The other two are the male and the female, and the male and the female are wisdom and understanding, hokmah and bina, wisdom and understanding. And these, the first unity when things take shape, and then the polarities, like the yin-yang, in turn give rise to seven other levels of the tree of life, and those constitute the world as we can know it, on any level. This is beyond knowledge, only spiritual insight can take one here.

[01:06]

But here is Malkuth, the kingdom, like the kingdom, the power, and the glory, kingdom, power, and the glory, to manifestations of Kether in the New Testament, our early hearkenings of the tree of life. And there is awareness here that a primordial unity gives rise to opposites, but in turn the opposites give rise to harmony. This is the heart, and this is yesad, yesad, the heart. This is the core of reality, Malkuth is the earth, the kingdom as we know it, the ground

[02:11]

that we stand on. And within all of us are macrocosms of the tree of life and all of its distinctions. So the Kabbalah says that the masculine and the feminine, or the male and the female, are necessary separations that move towards a higher fusion. The Liechi, the yin yang, says that the dynamic life is an interpenetration of the forces of the masculine and the feminine in terms of what is suitable at any given time. And so where it lies as it's whirling about, you know, whether it's like in the I Ching,

[03:19]

here we have yang, and here we have yin, well, almost all of reality, and in fact in the old text it's six lines, six unbroken, six broken. Well, you could rapidly see how many combinations of broken and unbroken lines you could have if there are six. One, two, three, four, five, six, it's sort of like a dovish torah, too easy to have too many or too few layers. Okay, well, here is one, here is another. Is this predominantly yin heading towards yang, predominantly yang heading towards yin? Well, in this case, because of the way in which it's drawn, it's predominantly yin heading

[04:20]

towards more yin, but all of these are dynamic changes, and as with the I Ching, if you toss the sticks or the coins, whatever comes up, assuming that there's credibility to it, I'm saying there is, would be what is appropriate then, not what is appropriate forever, because balance, harmony, isn't an absolute state. It's a state of using the Chinese and Japanese figure of speech of the unwobbly pivot that bends, that sways, and is not static. Its stability consists precisely in not being static.

[05:25]

Traditionally in religions especially, peace, tranquility, joy, is the peace that passes understanding that exists forever in a never-never land far beyond this veil of tears, permanent, fixed, certain, but balance from this point of view is what would be lopsided at one moment and totally out of harmony and out of kilter at another, because this is a world of dynamic flux, and the unwobbly pivot is the bamboo that sways in the breeze and not the rigid oak tree that cannot move.

[06:31]

So when a strong wind or hurricane comes along, the oak tree is uprooted and the frail-looking bamboo, having an adaptable and resilient equanimity, survives. So then the whole concept here of flux, of interpenetration and change, is one which would say that stability and balance are situational, are appropriate. You know the line goes somewhat, what is the line, they say peace, peace, and there is no peace, where is that line from, you know the line, something like that. To be in total equanimity when the house is on fire is most unsuitable.

[07:39]

No doubt you've read any number of Zen texts that use the image of the house on fire, but it isn't exactly the time to sit and meditate for eight hours, it's time to lift your ass up and get, and that's what's appropriate. And likewise, what is appropriate in terms of the masculine and the feminine are in what in gestalt terms we call a figure-ground relationship. In different times and in different ways, some components stand out in the forefront and others are the background. If for example we were looking at, let us imagine here is the Mona Lisa, La Chaconda,

[08:44]

and I said, hey look at her eyes, her eyes would be figure, it would be the focus of attention, it would be of importance, the rest would be background. If I say, look at the perspective of the fields, look at the perspective of the little castle remote and afar, her face, her body would all be background, her eyes would be ground, the figure would be what would normally be a detail. And so the figure-ground relationship states that in a given situation, in a given gestalt, in a given configuration, some element will stand predominant and other elements will not be conspicuous. Imagine, as on the cover of the book The Assertive Woman, that La Chaconda had bright red lipsticks.

[09:53]

Or imagine that she had a great big pockmark right over here, or a mustache. Now a mustache wouldn't be adding very much or changing much in the entire painting, but if we gave her a nice curved mustache, the entire configuration, the entire gestalt would be changed because the figure-ground relationship would be altered. Well much of what is considered sex-coded behavior has exactly that, a figure-ground relationship, and a lot of conflict occurs when that which conforms to the norms of the figure-ground relationship of one group occurs in another context where the figure-ground relationships are different.

