Rev Left Radio - On Being: Dismantling the Patriarchy, Inside and Out

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

In this episode, Breht is joined by musician, therapist, and teacher Suzin Green to discuss her upcoming book "The Being Project". In this episode, we discuss the rise of the Women's Liberation Movement and Second Wave Feminism, the promises and pitfalls of the 60's counter-culture, Hindu mysticism and mythology, Jungian Psychology, Suzin's unique conception of Patriarchy, the difference between Being and Doing, Suzin's relationship with the late Michael Brooks, and much more! This episode is the latest installment of our ongoing sub-series exploring psychology and spirituality.  Learn more about Suzin here: https://www.suzingreen.com/ Outro Music: "Nice and Quiet" by Bedouine ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On this episode, I have my friend, my teacher, and somebody I look up to quite a bit, Susan Green on the episode to discuss not only her work of this book and development called The Bean Project, but also her experiences growing up with mystical experiences growing up during the 60s, with the rise of the women's liberation movement, tying in politics of today with politics of then discussing the patriarchal mindset and how it's internalized in all of us, regardless of gender and gender identity, and so much more.

This is really a wide-ranging conversation, and this marks, like, I think, the second or third episode in a row where I'm really diving deep into the wisdom paths, these mystical traditions within the different religious traditions, traditions. We've done Sufism. We've done multiple episodes on Buddhism. This one is more in the Hindu religious context, specifically in the Hindu mystical tradition. So I thought I could use Susan to elucidate that path, as well as talk about a bunch of other things that are related to it. And I think we're going to cap off this little sub-series with the next episode

I'm doing with my friend Megan on Eric Fromm's The Art of Loving, because Fromm, you know, comes out of like the Frankfurt School and he combines a psychoanalysis with Eastern philosophical wisdom from Taoism and Zen Buddhism with a Marxist structural critique and so his work is really tying all the pieces of the last several episodes that we've done together and somewhere within this is also going to drop the tribute series I helped moderate to Michael Brooks with Susan as well as Adnan Hussein from from guerrilla history and Marianne Williamson. And we had a fascinating conversation and Michael Brooks's sister put it together and is letting me release it as a podcast on this platform as well as on their YouTube platform. So you'll hear that too.

And then once it's all said and done, we'll have this little string of episodes going from Union Psychology to Buddhism to the tribute to Michael Brooks to this episode on Hindu mysticism and wrapping it up with Eric Fromms, The Art of Loving. And then in March we'll get back to 100% political content. but this is a part of what I'm interested in. There's an element of my audience that truly enjoys diving into this stuff. And to be completely true to myself and authentic, it's always going to be me presenting things that I'm genuinely interested in. And this is a huge part of my life. And there's obviously some residents out there with other people.

So I wanted to put together this little sub-series and put it out back-to-back-to-back rapid fire for those that are interested. And those that are more just on the political front and just want to hear the political analysis and the historical materialism and the communist political theory. Get plenty of that coming all through March and into April. So without further ado, let's get into this wonderful conversation with my friend Susan Green on a bunch of different fascinating topics. Enjoy. Susan, it is an absolute pleasure to have you on the show.

Before I let you say a little bit about your background, just to orient my audience to who you are, and how I met you. We actually met through Michael Brooks, more specifically through the Michael Brooks tribute series. You were a teacher and friend of Michael Brooks, and his sister asked me to come on to host a conversation about spirituality on the left. You were a part of that conversation in prep. I believe you listened to me and Michael's episode together, and I listened to you and Michael's episode together. And then afterwards, we, you know, we're both interested in forming a friendship and a relationship in our own right.

And that's been developing ever since. And so it's an absolute pleasure to have you on. You're also an author of a new upcoming book called The Being Project, which we're going to mostly discuss today, as well as some stuff about, you know, your life and your experiences. So, yeah, really awesome to have you on. Is there anything else that you would like to say about your background or about yourself before we get into the questions? No, I mean, I think that's great.

I think we'll probably touch on all the interesting aspects of my background as we continue our conversation. But let me just say, yes, thank you so much. It's really great to be having this conversation with you and being on your show, which, as I just told you, I've become a huge fan of. So thank you. All right. Well, let's start with talking about, I think Michael Brooks, who is the bridge between you and I,

You dedicated your upcoming book, The Being Project, to Michael. Can you talk a little bit about your relationship with him and why you dedicated this book in particular to him? Yes, of course. You know, Michael was really dear to me, and we worked very, very closely over the last four years of his life. And I started writing this book during that time, and we talked about these ideas a lot. We rolled around these ideas a lot. And in many ways, Michael's imprint is very much a part of this book. And it's just like I'm writing this book for Michael.

And over the years, people have been asking me for years, write a book, you need to write a book, you need to tell these stories, you need to get your work down. And I've always had so many other things going on. I just never had the time to really focus on the writing. but finally I decided two years ago it's time I put everything but my private practice on the back burner and I started writing and this one's for Michael. It's really for Michael. It couldn't be any other way but for Michael. Yeah, absolutely. Do you, you said your private practice, you do, you know, you work as a therapist. Do you want to say a little bit about that or do you Sure, I can say a little bit. I work as a therapist, a coach, a strategist, an analyst, a consultant, a meditation teacher.

There are so many different pieces of the work I do in my private practice with individuals. And that's why it's often hard for me to talk about it because there are so many different pieces. But yes, I definitely work with many individuals all over the world, helping them go more deeply into their inner life, helping them connect the inner life and the outer life. So those two important aspects are both really in sync, helping people undo creative blocks, helping people. open up into deeper dimensions inside of themselves, helping people unravel, wounding from childhood. We pretty much address everything that anyone wants to address in their inner and outer lives through the work that I do. Yeah, definitely. And I've done a session with you, and it was deeply, deeply impactful for me. I was actually in a period of my life where

I was looking for some spiritual direction as well as for some specific sort of, you know, therapeutic intervention and working through some stuff that I have from childhood and in the present. And I was like, I'll never be able to find, especially living out here in Nebraska, I'll never be able to find somebody that can weave those two together. And as I was more and more thinking about that and feeling more despair at the probability that I wouldn't be able to come across somebody that would be able to handle both, you came into my life at a very synchronicistic time. And so, yeah, I'm highly, highly loved our session together for you. sure. And speaking about this book, I think it's fair to say just as a general overview. This is

sort of a part in this little sub-series we're doing about spirituality. We just did interview with Daniel Ingram from the Theravada Buddhist tradition talking about enlightenment and we're having a friend on tomorrow actually to talk about Eric Fromm's The Art of Loving, which is really interesting and pulls a lot of polls from psychoanalysis as well as from spirituality and Marxism, et cetera. And your work sort of sits in between there with, you know, doses of mysticism, of Hinduism, of feminism, and Jungian psychology. And we just did also an episode on Carl Jung,

so everything's kind of fitting together really interestingly. And maybe that's a good place to start. So what role does Jungian psychology play in your thinking and your approach as a therapist and a thinker and a teacher? Well, I think for me, when I first came into the work of Jung, what really kind of blew me out of the water was the notion of archetypes. And I've always loved stories. I've always loved myth.

I've always loved fairy tales. But I hadn't quite made the connection of the, how can we say, sort of the archetypal matrix that all the characters that I loved so much in various stories and myths seemed to be part of. And the way Young articulated that really spoke to me at a very deep level. So for me, Jung's archetypal thinking is probably the most important. I was also very formed when I began reading about his conception of the animus and the anima.

