chapter 8

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+<h1>CHAPTER 6</h1>
+<h2>Just/Us and Hequality<a href="#fn1">[1]</a></h2>
+<p>Nor do I care how politically incorrect it sounds to acknowledge how appalled I am that I ever accepted the concept of justice, another example of men's attempt to make us perceive power as external and dichotomous. Though it is symbolized by scales held by a blindfolded figure, in fact objective justice is an oxymoron. Justice is securely based in values, and values by definition are neither blind nor impersonal.</p>
+<p>Rather than being some sort of moral absolute, justice was created as a loyal servant to patriarchy, spawning a system dependent upon someone's meting out upon others either reward for conformity to patriarchal values or punishment for flaunting them.<a href="#fn2">[2]</a> The concept of justice cannot exist without acceptance of patriarchy's identification of power with hierarchy and external control.</p>
+<p>The assumption that any man or woman, no matter how "good," should or even <i>can</i> decide what is best for anyone else without being influenced by personal biases and beliefs, not only dignifies men's absurd belief in pure disembodied logos, but reinforces the idea that it is reasonable, nay "natural," for some to have control over others. And reinforces the absurdity that power automatically attaches to those who control.</p>
+<p>In creating the illusion that someone outside us must sit in judgment upon us, justice sanctions and gives life-support to tyranny. Tyranny can survive only so long as most of us believe that power is externally based, that someone else has the right to decide what is "just" for us, what we "deserve." A belief in god and god-surrogates is essential to tyranny.</p>
+<p>Inherent in justice is the eye-for-an-eye authorization of retaliation and revenge. One of my most difficult tasks as a mother has been to persuade my children not to be spiteful and mean in response to spite and meanness. This has been made particularly onerous not only by their study of the behavior of famous men in history, but also by watching present famous men rationalize bombing a city because a U.S. ship has been fired upon. With such models of moral pathology parading as "justice," women's job of humanizing children has been made well-nigh impossible.</p>
+<p>The concept of justice is based on distrust and hatred of human nature and is hostile to the development of self-trust, self-rule, and trust of others. Because it is external coercion, not self-government, justice is always a weapon of those in control. It cannot function in behalf of those controlled; it is not "just" that they should be controlled in the first place.</p>
+<p>Since I do not want justice, what would I propose instead? I want compassion and generosity, first from myself. If I can understand and love myself, I will be merciful and loving to others. If enough of us can deal with ourselves generously and truthfully, kindly, lovingly, mercifully, there will be no need for courts, for laws, for the top-heavy, top-down inherent cruelty of justice. I am tired of being controlled by others. What I want is self-rule. I want true anarchy. I am ready for it.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>Like justice, equality is a word I don't hear very often any more among the feminists I meet and with whom I associate. Many of us, having found equality an obfuscating concept, have long since rejected it as a goal. Equal to whom, we ask? In what way? Equality, like justice an externally referenced word, must always involve comparison, and as far as I am concerned, being a feminist means that I stop comparing myself against external standards or other people - particularly men - taking to heart my knowledge that because each of us is truly incomparable, the concept of "equality" is profoundly patriarchal. That we judge ourselves with criteria not of our own devising and compare ourselves with others in almost all aspects of our lives is a stunning achievement of the fathers.</p>
+<p>In addition, what we <i>think</i> of as equality (i.e., when we are not aware of it as a conditional, dualistic concept) is not even a possibility in a hierarchical system. I can't think why I ever thought it <i>was</i> any more than I can remember why I once thought it was a desirable end. Men admit that even when two of <i>them</i> meet, before they can so much as begin to talk they must both decide which one of them is in the one-up position and which in the one-down, using the criteria first of race, then of wealth and status measured in dozens of ways. Without imposing their hierarchical paradigm upon every experience, men cannot move an inch in any aspect of their lives.</p>
+<p>If no <i>man</i> ever perceives any other man as an equal but instead always either higher or lower in status than he, where do <i>women</i> fit into patriarchy's "equality" ideal? The answer is of course that we neither do nor even <i>can</i> fit and that equality therefore is not possible in patriarchy. Further, what we have always mistakenly called "equality" is really HEquality, a construct that bears no resemblance to what men say equality is but instead is a variation on the theme of tyranny.</p>
