We come to love not by finding a perfect person,
but by learning to see an  imperfect person perfectly. --SK

I knew philosopher Sam Keen as a neighbor and friend in the Methow Valley in northermost Washington state in the early 1980s, when he published this book.  His interest in Tantra, his zest for the joyful life and for his passionate new marriage were abundantly clear, and a testament to his clarity of spirit.  We danced on several occasions under starlit skies "To a Dancing God."  Therefore I have included this excerpt from his book on loving.  As well as a professor of philosophy and religion, and godfather of the men's movement, Sam was also a contributing editor with Psychology Today.

Sam coined a term, homo analgesia for "the species that can remain insensitive to pain or pleasure without the loss of consciousness."   According to Sam, "the erotic myth holds that love is not primarily something we make or do, but something we *are.*  We do not define it so much as it defines us.  Before it is ever manifest as an activity or behavior, love is that impulse, motivation, or energy that links us to the whole web of life." He asserts that the passionate life is a continuing dialogue between self and other...a "loving combat."  To become who we are we must learn to westle.  Push-pull.  Yes-no.  Love must be muscular, to enter the contest, to endure the agony, of the clash between points of view.  Mature love is about the transformation of desire.  To love is to be about the task of healing.

Tantra, tantric yoga, or kundalini yoga is an ancient philosophy and practice linking sexuality and consciousness that has appeared in widely separated time and places.  (See Arthur Avalon, The Serpent Power, New York; Down Publications, 1974, or Mircea Eliade, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom, New York; Bollingen, 1958.)  It has cropped up in different forms in India, Tibet, and Mexico has well as in the writings of the alchemists, in mystical Christianity, and in theosophy.  It central idea, which seems to have occurred independently to a large number of early thinkers and spiritual adventurers, is that the body contains a number (usually seven) of physio-psychic centers that may become suffused by a current of "sexual" energy that leads to an expansion of consciousness or enlightenment.  Although there is a lush variety of symbols in the various traditions, we can identify a common core of beliefs.

In Tantra, as in most forms of sophisticated mysticism, there is a fundamental belief that the human spirit and body are united with the cosmos.  It can be stated in several ways.  As below, so above; deeper in is further our; the microcosm reflects the macrocosm; every level of hierarchy of being can be fond within man; the human mind is a hologram of the universe.

In the concrete symbolism of religion, this belief is frequently presented in a pictorial way by showing how the human spine, with its seven ascending centers of energy (or chakras), is analogous to the seven-story cosmic mountain--Mt. Meru, Mt. Sinai or Mt. Analogue.  This mountain-spine forms a world pole (axis mundi) uniting the lower realms (Hades, the unconscious), middle earth (the everyday world of the ego), and the heavens (the ideal but unseen structures, powers and presences that underlie and in-form all visible reality.)  Each of the seven centers of the body vibrates with its cosmic counterpart.  We tune in to different levels of reality.

Physical/mental/spiritual illness results from any blockage that prevents us from communication or resonance.  Health is being full-bodied, allowing the entire range of cosmic rhythms and intentions to inhabit and harmonize the various physio-psycho-spiritual systems within the body.  The story of how we move from dis-ease to health is identical with the account of the ascent of consciousness and the metamorphosis of EROS.  We become whole by becoming citizens of each of the seven kingdoms of love.

The tantric consensus is that there is a single primal energy-spirit-consciousness that flows through all the cosmos and informs each person.  The path of maturation, enlightenment, or transformation involves allowing this power (which is called kundalini or serpent power in the East) to rise up the spine and infuse each of the centers.

In tantric imagery, the food that nourishes the nervous system during the elevation of consciousness is the seminal fluid in men and the erotic fluids in women.  The sexual fluid stream up the hollow channel in the middle of the spine (the susumna) and floods each of the chakras until it reaches the brain, at which point enlightenment occurs, with accompanying ecstasy.  As the concentrated energy (called variously prana, chi, holy spirit, libido, or orgone) passes through the chakras, it purifies the body and mind and reunites sexuality and spirituality.

Among some scholars and esoteric aspirants, there is a tendency to take the symbolism so literally that it makes nonsense out of Tantra.  Much of the interpretive literature discusses quite seriously whether there really is a channel in the spine through which sexual fluid might rise.  Such literalism  misses the point.  The most valuable thing we may learn from tantric symbolism is a vision of how eros may be transformed, of how sexuality matures, of how desire expands, of how motivation changes, in the course of an authentic life journey.

Consider, for instance, the symbolic meaning in the image of the sexual fluid as the fuel of consciousness.  It is a fact of science as well as an abiding mystery that the intentions and history of the entire evolutionary process is carried in the genes and chromosomes that flow together with the union of sperm and ovum.  Whatever nature or God is striving to create through this long drama of evolution is implicit in our drive to reproduce.  The sexual organs do respond to the entire symphony of being.  There is an intentionality, a telos, a purpose, a meaning, a direction encoded within our quest for pleasure.  If we understand eros in its fullest sense, we my discover in sexual experience an impulse that may guide us in the unfoldment of consciousness.  Perhaps our deepening desire is our surest path toward the sacred.  Why should it be so startling to suggest that the cortex (a late-comer in the evolutionary story) might eventually fully understand the cosmic intention that is programmed into the sexual fluids? (Might the image of the kundalini serpent winding its way up the spine be an intuitive prefiguration of the helix of the DNA?)

We make the best use of Tantra if we play with its symbolism.  I suggest that the seven chakras are symbols of different stages of life and the philosophies and erotic practices that accompany them.  The kundalini symbolism is an early developmental psychology.  Each chakra represents and orientation to life that is appropriate to a certain stage of the pilgrimage of the psyche.  These stages and their correlation to the progression of consciousness and the transformations of eros suggested in this work are as follows:

1.  Anal Chakra.  Symbolizes bonding or possession, being held or grasping.

2.  Genital chakra.  Symbolizes the orientation to life as pleasure, play and game.

Chakras 1 and 2 are parallel to the psychological development of the child, and the sexual awakening of adolescence.  The rebel impulse is not encouraged within Eastern philosophy or culture.

3.  The solar plexus.  Symbolizes the orientation to life as power.

Chakra 3 is parallel to the psychological development of the adult.

4.  The heart chakra.  Symbolizes falling in love with the ideal, romance, passion.

5.  The throat chakra.  Symbolizes purgatory, repentance, eating one's projections.

Chakras 4 and 5 parallel the psychological development of the outlaw, the first love affair with a transpersonal self, and the process of metanoia necessary to free the spirit from the myths, roles, and defense mechanisms that were a part of the adult life with its orientation to power and position.

6.  The third eye chakra.  Symbolizes the single vision.

7.  The crown chakra.  Symbolizes the homecoming, return of the Bodhisattva to the world, to live by the rule of compassion.

Chakras 6 and 7 parallel the psychological development of the lover, the unitive glimpse, and the return to the world follow the vocation of the healer.

                    Bert: What do you see as the major issues in men-women relationships?

                      Sam: Power, equality and violence are the major issues. On top of that we like to talk about
                      communication, as in Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand. Very often we turn
                      the big issue between men and women into a communication issue, but I think it's a lot
                      deeper issue than that. The gender arrangement that we've had in this culture previous to
                      the last 25 or 30 years has been one in which there has been more of an inequality in terms
                      of political, social and financial power. Men have had a dominant role. In order to change
                      that women have been coming into the workplace and in the political order and claiming
                      their own power, they begin to encounter the old thing, which is a gender relationship.
                      That's where, for me, the real, crucial issue has to be violence. Men have had a virtual
                      monopoly on violence, and that means a virtual monopoly on power. As women see
                      violence done to them, they are having to re-think about their relationship to power, and also
                      to military power. That's what I tried to show in The Faces of the Enemy. But I do believe
                      that when you define the male in terms of the warrior role, then you're going to define him in
                      terms of power and women are going to behind the victim end of the power-violence game.

                    Bert: Does that suggest that women need to move towards a relationship with violence?

                      Sam: Well, they need to take equal responsibility for the management of violence. We need
                      to see violence in terms of systems. One of the biggest changes in our thinking in the last
                      twenty years is to think in terms of systems, to stop just looking at individual things and to
                      look at interactions. That is the one thing we haven't done in terms of men, women and
                      violence. We haven't looked at their interactions. We haven't looked at violence as a
                      system. There are many different players who participate in the violence system. Mostly
                      what we see now is the victims of violence. In my terms, we have a way of thinking that
                      creates "guilty producers" and "innocent consumers" of violence.

                      Just like the Exxon Valdez incident. We point our fingers at Exxon and say that they are
                      "bad people," while we all drive along in automobiles that hog up gasoline and think nothing
                      of our consumption of oil. We create the demand, and they were merely supplying the
                      demand. So, I think the whole violence and warfare system flows from the fact that we
                      made a decision in our culture that this is what we wanted to do. Violence against women
                      is a product of this system. We're going to have to stop thinking of this issue in terms of
                      men and women. That is the big issue, the hard issue, what kind of a world is it going to be
                      if we do this re-thinking of gender. What I like to say is eliminating gender. "Help stamp out
                      gender" would be my bumper sticker.