So in Jungian psychology, this is going to be very reductive, but every man has an inner woman that Jung called the anima and every woman has an inner man that Jung called the animus. So although I have shifted my opinion on that, and I think it's more like each one of us has an inner man and an inner woman, and it's the relationship between those two very dynamic aspects of ourself that my work is really about. But Jung's notion of animus and anima really is what got me thinking about these inner, again, for lack of a better term, inner masculine and inner feminine realms. Yeah. And I think that's really for me the piece of Jungian psychology that I take. And also, you know, his love of the arts. One of my favorite Jungian books is Mandala symbolism. Do you know that book? I've not read it, but I'm aware of it. Yeah. It's a beautiful, beautiful book where it's like a report on one of the patients that he worked with who was an artist and she did a series of Mandala paintings throughout their therapeutic process. And it's just an extraordinary. journey. And when you see the way she was working through each aspect of her unfolding through the painting of these modalities, that was revelatory for me because I'm, I start as an artist. I'm a

musician and a writer, and I've been an artist for my entire life. And my life as an artist really informs everything that I do. And my just awe in the presence of the creative process really informs all of my work. And when I saw how young worked, with this woman's paintings and the transformation that she went through as she went deeper and deeper into her own inner work with Jung and then translated that in the paintings. It was revelatory and really I wasn't ready yet to go that route myself as a therapist but I knew there's something here for me. Absolutely and I certainly think union psychology appeals particularly to artists because one of one of his contributions to psychology and therapy was to bring in this element of expressive

art as a way of working through one's traumas or fantasies to bring to light their unconscious, et cetera. And you see that a lot in his work and also with his work around myths. I mean, if you're, for example, somebody that writes novels or that, you know, does screenplays or create stories of any sort to have a good understanding of the role that mythology plays, how it's connected to our sort of collective unconscious, et cetera, can only assist you in that art.

And throughout this work of yours, you discuss myths and you bring out deeper truths and things that those myths are saying about the human condition and experience that on the surface, a surface level reading of those myths would never fully get at. And I think that's one of the things that Jung and others like, you know,

Joseph Campbell or other people in that general tradition that talk about those things and dive deep into those things offer humanity as a whole. Yes, definitely. Definitely. Another huge part of your work, of course, is Hinduism broadly. Before we get into the role it plays in your, well, maybe we can weave these together and you can take it in any direction you want. Sure. What role does, you know, Hinduism, the mysticism within it and the mythology within it sort of play in your thinking as well as in your spiritual life over the last several decades? So for me, again, as I said, I started as a musician. And I'm trained as a classical pianist. I'm trained in classical music. But in my 20s,

I really wanted to learn how to improvise. And I really just wanted to bust out of the confinement of the classical tradition and find my own music. And so that was really the beginning of my spiritual journey. It really started with music. And I started having these very mystical experiences at the piano that I had no way of understanding what they were. But this light kept breaking open inside of me and I can almost see it coming out my fingers through the music and it was very compelling and something about it just felt really wonderful and I had to find out what is this and that is really what set me seeking on the so-called spiritual path and again this is back in the 70s where it wasn't so easy as it is today you know I mean now you just do a Google search for

anything and you'll bring up four gazillion articles about whatever whatever aspect of spirituality you're looking for. But in those days, no, there were barely any books about it. It was very, very hard to find teachers. It was very, very hard to find any information. But little by little, you know, I searched and I searched and I found my way to various teachers. And I started in the Sufi path, and I was two years in a Sufi tradition. And then I was one year in a tradition most people don't know about. That's called the Grjif work. And then in 77, I took a meditation, intensive retreat in a yogic tradition, not physical posture yoga, mantra meditation yoga, in a guru-centric tradition.

And that retreat blew me out of the water. And it was like home. And so for the next 17 years, I was a very serious student within this yogic tradition. And my guru was a, you know, he was an Indian man. he was a Hindu. So there was definitely a Hindu flavor to the practice. And most people think of Hinduism, I don't even know how most people think of it, but I think in a very small way. But the Indian spiritual, philosophical tradition, it is huge and vast. There are six categories of philosophy within this ginormous tradition. And yoga is one of these kind of technology slash philosophy slash

psychology systems within this much larger system that's been named Hinduism. And so that was just kind of part of this yogic path that I was on. And that was my first introduction to the Hindu goddess as a living thing. You know, one thing about Hinduism that's fascinating. I believe it is the only a spiritual tradition, religious tradition on the planet today that has a thousands year-long unbroken practice of worshiping the goddess as a face of the divine. And as a woman, that really spoke to me. So I may be getting off track here, but that's a little bit of how Hinduism, for me, it's less Hinduism, because when people hear Hinduism, I think they

think of going to the temples and doing very elaborate pujas. For me, that's not what it's about. For me, it's about the yogic practice of mantra. meditation, which is a process of continuing to open deeper and deeper and deeper into the space inside of us and working with mantras as a way of articulating the various aspects of self that we can say are the keys to feeling the wholeness and authenticity that lives inside of us. Yeah, absolutely beautiful. And maybe one way to break this down, which is something that I've talked about a lot

on this show and elsewhere is this, you know, within each religious tradition, whether you're talking about Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, there is, like it sort of divides itself into the overtly sort of, you know, often institutional religious forms of belief and ritual. And then there's also these mystical branches. In some traditions, they're more emphasized than in other traditions. And sometimes, I think within Hinduism, sometimes that line can be more blurry than it is and say Christianity, but would it be fair to say that there is that divide within Hinduism itself

between more orthodox or structural religious practices and mysticism, which is about a, you know, in lack of better words, a sort of divine union with the, with, you know, God or nature or the cosmos directly? Absolutely. I mean, the mystic is really about the direct experience. That's what the mystic wants. The mystic wants direct experience of whatever his or her. experience of this so-called divine is. Whereas in the sort of, what can we say, the non-mystic,

it's much more of an external organizing system to make someone feel, I don't know, part of a community, safer in the world. It comes with a lot of belief system. The mystic is about busting up all the belief systems. The mystic is about busting up all the isms. So definitely within Hinduism, you have the experiential people and the ones who are doing the more non-exeteric. There's a word, I can't remember what it is, but maybe the exoteric practice. And I think it's true what you're saying. We find this in every quote-unquote religious system. When you're talking about the guru relationship and the devotional path, I think people who, especially here in the West, who might be interested in spirituality and who have at all come across that particular

their tradition probably have come across that tradition through a figure like Ram Dass, for example. I know that you have different, you know, you're in different sort of worlds a little bit, but there's some overlap. And I've always wanted to ask you this just personally. What are your personal thoughts on Ram Dass? Did he ever play a role in your particular development, or is it something that you learned about retroactively? Like, what are your thoughts on him? Well, again, I mean, Ram Dass is older, you know, he's older than I, but not that much older. And again, I'm a child of the 50s and 60s. So when Ram Dass, who was, you know, once upon a time was Richard Alpert and Tim Leary first started making their LSD research public, I was still in high school.

But it was like, oh, my God, this is the coolest thing I've ever heard. You know, we were very excited by this. So early on, Ram Dass was touching me. And then when his book, published his book, Be Here Now, and that book was also. revelatory for me. In fact, my daughter, Kobe, is named after one of the people that he mentions in that book. Ram Dass was on a different tradition. He was with someone called the name Karolibaba. I was with someone called Baba Mukdananda. Those guys probably knew each other, but they were different traditions, a different central focus within each tradition.

Yeah, I mean, I don't want to go into the weeds here, so I'll let it go. The guru, what can I say? that's probably a topic for another show. I was with the guru for 17 years. My leading the guru was a very profound shattering of that belief system that from where I sit now was probably one of the greatest things that's happened to me in my life because it was so freeing of a very unconscious way that I was giving my power away. So when I, if you talk to me about the guru, a disciple relationship, I'm going to say this is a power relationship that is problematic. There are people on all sides of the spectrum on this question, and it's, I think, a very important question, and again, we should do another show about it sometime. And my book certainly

in some ways touches on it, but it's such a big topic. I hesitate to dive in too much. Simply, I guess, to say, for me, the guru was a very, very, very important passage in my life. and 17 years of incredible practice and guidance and wisdom. And when it was over, it was over. And I had to move on because I could no longer participate in what I realized was an extraordinarily hierarchical relationship. That although the teaching was about connecting to the so-called God within, it was really about projecting ones in its spirituality onto the guru. the guru was considered the intermediary between the student and the divine, the experience of oneness, whatever language one wants to use.

And I don't want an intermediary, you know. It's just like I couldn't do guru yoga anymore. And so that was 1994. And it was a very explosive. I actually tell the story in the book, but I'm just writing that chapter now. You haven't seen that chapter yet. And I've just been a free agent out here ever since. Yeah. Well, I'm certainly excited to get to read that chapter. And I ask the question, in part, because I'm actually reading through Ram Dass's sort of autobiography. I guess his friend helped him write it because he was very old at the time. But reading through, and I'm only gotten through the parts where right before he goes to India. So it's all about psychedelic experimentation, about him getting kicked out of Harvard with Timothy Leary, about all the different forms of communal living they were experimenting with. And it's absolutely fascinating. It's also an auto.

