Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others…

by Brown, David Jay

  RMN: Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance, Ralph Abraham's chaos theory, and your time wave model all appear to contain complimentary patterns which operate on similar underlying principles--that energy systems store information until a certain level is reached and the information is then transduced into a larger frame of reference, like water in a tiered fountain. Have you worked these theories into an all encompassing metatheory of how the universe functions and operates?

  Terence: Well, it is true that the three of us and I would add Frank Barr in there, who is less well known, but has a piece of the puzzle as well--we're all complimentary. Rupert's theory is, at this point a hypothesis. There are no equations, there's no predictive machinery, it's a way of speaking about experimental approaches. My time wave thing is like an extremely formal and specific example of what he's talking about in a general way. And then what Ralph's doing is providing a bridge from the kind of things Rupert and I are doing back into the frontier branch of ordinary mathematics called dynamic modeling. And Frank is an expert in the repetition of fractal process. He can show you the same thing happening on many, many levels, in many, many different expressions. So I have named us Compressionists, or Psychedelic Compressionists. A Compressionism holds that the world is growing more and more complex, compressed, knitted together, and therefore holographically complete at every point, and that's basically where the four of us stand, I think, but from different points of view.

  DJB: Can you tell us about Botanical Dimensions, and any current projects that you're working on?

  Terence: Botanical Dimensions is a non-profit foundation that attempts to rescue plants with a history of shamanic and human usage in the warm tropics, and rescue the information about how they're used, store the information in computers, and move the plants to a nineteen-acre site on the big island of Hawaii, in a rainforest belt that reasonably replicates the Amazon situation. There we are keeping them toward the day when someone will want to do serious research on them. As a non-profit foundation we solicit donations, publish a newsletter, and support a number of collectors in the field to carry on this work, which nobody else is really doing. There's a lot of rainforest conservation going on, but very little effort to conserve the folk-knowledge of native peoples. Amazonian people are going off to sawmills and repairing outboard motors, and this whole body of knowledge about plants is going to be lost in the next generation. We're saving it, and saving the plants in a botanical garden in Hawaii.

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  Raising the Chalice

  with Riane Eisler & David Loye

  Riane Eisler has been described as a modern renaissance woman due to her far-reaching insights as a cultural historian. She is the author of The Chalice and the Blade, which the eminent anthropologist, Ashley Montague has hailed as "the most important book since Darwin 's Origin of Species. " Her latest work, The Partnership Way--written with her husband David Loye is a handbook for applying the partnership model for which she has become renowned.

  Riane was born in Vienna, Austria, and at the age of six she found herself a refugee of Nazi Europe. She sailed to Cuba, on the last ship before the ill-fated St. Louis was refused sanctuary by the United States and she emigrated to North America when she was fourteen. Her early experiences with the dark side of human culture led her to pursue studies in sociology and anthropology and she went on to obtain a J.D. from the UCLA School of Law.

  She has taught at the University of California and the Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, and she is a member of the General Evolution Research Group. She has pioneered legislation to protect the human rights of women and children and founded such organizations as the Los Angeles Women 's Center Legal Program and the Center for Partnership Studies.

  Riane 's articles have appeared in many publications and journals. She has frequently appeared on television and addressed corporations such as Dupont and Disney. She has also spoken at universities such as UCLA and Harvard and keynoted many conferences worldwide.

  Riane is an eloquent and dynamic speaker. Her ability to interweave a vast expanse of information allowed for a fascinating and highly revelatory discussion on the politics of anthropology, the roots of civilization, the lost aspects of religion and the cease-fire recipe to humanity 's "war of the sexes. "

  David Loye is a social psychologist and systems theorist. He is the author of numerous books on the use of the brain and mind in prediction, political leadership and race relations. His psychohistory, The Healing of a Nation, was called "a work of uncommon humanity and vision " by Psychology Today and received the Anisfield - Wolfe Award for the best scholarly book on race relations in 1971. His other works include The Leadership Passion, The Sphinx and the Rainbow and The Knowable Future, which has been recognized as a pioneering work of unusual stature in the field of future studies.

  David is a former member of the psychology faculty of Princeton University and for almost ten years he was the Director of Research for the Program on Psychosocial Adaption and the Future at the UCLA School of Medicine. He is also a founding member of the General Evolution Research Group, a multidisciplinary think tank composed of scholars from various parts of the world. A member of the Editorial Board and Book Review Editor of The Journal of General Evolution, David's articles have appeared in numerous publications. He is also a major contributor to the first multi-volume World Encyclopedia of Peace.