                      Bert: One image that comes to mind is a t.v. news scene from a bar outside Fort Lewis
                      during the Gulf War. The soldiers' wives and girlfriends were as violent as the men. "We're
                      going to kick their butt."

                      Sam: Right. If you'll remember, the approval rating went up to somewhere between 89 and
                      94 percent. What that is, is a vote on the macho image of man. Everyone who tied a yellow
                      ribbon on a tree said, "Yes, we want men to be violent."

                      Bert: In The Passionate Life: Stages of Loving you said, "Our only real hope for a more
                      kindly and passionate pattern of relationships is our willingness to look at the ways women
                      and men collude in perpetrating the long-standing battle between the sexes and the warfare
                      system."

                      Sam: That's right. I still think that's an important passage.

                      Bert: In our last issue we had an article (Scott Abraham, "Take Care of Your Mother -- Or
                      Else") in which the author said we needed a safe container in which to express our rage
                      against our mothers, our sisters, and other women.

                      Sam: In a process of de-repressing any emotion, when it comes out, it's not going to come
                      out neatly. It's true that when we express our rage, when the shit hits the fan, everyone gets
                      sprayed. Hopefully, that doesn't last very long. It's not very individually creative, or socially
                      creative. But, basically, that's what we have now, is a lot of people expressing their rage
                      about everything. The problem is that it's making a pretty sick body politic. We've got a
                      political situation now where everybody's a victim and everybody's needs to have a Divine
                      right to rage. Rage is an entitlement. We all have a right to be outraged, because we don't
                      have this, we don't have that, we don't have the other. Disregard the fact that, despite what
                      we don't have, we're the wealthiest culture in the history of civilization.

                      I think this is a dangerous idea. Eastern wisdom have a different outlook. You have to
                      recognize rage. Certainly, you have to recognize it. You can't forgive somebody unless you
                      have felt the rage. But I think that the idea, somehow, that you have to go out and express
                      that is a dangerous notion. There's something between blowing off inappropriately and
                      repression. First of all, there's recognition. And then what I guess I would say, is "rationing
                      out the rage."

                      My own way of doing this was that I learned to wrestle when I was a young adult, in my
                      mid-twenties. And part of that had to do with rage. I found a very, very great way to handle it.

                      Also, your rage can be utilized in relevant situations. If you're in a relationship with a
                      woman, you're really encounter the rage. As long as you don't give anybody the full load of a
                      rage that's been building up for years. But, let's face it, that's also going to happen. You're
                      not going to go through a relationship always mature, with all the emotions honed down to
                      their proper size. No, part of what happens in a relationship is that you project your "stuff"
                      onto other people. Then we've got to take it off. So, you're going to project your rage onto
                      somebody else, and then gradually take it back.. What makes a relationship strong is not
                      that you never vent inappropriate rage, but that they keep moving away from that.

                      Bert: You say in Fire in the Belly, "Honor your anger, but before you express it, sort it out
                      the righteous from the unrighteous. Immediately after a storm the water runs muddy; rage
                      is indiscriminate. But once the water runs clear, express your outrage against anyone who
                      has violated your being."

                      Sam: That's good advice. I don't always follow it, but ..... When I get mad at my wife,
                      sometimes I just blow up, and yell very loud. Then what I have to do afterwards is sort it out,
                      and say what I'm sorry fore, and figure out which part is mine and which is hers. I mean,
                      ideally, I would never do all that, but I haven't reached that stage yet.

                      Bert: We haven't here, either. But what my wife Bernetta is discovering is that every once
                      in a while she will give vent at her rage, and she is amazed at how terrified some people
                      are when she begins to show it, because she's a very mild and gentle person under 99.9
                      percent of the circumstances.

                      Sam: Generally speaking, sin and forgiveness is a better way to handle a relationship than
                      the illusion of perfection. We learn from our mistakes. In intimacy, all of our childhood,
                      infantile desires and emotions are elicited.

                      Bert: One of the things that's said is that men are unwilling to commit. Clarissa Estés says
                      that men and women are both afraid to commit, because they're afraid of the "little death" of
                      the self that happens in a relationship. That brought to mind Robert Bly's poem "A Third
                      Body." " ... they obey a third body that they share in common. They have made a promise to
                      love that body. Age may come, parting may come, death will come. A man and a woman sit
                      near each other. As they breathe they feed someone we do not know, someone we know
                      of, whom we have never seen."

                      Sam: The old word was "sacrifice," which is a very good word because what it actually
                      meant was "to make sacred." We have a stupid notion that came out of the human
                      potential movement, that "I'm going to do my thing, and you're going to do your thing, and
                      we shouldn't compromise." It even gets confused with the whole notion of co-dependency.
                      "Oh, oh, I'm beginning to see myself through your eyes." We don't have much relationship
                      with sacrifice. Nothing gets done, nothing of value is created in life, without sacrifice.
                      Raising a child requires an enormous amount of sacrifice.

                      Or take the notion of compromise, or "co-promise." You're binding yourself to a promise.
                      But these are voluntary bounds, verses the bonds that are imposed on us by others. Bonds
                      that we take on, in order to create in our lives.

                      Bert: I understand that some people are delaying having children, or not having children,
                      because they're not willing to make the sacrifices involved.

                      Sam: Well, that's always been true in our culture. One of the sicknesses of our culture is
                      that we value our children so little.

                      Bert: And we're unwilling to make that sacredness, that sacrifice.

                      Sam: This is reflected in our national debt. We're passing our debt on to our children. We
                      don't have enough guts to put our own house into order. We're spending our children's
                      future.

                      Bert: One of the words that comes up in discussions of men's issues is "patriarchy."
                      Gregory Max Vogt writes in Return to Father of a positive, non-authoritarian, "homologous"
                      patriarchy. In The Passionate Life you write of the roles of the "matrix" and the "patrix,"
                      pattern, structure and rule-giving, in an infant's life.

                      Sam: I think the word "patriarchy" is a dumb word, because it creates a night in which all
                      cats are dark. "Patriarchy" becomes, in a sense, everything that has happened in Western
                      culture, in the sense that Western culture reflects those values we associate with "male" or
                      "hierarchy." It's very easy to turn this into some kind of an excuse for male-bashing -- "Oh,
                      everything associated with the patriarchy is no good." -- and praising everything that was
                      matriarchal and matrilineal. Or, as René Eisner says in The Chalice and the Blade, to say
                      that we had a "partnership" culture before we had patriarchy. Well, that's nonsense. That's
                      ideology. It doesn't help. It doesn't help to distinguish what we have now. We don't have a
                      patriarchal culture at all. We have what I call a "corporarchal" culture. We don't have a
                      bunch of wild and fierce men up there controlling the society. The old patriarchy protected
                      their own. "This is my tribe, this is my clan. No, we don't have that. We have wimps at the
                      heads of corporations. As John Kenneth Galbreath described in The New Industrial Society,
                      corporate leaders say, "I can't do very much. I don't have very much power."

                      Patriarchy is not a very accurate term. It doesn't get to the root of problems. There's a lot of
                      problems with what men do to women, and vice versa, but the word "patriarchy" doesn't
                      help us very much.

                      Traditionally, we think of the "matrix" as being the unconscious, and the "patrix" being the
                      cultural values. And, traditionally, of course, that was male and female. Mothers were the
                      source of the values of sensuality and intimacy. The male, the "patrix," was the source of
                      the law, the culture, given to the male by initiation. I don't think that's accurate anymore. Did
                      you ever notice that when that term is used, you have the feeling that you've read it all
                      before? It creates stereotype modality situations, but it doesn't get us any further. It's a little
                      bit like religion, "All is One, all is One." But what does that mean? All is many, also. The
                      term "patriarchy" does not distinguish enough to be helpful term in our analysis of the
                      present situation.

                      I'll give you an example. We are told that in this patriarchy women make 60 percent as
                      much as men. It's an interesting statistic, but what is also interesting is that when women
                      supposedly don't have any power, women actually account for 80 percent of all consumer
                      spending. It's a weird little thing, they actually account for 70 percent of the sale of men's
                      clothing and 50 percent of automobile sales. There are all kinds of power. And the language
                      of patriarchy hits only one aspect, namely that some identified positive values are identified
                      as male, that males head the political, economic and cultural environment. It looks at only
                      that fact, and overlooks other ways in which women have power within the system.

                      Bert: What struck me about your use of the word "patrix" was that it described the value of
                      necessary patterning, structuring, ordering, and rule-giving, as a complement in the young
                      baby's life to the development of the sensitive, the intuitive and the erotic.

                      Sam: I don't think I would use those terms today. Even those terms are gender-biased
                      terms. The mother is going to give us the sensuality, and the father is going to give us the
                      rules. My father probably held me as much as my mother, and my mother gave me rules. If
                      you look at any cultural situation, I think that you'll find that that's true. A father's way of
                      holding the baby may be different, but I want to get rid of gender terms. I want to get rid of
                      terms like "my masculine," "my feminine." I think they are very inaccurate. I think they
                      perpetrate a schizophrenia that is not true of our actual experience. I think men should get
                      out of the role of saying, "I am the law-giving one and she is the sensuous one." Both of
                      these functions are necessary in any vital human being, male or female.

                      Bert: Would a male or female express their sensuality or intuition differently?