So if people don't want to read the big book, you can always check it on Audible. If for nothing else, then for that radically interesting period of time in the 50s and 60s when psychedelics came online and then there was a social backlash to it. And there was a lot of naive hopes about what it could obtain for the person. And then there was sort of a period of, you know, sort of downfall when people realized that it couldn't do all the things that was initially thought it was able to do, et cetera. And so, you know, Timothy Leary and, you know, Richard Alpert, who would eventually become Ramda, went in two different directions after the sort of falling out of that era. But very interesting for an understanding of, you know, 60s America and psychedelic history, et cetera.

Definitely. Definitely. They were two very important forces within that time, for sure. And any of us who were paying attention were really affected by their lives, definitely. All right. Let's move on a little bit. And one thing I really appreciated about you just in general is this, refusal to isolate the spiritual practices into just a sort of self-development thing separated from social and political struggle. I think that's what you and Michael really sort of united on,

and that's something that carries over to you and my friendship. And in your book, you describe, you know, the 60s and the 70s and the rise of the women's liberation movement and second wave feminism. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about your experience at that time, the sort of advancements of that era, as well as your critiques regarding its shortcomings and its pitfalls? I mean, again, I think the advancements are pretty obvious. The women's movement really changed society as we know it, and it changed the gender roles as we knew them. And it gave women a lot more financial power. I mean, I can remember when I was growing up and talking with my mother one day, must have been in the early 50. She was reading

Betty for Dead, she was starting to wake up to all of this, but I remember she was telling me, yeah, you know, I can't even have my own credit card. And this was just in the 50s. I mean, this isn't that many years ago. So it's astonishing to me to think about how much really important positive change came through the women's movement. The problem that I came to see is that the women's movement, like so many, I think, movements for social change make a very correct which is there's something wrong here. And there was something really wrong with the way things were. The problem was the solution, in my opinion, was not correct.

The solution was, in order to solve this problem, we as women have to become more like man. And so women entered the workforce and kind of left the home and adopted the values that again, we'll come to this in more depth later, the values of patriarchy. And so, although the women's movement ended up creating a lot of what I call patriarchs in drag. Michael always loved that phrase, because the values of the feminine still continue to be undervalued. And in my opinion, that's the problem. Like the values of the feminine, which are values like nowadays people talk about. about the work of people like Rian Isler.

And she languages it very beautifully because she talks about the dominator model, aka patriarchy, and the partnership model, which is sort of a perfect marriage of our masculine doing and feminine being aspects. And what happened through the women's movement is the being realm,

the inner realm, motion connecting, intuition, the body, which had always been considered second class, it was still considered second class. And so we just get a continuation of all the problems of patriarchy, which certainly right now, the planet, the planetary crisis is one of the, in your face, horrifying examples of patriarchy and what it's doing to the planet.

And what I began to understand is the external patriarchy is bad enough, but inside of us we all have an inner patriarch. And until we address the inner patriarch, I don't think anything's going to change. And for me, the problem with the women's woman was the interpatriarch never got addressed. Absolutely. So I don't know if that makes sense, but that's... I think it does, and we're definitely going to dive a little deeper into that aspect and how you use those terms and all of that going forward,

because I think it's a really interesting doorway into understanding some of the deprivations that are still present in all of us. with regards to being fully sort of realized and holistic human beings and how that has social and political downstream effects. And so yeah, so we'll get into that more in a little

bit, but I do kind of want to... Actually, before we move on, I'm just kind of interested. There's the feminist movement, you know, there's so many other movements at that time. Black liberation movement really took on new dimensions during the 60s and into the 70s. And there was a period of time during

the 60s, which I'm always fascinating. with where it was this blossoming of potential this this sort of you know chaotic in some ways rebellion against all the norms of society that took political forms with you know black liberation women's liberation anti-war movements etc it also took spiritual forms with experimentation with psychedelics and bringing over some practices from the east to the west and introducing them to to a western audience for for a lot of people the first time they've ever even come across some of these ideas and practices. But then after the 60s and after the beginning of the 70s, you know, multiple assassinations,

you had the deconstruction of left-wing movements through Cointel Pro, the decapitation of the Black Panther Party. And then a lot of the people in the hippie movement, there was some significant portion, at least, that deformed into, like, a lot of the cults that we saw rise up in the 70s. And ultimately, it smashed up against Reaganism in the, 80s and that can be seen in a lot of ways as a backlash socially, economically, politically from the promises and potentialities that were fostered during that chaotic 60s and early 70s period. Do you have anything to say about the end of that period and why we saw things like

the rise of Colts and the rise of Reaganism after that extended period of the 60s and early 70s? I don't know. I mean, I think you said it very, very well. I think that. I think that Yes, Reaganism was certainly a backlash. I think we were so involved living. I don't know that we were paying that much attention to the consequences of how we were living. And not to keep bringing it back to what my book is about, but I will anyway. I think that in a way, this is, because on some level it was all being done in a patriarchal way. You know, we were, one of the problems with patriarchy, the whole notion of the mind-body split is a real problem. And the patriarchal paradigm, it really focuses on that split and it makes the mind, the head, the center of

the universe, which is a problem because the head needs to be attached to the body. And I think unfortunately, so much of the, I mean, listen, on one level, we needed the shattering of the 60s because we had hardened into such a boring, soulless suburban sort of post-war affluence. And for certainly, you know, obviously for those of us who had the privilege to be economically comfortable, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But just as a general rule, part of what the 60s was about was rebelling against the sort of the buttoned-up lifestyle of the 50s. early 60s. And I think it did need to shatter. And although the stereotypes had to shatter and the roles that were keeping some people really down, everybody down actually, had to shatter. The problem was we didn't have the wisdom. We didn't have the consciousness. We didn't have the

understandings and how to do that in a way that would make it sustainable. And honestly, Brett, even now, just thinking about what's happening right now, we look at the Democratic Party and the way it's managing itself now that they're, you know, okay, they've ramped through the stimulus bill through the House. There's going to be problems in the Senate. There are so many problems from where I sit with the strategies that they use that I think so much still of the strategies that the Democrats in power use are a fear base, which I would say is a then disembodied stance where they're way too much in their heads and they're not integrated enough to realize they can make much bigger pushes in much bigger courageous stances than they're taking and those of us on the

left are sitting out here saying what are you people doing and it's the same old thing yeah so i again i don't know if that exactly answers your question but no it does and i really like that that point too about being so in their heads that they over they sort of play poker against themselves in in so many ways exactly exactly and nobody's in reality yeah And it's really manifested in that second, the second attempt to impeach Trump because a large part of that effort was, you know, at least ostensibly, was to, if we could get this passed, you know, we could prevent Trump from running again in 2024. And a part of me just wants to like sort of scream at them is like, if you want to make sure Trump doesn't win in 2024, don't try to do it on a technicality, deliver so many material benefits to regular working people that he has no chance to play on their anxieties and their fears and their. confusions actually deliver the goods and you will have shut his entire political project out from the mainstream but they don't get that exactly and that's again from my perspective that's

exactly the problem because they're they're not connecting to human beings they're not connecting to the suffering they're not connecting to the fear they're not connecting to the reality that is so many people's lives and they're still stuck in this weird 90s 80s Did it ever even really exist by partisanship? I don't know. And then they have problems with the squad. You know, people who are coming up now are much more integrated

than a lot of the politicians of my generation and that they're not letting the members of the squad and the, like Rokana, you know, just people, younger people in the House and the Senate that they're not letting them take more leadership roles and really make things happen that have to happen. We're going to.

go right back to where we were and that scares me a lot exactly yeah they're very much doing what obama did is like repaving the road for the rise of fascism exactly and they don't see it and it's horrifying yeah and the younger generation whether that's in the streets or or in the squad or whatever is clearly like this pressure mounting up from below saying here's a new direction that we absolutely have to go in whether we do it through a bernie sanders presidency or we do it through black lives matters of protest or even more radical left-wing movements, you know, grassroots, etc. That's the direction, but it's becoming increasingly clear that instead of understanding that and embracing that, the Democrats are going to hold that off as long as they absolutely can,

causing innumerable amounts of suffering in the meantime, and it's going to have to be ripped out of their hands by some form of force, same with the Republican Minoritarian Rule. It's like coming too ahead eventually because more and more young people are not going to continue to be led in this way. And there's this huge contradiction developing and mounting every day. Yes, it's very, very true. So let's go ahead and move on and talk a little bit more about your experiences and mysticism before we get into a deep dive into patriarchy and the things that we've already sort of set on the table. So in your book, you say, quote, in the home of my childhood, spirituality

and religion were not allowed. So when I started having mystical experiences in my late teens, I didn't know what to do with them, how to name them. I had no context to understand what was happening to me, but there it was, shattering my very small concept of who I was, breaking me into this wild open space inside myself that felt more like home than any home I'd ever known. I think that's beautifully said, by the way, but also, I like to talk a little bit more about this. You said as a child on the piano, you had some opening experiences.