  During recent years, David's main research project has been the scientific study of moral sensitivity and he is completing two books on the subject. This has involved a re-evaluation of the work of many philosophers and psychologists in light of new discoveries in brain research, human prehistory, and the systems dynamics of cultural evolution. He is currently Go-Director of the Center for Partnership Studies in Pacific Grove, California.

  We met with David and his wife, plane on the Winter Solstice of 1988 at their beautiful home in Carmel, California. David offered us intriguing insights into the nature of morality and its relation to sexual distortion and denial. Pooling together his multi-disciplinary perspectives he spoke with passionate clarity on the subjects of cultural politics and the respective roles which the left and right sides of our brains have played in social evolution.

  RMN

  DJB: Riane tell us, what was it that originally inspired you to write The Chalice and the Blade, a book described by Ashley Montague as "the most important book since Darwin's Origin of Species," and what motivated you to complete the work?

  RIANE: I think that what people choose to study is related to their life experiences. I was a refugee from Nazi Europe, and at a very early age I had to ask myself some very basic questions, the questions that I tried to answer in The Chalice and The Blade. And they certainly weren't just academic questions for me.

  Because of my own life experiences, I was haunted by questions such as: Do we have to hunt and persecute each other? Do we have to live in ways that stunt our ability and willingness to be helpful and caring towards other people? Does there have to be war? And do we have to have the "war of the sexes"? One of the things my work shows is that there is an integral relationship, in systems terms, between war and the war of the sexes.

  RMN: Just so that everyone is familiar with your cultural transformation theory, can you define the differences between what you have termed a partnership and dominator, or gylanic and androcratic society?

  RIANE: I think the best way to answer this question is to begin with how I developed cultural transformation theory. About ten years ago I embarked on an intensive study, drawing from many fields, to re-examine our past, our present, and the possibilities for our future.

  Most studies concerned with our global crises focus on modern times, on what's happening now, or on what happened in the last few hundred years. My database was much larger. As you know, it included the whole of our history, including our prehistory. And it also included the whole of humanity; in other
words, both its female and male halves.

  Perhaps fifty years from now, people will say, you mean that's not how it was always done? Because it's ludicrous, when you come right down to it, to just take one half of a species into account. Yet most books on history or sociology or anthropology, if there are six or seven mentions in the index about women, that's already terrific, right? It's a progressive book.

  We all know that if we just look at part of a picture, we don't see the whole picture. What I started to see is what one can see if one uses a holistic or systems approach: recurring relationships or patterns that were not visible before. These patterns or configurations compose what I then called the dominator or androcratic and the partnership or gylanic models of society.

  Each has a clear configuration. But we didn't see that configuration because we weren't looking at a very key component in it, which is the status of women and of so-called feminine values, such as caring, nonviolence, and compassion. In other words, at the relationship between the female and male halves of humanity, and with this, between stereotypes of "masculinity" and "femininity."

  A lot of lip service is given to bemoaning that we don't have a social guidance system governed by these so-called "feminine" values that we now need for our survival. Only the talk about it is abstract.

  If you look at the configurations of these two models, you see something very interesting, which is that the dominator system requires that values like caring and nonviolence and compassion (stereotypically associated with women) not be governant. You see that at the core of that system is the domination of men over women, of one half of humanity by the other. And that this domination is ultimately backed up by force or the threat of force.

  Beginning with the ranking of one half of humanity over the other, the dominator system is also characterized by a generally hierarchic or authoritarian social structure and a high degree of institutionalized violence. Not only rape (a form of male terrorism against women), wife battering, incest, and other structural forms of violence designed to maintain men's domination over women; but also institutionalized violence designed to impose and/or maintain the domination of man over man, tribe over tribe, and nation over nation. That's of course what warfare is about.

  RMN: Can you give us some examples of each model?

  RIANE: If we look at human society using the templates of the partnership and dominator models, we begin to see that in all the seeming randomness around us there are actually patterns. Take for example, three very different societies: the Masai of Africa, Nazi Germany, and Khomeini's Iran --a tribal society, a highly technologically developed Western society, and a Middle Eastern theocracy.

  Underneath all the surface differences, all three are rigidly male dominant societies. Moreover, they are all highly warlike. The Masai were the scourge of Africa --the most warlike of African societies. The violence of Hitler's Germany and Khomeini's Iran is well-known. But the institutionalized violence is not only in warfare, but many other areas--wife beating, genital mutilation of women among the Masai, the brutality directed against women not only in Iran but many other fundamentalist Muslim regimes. And in all three there was strong-man rule, be it in the family or in the state. And it was absolute, authoritarian rule. So in Iran the Mullahs will tell you that they have the only direct telephone line to God, and you had better listen to them--or else.