                      Sam: Maybe, maybe not.. I don't think it's necessarily true.

                      Bert: Depending on cultural conditioning.

                      Sam: Look at the Eskimo culture. Look at the way they play. They may not do this so much
                      any more, since they have t.v. But on long winter nights they would play. They would play
                      "faces," grabbing and contorting each other's faces. Incredible sensual, bodily play. I think
                      that it has much more to do with a distinction between war-making cultures and relatively
                      peaceful cultures. The more peaceful a culture is, the more everybody in that culture has
                      permission to express their sensuality. The more war-like a culture is, the less permission
                      there is to do this.

                      Bert: That beings up the major thesis of The Passionate Life. I've got to tell you, that the
                      Seattle Public Library shelves that book with the other sex education books.

                      Sam: (laughing), Well, that's O.K.!

                      Bert: They're "idiots" in your classic sense of the word, private people who think that eros
                      is best expressed only in privacy.

                      Sam: Well, better there than ... I don't know where. Better there than education.

                      Bert: Your whole concept there -- you have such an interesting way of asking questions --
                      what would happen if we embraced the world as lovers? As a sensuous and erotic
                      experience.

                      Sam: Or even more interesting than that, to me, is the question what if we began to feed
                      our erotic and compassion quotient rather than our intelligence quotient. We go bug-eyed
                      over intelligence quotients. What if we really tired to increase our compassion quotients?
                      We spend a vast amount of resources on our children's education, so we can "educate"
                      them to "know" the world. What if we out an equal amount of resources into teaching our
                      children how to open up and enjoy the world, to reverence and love the world? It would be
                      an easy cultural project; it is not utopian at all.

                      Bert: Doesn't that tie into school boards' decisions in tomes of tight budgets, to cut out the
                      arts and music?

                      Sam: Totally, totally. It is a Western supposition that the more objective "knowledge" we
                      have about the world, the better we are able to live. That's the first assumption to question.

                      Bert: Especially in this day and age. I have more information on my own bookshelves than I
                      could possibly absorb in ten lifetimes.

                      Sam: Right.

                      Bert: The whole topic of loving the world brings up what your topic is going to be when you
                      speak here on Friday May 7th. Spirituality and sexuality. How do you see that connection.

                      Sam: Well, complexly. They both get very confused. It's easy to start with the traditions of
                      our culture as being at the root of the problem. In our culture, the two are completely
                      divorced, especially in the Roman Catholic tradition. It's a labyrinth supposedly governed by
                      a celibate priesthood. But they aren't. We don't talk about the seduction of little boys and
                      girls. So we have a rift, in our culture, between spirituality and sexuality. To make the
                      reconciliation, we need to ask, "what are they about?" They're both modes of trying to
                      overcome loneliness. Alfred North Whitehead once said that "religion is what one does with
                      his own solitariness." A major way that we deal with our solitariness is through sexuality. All
                      that that means is that sexuality is a bond between man and the world around him. And the
                      other way is through our spirituality. And to find a reconciliation between the two, in our
                      culture we have enormous capabilities, one of which is that we try to control what is "out
                      there" and another is that our technology alienates us from it. So, paradoxically, the more
                      we know about the world out there, the more we become alienated from it. And we have
                      this enormous problem of how we deal with our longing for the world. Sexuality, then, is the
                      longing of the body. Sex is part of our relationship with the world. I don't think in other
                      cultures they have a separate word for "sex." Sex was a just a part of their relationship with
                      life, and a gateway to the mysteries of the world. Therefore we have all kinds of boundaries
                      around it, all kinds of rules about it. Sex used appropriately, is an enlightening experience.
                      It's powerful stuff, because it leads you right into the heart of it.

                      Bert: Into the numinous.

                      Sam: Exactly. Into the numinous. Well, we have taken the numinous away from sex. And
                      away from religion and our view of the world, too. Our problem is how to get it back in. That
                      happens when we understand the depths of what we're doing in the world.

                      Bert: There's an image that comes to mind for me, from the end of your The Power of
                      Stories tape. You describe finding water for your cabin. You spotted ferns too high on the
                      bank, and dug under the rock. Add there you were, naked, digging into the earth, getting into
                      it, getting muddy. I saw something very primal, earthy and sexual in that image.

                      Sam: Well, certainly something very erotic. This is who I am, no matter what I'm doing. My
                      way of relating to the earth is very erotic. It is to live in it. I can't be any other way, because
                      otherwise there's no room for my spirit. So there I was, digging into the rocks and the roots.
                      And I derived an enormous amount of physical pleasure in it. I'd be wallowing in the mud,
                      and I'd go down there and dig around. It was so muddy there was no sense in wearing
                      clothes, except maybe for a jockstrap, to protect the sensitive parts.

                      Bert: There's a whole other theme that comes out of that, about being in touch with our
                      bodies. It's said that men are out of touch with their bodies, except from the neck up, and
                      out of relationship of their bodies except to use as a tool.

                      Sam: I wouldn't say just men. I would say that in our society what happens is that work gets
                      out of touch with our bodies. To the degree to which we become identified with economic
                      work, we become Type-A people. I would like to point out the fact that in the late 1960's all
                      the sociologists were saying that the greatest challenge we faced was how to use our
                      leisure time. Marcuse talked about this. He said that machines would set eros free. We
                      could have used machines in that way. But, instead, we increased the number of products
                      we have to have, and began to work compulsively to get them.

                      Bert: And now what's happening, instead, is that it's become an economic necessity for
                      both the husband and the wife to work. Otherwise they can't make it.

                      Sam: Sure. How are we going to buy the mountain bikes? How are we to get the lycra suits
                      to wear with it? You can't ride a mountain bike without a lycra suit. We're the only society in
                      the world that will spend $150 dollars for a pair of the lightest weight running shoes, and
                      then spend another $25 to buy weights to wear on our wrists when we run.

                      Bert: My wife Bernetta is going to be amused to hear you say that work takes you away
                      from the body. She teaches yoga, and her philosophy is that the focus of yoga is to be
                      totally in touch with, in tune with, your body.

                      Sam: Well, good, maybe. That's true, probably. But people who work with their bodies
                      professionally also get out of touch with them. I talk to a lot of dancers, and they talk of their
                      body as an instrument. And even yoga becomes this pose, that pose, can you do this, can
                      you do that. There is what I call the "tyranny of the lotus position." You can't possibly
                      meditate if you can't get into the lotus position. Well, that's not true. The body doesn't feel
                      that; not all bodies are made to do that.

                      Bert: If I were in the lotus position, if I could ever get into it, I probably couldn't meditate.

                      Sam: You probably couldn't get out of it, probably, either.

                      Bert: (Laughing) That's probably true.

                      Sam: For years they did this Fascist thing, that those who got into the lotus position told you
                      you couldn't meditate, and the fact is that if you ever got into the lotus position, all that pain
                      that you experience, well, you were supposed to overcome that pain. That was good for
                      you. It's like flagellation.

                      Bert: When you were a young theology professor you wrote a book about Gabriel Marcel,
                      the French Christian existentialist. One passage stuck out at me, because it seemed so
                      consistent with your own later work. "The quest for being must begin by exploring personal
                      experience in order to determine whether it contains any hint of a reality that resists the
                      corrosive acids of criticism, despair and tragedy.".

                      Sam: That's a great passage. Did I write that, or did Marcel?

                      Bert: That was you. And then you go on to quote him. And in your later work you go on into
                      how we get in touch with our own bodies, and how we develop our own stories.

                      Sam:. Yes, but that was not Marcel. Marcel went more in the direction of abstract emotions,
                      or what he called concrete approaches, where he talked about fidelity or love, or joy. I think
                      my unique contribution is that I say, "No, no, no, no no. Tell me your story. Tell me exactly
                      where you're coming from. God lives in detail. Tell me a detailed biography."

                      Bert: Your prose and your prose style reflect that. I found your book on Gabriel Marcel
                      interesting, and I was aware that I was reading a theological or philosophical textbook.

                      Sam: Right.

                      Bert: But Fire in the Belly and The Passionate Life was so much of your own writing, about
                      your own life.

                      Sam: Right. Or even, An Apology for Wonder. It's a marvelous book, which I feel is very
                      crucial to our culture. I did, unlike my formal, academic mode, write my own autobiography,
                      most especially in my dedication to my father.

                      Bert: Well, thank you very much for this interview. We will look forward very much to what
                      you have to tell us when you come up here to talk to us in May.

    Sarah van Gelder talks with Sam Keen about the complex arts
     of loving. The Heart & Soul section is supported by the Fetzer
                                                   Institute.
 

    The Loving Arts

    Sarah: Your new book is about what it means to be a great lover, but it's
    clearly not a sex manual. What do you mean by being a great lover?

    Sam: Well, first of all, if I start off asking, "Am I a great sexual partner?"
    that's a recipe for disaster.

    The primary question is "How do I become a loving human being?" My
    intimate sexual relationship will be healthy and creative only in the degree
    that I stay with that question.

    The great heresy of our time is when we start talking about love in terms
    of sex. Our concentration on sex has paradoxically ruined our sexual
    relationships - has trivialized them.