I've discussed my opening experiences on the show in previous episodes. Can you talk a little bit more about the mystical experiences you had as a teen? and how they sort of developed as you grew older? Sure. You know, it's interesting. I was thinking about this the other day, and I was remembering that when I was in the sixth grade, I discovered Haiku poetry,

and it just stopped my mind. And I'd never encountered anything like this before. And it was just, I just loved it so much. And I didn't know what it was. I didn't know anything about it. I mean, and I didn't even have the language to even articulate what I was experiencing. But I, it was like I saw myself somehow. It was like that space within those three lines of those haiku poems.

I somehow saw myself in the mirror of those poems. And it was very, very expansive. You know, I'm a kid. I'm growing up in the suburbs outside of New York City. I'm growing up in this very progressive New York, intellectual, Jewish family. My parents are successful business owners. We live in a beautiful house in a lovely neighborhood. We spend a lot of time in the city.

You know, I'm like, that's my life. And then I'm reading these haiku poems. And something is breaking open inside of me. And I don't even know what it is. but it shimmers inside of me. And so in many ways, I think that was the beginning of my seeking. Like, what is this? This is different than the poems that I'm having to read in school.

This is different. And then another really important book from me was when I, in high school, I read Sid Arthur, Herman Hess's book, Sidhartha. And I can still remember lying on the couch in the living room in my parents' house, and maybe I was a 10th or 11th grade, and I'm reading that book, and I know that this is the life I want, and how am I ever going to find this life when I'm living in this, you know, 20th century American life? But that's what I want.

And so for me, Sartre really became talking about archetypes, became a guiding principle, became my first teacher. in a way. I have to find, I have to make this life. I have to find the way to make this life my own life. And so, and again, as I said earlier, or as maybe as I've told you, for me, the piano was one of the places like that portal would open up again and I would experience the light. And it was always the longing to know this light, understand this light, just like, get what is this? That really led me to seek formal teachers on a formal. spiritual path. I don't like that word spiritual. I prefer wisdom path, but we can come back to that. And then also, of course, the 60s, you know,

I am a child of the 60s, and I was very much a part of the psychedelic movement. And I, in fact, I left New York and 67 to go live in Hayd Ashbury for the summer of peace and love. I mean, I was there. I took a tremendous amount of honesty during those years.

And although at this stage in my life, I have questions about overdoing psychedelics and I certainly once I came on a spiritual path once I started meditating it was just like that whole lifestyle dropped away for me. I just never even have

thought about it again since 74 but but yeah I mean between 67 and 74 I was your typical you know flower child psychedelic person

and I that is very formative in my development. But it was a part of the process, but ultimately I had to move on from that. Yeah. Yeah, fascinating. I've certainly had friends in my life. One in particular stands in my mind of somebody who overdid it, ended up in so many ways frying their brain by just, you know, this overconsumption of psychedelics without the respect and the moderation that is desperately needed to have the growth experiences and then integrate them, et cetera. You just keep slamming your brain with that stuff. You can really sort of become unmoored from reality.

And I think there are certainly plenty of casualties in the 60s from that exact sort of thing. But as we've talked about many times on the show, psychedelics. You talk about experiences you've had as a kid. I just discussed it with Daniel Ingram, who had similar experiences and openings as a kid that he had no idea what they were, but they set him on the path. And I've talked about how a heroic dose of,

of psilocybin mushrooms for me was the opening of a doorway that sent me on on this sort of path and my subsequent engagements with psychedelics ever since then have not been as mind-blowing as that first experience because it was a lot I had no experience with it it was complete collapse of subject object and I've never experienced quite that but every time there is an engagement with psychedelics there's a chipping away at the ego and you know anybody that's been, you know, fairly high on LSD or psilocybin mushrooms, and you think about the, like, you know, in Jungian terms, the persona or the mask or these little ego insecurities we have, like you just sort of let out this howling laughter at the absurdity of it all. It allows you to

see the tiny little absurdity of the ego. And often in very humorous ways, at least for me. And every time I came out of a psychedelic experience, a little. bit of my ego had been chipped away. I just took myself a little less seriously. I was a little more compassionate towards other people, a little less judgmental, et cetera. And so I certainly agree with you that that's not the only way or the primary way, but sometimes they can be these doorways that open up other experiences. Definitely. Definitely. That can be catalysts. I think the problem is if one doesn't have a proper container, the experience can leak out in ways that aren't so great and also there can be a big backlash.

Yeah, definitely. And that's one of the things that concerns me about overused. I wish our culture had more of a respect and understanding of these substances so that we could set up institutions that maybe allowed people to engage with them in very controlled and safe environments with the spiritual bend in mind and the set and setting taken very seriously, which is something Ram Dass talks about in the 60s, him and Timothy Leary became very aware that how you took it, what mindsets you were in when you took it, was half of the game as far as the experiences that you'd have.

But obviously, as a culture, we're much too fear-based and uncertain about the unknown to embrace that quite, yeah. Yeah, it's not going to happen, not in our lifetime. And one more thing, just because I love talking about this stuff, you mentioned Herman Hesda, as Sadartha. And that was a huge text for me. As a late teen, I came across it and read it. And I remember I was delivering pizzas at the time throughout my teens in early to mid-20s.

And I would like on my breaks or even on a delivery I got done quickly, I'd pull off on these old dirt roads. And I'd like read a chapter. And then I'd try to do the breathing meditation and a little to no guidance or understanding. Even before I had really the internet, as we know it today, to where you could Google and learn about this stuff. I was trying to stumble my way through, and I remember that book being a nice hallmark and milestone for me. And I also remember like these opening experiences when I was driving around delivering pizzas where as I started getting into the meditation, I would just be like looking up at the sunset as I was driving and like tears of joy would start flooding down my face. And

I had to wipe them away before I walked in because none of my friends and coworkers at the pizza place would have any fucking clue what I was, what I was on about. But I just remember like sort of very fondly. Those were some very opening experiences for me. When I had really no clue what was going on, I didn't understand the connection between, oh, if you meditate enough, like this, you know, these tears start flowing. Sometimes they can be tears of radical compassion. Sometimes they can be tears of overwhelming, you know, joy and bliss. And they sort of come and go in these little bursts and moments. But it's certainly looking back, I understand that's what I was going through. And it's beautiful, you know, and these books are so important because these books,

really are their messengers, you know, or they touch the heart in places that the heart has been longing to be touched, that we didn't even know it was longing to be touched. And suddenly, it's like, oh, my God, there's something bigger than me. Did you ever read Yogananda's book, Autobiography of a Yogi? I have not, no. That's another one of those books that, you know, I mean, intellectually, objectively, I mean, I haven't looked at it in years. And it's probably just very superficial on some level, almost the caricature of itself.

But that book, again, it was another one of those, oh, my God, this is the life. This is what I want. I need to find this. I need to find what he's writing about. I need to find what he found. And I think these are, again, these are the guideposts or the messengers or those beams of light that we just, they're like connecting the dots, you know, and the dots of light on that pathway into ourself. and it's very, very, very important.