[10:57]

Like for me, I'm very, very dressed up today. You know, this is very, very dressed up. I've been known to wear a suit. I've also been known to be very dark, calm and all the rest, but for the most part I go around looking very much like a chalet. And I went to Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith to see my stockbroker a while ago and was just about thrown out of the building. And it was really funny. It was really funny. Figure-ground relationship. Now they didn't figure that I had in the ground, I guess, as much as I do from the way I was dressed, but the figure-ground relationship. I was out of sync with their expectations and their norms, and I came in looking like what they would consider a panhandler, a degenerate, and even worse, someone who takes

[12:13]

toilet paper from the dispenser with his right hand or something like that. So I would violate their figure-ground norms very acutely. Well, at any rate, I've given you a mighty quick synopsis of a metallurgical conception in philosophy, of the Gestalt theory of perception in psychology, and a couple of other things that relate to physics and how we think as points of departure that at times might have looked as though they were very remote from what we were talking about. But I hope that as our first half of today's session comes to a send, it's coming together,

[13:23]

and you can see where a certain view of the universe, a certain conception of what makes sense, a commitment to thinking and speaking in ways that make sense, and taking things as they are, there is and not there ought, is right on when it comes to this utterly misunderstood subject. And I think what we'd move on to next would be different ways in which the masculine and feminine have been understood. And then on the 24th of February, I'll bring in some Stone Age sculptures and all sorts of things like that, and maybe we'll do some ritual magic with them as well, and all sorts

[14:28]

of things, and go into the actual imagery of the masculine and feminine, and especially the feminine and its various meanings in art, and especially in history, and especially in the spiritual experience. So I've enjoyed the last several months so much. I broke my watch. I was trying to replace the battery, and somehow the watch and I didn't get along too well. So fortunately it broke, and it took me until a few days ago to bring it to the repair shop. But for a long time now, even though I have some other watches that I put away and I haven't gotten them out, it's been so liberating. But, you know, the old professor says time has no meaning.

[15:33]

Whoops, class is over. But it's been so liberating. How do we stand time-wise? About ten after five. Does anyone have any thoughts to share before we break or rush up and beat up? I'm just thinking back and forth through the talk about, I know for myself that the roles are changing so much now. My own ideas of what I find attractive in a man, what I think of myself. There's just that definition, I mean, for men and women today, at least in the Bay Area, it's just really evolving. And it's a really confusing time. There doesn't seem to be that much ground. I feel that most people are open to groping for a new understanding.

[16:35]

Yeah, and I think too, if I may say, we'll get into this in the next session, when we talk about exactly how these terms operate and how they're defined, and especially more along the psychological and sociological levels of things, and we'll bring in good old Jung, Zanima, and Animas, and all the rest. But it's a fiction that the past was always stable and static. There have always been fads and fashions, hysterias, revivals. The great age of faith, the 13th century, was a time that the north of Italy and half of France was involved with the Qatari movement, where people spoke in tongues, had visions, didn't go to church, had sacraments of their own at home, and all the rest. And that was the great age of faith of St. Thomas Aquinas.

[17:38]

So, you know, the past never had the stability that it was all cracked up to have had for either the privileged classes or the working classes or whatever. There have been prolonged periods of rather rigidly enforced superficial conformity, but the perfect example of that is Victorian prudery, when pornography reached levels of popularity that were never surpassed. So, there has always been confusion, and that's why there have always been people around to tell you what's right and what's wrong. People don't do things like that. If there aren't confused and changing standards,

[18:44]

I'm all for the confusion, for the most part, but I bitterly resent being told. But when I look back, I don't find much encouragement. I find encouragement in looking ahead. I find encouragement in saying, hey, we can knock off so much bullshit. We can knock off so much hardware and artillery of the past that sounded so profound and was unmitigated bull. So, we have a job to do, and maybe in little and humble ways, not in gigantic ways where we legislate like Charlton Heston with the tablets in hand for all of humanity, but in much humbler, lesser ways that we become our own self-legislators.