    The Balinese say, "We don't have any art, we do everything as beautifully
    as we can." For pre-modern society, what we call sex is an integral part of
    life - even an integral part of metaphysics. The goddess or god figures
    placed in the fields signify the fertility and creativity of the Earth. Fertility
    and creativity is very much a part of the original experience of sexuality.

    When we strip sex of all of its meaning and focus instead on heightening
    sensation or even on heightening commitment between two lovers, it's
    really a very truncated vision.

    Sarah: So you'd turn Freud's theory on its head. He says that all desire has
    a sexual root, but you're saying that desire for sex is actually rooted in
    other desires?

    Sam: Absolutely! All sexuality, even the most twisted sexuality, is rooted in
    the desire to create.

    Plato's idea of Eros wasn't exclusively sexual. Eros was a force that drove
    the water through the rock and the sap through the tree.

    Plato would ask: Why is it that an acorn becomes an oak tree? Because it
    has a longing. The longing to become an oak tree is contained within the
    acorn.

    I think that sexuality is a part of our longing to join with others, to become
    who we are, to create. Paradoxically, it's when we see it in that context
    that we are going to have the best sex.

    Sarah: You've said that our emphasis on sex as the foundation for all
    relationships actually cuts us off from other forms of love.

    Sam: That's right. We're all going to be out of any sexual relationship for a
    good part of our lives - at the very least when we're children and much of
    the time when we're old. So, what do we do? In most traditional societies
    it's friendship, not romance, that is most highly valued.

    Sarah: I've been struck by how often outside North America you see
    touching that has nothing to do with sex. For example, in China it's not
    unusual to see two male soldiers holding hands. Friends hold hands as just a
    normal expression of affection.

    Sam: That shows one of the deep kinds of sicknesses of our society - that
    we have so sexualized touch: If you touch me, that's sexual; if I didn't want
    it, it's harassment.

    It's become almost taboo for us to touch people when we don't have sexual
    intentions. I mean teachers can't touch kids anymore!

    And we're creatures of touch! We live more and more in a world of
    electronics, in a world of images of images of images - the world of
    "information." Information doesn't smell, it's not tactile, it's a bunch of
    wavering images on a screen. But we're embodied creatures. We were
    created within a body and nurtured by a body. Most of our experiences of
    ecstasy have to do with touch. So, what kind of civilization are we creating
    in which we are literally "out of touch?"

    Sarah: It's interesting that we're losing track of touch at the same time as
    the news is dominated by stories of sex: sexual harassment in the military,
    Clinton's alleged affairs, the rape in Brooklyn. Why do you think there's
    such a preoccupation now?

    Sam: I suspect that to the degree that our relational lives - our love life in
    the largest sense - are impoverished, we become interested in sex.

    And the more frustrated we become in our efforts to create, the more we
    become hypnotized by violence. Violence is the final resort of impotent
    people, and a great deal of what we're talking about in terms of sex is
    really about violence.

    Our consumer society dehumanizes - we've become consumers of images,
    and sex is a big part of that. It's treating other people as objects, and
    treating this ecstatic relationship as a joining between a couple of
    anonymous bodies; this dehumanization is also a form of violence.

    Sarah: You've coined the phrase, the colonization of desire ...

    Sam: That's right. We are creatures of longing; every religious tradition has
    told us that. But the great change in the modern world came as mass
    advertising began to creep inside our desire system and say, "Look, I know
    what you want. This is what you want. This will really satisfy you."

    We are bombarded by images that literally colonize our desire system. The
    advertising industry tells us that our deepest longings are going to be
    satisfied by a Rolex, or by a new Buick, or now it's the Range Rover.

    And when we get those things and we're still not satisfied, we're hooked
    into trying again, like addicts. We're hooked on getting the next fix instead
    of going back to those deep, deep questions: "What is it that has real
    meaning for me? What is it that I really desire?"

    Sarah: I believe you've also said "You can never get enough of what you
    don't really need."

    Sam: Well, no. I've said, you can't get enough of what you didn't want in
    the first place. And that's the basic wisdom all addicts finally come to - the
    discovery that alcohol or gambling was a substitute for something else.

    Likewise, this excess - this drive for that fifth million - isn't about money.
    The great American parable about that is Citizen Kane. What was all his
    striving about? What did he really want? Rosebud!
    When we're addicted, we're obsessed with getting more - whether it's sex
    or money or luxuries. In all of our lives there's a 'Rosebud,' a longing that's
    not satisfied by whatever we've become addicted to.

    Sarah: Was there a moment of epiphany for you when you realized you
    didn't know what you really desired?

    Sam: Yeah, it was a gradual epiphany that came in the period before the
    breakup of my first marriage. I thought that I was a loving guy who knew
    what I wanted. I'd always thought the problems in my marriage were just
    my wife's dissatisfactions. Unfortunately, it turned out I was wrong.

    I got my wife to go to a therapist to get her "fixed up" and then went along
    to the therapist myself to help him fix her up. He gingerly suggested to her
    that maybe half of the problems were mine - that I was angry at her, angry
    at my mother, and distrustful of women. Boy, that got me really pissed off
    with that jerk!

    Then one day it came down on me - oh my God, he's right!

    At the time I was teaching courses on love at a seminary; I was supposed
    to know about this stuff! And to find out that I didn't - to find out that a lot
    of what I called love was fear, and a lot of what I called caring was just
    trying to control somebody, and what I called play was sarcasm and
    cruelty.

    Somebody once said, "When the clock strikes 13, everything that went
    before becomes questionable." I never, never thought there would be a
    divorce, but when it happened, the clock struck 13.

    After that, I began to ask myself, "What is it that I do want? And what is it
    that I call love?"

    Sarah: One of the themes that you return to repeatedly is the tension
    between solitude and inner work, and deeply knowing and being known by
    another person. Was that a significant issue in your marriage?

    Sam: Well I didn't have that separation in my first marriage; I didn't know
    the difference between me and her.

    Now, I'm sitting in a beautiful little studio 300 feet from the house. My wife
    has a little apartment downtown; I don't even know where it is. I come
    here to my studio to write, and sometimes I sleep here. It's a place where I
    cultivate my relationship with myself in solitude. If I don't do that, I get
    very confused in the intimacy about who I am and what the difference is
    between what she wants and what I want. Then I cease to deepen the
    wells out of which I have water to bring to others.

    Sarah: Many people spend a lot of time alone, but their experience is more
    one of isolation.

    Sam: That's true, but solitude has nothing to do with isolation. One of the
    major things that we find in solitude is how much we need other people. In
    solitude we discover that the idea that we are individuals isolated from
    other people is a lie. Buddhism and other practices of meditation are about
    busting through the illusion that I am separate and apart and isolated.

    And many of the scientific discoveries related to quantum physics and the
    study of ecology have confirmed this intrinsic connectedness.

    Sarah: Let me follow up on that. In some spiritual traditions, the ties of love
    and sex are seen as distractions from a search for transcendence, and in
    others they are seen as a means to greater union with God. How do you
    see that?

    Sam: In the Buddhist tradition when you come to somebody, you bow and
    say "Namaste," which means I recognize that which is sacred in you. That
    fundamental religious insight doesn't mean that I recognize that the mind in
    you is sacred, or any one part of you is sacred; it means I recognize all of
    you as sacred. It means that I'm not going to violate you economically, and
    I'm not going to rip you off sexually. Nor am I going to be ripped off
    sexually.

    It means that whatever relationship we come into is going to be one of
    respect and of acknowledgment of the sacredness of each other.

    And it's within that sacred context, and a context of celebrating the body
    and celebrating sexuality that we can try to figure out whether sex is
    appropriate or not appropriate - not whether we're legally married, and
    have taken a bath, and it's Friday night and the lights are off.

    Sarah: Hinduism and Buddhism also have a tradition of celibacy.

    Sam: They do, that's right. What's interesting about these traditions is that
    the celibacy is not anti-sexual. People don't flaunt their sexuality - they
    aren't out with miniskirts advertising - but they're not prudish either.

    Buddhism and Hinduism say celibacy is fine, but there is also a path to God
    which uses sexual intercourse and the conscious disciplining of desire.
    There's choice; you can chose the left-hand path or the right-hand path.

    That was not part of the Christianity I grew up with. Nobody ever said,
    "Get a sexual partner, and practice breathing and allowing the ecstasy to go
    into your mind and into your sense of unity with God."

    Both Catholicism and the tradition I grew up with, the Protestant /
    Fundamentalist church, have injured people a great deal. Both impose guilt,
    hypocrisy and shame.

    If you work with people in any kind of therapeutic situation, you see how
    many enter into marriages and relationships with an enormous sense of
    guilt and a sense of the dirtiness and unacceptability of their own bodies.

    Sarah: What is the relationship between the skills that make you a good
    lover and those that make you a compassionate, loving citizen of the world?

    Sam: I think that the journey of love is the journey away from feeling that
    we are at the center and the raison d'etre for all things. I think the journey
    of love is a journey into union with other forms of life - the realization that
    we are in a commonwealth of beings.

    I'm reading a book that's on the bestsellers' list, The Man Who Talked to
    Horses, about a guy who spent time with herds of wild mustangs and
    learned to talk like a horse by using his body the way they do.

    It's a marvelous book because it shows the difference between the old idea
    of breaking horses and making them fear you, versus this very concrete
    illustration of what it means to become a cosmic lover.

