So how are we men and women to grow up within the patriarchy? How do we arrange to embark on our own rite of passage?
Your Rite of Passage
Rather than initiating you into duplicating what has traditionally been done in the past, a modern rite of passage initiates you into the ability to redirect human cultures of the present into a sustainable future. The following are some hints and suggestions about what might be involved in a modern rite of passage.
One must keep in mind that there can be no guaranteed standard formula for a rite of passage that is also authentic. Authenticity is not standardizeable. Even with long-practiced and well-informed skills, the elders leading traditional rites of passage lose about ten percent of their candidates – yes, “lose” – meaning “dead.” A rite of passage must be unique so as to ignite each individual’s unquenchable inspiration for providing their unique contributions to humanity. At the same time, modern rites of passage have some common characteristics.
To begin with, this book that you have in your hands is a fairly decent map of what is involved in a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. This is not a nice book. This book requires you to start where you are with a clear assessment of what you are up against if you are going to try to grow up. So, finish reading this book even if some parts of it make you angry, sad, or scared and you find a really good reason for putting the book down. You will see what I mean as you get into further chapters. After you finish reading this book, consider reading it again. The second time through seems to significantly help in digesting what was read the first time. You might even form a study group for discussing and implementing the ideas in this book.
• A rite of passage is a period of time during which you will undertake certain experiences or experiments to change your relationship to the world, to yourself, to your community, and to what is possible for you. The changes involved are not merely changes in intellectual understanding. The changes will include shifts of context, meaning shifts in where you come from, shifts in what you perceive with. These kinds of changes can take long periods of preparation and then occur quite suddenly. Although parts of your rite of passage will be minutes, hours, or days long, plan to spend at least two years seriously engaging the rite of passage process for yourself. What gets initiated during those two years could involve commitments or practices that continue for the rest of your life.
• A rite of passage from boyhood to man hood or from girlhood to womanhood is a journey. It is not a lone journey. A rite of passage is usually done in the company of peers and guided by older, more experienced men or women. Most of you reading this book may not even remember your fifteenth birthday party, yet we are structured for rite of passage work in our mid-teens. I have had the honor of being-with fifteen-year-old males and females in training spaces where they make the leap to enliven particular Archetypal aspects in themselves and the experience can be unbelievable. The sudden transformations that can happen in properly conducted processes are clean and complete, far exceeding anything that we know of from our ordinary course of education and even what is shown in the most exciting and inspiring of films!
• But most of us are probably thirty to fifty years old, and unlike fifteen-year-olds we have some serious habits to contend with. Our thinking-joints do not flex as noiselessly or painlessly as they once did. There is more sludge built up in the system. We are slower and heavier than we once were. This is as it is. At times when contrary forces exert their resistance to your evolutionary steps try to remember this: It is never too late to begin a rite of passage. Galileo Galilee was fifty-one years old when he wrote Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the book that got him arrested for heresy, and it was his second book that reordered the world of science. Irina Tweedie was fifty-two years old when she first met her guide and started on her rite of passage that has helped so many people start on theirs. (See her book, Daughter of Fire, which exquisitely describes her journey.)
• To begin your rite of passage, declare that you are now beginning your rite of passage. You could be ridiculously bold and say that right now, out loud, before you read the next paragraph: “I (state your full name) hereby declare that I am beginning (or taking my next step in) my rite of passage into adulthood.” It is best if you make no assumptions about already knowing what this could even mean.
• Start regularly meeting with others in the name of your rite of passage. If you are a man, get together with a few other men, women gather with a few other women, and in your coming together try to discover what bonding is. These people do not need to be your friends. In fact it may need to be that most of the others are complete strangers to you. Your friends could well be in a completely different evolution swing from you, and perhaps you have used your feet-dragging friends as an excuse to procrastinate long enough.
Women have particular difficulty in bonding – a phenomenon that is easily dismissed in a patriarchy. Women don’t trust each other enough to bond, being far more committed to competing against each other for power and favors from men. For women, getting through your deep-seated fear and hatred of your seductive sisters will involve breathtaking feats of trust. You will never encounter by accident the immense quantity of trust required, no matter how long you wait. Shadowy fears will always lurk in the dark recesses of your imagination – storing fears is what imagination is for. Bonding enough to go through your rite of passage together will involve trusting the other women in spite of your fears. Trust is a decision that you make. It can be particularly touching for women when your ritual of coming together includes speaking your trust out loud to each other. “Jane, I trust you. Petra, I trust you.” Then keep dealing specifically with what comes up for each of you in this process. There will always be reasons to fear. Trust is the decision that something else – in this case your rite of passage to womanhood – is more important than fear. Take a breath. You can manage this.