  This dominator configuration of rigid male dominance, a high degree of institutionalized violence, and strong-man or authoritarian rule in both the family and state is discernible in very different societies and groups. In the United States, you see the same kind of configuration in the rightist-fundamentalist alliance. "Get women back into their 'traditional' (a code word for subservient) place." And a lot of emphasis on "holy wars" and on strict obedience to "divinely ordained" commands. But it isn't only that war is holy in the religious sense in the dominator model. The Nazis thought war was holy--because war is holy in the dominator model. That's why I chose the title The Chalice and The Blade--the blade becomes the highest power.

  RMN: And the partnership model?

  RIANE: As you move towards the partnership or gylanic model, you see the opposite configuration. You see power equated more with the chalice--with the power to give, rather than take, life. You also see a more equal partnership between the female and male halves of humanity. And you see a more democratic, more equitable system and a far lower degree of institutionalized violence. It isn't that there's no violence. But there's a very big difference, which is that in the partnership or gylanic model, male identity is not equated with domination and conquest--be it of women, other men, other nations, or nature. And violence and abuse are not institutionalized in parent-child relations and in other human relations.

  One of the characteristics of the partnership model, as evidenced by prehistoric societies that we are now rediscovering, is that they had what we today would call an ecological consciousness---a real reverence for nature, which they venerated in the form of a Great Goddess. So the contemporary ecology movement is a very important partnership or gylanic trend with its growing understanding that we need to respect, rather than conquer, Mother Nature.

  There are all over the world today many partnership trends. If you look at the Scandinavian nations, you find the strongest movement toward an integrated partnership configuration beginning to come together. In the first place, there is a more equal partnership between women and men. For example, in the Norwegian government, women constitute approximately forty percent of Parliament. (Compare this to the less than six percent in the United States Congress or none in rigid dominator regimes like Saudi Arabia.) Moreover, this goes along with a more equitable and democratic distribution of wealth--one that did not devolve into the Soviet Union's dominator form of socialism. There is also the fact that the Scandinavians boast the first peace academies and some of the groundbreaking work in human rights. And Scandinavian countries evidence more "feminine" values in their social governance--with a consequent emphasis not so much on technologies of destruction (weaponry) but on health, education, and welfare, as well as the environment (in other words on "women's" work such as caring and cleaning).

  When you think about it, we're what's known as a dimorphic species, a species composed of two halves. It should therefore come as no surprise to anybody that the way that a society structures this fundamental relationship makes a tremendous difference.

  DAVID L: An interesting thing to me is that when you confront a lot of social scientists with this idea that everything boils down to two models-- they may not say this openly-- but what's going on in the back of their heads, is that's just too simplistic. They tend to discount the idea on that ground. But I've looked at a broad range of phenomena in light of Riane's fundamental insight, and it is that simple. The term, incidentally, partnership, is actually one I came up with. Riane was using the terms "androcratic" and "gylanic." It was pointed out by a friend of ours, the futurist writer Bob Jungk, that somewhat more accessible terms were needed for broad appeal.

  DJB: Does your dominator-partnership model of human evolution require a revision in Darwin's theory of natural selection, which assumes that competitive and selfish reproductive success is the driving force in evolution, or do you think, perhaps, that symbiosis and cooperation could be viewed as a, or the, driving force in evolution?

  RIANE: My book is very different in its basic assumptions and findings from Darwin’s, and particularly from how Darwin has been popularly interpreted. It isn't like if species A survives, species B has to die. That's not how evolution works.

  As a matter of fact, most of the world's ecosystem demonstrates a far more synergistic and symbiotic relationship between many species. And of course the great danger with that totally competitive dog-eat-dog approach, which is the dominator system approach, is that it is now, at our level of technology, not only threatening our species with extinction, but it's threatening all species.

  Although I have to clarify here that there is
also competition in the partnership system, just as there's also cooperation in the dominator system. But it's a different kind of competition and cooperation. For example, in the dominator model men cooperate to go to war, to better dominate or destroy. So the answer is not just cooperation. The issue is cooperation in the context of a partnership or dominator society. That extreme conquest-oriented dominator competition is truly not adaptive.

  I am not a biologist, so I can only tell you that my work is more in line with new interpretations by biologists and evolutionary scholars, that the Darwinian model at best deals with only part of the picture. The biologist Humberto Maturana in Chile, for example, is very much involved in that kind of work.

  DAVID L: Ashley Montagu characterizes the difference by saying that it isn't survival of the fittest, it's the survival of the fit. This has the implication that it isn't this dog-eat-dog battle for only one survivor out of many. It's the survival of the fit, and you can define the fit in many different ways, including the way that Riane is defining it.