    We can't love nature in the abstract. But we can go out and observe and
    appreciate. I am sitting in my office right now looking out over the creek,
    and a pileated woodpecker just landed on a tree right in front of me. It's
    enormous, the largest kind of woodpecker in the United States.

    Well, I can say that I love those woodpeckers. There used to be a nest
    right over there, and I would sit and watch them - I would pay attention to
    them.

    And I give them respect - even a kind of commitment that I won't hurt
    them. There's a big dead tree out here, and somebody once told me I
    should cut it down, but I said, "No. The woodpeckers need that tree."
    The elements of attention, appreciation, and respect are exactly the same
    elements or skills that I practice in relationship to my daughter or my son.

    Sarah: Why would someone choose to cultivate empathy or compassion
    when it opens you to a greater number of painful experiences?

    Sam: The deepest forms of love always involve suffering. I remember
    when my first baby got her first shot. The doctor came with a needle and
    put that shot in Lael's bottom, and man, I winced! I felt that needle go right
    in my bottom, and it hurt!

    Then there's the compassion I might have for the people killed in the little
    village in Algeria. I see a picture of a slaughtered child, and my heart goes
    out to those people. I'm not intimate with them - I will never be intimate
    with them - but it's not accidental that the great religions of the world have
    said that compassion, not intimacy, is necessary to becoming fully human.

    We have only one choice; whether to feel more or less. We can try not to
    come in contact with anyone else's suffering, or we can open up and get
    more suffering - and more joy!

    Ultimately, the great crisis in our society is that we increasingly try to
    privatize love. We think we can have our little love nest down where the
    roses bloom. Outside, it's okay to be against other people, it's okay to
    compete, it's okay not to know or care about your neighbors. The
    community as a whole can go to hell!
    The notion that we can have satisfying love only in intimacy, without loving
    strangers, is psychological nonsense. We are not splittable that way. It's
    the great illusion.
 

    Sam Keen is author of To Love and Be Loved, (Bantam), Hymns to an Unknown
    God , and Fire in the Belly. He is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and holds
    a PhD in philosophy of religion from Princeton University.

                            "The idea of total liberation is a bad and very destructive idea," the
                            gruff voice on the other end of the line announced, adding, "One of
                            the things I frankly don't like about your magazine is the holding up of
                            these people who are supposedly ‘in the absolute' and totally
                            liberated." While our commitment to investigative journalism often
                            finds us in unexpected territory, I had to admit that this was a new
                            one. Not five minutes into what was scheduled to be a
                            one-and-a-half-hour interview, and already our magazine and the
                            very aspiration on which it is built were under fire. Fortunately, I
                            thought to myself, I hadn't called Sam Keen to ask him about his
                            views on enlightenment. And having discovered firsthand that he
                            was not a man to mince his words, I was all the more eager to ask
                            this modern-day master of myth—one of the most influential figures
                            in today's burgeoning men's spirituality movement—our questions on
                            the role and influence of gender in spiritual life.
                                Our introduction to Keen's work had come only a few months
                            before when, while beginning our research into gender and
                            spirituality, we picked up his book Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man.
                            A rich, almost lyrical blending of autobiographical anecdote and
                            psychological theory, the book—which in the early nineties had
                            served as a rallying point for thousands of men bent on breaking free
                            of the culture's male mythos—soon had us under its spell. For
                            several weeks, our basement sauna was transformed into a private
                            sweat lodge of sorts, as the male members of our editorial team
                            gathered there by evening with our spiritual teacher to read aloud
                            Keen's riveting analysis of the social and cultural influences that
                           have molded the psyche of late twentieth-century man. Having each
                            managed to miss out on all but the broadest strokes of the men's
                            movement, we found our own experience often powerfully
                            illuminated by Keen's detailed tour through the rites of war, work and
                            sex—the three arenas he feels have come to define our conceptions
                            of what it means to be a man in today's world.
                                Using his own pilgrimage as a template, in the book Keen also
                            goes to some length to outline what he sees as the way ahead for
                            modern men. Not content with the popular men's movement mantras,
                            "embracing our feminine side" or "unleashing the wild man within," he
                            points somewhere between these two extremes to a redirecting of
                            "the fierce warrior energies . . . that men have honed for centuries . .
                            . toward the creation of a more hopeful and careful future." In his
                            "new vision of manhood," he leaves little room for the endless
                            self-centered probing that many associate with "men's work," calling
                            instead for a new breed of heroic, passionate and "virile" men to rise
                            up and take responsibility for confronting the ecological and social
                            crises of our times.
                                By his own description, Keen is a "philosopher of the sacred."
                            Hailing from the likes of Harvard and Princeton, with a string of
                            advanced degrees in philosophy and theology, he has authored over
                            a dozen books and has for years been a prominent figure in the
                            American human potential movement. It was through his experiences
                            leading workshops at Esalen Institute, as a contributing editor for
                            Psychology Today, and as cofounder of a men's group called SPERM
                            (Society for the Protection and Encouragement of Righteous
                            Manhood) that he began to formulate many of the ideas that would fill
                            the pages of his books.
                                In the larger body of his work, Keen informed me, Fire in the
                            Belly is perhaps best characterized as his answer to the
                            psychological dilemmas of modern man and, as such, is not in itself
                            focused primarily on the spiritual dimension of life. It was only in his
                            1994 book Hymns to an Unknown God that Keen attempted to chart
                            the waters of the spiritual quest—a journey he sees as common to
                            both sexes—which only can begin after the psychological "wounds
                            of gender" have been healed. Describing the book, he writes: "[It] is a
                            map of the path we travel together, when the questions of
                            masculinity and femininity, male and female roles, have been left far
                            behind." Keen's approach to spirituality, along with Jungian analysis
                            and many body-centered "transpersonal" therapies, does not count
                            itself among those spiritual paths aiming for final enlightenment, but
                            falls instead under the broad umbrella of what has come to be called
                            "sacred psychology." Attempting to bring the individualistic ideals of
                            Western humanism into a spiritual context, Keen and other authorities
                            in this increasingly popular school of thought point to a life of
                            meaning found not in surrendering to a God greater than oneself, nor
                            in an effort to slay the ego through the renunciation of self-centered
                            impulses, but through a personal confrontation with one's own
                            existential questions and a reckoning with the shadow-world of
                            one's unconscious. Keen writes: "My quest . . . is driven primarily by
                            a personal-existential need to discover how I fit within the scheme
                            of things, not by a . . . need to understand how human beings fit
                            within the cosmos. . . . The dignity and meaning of my life involve the
                            discovery and creation of my way, my truth, my destiny." Although
                            some traditional enlightenment teachings do find expression in Keen's
                            work, the ultimate goal of spiritual life as he defines it is not the
                            dissolution of the separate sense of self, but the empowering of it.
                                During the course of our conversation last spring, Keen related
                            some of the details of his own personal struggle first to prove his
                            manhood and later to shed the rigid notions of masculinity in which
                            he found himself bound. Having spent the better part of his life going
                            against his own deeply sensitive nature, he recounted, it was only
                            when a therapist pointed out to him that his "manliness is [his]
                            sensitivity" that he was able to begin to make his own "journey
                            beyond gender."
                                Having heard Keen's description of this pivotal moment in his
                            search, it struck me as perhaps slightly ironic that his phone manner
                            seemed to fall somewhere on the spectrum between John Wayne
                            and General Patton. In the course of our conversation, Keen made it
                            clear that he does not suffer fools—or opposing viewpoints—gladly,
                            as he forthrightly shared his informed and often scathing critique of
                            everything from radical feminism to Jungian psychology to the very
                            men's movement which gave him his fame.
                                And while I can't deny that I was still glad I wasn't interviewing
                            him about enlightenment, there was nonetheless something about the
                            straightforwardness, and even boldness, with which he spoke that I
                            couldn't help but appreciate. For one meets few people who have
                            lived their questions as Keen has. And his thinking on many of the
                            central themes surrounding our inquiry into gender and spirituality
                            showed not only an unusual clarity and precision but a passionate
                            conviction and a refreshing depth and breadth of hard-earned
                            common sense.
WIE: In Fire in the Belly, you call upon men to undertake a spiritual
                            journey that culminates in "the celebration of a new vision of
                            manhood." What defines this journey, as you see it?