[19:52]

So, I find the hope and the encouragement, not in the golden age of the past, because the past was lousy. The present isn't very good either. The only hope is to do something better tomorrow, today and tomorrow, as far as I'm concerned. And I find periods of great ages of faith, of great political and civil leaders, of men who were men, women who were women, and heroes who were heroes, and this that were this and that that was that. When I look back, maybe other people, the much nicer things, when they look back, having been an art dealer for many years, I tend to believe that most of what we call antiques that have come down is the junk that didn't get demolished years ago,

[20:55]

that somehow escaped the garbage heap. So, just because something is old doesn't make it good. Just because it's hallowed doesn't make it right. Just because it's enunciated in a very pompous tone of voice doesn't make it sacred or profound. So, I say, though our knees may knock and we have immense uncertainty and less knowledge, what we have is something to work with. And that's it. And let's get to it. Anybody else have a comment or thought to share?

[21:57]

Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to drop the helmet.

[23:29]

Excuse me? I'm going to drop the helmet. Go on. Okay. So, we were talking before about the distinction between terms like male and female, which refer to biological, organic distinctions, and culturally defined terms like masculine and feminine, such that types of dress, behavior, and all the rest that are defined as one in one culture or subcultural group may in another period be defined exactly the opposite way in another time, such that fancy hairstyles are very masculine for men in the age of the pompadour and all. If you watch the rerun movies and so on of the forties,

[24:31]

women had simple hair, talked a bit about Madame Pompadour, and when pompadours were worn by females in the age of Louis XIV, women had fancy hair, and so on. Now, I would like to pursue some of these distinctions a bit further and clarify them as well, both for a point of departure to going into the psychology and sociology, what it meant especially about feminists, and also to give a bit of clarification for those who weren't here at the earlier session. Now, we know both from empirical biology that male organisms contain what are called vestiges, though they may not be actually vestiges, but counterparts to female organisms.

[25:35]

Female organs have hormones that are feminine. Likewise, females have testosterone, clitoris, which is a counterpart phylogenetically to penis, and so on. So that in terms of empirical biology, the line of demarcation, not in terms of what is culturally defined, but what is biologically defined between male and female, is a matter of preponderance and not a matter of an either-or. Especially in a species like man, the distinction is much more blurry than when one is talking about male and female plants, in which the male, as the producer of the spore or sperm equivalent,

[26:39]

has very little, if any, phylogenetic connection to the female plant. But this was something that the early Chinese were aware of to a very large extent, that we see in the Vietji, the yin-yang, in which the microcosm of the universe in the person, or macrocosmically in nature, the world, or what was commonly called, for want of a better term to translate it, providence, providence, macrocosmically, there was an interchange, not of polar opposite forces. This, let me begin with a blunt statement,

[27:41]

is an utter distortion of the yin-yang distinction. No polarity in the sense of opposition, contradictories. Rather, what in logic you would call contraries, polar contraries. So that, for example, in a given day, your tummy may say, not malto meal, but bland food, another day, loads and loads of salsa on the burrito. And so the vigor or intensity of one day is the natural harmonious balance of that day. And the blandness, mildness of the malto meal day,

[28:42]

when you have a New Year's hangover or something of that sort, is very appropriate and in balance for that day. And so the whole perspective here is that balance is not an absolute immovable point. But as I said before, balance is an unwobbly pivot. It is a centering in terms of the appropriate dynamic for that point, for that day, for that time, for that experience. If someone were to die in front of your eyes, unfortunately that just happened to me recently, and I was acutely upset by it,

[29:46]

I would think it would have been peculiar not to have been upset by it, even though the Buddha said, you know, walking on the road, if you see a corpse, this and that and that, those were metaphorical and hyperboles. They're not intended for everyday behavior. It is in balance, in harmony, and full of human heartedness. To be off kilter when an off kilter experience occurs. There is a core of constancy that is there, that is expressed in a manifestation that is a different manifestation from another time. So the core harmony has an external expression that may vary in its intensity of yin or yang, let us say,

[30:49]

depending upon the situation. So if you're on the firing line, on a battlefield, certainly it would be appropriate to have a lot of adrenaline going. If you are doing your sitting meditation, then it would be appropriate for there to be a minimal adrenaline flow. Both would be in balance and in harmony because the core would be well centered to the reality of the experience of life as it's lived. So the wholeness, the balance, is not a fixed state. The only thing that is fixed about it is that it's balanced, is that it's centeredness. But the form in which the centeredness is expressed

[31:55]

is utterly varying in a world of constant change. And in a world of people, as we will soon see when we talk about Jung's psychological types, are very different yous and mes. And so the appropriateness of what is an appropriate balance for one person and another may be quite different. The quality may be the same, but the expression is quite different. Now, we saw that although the diagram shows the Viet Chi very static, a light side, a dark side, and a yin component within the yang, and a yang component within the yin,

[32:58]

that in actuality, especially as developed in the I Ching, in Neo-Confucianism, and in Taoism, is that this is a very dynamic process. The passive is active, actively going into the active. The active is very passive, actively going into the passive. There is constant motion, constant change. And again, to review, as we saw, the hexagrams for the yang and the yin, the six unbroken lines, the six broken lines are merely the extremes, and most of life is experienced as something in between.