+<p>More than this, however. The concept of equity is only possible to the dualistic mind, the mind that must posit "unequal" in order to posit "equal." When we realize that its existence is dependent upon the existence of inequality - not just in our minds but also in the world - we see that equality is an artifact of dichotomous patriarchal thought.</p>
+<p>So in solemnly teaching us to revere and desire equality, men have played a great joke on us. But now that we have caught them out, perhaps we can acknowledge their drollery by referring to this venerable nonideal in the future not only as hequality but also as "hee-heequality."</p>
+<p>With what shall we replace this figment, this dream of "equality?" I suggest that it was part of a long and ancient nightmare and that we just let it go. It needs no replacement. Feminist anarchy is simple: self-love resulting in love of others out of which springs behavior in the best interests of everyone. To some that sounds impossible. But it is not nearly so complicated, not nearly so difficult to maintain, as patriarchy, and it is home to the human heart, where it longs to go, where it knows it is <i>possible</i> to go, where, guided by the rising of women out of self-hatred and out of our consequent facilitation of men's destructiveness, it is heading at the speed of light.</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p><a id="fn1">[1]</a> These are Marlene Mountain's words that she lent me in conversations in January and March 1989.</p>
+<p><a id="fn2">[2]</a> Having been a mother for over 25 years, I no longer believe in the efficacy of punishment.
+It has never improved any of my children's behavior for long.</p>

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+<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>

14_chap8.html

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+<h1>CHAPTER 8</h1>
+<h2>The Past Age Movement</h2>
+<p>New age ideas, though saturated with a masculinism that would be expected to deter even the least politically conscious feminists, are nevertheless seducing thousands of women of all degrees of feminist consciousness.</p>
+<p>I believe this is because these ideas bear faint echoes from the 200,000 years of women's world that preceded patriarchy. The "new age" movement is the repository of pseudofemale Eastern thought in this country. Patriarchy has always lured women back into our prisons by dangling our own disguised precepts before us, teasing us with their familiarity. Even dimly hearing ideas that resemble the shape of women's mind causes some of us to succumb to the old subterfuge. We think we have found something wholly good and different and as if hypnotized fall back into our age-old position of listening to external male voices, either channeling them (and almost all women I know who channel entities, channel male entities<a href="#fn1">[1]</a>) or following male leaders. We have seen all this before. It is the bynow familiar pattern. Christianity when it began "empowered" women in just this way. But once it had captured our hearts and minds, it made no more pretense.</p>
+<p>There is very little or no feminist consciousness among leaders of the "new age" movement. All is based upon the premise that women experience the world as men do, that there is no important or appreciable difference that merits attention. So women are invisible again, colluding again by pretending that we are really included with the men, denying our very different experience in the world, denying what male/female relationships mean at this time of the world, denying patriarchal enslavement.</p>
+<p>The "new age" movement is the same old exploitation of women, the same old lipservice paid to the importance of our contribution in order to bring our wonderful energy, our invaluable resources of mind and spirit, under the command of men again. It is patriarchy indulging its habit of siphoning off strong women and usurping their power by taking upon itself a veneer of female values - the same old Bygone Age Movement.</p>
+<p>Though more and more women are becoming aware of these tactics, our consciousness as a group is not rising in an unbroken column. We have occasional relapses, proof that our conditioned derogation of women's value is difficult for even enlightened women to overcome. A case in point was the response to the Past Age's so-called "harmonic convergence" - or "harmonica virgin," as my irreverent daughter Kari and others dubbed it.</p>
+<p>A couple of years ago, the men who lead the past age movement, as usual pirating women's ideas and power and battening on our energy, oracularly proclaimed that the time was near when celestial bodies would be so configured that for several hours on a certain day female energy would pour forth upon the earth. Their message was so affecting that on that day all over the country people betook themselves to the most naturally powerful spot they knew of to celebrate this great event with rituals and prayers and meditation. Ironically, thousands of people who would no more listen to women than to toads celebrated women's energy when directed to do so by men.</p>