                            SAM KEEN: Well, a large part of my work is focused on the way in
                            which the myths of a culture shape and inform the way we live, the
                            way we think about ourselves and the way we feel. What I'm doing
                           in Fire in the Belly is dealing with the myth of gender and specifically
                            with the myth of male gender. And you have to understand that
                            when I talk about a spiritual journey in that context, I'm not talking
                            about a total spiritual journey; I'm talking about only one aspect of it.
                            My ultimate message for the men's movement or, as far as that's
                            concerned, the women's movement, with regard to spirituality and
                            gender is: Get over it! Because the spiritual journey starts on the
                            other side of gender.
                                Now let me say what I mean by that because I think my
                            perspective is different from that of most people. I've got to start with
                            the idea of myth, that a myth is like the software that is inserted into
                            us by the society, by our family. Nature gives us certain hardware.
                            There's male hardware and there's female hardware. But the
                            moment we're born, people start shoving these software disks in,
                            saying, "Here's what a real man is. Here's what it means to be a
                            man. Here's what it means to be an American man," and things like
                            that. That's what gender is. And those gender divisions, for roughly
                            the last four thousand years, have been largely circulating around
                            warfare. The division between men and women has been the
                            division between warriors and nurturers. The male has been
                            artificially conditioned to be tough, to be aggressive, to be hostile, to
                            be willing to either kill or die for the tribe. The most poignant symbol of
                            this, of course, is circumcision, which is a way of saying that to be
                            male is to be wounded and to be willing to be wounded, whereas the
                            female has been conditioned to be the servant of the warriors, the
                            bearer of the children, the nurturer of the society, and in that sense
                            to be inferior to the male. So when we're talking about gender, we're
                            largely talking about injuries that have been done to male persons
                            and female persons in the effort to perpetuate a way of life based
                            upon warfare, aggression, domination and control. And all of that,
                            from the point of view of the life of the spirit, is a mistake. It's this we
                            have to rise above in order to begin to have any notion of what the
                            spirit is.

                            WIE: Would you say, then, that the spiritual path is the same for men
                            as for women? Or is it different?

                            SK: I would say it's the same, although it demands that we get over
                            different illusions. The male has got to get over the illusions of
                            manhood, and the woman has to get rid of the illusions of
                            womanhood, to go beyond them, to go beyond the cultural
                            stereotypes that have shaped them and to realize that, at the level of
                            the life of the spirit, there isn't a difference—that it's equally difficult
                            for us to transcend those things, to grind up the whole shadow, to
                            delve into our unconscious and to transcend our conditioning. I think
                            of the life of the spirit, in a sense, as that which begins to emerge on
                            the far side of the mythologies that have shaped and informed us.
                                The first place I can remember that this question was raised
                            was many, many years ago when Reinhold Niebuhr, the theologian,
                            wrote an essay about pride, about how we have to get over pride
                            because pride is a chief sin. And a woman who must have been one
                            of the first feminist theologians wrote and said, "Wait a minute, that
                            may be true for men. But it's not true for women. Women, by and
                            large, have a problem of low self-esteem, of not having enough pride
                            because that's what the culture has done to them; it says that you're
                            second class." So in that sense, there is a different emotional
                            agenda that attaches to a woman freeing herself and a man freeing
                            himself, just in large terms.
                                Let me tell you another way in which this topic is talked about
                            that I think will distinguish how I think about it differently from other
                            people. Of course, Western spirituality has until recently been almost
                            exclusively male in its metaphors. The metaphor of "God the Father"
                            is perhaps the strongest example. And Mary Daly came along some
                            twenty-five years ago and said, "This is a big mistake. Talking about
                            God the Father is just a way to smuggle your politics and your sense
                            of male gender superiority into theology." It was like dropping a
                            bombshell into theology because suddenly you realized that these
                            male-biased metaphors really said that "masculine" traits, such as
                            control and reason, were better than "feminine" traits. Like all males, I
                            resisted her stuff in the beginning. Then I began to realize she was
                            absolutely right about it. But the problem is that the feminists then
                            said, "Oh, God the Father. That's right. That's a baaad way to talk.
                            Now, let's talk about God the Mother. Let's talk about the Goddess."
                            Now, I think that Mary Daly should be as critical of that as she has
                            been of the notion of God the Father. We do not begin to get on a
                            spiritual journey until we go beyond the gendered metaphors for
                            God. For instance, tell me what in the world it could possibly mean to
                            say Mother Nature? What's motherly about it as opposed to fatherly
                            or brotherly? It's a metaphor, and it's a metaphor whose time has
                            passed as far as I'm concerned. I say that we need to get beyond
                            that and to get back to the much more basic kinds of metaphors of
                            knowing, of compassion, of loving.
                                The second book I wrote was called Apology for Wonder.
                            Aristotle says that philosophy begins in wonder. The same thing is
                            true about the life of the spirit. The life of the spirit begins in wonder,
                            the wonder that there is anything, the sense of gratitude to be in a
                            world that is filled with all of these marvels. And if the life of the spirit
                            begins in wonder and awe, then what could it possibly mean to say
                            that's either male or female? It's irrelevant. Maleness and femaleness
                            are irrelevant to the basic fact that there is this marvelous universe.

                            WIE: You were speaking about how we all have strong ideas of what
                            it means to be a good or real man or a good or real woman, ideas
                            that have been implanted into us by culture. And while people
                            generally tend to put a lot of energy into trying to live up to that
                            gender ideal, spiritual liberation teachings stress that we have to be
                            willing to give up all of our preconceived ideas and live in a state of
                            perpetual unknowing, a condition of genuine openness to the
                            discovery of what is. One of the things we're exploring in this issue
                            is what this kind of unknowing would mean in relation to our gender
                            identity. Would it be possible, for example, for an individual to come
                            to a point in their spiritual development where they were completely
                            freed from any fixation on gender differences while at the same time
                            felt no need to avoid or deny whatever differences might actually
                            exist?

                            SK: Well, yes and no. In the first place, the idea of total liberation is a
                            bad and extremely destructive idea.

                            WIE: It is?

                            SK: Yes, because it's something to aim at that you're never going to
                            hit. To be free from the crippling effects of gender is a good ideal and
                            we should work in that direction, but you're also always living within
                            a society where those distinctions are operative and continue to be
                            wounding to you and to others. And part of what it means to live the
                            life of the spirit is to work to overcome that. But no matter how far
                            you go, you're always going to have an unconscious, you're always
                            going to have a shadow, you're always going to have something that
                            has the tendency to draw you back into those distinctions because
                            you were formed that way in the beginning. In a sense, it's sort of a
                            countercultural act to get free of them.
                                So in terms of the notion of total liberation, I don't have the
                            foggiest idea what that would mean. One of the things I frankly don't
                            like about your magazine is the holding up of these people who are
                            supposedly "in the absolute" and totally liberated. I don't know
                            whether you remember, but for many years I was the person at
                            Psychology Today who interviewed all these gurus. And so I've had
                            a good bit of experience with a
                            fair number of them—Chögyam Trungpa, Oscar Ichazo, Muktananda
                            and others. And if these are all examples of people who are totally
                            liberated, I say give me slavery because they were people with
                            enormous illusions and who were cultivating enormous illusions in
                            their followers. By and large almost all of them were totally unclear
                            about three important things: sex, money and power. And they could
                            play like they were liberated as long as they had a whole cult of
                            disciples who did everything for them except wipe their asses—and
                            probably that, too. And most of them were on enormous power trips.
                            So I think the idea of total liberation is sort of like the idea of
                            perfection. It's an idea that is more crippling than helpful.

                            WIE: But in your chapter "Taking the Measure of Man" in Fire in the
                            Belly, you write about the "Hall of Exemplars," about the
                            extraordinary men and women who, in their rare demonstration of
                            "elemental virtue[s]," stand as "harbingers of hope" for all of us who
                            aspire to live a greater life. You state that what's significant about
                            these men and women is that "their lives are our strongest evidence
                           that human beings are spiritual creatures, that we are able to
                            transcend the conditioning of both biology and culture." So what I'm
                            asking you is: What does it mean to transcend biological and
                            cultural conditioning, specifically where gender is concerned?

                            SK: Well, let me take one of my good examples: Georgia O'Keeffe.
                            Now, Georgia O'Keeffe, right from the beginning, did not follow the
                            path that one was supposed to follow to be a nice girl. She wasn't
                            sugar and spice and everything nice. She wasn't getting the coffee
                            for anybody. She wasn't asking anybody how she should draw.
                            Right from the beginning of her life, she had a vision and she
                            pursued it. And she pursued it in such a way that she broke many of
                            the taboos of her time. When she wanted to marry Stieglitz, she got
                            married; when she needed to be in New Mexico, she went to New
                            Mexico. Today that would not be all that shocking, but back then it
                            was pretty radical stuff.

                            WIE: So in this sense of the word "transcendence," you're not
                            speaking about an absolute transcendence as it's been conceived
                            by the great mystical traditions, but more specifically about a
                            willingness to break with the status quo?

                            SK: Well, yes, but it's about self-understanding, too. And, you know,
                            there are millions of quiet exemplars to look to as well. As a matter of
                            fact, I have much more trouble looking at the official examples than I
                            do at unofficial ones. We all salute these official sort of semi-saints
                            but, I mean, who knows what the Dalai Lama does on the side?

                            WIE: Coming back to the question of gender differences, a number
                            of contemporary thinkers and practitioners have asserted that
                            women are, by nature, predisposed to pursue a path of
                            immanence—which involves deeply connecting to their bodies and
                            to the cycles of nature and finding the sacred in relationship—while
                            men tend to seek transcendence of all that is worldly, to look
                            beyond themselves for the sacred mystery that lies at the source of
                            all existence. Seemingly in support of this idea are certain religious
                            traditions that adhere to a kind of tantric model in which there are
                            strictly defined spheres that are said to be divinely ordained for men
                            and women. In Orthodox Judaism, for example, the men devote
                           themselves to study and prayer and the women are expected to find
                            their spiritual fulfillment in bearing children and maintaining the
                            sanctity of the home. According to this paradigm, it is only by each
                            sex giving themselves wholeheartedly to the fulfillment of these
                            preordained roles and then coming together in their differences that
                            divine union can be achieved and God's will can become manifest
                            on Earth. Do you feel that this notion of distinct paths for men and
                            women bears out in practice?