[34:06]

Or whatever. Almost did a heptagram. At any rate, that is balance. That is balance. That is balance at the appropriate time, according to this perspective. And so it's rather ironic and unusual, isn't it, that in ancient China, there was an awareness that came into the West only in the 1920s, when the psychological and sociocultural implications of Heisenberg's indeterminacy became widely known. Namely, that we do not live in a static universe, or even in a process universe,

[35:16]

aimed to an end, to a goal. We live in a universe in which a lot goes on, and a lot goes on that we, even in theory, can never know, not to say in practice. And there's a spectacular adventure of ignorance, ignorant groping, and having a ball, and doing what traditions have said the gods did for us, namely creating universes. Now, here we are. Here's the world, whether it began with a big bang, as it is now. Whether the world as it is now began doesn't matter anyway,

[36:20]

because it began as a big bang. It began because it was compressed from a previous exploded world that contracted. So, it's all fairly immaterial, except that we know for sure the universe is a mighty chaotic place. So-called iron laws of science, only archaic fossilized people of the 19th century believe in any more. I talked earlier today about Marxist iron laws of history determinism, and all the rest, and the inevitable this and the inevitable that, the inevitable contradictions of capitalism, and the inevitable triumph of the working class, and to me it sounds like a lot of Jehovah's Witnesses' inevitables that inevitably the good guys and the bad guys are going to be on each side and literally have one hell of a battle. But we're not that smart.

[37:24]

And Heisenberg, I think rightly pointed out, we can't be that smart. So here we are in a stuck predicament. Now, let's look at us in a stuck predicament. Man in, using the popular word today, alienation. The word goes back to Hegel in 1804, so it's not so new. But alienation. Hegel, now Hegel is famous for being unreadable. And if there's one thing about apocryphal things that people are famous for, it's that they're usually right. And Hegel is impossible to read in German, as well as in English translation. But one thing that is very readable

[38:29]

is the introduction to his Phenomenology of Mind. Some translations it's called Phenomenology of Mind, some translations it's called Phenomenology of the Spirit. The German word is Geist, and if you know the word Geist, you'll know it can be translated either way. But the spirit is probably a better term. Hegel, way back then, in 1804, in Germany, not in England when the Industrial Revolution was going on, said one of the characteristics of modern man is that there is an increased separation of man from roots, an increased separation of man from marketplace, from finished goods. There is not an organic link between producer, consumer, or people in between.

[39:31]

Produce is transported, manufactured goods are imported, and the traditional ties to the soil, to the town, to the family, to the extended community, to the national tradition, are exploding away, and man is cut off or made an alien from his society, economically, socially, politically, his infrasociety, his family, his acquaintances, and himself. Because with the death of traditional faith, man no longer feels a sense of linkage with upstairs.

[40:34]

So he doesn't feel a sense of linkage here, doesn't feel a sense of linkage there. Now, Hegel was supposed to have been an extremely reactionary Prussian. Well, there was Hegel. Marx just lifted it lock, stock, and barrel. And then American sociologists, who of course couldn't use Marx's name unless they lose their tenure jobs and their six or eight teaching assistants, because the next professor, you know, the most precious commodity to a research professor is a handful of teaching assistants to do all your unpleasant tasks. And, you know, so lest anything like that happen, American social science adopted universally the word alienation

[41:37]

without giving credit to where it was popularized. But this is the phenomenon. Now, alienation, when it first appeared, of course, was addressed to males, because the radicals of the early 19th century, for example, indeed very much like the radicals of today, were a few of these sexes. Name one female political leader in the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia, Red China, Vietnam. So, I think a parable, of course.

