolerance) because I didn't learn it in my former lives." When I hear this kind of thinking, my alarm bells begin to go off, the bells that peal "Patriarchy! Beware!"</p>
<p>For the fathers, living is never enough in itself. There must be some external purpose for it, some lesson to be learned, some difficult and far-off goal to be attained, something to "win" (always with a measuring, comparative eye on everyone else's progress toward that end). If we succeed, we are rewarded, in this case by being incarnated into greater happiness and a more refined consciousness next time. If we fail, we must come back to try again, to atone for our failure. Patriarchy purposefully trains our eyes upon the future (which never comes), teaching us to live now in such a way that we might live better in the future, trapping us in the pernicious lie that living is a means to some end other than simply being alive in the perfectly satisfying richness of the present.</p>
<p>I recently received a letter from a couple of students doing a study on "the meaning of life," questioning a certain number of us about our perceptions of it. They left a large space for the answer and suggested attaching additional pages if necessary. I sent a postcard on which I wrote one short line, "The meaning of life is to be alive."</p>
<p>The fathers have taught us to view life as a very heavy, serious, lesson-laden business, fraught with consequences for punishment or reward in the future - in heaven or hell or in future lives, it is exactly the same. But to live right now, to perceive, to feel, to sense, to experience, to enjoy this moment - this, I believe, is the reason we choose to come back into a body and live in a physical world.</p>
<p>Sometimes, and more and more often now, when I pass a lilac in bloom, or hold someone close in my arms, or accidentally meet some stranger's eyes on a bus, a wild gladness floods my heart, and I think to myself: <i>this</i> is why I came back!</p>
<p>Not to learn - our spirits are perfect, already knowing everything-but to play, to experience the infinite variations on the theme of the character I am this time. Someone has said that humans are the otters of the universe. That feels right to me. I like the feeling that we have come here to this beautiful planet lightly, playfully. joyfully to experiment with the amazing possibilities of ourselves. Some of us had the extra motivation to come back of being fascinated by the on-going drama of tyranny that is being enacted here and were eager to play our part in ending it, in making that delight possible that is the natural condition of every living thing.</p>
<p>And of course we <i>do</i> learn. Learning is a sort of bonus, a by-product of living, not the reason for it.</p>
<p>"But it is the human condition to suffer," the patriarchs intone; "into every life a little rain must fall. Sweet are the uses of adversity, so be glad for your troubles, they strengthen you." No wonder the aim of practitioners of some Eastern religions is to get off the wheel of life. The fathers teach us that life, by its very nature, is full of pain and sorrow, and that this is good because only through suffering can we come to know joy, only by understanding evil can we know good. They teach us that such polarity is a law of human experience.</p>
<p>As usual, I ask myself, "Who said so? Who profits from the theory that polarity is an inescapable fact of life? For whom is it necessary that we accept the notion that we <i>need</i> to suffer?" The answer is obvious. Tyranny is based on suffering and on the acceptance of it by the tyrannized as "natural" and god-ordained. For sadists, polarity is a necessary and reasonable concept, and for sadists to control the world, as they do, it is necessary that this be a <i>universal</i> assumption.</p>
<p>But except as a weapon over the human spirit, it doesn't make any more sense than the rest of their propaganda. Suffering teaches us how to suffer - period. There is no reason to believe that it has equal or more value in the strengthening of character than happiness has; in fact, there is reason to believe that it has less or none. I think that suffering and pain, despite patriarchy's self-serving insistence to the contrary, are not only unnecessary for health and happiness but make them impossible, that people are strong <i>despite</i> suffering, not because of it.</p>
<p>It seems to me likely that by reinforcing our programmed belief that it is inevitable and must simply be borne, suffering weakens us on all levels of our being. Though pain is "real" now, I am not persuaded that it <i>has</i> to be. Perhaps sorrow and pain <i>are made possible by</i>, perhaps they <i>result from</i>, patriarchy's sadistic ontology. It seems obvious to me that only joy can teach us how to be joyful, and that from joy and delight and peace we can learn all we need to know, which is how to be happy, how to rejoice, how, that is, to think about the nature of the human experience and to live on the earth in radically different terms.</p>
<p>People often say to me down their noses, "But Utopia would be so <i>boring</i>!" This is evidence to me of the success of a sadistic world mind in brainwashing us to believe that pain and suffering and evil are not only necessary but are also the sources of excitement and energy in life, a global ideology that equates goodness, peace, and joy with dullness and stupidity. Lucifer, in "Paradise Lost" the embodiment of evil, is supposed to dazzle us with his brilliance; in comparison with him the characters who personify "goodness" appear complete bores.</p>