                            SK: No. I think that's sort of like saying it's intrinsic and God-given that
                            women should wear skirts and men should wear pants. I think it's
                            just about as culturally conditioned as that. I mean, come on, give me
                            a break! Women are more immanent than men?! Tell that to van Gogh!
                            Tell it to Audubon, tell it to John Muir, tell it to Agassiz, tell it to any of
                            the poets. I don't know where people get off making this kind of
                            generalization! I mean, what could that possibly mean? I'm sitting
                            here, as a matter of fact, this very moment, looking out my window at
                            the stream and the beautiful greens with the sun on them—so I
                            guess that kind of makes me like a woman!
                                Almost every year I take groups into Bhutan. It's marvelous
                            because there you see that men and women, especially in rural
                            areas, practically do almost exactly the same things—the same kind
                            of work. Their bodies even look kind of the same. And it's not a big
                            deal. You get the sense that sexuality and everything goes much
                            more easily. I don't ever hear anybody saying anything that would be
                            vaguely like, "a real man does this or a real woman does that." There
                            are some role divisions in the society, of course. Male monastics are
                            uppermost in the establishment. And there are some put-downs of
                            women in the tradition, including the assertion that it's harder for
                            women to get enlightened and things of that kind. But I just think that
                            generalizations like that are repressive. And let me tell you why I
                            think they're repressive, why I'm so passionate about this idea.
                                As a young man, I was unusually sensitive. I loved birds, I loved
                            nature and I was sensuous. And gradually it occurred to me that this
                            was something I had to be ashamed of, that it was kind of sissy. So I
                            put that stuff away for a long time. Through my teenage years I took
                            Charles Atlas courses and learned to wrestle to toughen myself up
                            so I could be a man. And it wasn't until I began trying to work through
                            some of these ideas that I began to realize, in retrospect, what
                            bullshit that was, what destructive cultural stereotyping it really was.
                            When this first really began to open up for me was actually during a
                            bioenergetics session with Stanley Keleman. I was going with a
                            woman at the time who was giving me all kinds of trouble. I just
                            wasn't manly enough for her, in my view. And Stanley looked at me
                            one day and said, "You don't get it, do you? You just don't get it.
                            Your manliness is your sensitivity." And I realized I had been
                            misidentifying where my "Sam Keen" strength was all along, that all
                            these "feminine" parts that I had thought were not worthy of me
                            were really where the juice of my life was, and that I had to learn to
                            be more accepting, more surrendering and softer and more
                            sensuous.
                                So I think that those notions are really destructive to individual
                            people. In my seminars, I frequently have women come up and talk
                            about how deeply shamed they are because they're aggressive,
                            competent women and they maybe even look kind of manly. They
                            say, "I have all this competence and everything else but, you know, I
                            just feel like maybe I'm not feminine enough." And I look at them and I
                            say, "You look like a pretty attractive woman to me. What do you
                            mean?" They say, "Well, you know, I'm not x, y and z, and all these
                            other things." You see, it's injurious to put these kinds of cookie
                            cutters over ourselves.
WIE: It seems to be common practice today to label qualities such
                            as compassion, receptivity, sensitivity and intuition as "feminine"
                            and qualities such as aggressiveness, competitiveness, ambition
                            and reason as "masculine." Near the end of Fire in the Belly, in
                            writing about what you call "the gender game," you speak at length
                            about these binding polarities that have come to define our
                            conceptions of gender. You state: "Manliness and womanliness are
                            both defined by a process of decision, and denial. Each gender is
                            assigned half of the possible range of human virtues and vices. . . .
                            We do not know what human beings would be like if encouraged to
                            develop their innate promise without the systematic crippling effect
                            of the gender game."

                            SK: Yeah, well, in the first place, I go on to say there that I think that
                            no self-respecting person who's thought about these things should
                            ever use the word "masculine" or "feminine" and attach any kind of
                            general predicates and virtues to it. That's just nonsense. It's time to
                            get rid of that stuff. It may be helpful on the spiritual journey to ask
                            myself the question: How have I been crippled by my effort to
                            become a man or a real man, or a woman or a real woman? That's
                            not a bad question to begin with. But there is a far, far more
                            important question which is far more subtle and that is: Who am I?
                            Who is Sam Keen and what does he experience and what does he
                            need to do and where are his injuries? So much of my approach is
                            the effort to go beyond mythology to autobiography, to take my own
                            story and the uniqueness of my own situation, my own gifts and my
                            own wounds, with a kind of ultimate seriousness. In other words, to
                            put it metaphorically, God does not issue something to me that says,
                            "To whom it may concern," nor does he say, "To all men" or "To all
                            women" or "Directive to twentieth-century man." No, the still, small
                            voice addresses me with my name: Sam Keen, do this. Sam Keen,
                            experience that. It's individually tailored, you see. And the fact is that
                            my way of being a man is probably different from your way of being
                            a man. And it's my task to find out what that is. I'm always going to
                            be a man. Biologically, I'm going to be a man. I have the male
                            equipment. But what that means is going to be so governed by my
                            own experience as to be something that would be almost totally,
                            perhaps, strange to you.

                            WIE: Along these lines, at another point you state, "Far better to
                            remain with the real mystery of man and woman than the false
                            mystification of the masculine and the feminine." What do you mean
                            by "the real mystery of man and woman?"

                            SK: I don't know. I know what the false mystery is. The difference
                            between a false mystery and a real mystery is that you can tell what
                            a false mystery is, but I'm not sure that you can ever say what the
                            true mystery is. It's like when I'm in the presence of a woman who
                            has gone beyond the gender crippling stuff in herself, and I am at
                            least endeavoring to go beyond it in myself, and we face each other,
                            no longer as masculine and feminine, but as unique individuals, then
                            there is the real mystery of that other person. I think I said in the book
                            it's sort of like what Satchmo said when somebody asked him what
                            jazz is; he said, "Man, if you don't know, I could never tell you."

                            WIE: Jungian psychology holds that within each of us, male or
                            female, there are both masculine and feminine energies, which
                            need to be brought into balance if we are to become whole. For
                            instance, Marion Woodman in her book Leaving My Father's House
                            states, "We all function with these two different energies. As health
                            and growth depend on both dark and light, so maturity depends on
                            an inner balance between yin and yang, Shakti and Shiva, being and
                            doing." Do you agree with this notion that a fundamental polarity of
                            masculine and feminine energy exists in the psyche?

                            SK: No, I think it's boring—it's a boring idea. I could put it this way.
                            There are two kinds of people: those who divide the world up into
                            two columns and those who don't. I am a person who does not
                            believe in setting the world up in terms of two columns and then
                            saying, "But you see, there's a little of the yin in the yang and a little
                            of the yang in the yin, and we have to get the two columns together."
                            Well, why start with two columns? Why start with making your basic
                            concepts about the human psyche goose-step along? I think that's
                            intellectual tyranny. It's not helpful! It is helpful for me to say, "Now,
                            Sam, what are you experiencing?" It's helpful for me to sit quietly in
                            meditation and try to get in a witness space and to identify my
                            feelings and images. It's totally unhelpful for me to say, "Now I've
                            gotta get my yin balanced with my yang! Am I too yang or too yin?"
                            And again, to label these virtues and/or vices as masculine and
                            feminine is part of the problem. Don't start with an artificial
                            separation. Think in different categories. If all I can think of is, "I've
                            got to do this or that," if all I think of is masculine or feminine, it's a
                            shotgun to my head. That's why I don't like Jungianism—just like I
                            detest the idea of archetypes.

                            WIE: Why is that? There are more than two of those.

                            SK: All right. Let's take the most recent thing. Tell me what the
                            archetypes of man are?

                            WIE: The king, the warrior, the lover and the magician.

                            SK: Now, the idea is that these archetypes are different ways of
                            structuring our experience that we all somehow have to go through.
                            To show you how ridiculous that is, let's go back to the earliest
                            notion in the West of what constituted the dignity of a human being,
                            which was what? The citizen. In the Greek world, the word for
                            "idiot," as a matter of fact, meant somebody who was not a citizen.
                            Now tell me, why isn't the citizen in the archetypes? Because the
                            Jungians are apolitical, because they're interested in inner
                            psychodrama. They're not interested in the transformation of the
                            world. You see, if those are the four archetypes, then we don't have
                            to worry about what's happening in Kosovo or anywhere else.
                            That's just stuff that's going on over there. We don't have to worry
                            about the educational system deteriorating because that's something
                            citizens worry about. Give me a break! King as an archetype?! That's
                            why we came to this country—to get rid of those archetypes! That's
                            what America was all about, "Screw kingship! Screw dominion!" And
                            the warrior? That's the hair of the dog that bit us. That's what's been
                            driving us all along. If the Jungians would say, "There are endless
                            numbers of metaphors that help us to understand ourselves, and
                            here are four," I'd say, "That's a good start. Now give me five or six.
                            How about giving me, oh, garbageman." Now, that's a good
                            archetype, right, because isn't half of the problem cleaning up the
                            trash in our psyche? Well, sure it is! Separating the wheat from the
                            chaff, you know. Or how about fool or hobo or wanderer or friend?
                            How about friend! Now, that's an interesting archetype. Aristotle's
                            Nicomachean Ethics has a great deal to do with friendship, philia.
                            I'm not much of a fan of Jungian thought because it ignores two
                            things: politics and the body. They're largely a disembodied
                            movement.