[42:38]

But one manifestation of alienation that has come to consciousness today is the problem of sexism. And what's left upon us is something new. It's as new as alienation. There was alienation for thousands of years before there was the word. But when George Sand went around in men's clothing, she got away with it, because she was a great writer and had friends in powerful places and so on. She was accustomed to this. When Jane Austen wrote five of the greatest novels in the English language,

[43:40]

she wrote them in the living room of her home on little folded eighths of paper. And on these eighths of paper, in the super bourgeois home, are the manuscripts of five of the great novels of the English language. But Joan of Arc, at any point, you can just close your eyes and take a chronological chart and go zap. If you look at the transcript of the heresy trial of Joan of Arc, then the entire transcript exists. The worst offense that she committed was blaspheming God and God's creation by wearing the clothes of a man.

[44:41]

Secondly, claiming to hear voices and oracles unauthorized by the church. But the first was the most important charge. And if she would recant the first, she would have been let off on the second. That's all in the transcript. But she said, I guess, Not thy will be done, but well done, thou good and faithful servant. And that was the end of Joan of Arc. Well done. Well... It is a little whammy involved, which is so utterly ignored. Now, I'll go sort of by a backdoor,

[45:45]

namely Freud, to you. And I know him. And I know him. Yeah, Freudian slap. Now, good old Freud, in one of the last books that he wrote, Civilization and Its Discontents, in the opening chapter, on the second page, no, second paragraph, the first page, says, Within the bosom of every human being is cannibalism, incest, and murder. No. You are, inside, a person who can commit incest. You, inside, can love thy neighbor so much

[46:48]

that you'll have him for dinner broiled or basted. And you can go, Bang, bang, you rat. Good riddance, and I'm glad. So said Freud. Okay? Now, the funny thing about it is that, darn it, I don't think it was a Freudian slap. We are, as the whole universe is, utterly incomplete beings with a whole jumble of instincts and anxieties, fears and joys and loves and lusts and all sorts of jumbled together things that don't make much sense to us. And so we spend most of our waking hours putting immense amounts of energy,

[47:50]

keeping the lid on all that and denying that it exists. It's a large portion of the investment of life energy of anybody. Me? Maybe there's someone in this room who doesn't. I don't know. I'd like to get your autograph for posterity. If there is, you'd be the first person ever to have no, as Freud called it, id, no instinctual, irrational core to your personality. Well, if you ain't done it, you'd be quite surprised. One of the roots of alienation which Hegel and Marx never talked about is the inner conflict of a thousand and one contradictory desires,

[48:56]

drives and impulses within the person, within each one of us. And so our alienation is first and foremost an alienation from self. He talked about society, culture, religion, family. Marx and Engels added, especially Engels, the means of production. But first and foremost is the alienation from self that is old hat to some of the wise guys of foregone years. But in terms of the modern West, took some very far out people

[50:00]

like Freud and Jung to point out. And of course, like so many people with new or good ideas, they ran hard wild with them and went into so many complicated theories about it all that nobody believed any of it because it was all, in the long run, such a fabrication of fantasies. So the cores that were on the beam were easy to ignore because there was so much gobbledygook connected with it. But alienation from self is the core of that. Alienation from a sense of well-being and centeredness within one's own entity, one's own self. I'm not talking about a metaphysical entity, something invisible in us. I'm talking about a well-being.

[51:03]

A tranquility means that there is constant warfare and strife going on. And this warfare and strife takes place within the varying components within oneself, which we'll get to right at the end of tonight's session, but also with other people. And the so-called battle of the sexes is a good manifestation of that. People rarely need to show power, authority, or supremacy if they don't fear its absence within them. How can we be certain, for example, that the ancient Israelites very rarely went to the Hebrew temple

[52:08]

but practiced the Canaanite fertility cults, had sexual intercourse on the threshing floors, at the hilltops, at full moon, and all the rest, if the prophets and the others didn't scream bloody murder about it all the time? People don't yell and howl and protest about things if nothing's going on. And there are no prohibitory laws if people aren't breaking the law right and left. So one measure of how our society functions is to look at its legal prohibitions. And if you look at the no-nos, you get pretty much a darn good idea of what's going on beneath it all. Well, the battle of the sexes. There's been so much speculation and hard wash about this that it's incredible. But one person who early feminists seized hold of very much

[53:13]

was a German writer, Bachofen. He was an early, I guess we call him now, sociologist. He wrote a book. I don't know if it's in English or not. Das Mutterrecht. And it's The Mother Rule, Law, and Right. It'll be all three in German. In which Bachofen suggests that in antiquity, where there is a considerable indication of many early peoples having female-type of leadership and all the rest, and family names through the mother and not the father and so on and so on, that the source of the power of women

[54:14]

was in the ability to do what men didn't know anything about, and that was to give birth. Only a German would think along these lines. And that when the mystery of how birth occurred, namely that it took two to tangle, and there's a relationship between the development in size of the uterus and what took place a little bit before on the part of the man, and men suddenly discovered that they had a part to play in the reproductive cycle, that then men seized power from women. And then the matriarchy was supplanted by patriarchy. Well, it's just too pat to be true.