We have only vague ideas what it might mean to bond with each other in our own gender cultures. Go ahead and bond anyway. This does not mean go drinking. Then again, neither does it mean do not go drinking. Just do not make your group about drinking or you will never have your rite of passage. These days, men’s or women’s groups are often confused with homosexual men’s or women’s groups. Making your group about being gay, touchy-feely flirting, and finding your next lover, will also not take you on your rite of passage. On the other hand, do not avoid being in a group just because someone is homosexual. For example, of the four men in my first men’s group, one man was gay, one was alcoholic and gay, and the third man was confused, angry, punk, and occasionally gay. I met with these three men every week for three years and it changed my life in a profoundly sane way. Together these men helped build a foundation in me that I stand on to speak to you now, and for their work with me I will remain forever grateful. Create a team of two to four men or women, meet consistently every week or every other week no matter what, and go through your rite of passage together. Consider using this book as one of the study materials for supporting your group.
• Because a rite of passage involves upgrading ways that you think, feel, act and are, it is self-deceptive to think that you can design and manage a rite of passage for yourself by yourself. I do not like telling you that anything is impossible. Promoting impossibility is against my nature. And I have to say here that, based on my experience, when it comes to navigating your own unfolding it is far too easy to fool yourself. A central component of successful rite of passage work is persistent, clear, direct, and honest feedback from the other members of your group. Thinking that you can give yourself accurate feedback would be like leaving a kleptomaniac to guard a jewelry store or a nymphomaniac to babysit your nine-year-old son. You might not get the results you hoped for.
In addition to exploring study materials, exchanging feedback, sharing stories and giving and receiving support with your team, the suggestion here is to also obtain the help of a rite of passage guide. A guide can be anyone
who is more experienced and further advanced in their rite of passage than you are and who is responsible and clear enough to serve as a guide. Since rites of passage are not sponsored by our culture, your guide will need to be someone who already has gained access to a greater context than our culture. This does not mean that you should commit to the first Shaolin American-Indian Psychic Kabalistic Tibetan-Buddhist Tantric Sufi Shaman Kundalini Priest Healer from Africa who comes along. Stick a feather in your hat these days and advertise sweat lodges, vision quests, firewalking, outdoor drumming or meditation retreats and you can fill your pockets with gold from the gullible. Let the buyer beware. Being ripped off and betrayed a few times does not necessarily need to be part of your rite of passage. Then again, maybe it does.
• You will most likely end up with more than one guide along the way. But again beware. The tendency of mind to come up with reasonable arguments for jumping from guide to guide the instant before an important shift is about to happen is uncanny, irresistibly tempting, and classically predictable. Jumping from guide to guide will only make you good at jumping. The best way to find an authentic guide is to speak with other people who are already participating in what the guide is offering. Look for a guide whose participants tend to stick with him or her for a long time. Then, you plan to stick with that guide for just as long. A worthy guide will be surrounded by participants who are grounded, centered, balanced, healthy, vocal, interested, vibrant, kind, generous, informative, vulnerable, intelligent, patient, well-rounded, and not only able to speak about what they are doing with clarity and enthusiasm but also able to listen to what you are looking for with respectful attention. The way to have the guide commit to you is to commit to the guide first. Committing first is a little-known and extremely effective nonlinear action. Find out what the guide expects in practical terms as a commitment from the people he or she works with, and then commit in exactly those practical terms. The guide for a man’s rite of passage into manhood will not be a woman. And vice versa. (Just being clear about this.)
• Preparing yourself for the various stages of a rite of passage involves developing internal disciplines, rigorous vigilance, various kinds of attention, consistency of practice, enduring various discomforts and challenges, perhaps feeling embarrassed or overwhelmed, an ability to persist in the face of unforeseen or unimaginable difficulties, paying certain participation fees, attending particularly nonattractive gatherings or work projects, accepting with equanimity your own and other people’s lacks and insufficiencies, and so on. For a dignified rite of passage it helps when you decide from the start to do whatever it takes to proceed with sincerity and whole heartedness. Swâmi Prajnânpad, a little-known but skilled guide from India, was famous for telling his students, “It is not a joke. You will have to pay the full price.”
Your guide will suggest specific practices that either prepare you for or actually take you a step forward on your journey. These practices could well include reading certain books, watching certain videos, listening to certain music, doing certain physical movements or exercises, making certain restrictions or enhancements to your daily diet, engaging some kind of meditative or sitting practice, attending certain talks, presentations, workshops or trainings, exposing yourself to certain environments, and developing specific inner faculties that allow you to perceive various energetic relationships and spaces. If your rite of passage does not challenge your cultural addictions or does not include most of the above listed practices, your rite of passage may not be strong enough to provide for you what you are looking for.