                            WIE: It seems as though much of the men's movement has centered
                            around Jungian thought.

                            SK: That's right. It has. And I don't think it's helped them.

                            WIE: In this issue, in addition to exploring the relationship between
                            gender and spirituality, we're also looking into the relationship
                            between sexual orientation and the path to liberation. In our time,
                            there are many gays and lesbians who view their experience of
                            sexual orientation as the very basis of their spiritual path, a path
                            employing unique forms of practice and worship. Some advocates of
                            a distinctly gay spirituality have even suggested that because the
                            male and female polarities are theoretically more fully integrated
                            and balanced in homosexuals, theirs is an inherently superior form
                            of spiritual practice. Andrew Harvey, one prominent spokesperson
                            of this view, states that "in earlier times . . . homosexuals . . . were
                            seen as sacred—people who, by virtue of a mysterious fusion of
                            feminine and masculine traits, participated with particular intensity
                            in the life of the Source." What do you think of the notion that sexual
                            orientation constitutes the basis for a distinct and separate spiritual
                            path?

                            SK: I don't like it at all. I think that sexual orientation is an individual
                            thing that shouldn't be politicized. And I don't think, in that sense, it
                            should be spiritualized, either. In the life of the spirit, the question isn't
                            whether somebody is gay or straight. From a spiritual perspective, I
                            think that's meaningless. In the life of the spirit, the question is
                            whether you're loving or unloving, and to what degree you can enter
                            a relationship with the fullness of who you are. And this theoretical
                            construct that the polarities are more balanced in gays and lesbians?
                            Well, who says that and by what possible jump can we get there?
                            Maybe they just don't have the polarities. To make gay or lesbian a
                            category is itself a sin. It's a mistake and a sin. I have friends who
                            are largely homoerotic who would never call themselves gay. And
                            people who are homoerotic are as different from each other as
                            people who are heterosexual are. I'm all for anybody being able to do
                            what it is that they want with any consenting adult of either gender,
                            but let's not raise it to the level of something superior. Let's not make
                            homosexuality or heterosexuality spiritually superior. It's not the
                            issue.

                            WIE: In our research for this issue, we also came across the idea
                            among Jungian psychologists, some feminists and a number of
                            contemporary spiritual thinkers that our ultimate human potential is
                            the realization of a kind of androgyny in which all human qualities
                            find equal expression in everyone, regardless of gender. Describing
                            the fruition of the spiritual path as the birth of what he calls the
                            "sacred androgyne," Harvey, again, writes: "The main mystical
                            traditions agree that this birth of a new being can only take place
                            through a long, arduous, and increasingly conscious intermarriage
                            of the masculine and the feminine within each one of us, male or
                            female," and that "only such an intermarriage can give birth to the
                            sacred, androgynous, free child of the Source that is potential in
                            each of us." Do you agree with Harvey's view? Is the fullest
                            expression of our spiritual potential the realization of androgyny?

                            SK: HO HUM. I mean, why try to press every old idea into service?
                            Why not try to think about things differently? The idea of androgyny
                            is just the romantic myth taken into the interior. "Oh, boy. Finally, now,
                            the man in me and the woman in me are going to get together and
                            have this marvelous romance and I'm going to be whole." It's like
                            thinking with wooden blocks. I mean, that idea comes up all through
                            the alchemical tradition, and it was okay to talk about it then. But isn't
                            it time to think creatively, to get some new categories, new ways of
                            thinking, instead of just trying to knit new wool on these old needles?

                            WIE: You brought up Mary Daly earlier. She and other radical
                            feminists hold that most if not all of the ills in our individual psyches
                            and in society at large are the result of the overwhelming influence
                            of men—male values, attitudes and dispositions—on everything
                            from the structure of government and commerce to the structure of
                            language. Citing the widespread, catastrophic effects of patriarchy
                            on not only the status of women but on the quality of life on this
                            planet, they call for a return to a gynocentric spiritual culture with
                            values and institutions akin to those of the peaceful, agrarian world
                            that existed thousands of years ago. Is Mary Daly right? Would
                            placing all power in the hands of women be enough to bring about a
                            peaceful, harmonious culture rooted in deeply spiritual values?

                            SK: Yeah, yeah. Of course. I mean, you know what they did to build
                            the pyramids—they went out and they got union labor and they
                            asked for volunteers because it was all a "cooperative culture." And
                            in those matriarchal cultures, they also asked people if they wanted
                            to be human sacrifices because they were nice and kindly in those
                            days. You know . . . it's the chalice and the blade.
                                What all of that really is is a disguised rewriting of history in
                            order to do male bashing. Men and women have been in this thing
                            together all along. If you want to bash patriarchy, you can bring it
                            right up to the modern era and speak about how these brutish men,
                            these terrible men, went over to Vietnam and killed all those people. I
                            mean, they were nineteen-year-old kids who had no more choice
                            about what they did than Mary Daly did. Anytime that you put the
                            blame on one of the genders, you have rendered the other inferior. If
                            it's true that men just dominated women all that time and women had
                            no power, then they probably needed to be dominated.

                            WIE: Do you think putting the blame on men is a complete
                            misappropriation?

                            SK: Yes. But I also want to say that I do believe that Mary Daly is one
                            of our great prophetesses. I have learned enormous amounts from
                            her. I want to affirm so much of her analysis, but I don't want to
                            affirm her anger. It takes a good deal of courage for a man to really
                            read Mary Daly and to open himself up to her arguments. Many of
                            them are brilliant and are necessary medicine to help most men to
                            understand the injuries that women have experienced in this culture.
                            But there are certain feminists whose anger gets in the way of their
                            clarity.

                            WIE: I think they would argue that they've got a lot to be angry about.

                            SK: And they do. They do.

                            WIE: In your view, what does it mean to go beyond gender?

                            SK: Again, it means get over it! This question of gender is something,
                            by and large, to be gotten over, to get on the other side of. I don't ask
                            myself the question: Am I a man? Am I manly enough? I ask myself
                            the question: What am I about? In other words, I think we need to
                            stop making gender a primary way of asking the question: Who am
                            I?

                            WIE: What do you think becomes possible within the individual and
                            between human beings when we do "get over it," as you put it?

                            SK: Well, I would ask—and this question is at the very center of
                            Buddhism and Christianity—What does it mean to be wise and
                            compassionate? That's a hard question for me to answer. In my daily
                            life, how do I be wise and compassionate in relationship with my
                            wife when I'm in conflict, or with my children or my friends? What do
                            I do about Kosovo and my government to be a decent human being?
                            This is an age in which, somebody said, you have to become heroic
                            just to be decent! And that isn't a gender question. What's injuring the
                            world here isn't gender. In America, women are just as injurious to
                            the world as men are. They're out there in the malls. The mall is
                            where we vote about values. Why did we do what we did in Iraq?
                            So we could drive to the mall. And again, I think what I object to about
                            your magazine is the lack of the real political kinds of questions. All
                            afternoon you haven't asked me anything about the politics of
                            gender.

                            WIE: Well, our magazine is about enlightenment.

                            SK: Well, that's what's wrong with it, then. Frankly, that's what's
                            wrong with it. It's kind of narcissistic. There's a lot of spiritual
                            narcissism, I think. Now, that's not to say it's completely that way.
                            You do come out of it and you do have the courage to speak with
                            people who aren't particularly in sympathy with your major point of
                            view. But let me ask: What would it be like if, on your cover,
                            underneath the words "What Is Enlightenment?" you put: "One
                            definition of an enlightened person might be that the first question
                            they would ask is: What is just? How do we establish justice?"
                            Because that takes us into the political realm. That takes us beyond
                            the obsession. And the obsession with enlightenment can be just like
                            the obsession with gender. People who are obsessed with
                            enlightenment are never going to get there.

                            WIE: This is a common argument against the pursuit of
                            enlightenment. But I don't see the question "How do we establish
                            justice?" as being in any way removed from the question "What is
                            enlightenment?" If we look at the human condition, if we look at
                            what's behind the atrocities in Kosovo or Nazi Germany, it seems to
                            me that we have to confront the question: How is humanity's problem
                            going to be solved without individuals making a change, without
                            individuals coming to a reckoning with themselves, with their own
                            motivations? Our magazine is actually founded in the idea that there
                            is a strong moral and ethical component to liberating ourselves
                            from delusion.
                                In this issue, for instance, we're questioning the core of gender
                            identity because, as you've pointed out, it seems that the strong
                            identification most of us have with gender is one of the fundamental
                            structures underlying the conflict we see in the world. And the idea
                            is that if enough light can be brought to something so fundamental
                            to our makeup, then hopefully we can begin to see, and even
                            respond to, another possibility.

                            SK: Well, good. Transforming the self and transforming our society
                            are warp and woof of the same tapestry. It takes both to weave
                            anything hopeful, beautiful and new.