[55:15]

And only a German can do that number because there is enough to go on that gives a certain degree of plausibility and credibility to several of its points. But if many other species of life know the connection, there is little doubt that Uga Uga and Naga Naga in their Neolithic caves didn't know the distinction between the act of sex and the act of reproductive life. But more to the point, more to the point, going back to the Nietzsche, the woman in the sense of the feminine

[56:20]

has had a historic, psychological, symbolic connection with the earth, Mother Earth, if you will. And in February, in our second session, I will bring in some Neolithic female sculptures and you will see for yourself. But undoubtedly, in food-gathering times, life lived close to the earth required everyone's effort to survive. And so just to survive in a Neolithic era would certainly have required little social distinction among the sexes.

[57:24]

And then in the early agrarian society as well, the woman, fertility, and the symbolism shows itself even in the sexual right, as I alluded to, among the Canaanites and the Hebrews who followed suit. And as you see in Japan in the fields of phalluses, of vagina symbols to promote fertility in the fields, that the necessities of early pre-commercial agrarian life may well have been such that there was a very high degree of equality. The studies that have come down of early tribal leadership in ancient peoples and literatures

[58:29]

and in an area where I have studied it, in mid-eastern cultures, it is incredible. Well, the further back you go, the more tribal leaders and so on you find who are female. But right off bat, with the shift to commerce, division of labor, and the inability to have collective care of children and things of that sort, one can assume, again, a measure of credibility to the extreme exaggeration of his work and point of view that the division of labor made the woman not only the child-bearer, but then the child-raiser,

[59:30]

especially as there was a further move from hunting and gathering as well as planting to commerce and hunting and gathering. The children, especially the sons, but sons and daughters are close to the father. And so the division of labor over the ages produced this battle of senses. And it's rather interesting, the word woman in early Arabic writing, in early forms of Semitic writing, is never used as a scornful term. But from the age of commerce on,

[60:31]

if you called a man a woman, you were cursing him. Or if you said to a woman, well, you are just a woman, that meant that you were a subordinate life form. And so the change in economic society, the beginnings of commerce, agrarian commerce, produced a division of labor that resulted in subordination of roles. Which is quite interesting, since there had been priestesses well before there were priests, and so on. And the woman as the healer goes back incredibly far into prehistory, not that there weren't men who were shamans and so on.

[61:36]

But division of labor, division of labor, division of labor, subordination. So that the spiritual role of the woman was defined in terms of new law codes in which the woman's job was to serve her lord in heaven and her lord on earth. And in both cases, her master. And so I think this is some of the historic socio-economic ideology of the subordination of women. And it's interesting because ever since then, women have sought incessantly over the centuries in offbeat ways, counter-cultural ways,

[62:37]

to express spiritual interests in cults, in illicit movements, in secret societies, the so-called witches of the 17th and 18th century and all the rest, for the most part were not gals going around with black peaked hats flying around on brooms, but secret cults that went way back in their origin to rites of immense antiquity that were recapitulated through the ages. But essentially, the very definition of woman was as chattel, as property. So that in the Genesis account of the creation of Eve,

[63:39]

she was created out of Adam to be a servant. So that the job of woman is to rejoice in good service and perpetuate the tribe, the faith, the nation, the race, and things of that sort. And yet, with all of that as the official line, in as male-dominated period as the 16th century, there was Queen Elizabeth as an almost absolute dictator in her rule of England. Her rival for power of the throne of Scotland was another woman in Mother Russia, where women have been more subordinate

[64:44]

than in most places in the West. Many times the Russian rulers were female. In China, the last significant ruler was the Empress Dowager. And Great Britain has wonderful Maggie Thatcher today. And who knows, we may have heard of, who knows, some people have said Mrs. Black. You know who Mrs. Black is? Good ship, Lalipa. Shirley Temple Black. As our future president, who knows. But it's interesting that the significance of woman is in very select periods

[65:46]

and select areas. When there is a vacuum and not much is known what to do, a woman is put up front. She usually will roll like a tyrant straight in the thing out. Catherine, Elizabeth, and so on. Now, but these are always regarded as special people. They either never married or they married a multiple number of times and had yet more lovers. And if you know anything about Catherine, she didn't stop with the human race. She liked, she was a lover of horses. Not at the track. But at any rate, take for example, religion. Mary Baker Eddy. Look in the newspaper.

