interview

WIE: In Fire in the Belly, you call upon men to undertake a spiritual journey that culminates in "the celebration of a new vision of manhood." What defines this journey, as you see it?

SAM KEEN: Well, a large part of my work is focused on the way in which the myths of a culture shape and inform the way we live, the way we think about ourselves and the way we feel. What I'm doing in Fire in the Belly is dealing with the myth of gender and specifically with the myth of male gender. And you have to understand that when I talk about a spiritual journey in that context, I'm not talking about a total spiritual journey; I'm talking about only one aspect of it. My ultimate message for the men's movement or, as far as that's concerned, the women's movement, with regard to spirituality and gender is: Get over it! Because the spiritual journey starts on the other side of gender.

Now let me say what I mean by that because I think my perspective is different from that of most people. I've got to start with the idea of myth, that a myth is like the software that is inserted into us by the society, by our family. Nature gives us certain hardware. There's male hardware and there's female hardware. But the moment we're born, people start shoving these software disks in, saying, "Here's what a real man is. Here's what it means to be a man. Here's what it means to be an American man," and things like that. That's what gender is. And those gender divisions, for roughly the last four thousand years, have been largely circulating around warfare. The division between men and women has been the division between warriors and nurturers. The male has been artificially conditioned to be tough, to be aggressive, to be hostile, to be willing to either kill or die for the tribe. The most poignant symbol of this, of course, is circumcision, which is a way of saying that to be male is to be wounded and to be willing to be wounded, whereas the female has been conditioned to be the servant of the warriors, the bearer of the children, the nurturer of the society, and in that sense to be inferior to the male. So when we're talking about gender, we're largely talking about injuries that have been done to male persons and female persons in the effort to perpetuate a way of life based upon warfare, aggression, domination and control. And all of that, from the point of view of the life of the spirit, is a mistake. It's this we have to rise above in order to begin to have any notion of what the spirit is.

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

SK: I would say it's the same, although it demands that we get over different illusions. The male has got to get over the illusions of manhood, and the woman has to get rid of the illusions of womanhood, to go beyond them, to go beyond the cultural stereotypes that have shaped them and to realize that, at the level of the life of the spirit, there isn't a difference—that it's equally difficult for us to transcend those things, to grind up the whole shadow, to delve into our unconscious and to transcend our conditioning. I think of the life of the spirit, in a sense, as that which begins to emerge on the far side of the mythologies that have shaped and informed us.

The first place I can remember that this question was raised was many, many years ago when Reinhold Niebuhr, the theologian, wrote an essay about pride, about how we have to get over pride because pride is a chief sin. And a woman who must have been one of the first feminist theologians wrote and said, "Wait a minute, that may be true for men. But it's not true for women. Women, by and large, have a problem of low self-esteem, of not having enough pride because that's what the culture has done to them; it says that you're second class." So in that sense, there is a different emotional agenda that attaches to a woman freeing herself and a man freeing himself, just in large terms.

Let me tell you another way in which this topic is talked about that I think will distinguish how I think about it differently from other people. Of course, Western spirituality has until recently been almost exclusively male in its metaphors. The metaphor of "God the Father" is perhaps the strongest example. And Mary Daly came along some twenty-five years ago and said, "This is a big mistake. Talking about God the Father is just a way to smuggle your politics and your sense of male gender superiority into theology." It was like dropping a bombshell into theology because suddenly you realized that these male-biased metaphors really said that "masculine" traits, such as control and reason, were better than "feminine" traits. Like all males, I resisted her stuff in the beginning. Then I began to realize she was absolutely right about it. But the problem is that the feminists then said, "Oh, God the Father. That's right. That's a baaad way to talk. Now, let's talk about God the Mother. Let's talk about the Goddess." Now, I think that Mary Daly should be as critical of that as she has been of the notion of God the Father. We do not begin to get on a spiritual journey until we go beyond the gendered metaphors for God. For instance, tell me what in the world it could possibly mean to say Mother Nature? What's motherly about it as opposed to fatherly or brotherly? It's a metaphor, and it's a metaphor whose time has passed as far as I'm concerned. I say that we need to get beyond that and to get back to the much more basic kinds of metaphors of knowing, of compassion, of loving.