I was thirty-seven years old when I took my first step toward becoming a man. Even though I was graduated from the university, had traveled around the world for two-and-a-half years working in Australia and Japan, was happily married, had two wonderful children, owned a house and a car, and was running my own home-based electronic production company in northern California, I was still a boy. In 1989, at my wife’s suggestion, I participated in a weekend training near Los Angeles. I had “some” resistance to attending this training because I was a scientist and I imagined that I already had everything figured out. How could I have any problems? Everything already worked – from my point of view.
This experience was not what one might typically imagine a seminar to be: a few days where you learn something new. This was a training: a few days where you become something new. This particular training originated in the bowels of the maximum-security federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, in the 1960s. It was developed through a creative collaboration between one of the prisoners, Ken Windes, and the prison psychologist, Dr. Martin Groder. The style of the training was radical, transformational, guerilla street theater – quite confrontational and immune from manipulation, definitely originating far outside mainstream culture. Participating in this training formally started my rite of passage into adulthood. During the training I realized with serious dismay that, contrary to my previous self-concept, my highest priority and commitment in life was to be a “good boy.” This shocking realization propelled me through a doorway into the expansive evolutionary journey that I am still on today. Perhaps you too will find that such a training contributes important ingredients to your rite of passage.
The Story of a Convalescence
The following is a personal letter written to me in August 2001. The author gave me permission to share his letter with you. The letter itself is only paper with handwritten marks on it. But this man’s life is full of feelings, sensations, questions, and options. In his own words this is “the story of a convalescence.” There is a rite of passage map in what he writes. You get a sense of what we are all up against in the patriarchy. Perhaps from this man’s story you can breathe enough courage into your soul to make further steps in your own growing-up process, particularly in your man-woman relationships.
Dear Clinton,
This letter might come as a surprise to you. Well, I just felt the urge to send these lines to you and share some of my insights and experiences of the last few months.
But let me start from the beginning (which, looking back, was rather like an end). It was about two years ago. I participated in your training (it must have been my sixth or seventh training), and, maybe you remember, my process was about my stories going on with women and sex. It was my toughest and most persistent and lasting process so far. When after an eternity the training was finally over, it didn’t feel like any “endings” I experienced before. Before, [after a training] there was always this relief, a new vision, a clarity, something got healed. This time I felt like I’d been annihilated. I felt so miserable that I wasn’t even able to drive home. Fortunately another man stayed with me and took over the job of driving the car.
During the next 2-3 months, although still feeling miserable, I did as you suggested: I didn’t connect in any way with women, neither women-friends I knew from before nor the unknown woman at the counter of a shop. No eye contact, nothing! It felt horrible, but I somehow knew that that was the only right thing to do. Somehow, that was the easy part, the logical understandable steps on the way. The difficult, frightening part of it was that this process scattered my whole life-plan, my whole story, a story about me, which I thought so far was true and more or less ok! This identity was gone, completely, only some fragments left here and there. I was in a big despair, in the middle of a nightmare: the old identity didn’t work anymore, most of it wasn’t even there anymore, and besides that, there was just this void. During these months I hated you. I was convinced that you had made a big mistake, that you had gone too far, that you lost all respect and in a sadistic way enjoyed “killing” me. As a result I decided to never do another training, to look for something nice and gentle. I quit my long-term training program and withdrew from my spiritual path.
So far this was a description of my internal emotional process. What happened on the outside is that I really was not able anymore to live the way I did before. During my process you said: “Mister, the game is over!” I didn
’t get it then, but I got it much, much later! The women / sex – game was (and still is) definitely over!
During the 18 months afterwards, it was like a pendulum had swung from one extreme to the opposite extreme. I didn’t have any contact at all in the first few months, then slowly started to meet women once in awhile, but still staying very distanced and cautious. I really began to think that this was going to be my new style of life: the u-turn from the womanizer I used to be into a monk.
Now, in August 2001, things are different again. The pendulum found a balance! I’m in love with a wonderful woman. We met about 9 months ago for the first time, then met maybe every second week in the beginning, both being very cautious and respectful. By now we meet nearly daily, and, this really sounds incredible, since about a week or so we hold hands once in awhile. Two years ago this idea of a very slow, gentle approach was just not part of my imagination. It was about going to bed with a woman as fast as possible, and then (maybe) starting to get to know the person.
It’s the complete opposite now. We talk and talk for hours, have wonderful walks in nature, and we just are both so fully nurtured with that. There’s nothing missing! It’s so beautiful. I feel like a 14-year-old adolescent, being in love with a girl for the first time.
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 12