[66:49]

Spiritualistic and Theosophical groups. Most of them are led by women. Astrology. Mostly women. And women have had to go to the fringes and the edges for their spiritual self-expression in a leadership way. Otherwise it's do good, keep your nose clean, and stay on the sidelines. It's interesting that being an Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian Buddhist, the ordination of women that has recently been approved by the Episcopal Church in the United States means that bishops that don't like it can refuse to have female priests

[67:50]

perform within their diocese and in the Church of England and the Anglican Church elsewhere Uh-huh. No, never. And only one of the women who have been ordained to the priesthood have been put in full charge of the parish of the many that have been thus far. So it's idiocy to me that they want to do it. They should recognize that the wrong is the wrong time. The wrong place. What's the matter? Hm? Well, maybe well, actually, point of fact, there are so few jobs available the Church is losing out so much that learning matters. But the power struggle is such that there is a dynamic involved that

[68:52]

with most people in order to feel good about oneself you have to put down the other person. So whether it's a race or whether it's a nationality or whether it's a sexual group there's a tremendous investment in one's own well-being in putting down someone else. So if, um if you're a Swiss well, he's an Italian! And if you're an Italian well, he's a Swiss! That's part of feeling good. The more people that you can despise the better you feel about yourself. You know, if you're here and they're here and you're not feeling so great that's not very pleasant. So you can't go up you just

[69:52]

push them down. Then you feel great. And they're all the way down there. So there is a tremendous psychological investment in the put-down on whatever level regardless of race, color, creed sex, or national origin there's a tremendous investment in the put-down. Now, as Uncle Sigmund pointed out there's a tremendous investment in being put down in defining yourself as a poor woman let's say or whatever the case may be and assuming and accepting all the

[70:53]

miserable things that are said about the group because it gives you a definition in this chaotic world and a definition as being a rather low-grade type of human being is still a definition. It is a place in the order of things. And especially if part of one's conditioning is non-competitiveness that being a woman you accept only this and only that and only that then there is a vested interest in opposing or even hating other women who are striving for equality or self-expression

[71:55]

or have achieved something. In fact, I've noticed it's very rare that a woman will praise another woman who has a position of high responsibility. Men will praise her. Men will praise men. But it's part of the oppressed mentality to resent those of one's own group who have attained anything. They must be resented. They must be despised. The same phenomenon exists in other oppressed communities among gays. Very rare that a gay

[72:57]

who has attained something will be praised by other gays. Quite the contrary. Quite the contrary. Much more likely to be acute negativity because so many oppressed people have a fantastic investment in their oppression. And this is right smack at that irrational core in man that Freud called cannibalism, incest, and murder. And I think one can add self-hatred, hatred of others, feeling lousy about oneself, about the world, about opportunities, about all the rest. And so it's part of the mentality

[74:00]

of oppression that the oppressed person not only feel oppressed but perpetuate the oppression himself or herself. Now here we have us and the world as we experience it. You talk about mood turns. It's active, it's passive, it's everything in between. It's light, it's dark, it's everything in between. It's in all of us. It's male, it's female, it's everything in between. And I don't know particularly of anything other than Jung's distinction of anima and animus

[75:02]

that is a clear-cut psychological differentiation between men and women. Only in the symbolic life is there this tendency and Jung near the end of his life acknowledged that he overstated it and that it is not as universal and total and complete and applicable to everybody as he initially claimed was the case. Now Jung in part inspired of the yin-yang and in which you notice the core of yin within yang and yang within yin indicated that there is a psychological feminine component within males which he called the anima. Note the feminine ending. And the counterpart of that

[76:07]

is a masculine component in females, the animus, the male ending. There is a tendency in the dream and fantasy life of men to project as the ideal image of fulfillment a female like Dante's Beatrice. There is a tendency in the dream life, symbolic life, art and literature of females to project the hero, the ideal, even the image of the self as a male. The dominant character in all but two of the writings of America's greatest female novelist

[77:07]

Willa Cattler is a male. The archbishop in Death Comes to the Archbishop is her working out of the masculine component within herself. Or in the poetry of Christina Rossetti in many, many places. In American literature there's an excellent anima novel, She, by Ritter Haggard, in which the goal of one's whole being, of one's whole idealization is personified for the male as the female, for the female as the male.