And I think those of us who are longing to wake up, we're going to be very receptive. Yeah, definitely. And, you know, your book could certainly act like that as well for somebody, and I think it definitely will. And speaking about your book, before we move on to talking about the concepts within it, one last question, just sort of personally about spirituality and whatnot. You have an interlude in the book, at least the version that you sent to me, discussing the dark night of the soul. We've talked about this a lot, and again, Daniel Ingram talks about this very sort of compellingly as a part and parcel of the spiritual journey and like, you know, sort of unavoidable. And for some people, it can be manageable.

For others, it can be, I mean, life wrecking, at least for a period of time. And people get lost. There's the Dark Night Project, for example, I think by Willoughby Britain, who is now developing this system of understanding these pitfalls and downsides of spiritual practice, meditative practice. to be able to help people navigate them more, you know, with help and assistance and have the clarity and be like you're not, your brain's not broken. This is an experience that people go through. Here's maybe the way out, et cetera. Could you talk a little bit about what the dark night of the soul is, how you understand it, and maybe even some of your own experiences with it? Sure.

I think that phrase, the dark night of the soul, you know, it's very evocative. I mean, we're really in the realm of poetry when we're, where, talking about these cycles of growth that we go through on a path of awakening, on a wisdom path. And the dark night of the soul, you have to, in my opinion, you have to hear that phrase from a deeper part of your awareness than just the mind. Like just the notion of soul, even this, you know, what is the soul? this very mysterious essence. We can't touch it. Nobody really knows what it is. We just,

but somehow we hear that word soul and it's evocative of something that we are or we feel inside of ourselves. And for me, it's like that soul, it's that in us that is always reaching towards light. It's like a plant, you know, and it's always reaching towards the light. It's always, it's always looking to grow deeper and higher and finer and more into itself. And it, it is carried within this larger mind-body continuum that we think of as ourselves and that light sometimes it goes into darkness you know and it loses itself and it can't see itself and I think the dark night of the soul is very much a term that's used in the spiritual journey in the wisdom journey and the waking up journey I think and a dark night is different I think again I have

studied this in any careful way, so I can't say for sure, but I think it's very different than a clinical depression. Because I think a dark night, at a very deep level, a dark night is showing us we're not serving the soul in the way it wants to be served. We're not living in communion with our soul. We're much more under the influence of our mind, of our psycho-emotional wounding, but the soul is calling us to whatever is calling us to, and we're fighting it, we're resisting it. And I think then the only way can get our attention is to come into a dark night, and that forces us to stop and figure out what's going on, work through what's going on, whatever language you

want to use to reconnect with the true calling, the true essence of who and what we are. And so the dark night, you know, it's a very complex, very, very important movement that we go through in any true path of transformation because there's always going to be growth and there's going to be fallback and there's going to be growth and there's going to be resistance to that growth and there's going to be growth and then there's going to be fear and there's going to be testing of that growth. And it's a back and forth, back and forth. The dark night, one of the great things about the dark night, is pulling us into what I call the fertile darkness. And the fertile darkness is a very rich. It can be a really scary place.

But the more we move around in the fertile darkness, really, really working to see what's here and really working to make friends with all the aspects within the fertile darkness as well. When we come back up, we come back up with more grounding. We come back up connected to more power. So for me, the main dark knot of the soul that I went through was when I was living in the ashram, when was this in the 80s? I would, in my guru's tradition, you could live so-called in the world or in the ashram and move back and forth. And a lot of us did that if we could afford to take time off. We would go spend a few months in the ashram, then we'd have to go back to our life in the so-called world. They always call it the world versus the ashram.

It's kind of a silly duality, but there it is. And so I, you know, for the 17 years that I was a student within this tradition, I would go back and forth between my so-called life and the world and my own life in the ashram. So at this particular period, I had moved into the ashram, I thought, for good. And it's like I finally had everything I ever wanted. And I was miserable. And I'm not someone who struggled with depression in my life, so I didn't really even understand what was going on with me.

But I, and it didn't last that long, but it was like there were a couple of weeks of just getting more and more depressed and losing, I just had no desire to even get up in the morning. Everything became very, how can I say, I just was walking through life like a dead person. And one night, it all came to a head. And I just collapsed in this almost catatonic despair. and my poor, I was recently married and my poor husband, you know, his lovely new wife, he couldn't help me. And, you know, I just sat there in this terrible, terrible despair and he just kind of held me and, and I finally just started sobbing and sobbing and sobbing and I finally fell asleep. And then in the morning, the way kind of came clear. And I realized that,

We actually had to leave the ashram, and I had to go back to the world. And I had to start teaching music to children, which was nothing that I had ever. I mean, I was a performer. I wasn't a teacher. I had no pedagogical training. But I knew, every cell in my being new, I had to go back to the world. And on some level, I was using the as a way to escape from the world. And I had to go back to the world.

And I had to be in the world. And I had to interact with people. And I had to interact with children. And I had to teach children the thing that I knew better than, anything else, which was music. And as that became more and more clear, my dark night lifted, and we ended up leaving the ashram and settling in southern New England, and I began teaching music to children. And in the very magical way that the path of transformation works, that's when all the seeds for the work I do today were really planted or began to sprout. I'm sure

they were planted way before, but that's when they started to flower. And so that dark night that I went through back in the ashram in around 1982, I think it was, is really the crucible that broke me into the work that I have done for the last 25, 30 years. Yeah, I think that is incredibly profound. It's something I am deeply, deeply interested in. And I've talked about the specifics on a few different platforms, but I have noticed, especially when retroactively when you can look back, with the clarity of hindsight that for me every and it is I think appropriate to talk about it as

cycles and there could be you know worse dark nights and might maybe more lighter manageable dark nights but before every cycle into the dark night there was at least in my experience some form of radical opening some some spiritual advancements that were very palpable and obvious and then after every cycle of the dark night I came out and in fact the the coming out of it was marked by some new ruptural advancement and some new clarity, some new wisdom, some new compassion that was not there before and that afterwards never leaves. And every time I cycle through it, I come out with more of that on the other side. And, you know, like one of my, the most intense dark night was a period of time,

which I've discussed where it was this obsessive, it was really my own fear of my own mortality, and it was this existential fear that I had had for many, many years, and I had ignored and repressed. And it came out in the form of obsessive thinking every single day about my own mortality and the mortality of everybody around me to the point where I, like you said, I was walking through life dead, literally, you know, seeing the inevitability of death in every plant and animal in person in my life.

And I thought my brain was broken. And I remember telling my, she wasn't my wife at the time, but my partner at the time, I was like, you know, I've been clinically depressed. I've been clinically anxious. I know what these things are, and this is not that. Like, there's no therapist I could go see, maybe a spiritual teacher, but I didn't know anything about that at the time.

I didn't even know what I was going through. And there's certainly no pills I could take. And that's something that I kept telling the people around me. I was like, you know, people were concerned. Like, do you need medicine? Like, you know, would go into the doctor and getting antidepressants help or anything? And I was like, I've been there and this is clearly not that. This is something much deeper that.

that no form of pharmacological response could ever address. And I wouldn't want to address it in that way because it's clearly something I need to work through. And then at the end of that period of time, through meditation and sort of moving forward with my practice, it broke open into not only, as I've described before, selfless compassion, this really profound moment of realizing that my pain was the pain of the whole. And in that experience of pain, myself went away. just the human condition and that compassion has never left me but also importantly my fear of death has never ever ever been as stultifying and as mortifying and as existential as it was

you know what i've obviously if there's a gun to my head right now i'd be nervous and shit but um i don't beat myself up i i death does not scare me in any way like it used to and it used to be the you know the cause of panic attacks out of nowhere and whatnot and so it was clearly something in retrospect i had to go through and came out the other side with more more wisdom and more compassion very clearly, you know. Yeah, and which is, you know, that's an extraordinary story. I mean, again, I think you're really an amazing person. It's amazing to me that you have come as far as you've come without any kind of human

teacher. It's incredible, really impressive. It says a lot about who you are. Well, I appreciate that. Yeah. It was very challenging, but it is also, go ahead. But you came through it, you know. And I'm better for it.