<p>Evil in this poem, as in patriarchy, is made attractive to inure us to it. But its presentation does not make goodness more real to us. All we can know from evil is evil; it cannot teach us about goodness. Patriarchy has no concept of energized goodness, of nonpolarized and non-polarizable creativity.</p>
<p>I want a world in which it makes no sense at all to believe the dangerous nonsense that suffering allows us to experience joy at a deeper level, or that we learn about goodness most profoundly from studying evil. I want a world in which opposites are not even posited, in which there is no dichotomous, polarized mind. If we believe that everything is balanced by its opposite, not by its own intrinsic nature, we must always posit light and dark, male and female, rich and poor, large and small in opposition - noticing that the "desirable" concept always comes first in English when we speak of polarities: light, male, rich, large; in patriarchy first position is always most desirable.</p>
<p>The assumption is that because these are opposites, they have naturally opposite roles to play in their spheres. In this way, the doctrine of polarity - yin/yang - is patriarchy's basic justification for tyranny.</p>
<p>Though theoretically polarity makes no judgments and holds that both poles are equally necessary, it is not lost on feminists that the feminine is always the negative pole, the opposite of the positive male poles. It is incredible to me, however, to what lengths some women - many of whom throw up their hands at other women who are making excuses to stay in christianity - will go to justify and rationalize and to try to make it okay to believe the same basic patriarchal structure in Eastern thought. One look at women's status and experience in the East should instantly warn us not to import indiscriminately the misogynist messages in Eastern philosophies and religions.</p>
<p>All we need to do to rid ourselves of rigid polar-thinking is to ask ourselves who said that dark is the <i>opposite</i> of light, therefore making possible the extension of tyranny over whole peoples? How would patriarchy change if we viewed dark and light, not as opposites at all, but as simply aspects of the same thing, variations on the same theme? The dichotomous thought necessary for oppression is based in the concept of polarity.</p>
<p>From women who are accepting Eastern thought without clearly recognizing its patriarchal origins, I also hear a lot of this kind of idea: "I brought this misfortune upon myself by being [a certain undesirable way] in a past life." It seems to me that this thinking lacks even a semblance of feminist analysis. It is the "blame-the-victim" mode so beloved of the elite, justifying their violence and others' poverty and misery: they deserve it, they brought it on themselves. It is a totally nonpolitical analysis, and sexual politics undergird our every act. While it is true that we collaborate as victims in oppression, collaboration is <i>not</i> causation. Our most serious collaboration is accepting patriarchy as "real" and inevitable.</p>
<p>Many of those who adhere to Eastern thought believe that by doing so they get completely out of christianity's way and into some extraordinary new spiritual mode. It seems to me, however, that whatever tells us that the purpose of life is for us to improve ourselves and to atone for our past sins is the same old dreary stuff the fathers have taught us under every guise. We are not good enough as we are, they say, not worthy of love yet, not enough, not enough, not enough. And because we are not enough, we must suffer until we learn to be enough and to repent of never having been enough yet. Those of us who are not enough will be ruled by those who are enough.</p>
<p>Though I don't agree, I don't argue with those who need to believe the disempowering "justice" dogma of some varieties of karma. No one knows the ultimate "truth" (if there is such a thing). Since none of us can know "the truth," we must each believe what we need to believe right now in order to make sense of our lives, in order to have the courage and strength to live.</p>
<p>But we also each need to examine and question, privately and publicly, the isms of men. Nothing men have taught as "truth" is safe for women to internalize without serious analysis. I accept none of the old stuff if I can help it, nothing from men any more. Our own internal women's voices will teach us all we need to know, and if they sound a little like Eastern thought, it is because Eastern thought still contains some of women's archaic mind. But the female mode that echoes in those philosophies has been twisted to fit male supremacy and cannot be trusted.</p>
<p>As my life has changed over the years and as I have come to understand more clearly the manifestations of patriarchy in my life and thought, I have changed my supporting beliefs about the nature and purpose of existence. Right now I want to be rid of my dichotomous mind, I want to be free of the idea of earth life as "school," the experiences of this present life as consequences of former lives - we all had enough of that in church. I want out of cause-and-effect thinking, out of constant projection either into the future or into the past, out of atonement, out of "justice," out of that mind. I want into a lighthearted, playful reality, finding joy in the experiences of the moment, and in fearless, disciplined thought. My belief that <i>being is enough</i> makes this possible.</p>