The second book I wrote was called Apology for Wonder. Aristotle says that philosophy begins in wonder. The same thing is true about the life of the spirit. The life of the spirit begins in wonder, the wonder that there is anything, the sense of gratitude to be in a world that is filled with all of these marvels. And if the life of the spirit begins in wonder and awe, then what could it possibly mean to say that's either male or female? It's irrelevant. Maleness and femaleness are irrelevant to the basic fact that there is this marvelous universe.

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

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

WIE: It is?

SK: Yes, because it's something to aim at that you're never going to hit. To be free from the crippling effects of gender is a good ideal and we should work in that direction, but you're also always living within a society where those distinctions are operative and continue to be wounding to you and to others. And part of what it means to live the life of the spirit is to work to overcome that. But no matter how far you go, you're always going to have an unconscious, you're always going to have a shadow, you're always going to have something that has the tendency to draw you back into those distinctions because you were formed that way in the beginning. In a sense, it's sort of a countercultural act to get free of them.

So in terms of the notion of total liberation, I don't have the foggiest idea what that would mean. One of the things I frankly don't like about your magazine is the holding up of these people who are supposedly "in the absolute" and totally liberated. I don't know whether you remember, but for many years I was the person at Psychology Today who interviewed all these gurus. And so I've had a good bit of experience with a fair number of them—Chögyam Trungpa, Oscar Ichazo, Muktananda and others. And if these are all examples of people who are totally liberated, I say give me slavery because they were people with enormous illusions and who were cultivating enormous illusions in their followers. By and large almost all of them were totally unclear about three important things: sex, money and power. And they could play like they were liberated as long as they had a whole cult of disciples who did everything for them except wipe their asses—and probably that, too. And most of them were on enormous power trips. So I think the idea of total liberation is sort of like the idea of perfection. It's an idea that is more crippling than helpful.

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

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

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

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

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

SK: No. I think that's sort of like saying it's intrinsic and God-given that women should wear skirts and men should wear pants. I think it's just about as culturally conditioned as that. I mean, come on, give me a break! Women are more immanent than men?! Tell that to van Gogh! Tell it to Audubon, tell it to John Muir, tell it to Agassiz, tell it to any of the poets. I don't know where people get off making this kind of generalization! I mean, what could that possibly mean? I'm sitting here, as a matter of fact, this very moment, looking out my window at the stream and the beautiful greens with the sun on them—so I guess that kind of makes me like a woman!

Almost every year I take groups into Bhutan. It's marvelous because there you see that men and women, especially in rural areas, practically do almost exactly the same things—the same kind of work. Their bodies even look kind of the same. And it's not a big deal. You get the sense that sexuality and everything goes much more easily. I don't ever hear anybody saying anything that would be vaguely like, "a real man does this or a real woman does that." There are some role divisions in the society, of course. Male monastics are uppermost in the establishment. And there are some put-downs of women in the tradition, including the assertion that it's harder for women to get enlightened and things of that kind. But I just think that generalizations like that are repressive. And let me tell you why I think they're repressive, why I'm so passionate about this idea.

As a young man, I was unusually sensitive. I loved birds, I loved nature and I was sensuous. And gradually it occurred to me that this was something I had to be ashamed of, that it was kind of sissy. So I put that stuff away for a long time. Through my teenage years I took Charles Atlas courses and learned to wrestle to toughen myself up so I could be a man. And it wasn't until I began trying to work through some of these ideas that I began to realize, in retrospect, what bullshit that was, what destructive cultural stereotyping it really was. When this first really began to open up for me was actually during a bioenergetics session with Stanley Keleman. I was going with a woman at the time who was giving me all kinds of trouble. I just wasn't manly enough for her, in my view. And Stanley looked at me one day and said, "You don't get it, do you? You just don't get it. Your manliness is your sensitivity." And I realized I had been misidentifying where my "Sam Keen" strength was all along, that all these "feminine" parts that I had thought were not worthy of me were really where the juice of my life was, and that I had to learn to be more accepting, more surrendering and softer and more sensuous.

So I think that those notions are really destructive to individual people. In my seminars, I frequently have women come up and talk about how deeply shamed they are because they're aggressive, competent women and they maybe even look kind of manly. They say, "I have all this competence and everything else but, you know, I just feel like maybe I'm not feminine enough." And I look at them and I say, "You look like a pretty attractive woman to me. What do you mean?" They say, "Well, you know, I'm not x, y and z, and all these other things." You see, it's injurious to put these kinds of cookie cutters over ourselves.