Yeah. And I always love talking about The Dark Night because everybody you talk to, they have a slightly different angle on it, like a slightly different explanation and take. And I just think that's absolutely fascinating. But let's go ahead and dive into your work properly, the Being Project. And we've discussed, we've laid a few things on the table throughout this discussion about patriarchy and the masculine and the feminine. So before we get into patriarchy proper, can you elucidate your conception of the masculine

and the feminine. And importantly, how it is and is not related to sex and gender as we usually think about them. Yes. So when I talk about masculine and feminine, I am not talking about gender at all. And in writing this book, I really struggled with the gender terms. But because I'm working with the concept of patriarchy, I had to use them. And so in the book, I hope I make the point, clearly, I certainly try to make it over and over again, that when I talk about the masculine, I'm talking about the realm of doing. And when I talk about the feminine, I'm talking about the realm of being. So the masculine is that realm of external doing, action, how we are in the world, what we think, what we say, how we do. It's our doing function.

and the feminine is our being function and that's all the inside stuff the external is much more visible we we see the physical we see action we see doing we see we don't necessarily see our thoughts but they're very visible to us in a way they're more conscious i should say the the inner realm the feminine realm, it's much more mysterious, it's our emotions, it's our sensation, its intuition, its insight, it's all the full complex of emotion, from the most sublime experience of love to the most the depths of despair, all of that is enfolded into the interior realm that I call being, or I call the being realm, and I consider that of the feminine. I don't want to get to in the weeds here, but in the book, I break down why I make those

classifications, and I do think they fit, but everyone, man or woman, or in between, has a masculine doing realm and a feminine being realm. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's really, really important to note is like it's sort of unmoored from a strict binary, it's in no means reifying it. It is, and maybe correct me if I'm wrong, sort of using of Jungian archetypes in a sense to make sense of this aspect that is within all of us, but an aspect, particularly when it comes to the feminine or the being aspect of human life in men, women, and non-binary people is repressed in our society because we live in a

hyper-patriarchal society that denigrates that side of things. Exactly. And that's why I think, although the gender terminology is becoming archaic and I've been a little bit uncomfortable to use it because I think it is archaic, right now we're still in patriarchy and I don't know how else to talk about this without using these terms. And I just want to say one more thing.

It's not just Young, because again, Jung started this idea when he identified the inner man in a woman as the animus and the inner woman as the anima in a man. But actually, another thing about the Hindu tantric system that, again, I'm not going to get in the weeds here, but it is actually, in my opinion,

the first archetypal psychology that we have. It's a very ancient archetypal psychology. And we know that Jung studied this stuff and was informed by it. In that system, the feminine personified as the goddesses, is the, how can I say, it's the energizing, it's the power of life. And the masculine deities are considered, they're like the container. In that system, it's like if you think of form and content, the masculine is the form and the feminine is the content.

So the masculine is the outer container that holds, the inner content, which is the feminine. And the big broad word for that feminine is the Shakti. When you hear about Shakti Shiva, that's really what it refers to. Or, you know, in even the Yin Yang, same thing. And so the way I work with these terms, it kind of mixes up Young and the Hindu Tantra. So maybe that's too much in the words. But anyway, for whatever it's worth.

I thought I should throw that in. I think it's really important and really interesting. And in fact, this sort of conceptual use of the masculine and the feminine appears in Rumi poems. I just read a Rumi poem the other day that ran wild with these concepts about Earth and Heaven, masculine in the feminine. And in Taoism is constantly referencing these elements that are, again, within us all. There's this co-incidence of opposites that if taken together and both sides are fully expressed, reaches towards a deeper balance harmony and holistic connection that I think is what all of these

things are pointing towards. Exactly. And that, if we bring Jung back in, that's what Jung called the sacred marriage. And that's what we want. We want that sacred marriage within our inner life of our so-called these polarities, the masculine and the feminine, our doing and being, mind, body. We want integration. That's what integral theory. At the end of the day, that's what integral theory is really about. It's integration. We need integration, and we don't have it. We're extraordinarily dissociated.

Yeah, extremely one-sighted, and we see how that manifests politically and socially. Yes, exactly. So let's move on and talk about your conception of patriarchy. When most of my listeners hear the term patriarchy, they'll definitely think of social and political constructs, and it's definitely related to that. But can you just bring that out a little bit more and talk about how patriarchy, as you said, earlier is sort of internalized inside of us regardless of one's gender identity. Yes, definitely. So again, I'm sure the way your listeners think of patriarchy is excellent and is way

more complex and detailed than I will even say. So I won't say too much about the patriarchy except that we've lived in it for we've lived in a world that's organized in that paradigm, which is a paradigm that values the so-called male qualities of doing over the so-called feminine qualities of being. And in that paradigm, what arises from that paradigm is constantly moving forward, always conquering the next frontier, and then conquering comes into it, and then domination comes into it, and then control comes into it. And so the patriarchal paradigm becomes a way of living that's always reaching outside of itself to get more, have more, acquire more, control more.

And we see what that has brought us. And depending on who you talk to, we've been living in a patriarchal system for anywhere from 2000 to 6,000 years. I personally think it's closer to 6,000. So that's a long time. And like it or not, and however self-actualized, we may think we are, we are formed in patriarchy. and what I have observed in myself and everyone I've ever worked with and everyone I've known and so much that I observed, we have what I think of as patriarchal structures of consciousness

that form us and we don't even realize it. And so we're always internally under the influence of what I call a wounding, wounded masculine, aka inner patriarch, that is brilliant at making up. us always do the wrong thing. Brilliant at dissociating us. It's a fear-driven, because obviously anyone who thinks about this

for more than a nanosecond realizes the impulse to control is driven by terror. We don't need to control if we're not in terror. But it's an unconscious terror. If we can embrace the terror, which again would be of the feminine, of the inner being, if we can embrace that terror,

if we can make friends with that terror, it would no longer frighten us and then we wouldn't need to try to control whatever it is that was terrifying us and we could all be friends and that's a rather simplistic reduction but I think in its own way it describes exactly what we all go through and so we experience the inner patriarch what I actually prefer the term wounding wounded masculine because it is a wounding function and it's wounding to us because it is itself so wounded we experience that function as the so-called inner critic just that inner voice that's always guiding us in the wrong way and it can speak with great authority it can even speak

with love and compassion but it always wants to actually point us away from ourselves it is related to the concept of the ego the monkey mind

the constant chattering the negative self-worth thoughts I'm not pretty enough I'm not worthy enough I'm an imposter nobody likes me or etc the beating our own asses

in our head sort of pattern right exactly exactly and see all those thoughts as you know for meditation when you sit in meditation you realize they're just thoughts i don't have to identify with any of these thoughts but what that wounding masculine function does is it weaponizes those thoughts against us so that if we don't have the kind of container that develops through ongoing meditation practice if we don't have that container when those thoughts begin arising we get lost in those thoughts The yogic term is we become identified with those thoughts. It's just the mind spitting out, I'm ugly, I'm stupid, I'm an imposter, whatever.

It's just the mind spitting out those thoughts. There's no need or reason to identify, to buy into those thoughts. But that patriarchal masculine, you know, it grabs hold of those thoughts and it's like sticky glue and it just like glunks them onto us. And the next thing we know, we're lost in this narrative of what a horrible loser person I am. And, you know, the next thing you know, you're just curled up in a ball in a corner of your room. Yeah. It's very hyperbolic in the sense that when you don't have access to this realm, that meditation gives you this spaciousness around thoughts

where you can sit back from a different perspective and watch the thoughts arise and fall away of their own accord and then begin to identify with that spaciousness from which you're watching, if you don't have access to that or you haven't developed that, which is by no means your fault because our society completely ignores and covers that aspect of life up, like it is torturous to be constantly dominated every single day by this incessant, chattering, petty, insecure, vindictive voice in your head. And even if you are more or less well adjusted,

even if the thoughts in your mind are not constantly negative, They're most of the time utterly absurd, superfluous, unnecessary at the very least. And then when times do get rough, they can become very sort of, you know, they can be devices of torture. And I think what I'm trying to do with exploring this side of human existence is to point people towards the reality that you can move beyond that. You can have a different relationship with those thoughts and that it will bring you increasing amounts of people. peace and calmness and an ability to go deeper inside of yourself and have a slightly better, more enjoyable experience of your own existence. And I think that me and you, I think, both share that goal.