[78:07]

And so these components of masculine and feminine imagery are in polar expression within each person. Jung observed that a person who is a male who cannot deal with his anima, with his feminine component, will either be acutely effeminate or acutely brutal. In either case, the person will be denying the feminine component by either submerging into it or utterly repudiating it.

[79:10]

Likewise, the female who does not deal with her masculine component will either be a really silly thing or a brutalized, vicious person. In neither case is there the use of the respective feminine and masculine components which in the male is utilized in terms of sensitivity that combines with strength, and in the female is strength that combines with sensitivity. These are proper uses of these respective components,

[80:14]

and they wind up making people people. So even where there are these polar distinctions, their most creative use is in bringing wholeness, inclusion, a larger, broader dimension to the person, and not a narrowing of perspective, of role identity, or anything of the sort. That's the odd thing about the net result of it all. It means that the wholesomely

[81:16]

integrated male psyche produces a wholesome, integrated person. The wholesome, integrated female psyche produces a wholesome, integrated person. And we just spoke about what it boils down to. Now, to be untrue to the components that make up one's being, to be untrue to oneself, means that one pays a price. The price is being

[82:19]

off the center, off the balance of being condemned to a perennially, perpetuatedly, exaggerated state to one's entire life. And so, to be out of touch with these components and not utilize them for every horizon that their self-expression can bring you to, whether it's to poetry, to music, to the beauty of the sunset, to jogging, to bouncing around on a punching bag at a gym, to anything and everything that is an expression of one's life and one's being, is to be crippled

[83:21]

and have a crippled psyche. And if the spiritual life is the projection from ourselves of our yearnings beyond ourselves and responding back to that transcendent experience, if we do it with part of our being, only, we are doing it utterly and completely. To have a spiritual life, for example, in which all of the images and media that have personified form are all male or all female,

[84:23]

is sort of like reading a book in which every other word is blanked out. It doesn't make much sense and it has no unity and wholeness. So the whole of one's being projected through media that represent who one is require projecting through a multitude of media so that the components within us are all deeply encountered and developed. I've often suggested to people since I erased a portion of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life that remembering that

[85:26]

the crown, Kether, the golden radiance not the sun, but the golden radiance is at the top, I've often suggested to people that they meditate with a brass-top thumbtack on the wall that masculine, feminine, but it's glorious, bright, it's illuminating, it brings us to the highest dimensions of illumination. But in personal imagery, since we include all people and certainly both sexes in each of ourselves, it is a denial of our own being to not utilize

[86:28]

the expression and the enjoyment of these components. The expression and the enjoyment. Like... Well, I'm doing this next week and next month, but... To me, the enjoyment is so important. When you go to meditation, you sort of say, Hi, Tara, hi, Buddha, you know, how are you doing, kid? And kind of have a good plus vibe about it because it's all here, you know? That stuff is all components of us. And the more significantly true to us, these external components are, the more all of us transcends and comes back

[87:30]

and is back transcendent. Which is the whole purpose of meditation. Samsara is nirvana. But samsara includes the male, the female, animal, vegetable, mineral, the hills, the waters, the sky, the sun, the moon, everything. So everything is a vehicle and an expression, including for enjoyment. So, to me, it's easy enough, though, to talk about what you or I can do as individuals and overlook the extreme investment that people have in their oppression and being oppressed.

[88:33]

And very frankly, you know, I'm politically highly interested and have acted politically most of my life. And I'm just amazed that I have opportunistic vehicles of political expression or changing attitudes and involvement that I haven't given up still looking for the rainbow, I guess. But I know for sure that individually, no matter what, that wholeness of enjoying one's total sexuality in all of its components and lifting it to transcendent levels and bring it right back to here

[89:37]

and now can be done if we are in an oppressive society, a society more oppressive than our own, less oppressive, or whatever. In the Eastern Orthodox liturgy, there's a beautiful passage in which the priest asks God to take these offerings of the bread and wine from the altar on earth to the altar in heaven and exalt them and bring them back with celestial majesty for the enjoyment and use of his people. Now, I'm not devoutly Christian enough to take any of that stuff literally,

[90:44]

but I think there's a heck of a whammy to the celebration.

[90:53]

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