+<p>The truth is that women's energy has been pouring forth upon this planet in the most extraordinary fullness, not for two hours, but nonstop for at least 200 years, rolling forth from all its sources in the universe - including us - like a mighty river of goodness and life. Some of us have been saying so for a long time. But because we are <i>women</i>, few men or women have seriously considered our message. It takes <i>men's</i> saying it, it takes male appropriation and management, to persuade even some feminists. We are too often still deaf to women's voices, blind to our own effect, unbelieving of our own achievements until men steal them, diminish them, and reintroduce them as their own - a major male strategy for keeping us from a knowledge of our power and stealing it from us at the same time.</p>
+<p>When men so generously bestowed upon us a few hours of women's energy, when they purred, "Oh, celebrate the glorious feminine!" many women were deeply moved. They felt so important and powerful and proud for that short time that they handed over their power without a murmur. I heard too few women question this male perversion of the truth.</p>
+<p>I want women to consider that nothing of value that is being said by the past age movement could even be <i>thought</i> if it weren't that women's mind has been waking for a couple of centuries, regaining its power, breaking its chains, and rising to transcendence on this planet - a phenomenon that is occurring <i>despite</i> men.</p>
+<p>Now everywhere we hear women's values, infiltrating, saturating every movement, nearly all of which are headed by men. Women's mode of being, and our Movement - the rising of half the human race out of bondage - is what is igniting the freedom fires ablaze now around the globe. Human consciousness is expanding and finally exploding from the heat of women's liberation. All present-day insurrections take their cue and their fire from women's energy and mind.</p>
+<p>I want women to own all this and to stop bowing at men's feet - men in this dimension or any other, to stop looking to men on any plane for leadership. I want women to recognize our own magnificent female powers of mind and spirit and to trust them without verification from the men, to start channeling our own living selves. <i>Nobody</i> outside us is wiser than we, regardless of their location in space and time. I want women, by listening to ourselves, to end this co-optation and perversion of women's material, the age-old phenomenon of men's vampiring our power, naming it their own, and using it to destroy life and joy.</p>
+<p>Women's gratitude for the few hours of female energy men "granted" them, when they could <i>wallow</i> if they would in the illimitable quantities of it, reminded me then of some women's equally blind and humble gratitude for the UN Decade of Women that ended in 1985. We were overwhelmed that men so generously gave us permission to use ten of their 5,000-or-so years to take a little peek at ourselves - only on condition that we do it their way, of course, which effectively foiled any possibility of a global slave revolt.</p>
+<p>Who are men that we think they can donate years to us? Do we really believe that men own time? What would happen if we believed the truth - that we could have all the decades we wanted, that we already do legitimately own them and could name them ours at any moment we took ourselves seriously enough to do it? The bestowal of the Decade upon us proves that <i>men</i> believe we could do this.</p>
+<p>Remembering that men never do anything that will actually benefit women but only appear to, so that everything they ostensibly do for us they are really doing for themselves, we recognize the Decade as a clever stratagem to divert our rebellion into controllable channels before we realized our power and took <i>everything</i>. Men know our power far better than we do. They fear us as the masters always fear the slaves, fear our waking up in the middle of the parade and seeing that they have no clothes on, no real power. And so they must constantly develop ruses to prevent us from recognizing that their control is maintained by legerdemain. They must keep us from discovering that they are powerful and we are powerless only <i>because they have succeeded in making us believe it</i>.</p>
+<p>Every day, however, more of us wake up to our magnificence and to the knowledge that our personal power is intensifying the fire of hope and change in which the world is being reborn. Soon men won't be able to fool any of us with such flimflam as harmonic convergences or women's decades.</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p><a id="fn1">[1]</a> Though these voices disingenuously proclaim that they are genderless, they use male names. Even clearer evidence that they are perceived as male is that their followers refer to them as "he" and "him," never as "it." When these followers were once feminists, they - also disingenously it seems to me - vow that <i>they</i> do not think of their entity as male at all, just as christian feminists often assure me that they do not think of god or Jesus as male. There is a powerful lot of self-deception going on here.</p>