Well, yes. And I would, I would say, let's not say slightly better, you know, let's go for Brokier. I mean, I think, I think it's quite possible to live in a spaciousness. And by the way, that spaciousness is what gets personified. as the feminine, deep feminine, inner being, goddess, et cetera, et cetera, will come back to that. And that inner spaciousness, again, is what the quote-unquote patriarchal masculine is determined to cut us off from.

Yeah. Because it fears the spaciousness, because the spaciousness is just spaciousness. And there's a groundlessness to it. And the patriarch fears that because it always wants to be in control. control. And the spaciousness, it won't be controlled because it's reality. Like the fear of death that you talked about, that's part of reality, right? It just is. And the patriarch is terrified of that. So what's to cut us off from that very mysterious will not be categorized or defined or named or known through the mind? It can only be experienced.

Yeah, exactly. But, you know, I'll tell you a funny story when you were talking about all those kinds of thoughts that I don't want people to think that it ever goes away. You know, I teach a weekly meditation class and where right now the topic is compassion. So I'm getting ready for class and I'm getting ready to give a talk on compassion. And I open up a book. I'm looking for a specific poem I want to read. And the book was given to me by someone and saw the inscription in the book. And I remember something this person did that actually really hurt my feelings.

And the mind is off and running. Oh, my God. And that was so horrible. And I just, it was hilarious. Again, where I am now in my life, thanks to many years of practice, I can, as we say, witness this. and just see the humor of it. But here I was, getting ready to teach a class on compassion, and my mind was often running,

finding everything possibly wrong with this person who once upon a time a million years ago said something that hurt my feelings. And that's, you know, and it's when we don't have a ground, when we're not much more grounded in the ground, it's very easy to have caught up in these thoughts and the next thing you know, you're lost in this story. And I think that's one of the most powerful things that you can do

is to develop the capacity to laugh at the absurdity of the mind. And how quickly it just bolts and runs away with any little material you give it. It's essential. We have to have a sense of humor because it's the best weapon. Well, we're one of the best weapons, really. Absolutely. And that's something that you really come to realize about this chattering aspect, the ego, whatever you want to call it,

is that it is ultimately when you really dive down, it is rooted in this trembling insecurity. and you talk about being as this groundlessness and to let yourself go into that groundlessness is part of what this little chattering voice is so scared of and we'll try to convince you it doesn't exist. This is all nonsense. You know, don't even pursue this stuff. You know, like the way that your mind will actually begin to try to convince you of various things is a fascinating process to watch. And it's through that awareness, the awareness of how it operates that it starts to become taken less and less seriously over time. You're not actually

coming in with new thoughts and dominating the old thoughts or you're not eradicating all thought. You're radically transforming your relationship to it so you can see it for what it is and not be swept away by it. Exactly. I always think of it. It's like we keep getting bigger. And as we get bigger, it gets smaller. Yeah. Daniel Ingram, the person I just interviewed talked about it as he's like when I'm in a room my consciousness fills up the room and so in that expanded sense of awareness the thoughts are these he calls them these wispy little things like they're they're ephemeral and immaterial but when you're locked into them they seem like they're everything they are the room the thoughts are big and loud and booming it's an interesting

way to think exactly and they and again if you use this languaging of the picture of masculine it wants us to believe that they are the room absolutely and that's and they're not that's that's an illusion yeah well let's go ahead and move on and i'll read this quote from your book um as the doorway into this this next question and then we'll we'll zoom in towards the end of this wonderful discussion you say in the book quote we think we are our bodies and our minds but we are so much more we're this huge shimmering awareness waiting to be remembered and integrated into our sense of self. And this integration is the secret of true healing. If you want to transform the patriarchal structures that muck around inside of you, contracting everything you are into everything

you're not and making a big mess in the process, I offer you the goddess. And at that point, you go into this wonderful discussion of goddesses within the Hindu tradition and sort of, you know, what they can represent. And I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that and how you use the Hindu goddesses in your work and sort of what they represent for you. Sure, I'm happy too. And let me just start by saying, people who are listening, you're going to hear this and you can hear me talk about these goddesses and maybe you're going to Google them and you're going to start reading about them.

Please understand that my way of working with the Hindu goddesses, and actually the fourth aspect is not Hindu, she's Chinese Buddhism, Kuan Yin, but she hasn't gotten written yet. She's still in process. I spent years unpacking this tradition and I've spent years really living into what we might call the living reality of these archetypes inside myself. And so what I'm writing is my own lived experience. And the problem with reading this stuff online is it's all coming down through, here comes that word again, patriarchal systems. And so you have to read between the lines of the stories. Because if you read them literally, then you're not going to get the really profound

truth that is shimmering underneath all the patriarchal overlay. like just i'm going to talk about the goddess collie now because she's the first one and if you read about collie online most of what you come across is this fierce warrior goddess and she looks scary and she is scary and you should be careful and don't blah blah blah blah keep your distance and she can harm you and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But no, Kali is the archetype of the truth that pulsates inside of us. And in this system, in this particular system of what we can think of as sacred feminine archetypes, collie is the most fierce potency of the deep feminine.

And the deep feminine is that shimmering awareness. The deep feminine is that pulsating sense of truth and authenticity that when we're in that, nothing can harm us because we're in the, we're in reality. And in many ways, you know, as a warrior goddess, what this energy field is doing is it's cutting all the ties inside of us that bind us to systems of ideas, thoughts, narratives, belief systems, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that actually keep us trapped in that small mind's self that's actually ruled by what we're talking about as the so-called patriarchal masculine that inner patriarch. And in the stories, the goddess Kali, there's always wars in Hindu mythology. And one of the famous Kali stories is a big war. The demons are was winning and collie this powerful feminine flavored warrior goddess comes and basically

demolishes this entire demon army and it's really it's a story about demolishing that which causes harm and protecting and restoring innocence and wisdom and that's what the force field personified as the goddess collie that actually does exist inside of us that that That's what it's about. And so it's just ironic, I have always thought, that we live in a time that in the cosmology of Hinduism is called the Kaliuga. And what they say about Kaliuga is a terrible time. And it's like we're totally living it. I have a quote in my book that describes, it's a very ancient scripture, but it describes exactly what we are experiencing now.

Trees will be stunted. I can't, I don't know this by heart. But it's exactly, in a very poetic way, it describes exactly the destruction of the environment and the complete corruption of our political system that we are living in today. And this is what is characterized as Kalauga. But from where I sit, it's like that is the embodiment of this ginormous patriarchal thought form that has been controlling the consciousness on the planet for thousands of years. And the only thing that can meet that, that ginormous thought form paradigm and bring it down to size, bring it into integration, is this other ginormous force field of collie that has been suppressed, rejected, et cetera, et cetera over all these years of patriarchy. So to me, it's very important to cultivate the awareness of collie because in this time, I think it's one of the primary medicines to bring integration, to bring that integration. inter-patriarch into its proper role as what we can think of as the pure masculine or the

sacred masculine, an untainted doing function that simply wants to do good, that is driven by wisdom, that is driven by clarity, that is driven by insight and intelligence, that is driven by love. And you see it embodied in people like Bernie Sanders. You see it embodied in a corner of West. You see it in men who are extraordinary teachers and healers of the world. world and we want we want to awaken this in everyone i think that's that's beautiful and uh i'll actually read the read the little part from the from the text um because i think it is so sort of startlingly on point um this is an ancient hindu text describing the kaliuga and you put it in your book you say or it says day after day righteousness will decline wealth alone will be the

criterion for worth of character strength alone will determine who is just Even the administration of justice will be perverted by bribery and corruption. Hairs styles will determine beauty. Veminence of speech will determine truth. People will be overtaken by famine, pestilence, drought, and storms. Their wealth drained by taxation and robbery and their energy depleted. Even trees will become stunted on account of their ruthless exploitation by unrighteous man. And it's sort of in one way perennially relevant because this is sort of always been the case under patriarchal domination,

it's becoming increasingly relevant as we enter into climate chaos. Yes, that's great. I'm so glad you read that. Yeah. Well, let's go ahead and zoom in towards the end. There's more you could talk about. In fact, is the other god pronounced Lakshmi? Lakshmi, yes.

Because after reading this segment, I've always been fascinated with Hindu mythology and imagery, and I bought a Lakshmi statue for my little. I have a conglomeration of Buddhist, Christian, and Hindu statues for the aesthetics and the sort of spiritual little part of my room. And I added it after reading your chapter on her. That's lovely. Yeah, I mean, Lakshmi is wonderful. And the way I work with these archetypes as polarities,

and that's a story for another time. But in my understanding, in my experience, Lakshmi and Kali are actually polarities of each other. because collie is this fierce truth protective warrior cutting the ties that bind us energy field it's it's very intense very potent very doesn't mess around Lakshmi is a different Lakshmi is very it's really at the end of the day it's the embodiment of love you know Lakshmi is like the love that actually holds us all it's part of the it's called the sustainer and that sustaining power of the cosmos that holds us in life, which, in my opinion, is love.

And so it's almost like too much collie we get dry, too much Lakshmi we get a little too lazy. But when we're working with those two in balance, we're just fabulous. You know, we're just so alive in ourself. But at the same time, we're just perfectly, gracefully, magnificently, contained within our power. And so we really want a Kali Lakshmi combo together. Yeah, I think it's fascinating how you use those goddesses within Hinduism to draw that out and to make those points about the self and development.

So let's wrap up here. And this has been an absolute honor and a pleasure. I love talking about this stuff. I know Michael had you on that conversation and he was moving in this direction. And I'm happy to bring this to fruition. on Rev Left and to discuss it. Ultimately, though, what do you hope your readers, when the book comes out because it's not out yet, of course, what do you hope your readers ultimately take away from your book? What are you aiming to achieve with it? It's a great question. This book is really

a battle cry for being. It hopes to inspire people to really step back and give as much attention to their inner life as they do to their outer life. Again, that term, battle cry often comes up for me when I think about this book. I'm so concerned that especially people who are coming up now who are doing incredible work for social justice, for environmental justice, for racial justice, incredible, incredible work being done now, incredible people. I'm so inspired by what's happening with the younger people. You know, I'm in my 70s now. And I think I was saying this on the panel that we did for the Michael Legacy project that I've kind of been on the wrong, the losing side for my entire life. And yet I'm so determined we can never give up.

We just have to keep on fighting, keep on fighting. And I look at the people who are coming up now and it's like, yes. But I worry that if they're not doing the inner work, they set themselves up for burnout. and worse than burnout, being co-opted. And the system that we live in, it's like this giant voracious, you know, this patriarchal capitalism, it's a voracious beast.

And it devours anything it thinks it will serve it. And we've seen this over and over and over again. We've seen great movements get co-opted. And we've seen great people burn out. And I just, I don't, we don't have the luxury for that. And, you know, it concerns me, well, of course, I'm a person much more of the left, so I know more about what conversation that goes on on the left than I don't really pay much attention to what goes on in circles over the right. But, you know, the anti-quote spirituality of the left, I find really problematic. This is one of the things Michael and I were talking about a lot.

This is one of the things I love about your work. This is one of the reasons I don't like that word spirituality. I think it's too loaded. I prefer wisdom path. I prefer waking up. And I do think it's essential for all the warriors on the left to also stop and learn how to be quiet and learn how to be still and learn how to really listen. You know, and there's so much, you know, we see all the infighting now. It's disturbing to see all the infighting and cancel culture and all the identity politics.

This stuff is really concerning to me because this is not going to advance us at all. But if we're not doing the inner work, if we're not cleaning up all the messy stuff inside of ourselves, we're very much at risk of being pulled into just what the side we think we're against is doing. So I hope that my book addresses that. I hope my book gets people thinking about this. I hope my book gets people going deeper inside of themselves and really wrestling with everything that we're talking about. Absolutely.

I hope my book makes everybody become like you. Well, that's too high praise, but I do appreciate that. And I do absolutely want to echo your point. I think on our tribute series to Michael Marianne Williamson made this point, there is a lot of not only ego on the left, but a lot of cruelty, a lot of self-righteousness, a lot of over-moralizing that comes out of an egoism. And those things can only be detriments to our political project. and they can only be limitations to what we want to achieve in the world.

And these practices, whether it's in the Hindu tradition, the Sufism tradition, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, these traditions exist and they point towards a place of more integrity, of more self-knowledge, of more wisdom and compassion from which to operate. And I think that is something that you, I, and Michael Brooks, and more and more people every day are realizing, coming around to, and trying to weld our political outward social projects with this inner development and this sort of evolution of consciousness

that's inherent within it because these things can't be separated and when they are separated, both projects, I think fundamentally suffer. Exactly. And honestly, it just makes us better people. It just makes us more fun, if anything else. It makes us just more effective and more alive

and more just feels good to be. be around us and that's what we want right we don't want just a bunch of identity police you know it's so boring bludgeoning each other over the head every day right and it's not necessary it's and it all again you said it very well and marian said it very well you know it arises from fear and unconsciousness and that's what i think needs to be addressed yeah absolutely well susan thank you so much for coming on for discussing your work and your experiences throughout your life before I let you go. Can you not let listeners know where they can find you in your work online and then when this book itself will likely come out and where they'll possibly be able

to find it in the future? So I have a website, susengreen.com, S-U-Z-I-N, Green, like the color, g-R-E-E-N dot com. I'm sure if you Google me, there's all kinds of other stuff also. There's a blog I don't keep it anymore, but if you're interested, in a lot of my Dharma talks it's Monday night blog it's just Monday dot blog there's many many years of this class

I've taught for many years here in Princeton called Monday night class and there's a lot of very rich it's a very rich blog I don't have time for it anymore so I don't keep it updated but there's a lot of great material a lot of great Dharma talks

if you want to hear chanting a lot of chanting it's very very lovely the portal, wisdom portal. What else? If you're interested in my music, last two albums are called the mantra project, volumes one and two. You can just find that it's on my website. Oh, in the book, I don't know. I think it's probably going to be another year before. I'm coming closer. I have to finish the chapter I'm on now, and then I need to write

the third section, which will be a practice session. I think we're probably a year out. I'm probably going to self-publish it because I'm just sort of not interested in going through. I've been down that road before and it's so time-consuming. So rather than look for an agent and a publisher and go that route, I think I'm just going to self-publish it. So it'll be available on my website. I'm sure people like you will talk about it on your show. Maybe we'll make copies available for people as gifts. I don't know. We'll see. But I think we're probably about a year out. Cool. Yeah, definitely let me know. keep my audience updated on that. In the meantime, you can check out Susan and her ongoing work

in so many different realms of life. Again, I really appreciate you coming on. Let's absolutely do it again. And I'm really thankful, ultimately, that through Michael Brooks, I was able to meet you form a friendship and a relationship with you. And it's been already a very deepening for me in my life. And I look forward to working with you more going forward. Well, that's wonderful. Thank you. And the same back to you. It's been great to get to know you. After all, isn't it, the time that we make? And all the innocence we give and we take. I've tried so hard to be there for you.

It seems it may mean disappearing for you. I don't want to run I don't want to try to fight it Every time I try I find new waste you tonight I will try my best to keep my head Nice and cry for you You

I don't want to hide I don't want to make it right Anything else and should you either try and find it When I'm on my way I keep my feet nice and cry it For you You

After all is an aid, the fear that you face And all the bitterness we try I'll love the reasons to keep me at bay. are the same reasons that I should stay. I don't want to mind, I don't want to try to fight it. Every time I try, I find you wasted tonight. I will try my best to keep my head nice and cry for you. You, you, I don't want to hide, I don't want to make it right.

Anything that wasn't should you really try and find it. When I'm on my way, I keep my feelings and cry for you, you, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. I don't want to ride, and I don't want to try to fight it. Every time I try, I find you waste you tonight. I will try my best and keep my head nice and quiet for you. I don't want to hide, I don't want to make it light. Anything you lose and shit you will try and find it. When I'm in my way, I keep my fingers and cry it with you, you.

Oh, ooh, who, who, who, oh, oh.