Sam Keen: Get Over It!

introduction

"The idea of total liberation is a bad and very destructive idea," the gruff voice on the other end of the line announced, adding, "One of the things I frankly don't like about your magazine is the holding up of these people who are supposedly 'in the absolute' and totally liberated." While our commitment to investigative journalism often finds us in unexpected territory, I had to admit that this was a new one. Not five minutes into what was scheduled to be a one-and-a-half-hour interview, and already our magazine and the very aspiration on which it is built were under fire. Fortunately, I thought to myself, I hadn't called Sam Keen to ask him about his views on enlightenment. And having discovered firsthand that he was not a man to mince his words, I was all the more eager to ask this modern-day master of myth—one of the most influential figures in today's burgeoning men's spirituality movement—our questions on the role and influence of gender in spiritual life.

Our introduction to Keen's work had come only a few months before when, while beginning our research into gender and spirituality, we picked up his book Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man. A rich, almost lyrical blending of autobiographical anecdote and psychological theory, the book—which in the early nineties had served as a rallying point for thousands of men bent on breaking free of the culture's male mythos—soon had us under its spell. For several weeks, our basement sauna was transformed into a private sweat lodge of sorts, as the male members of our editorial team gathered there by evening with our spiritual teacher to read aloud Keen's riveting analysis of the social and cultural influences that have molded the psyche of late twentieth-century man. Having each managed to miss out on all but the broadest strokes of the men's movement, we found our own experience often powerfully illuminated by Keen's detailed tour through the rites of war, work and sex—the three arenas he feels have come to define our conceptions of what it means to be a man in today's world.

Using his own pilgrimage as a template, in the book Keen also goes to some length to outline what he sees as the way ahead for modern men. Not content with the popular men's movement mantras, "embracing our feminine side" or "unleashing the wild man within," he points somewhere between these two extremes to a redirecting of "the fierce warrior energies . . . that men have honed for centuries . . . toward the creation of a more hopeful and careful future." In his "new vision of manhood," he leaves little room for the endless self-centered probing that many associate with "men's work," calling instead for a new breed of heroic, passionate and "virile" men to rise up and take responsibility for confronting the ecological and social crises of our times.

By his own description, Keen is a "philosopher of the sacred." Hailing from the likes of Harvard and Princeton, with a string of advanced degrees in philosophy and theology, he has authored over a dozen books and has for years been a prominent figure in the American human potential movement. It was through his experiences leading workshops at Esalen Institute, as a contributing editor for Psychology Today, and as cofounder of a men's group called SPERM (Society for the Protection and Encouragement of Righteous Manhood) that he began to formulate many of the ideas that would fill the pages of his books.

In the larger body of his work, Keen informed me, Fire in the Belly is perhaps best characterized as his answer to the psychological dilemmas of modern man and, as such, is not in itself focused primarily on the spiritual dimension of life. It was only in his 1994 book Hymns to an Unknown God that Keen attempted to chart the waters of the spiritual quest—a journey he sees as common to both sexes—which only can begin after the psychological "wounds of gender" have been healed. Describing the book, he writes: "[It] is a map of the path we travel together, when the questions of masculinity and femininity, male and female roles, have been left far behind." Keen's approach to spirituality, along with Jungian analysis and many body-centered "transpersonal" therapies, does not count itself among those spiritual paths aiming for final enlightenment, but falls instead under the broad umbrella of what has come to be called "sacred psychology." Attempting to bring the individualistic ideals of Western humanism into a spiritual context, Keen and other authorities in this increasingly popular school of thought point to a life of meaning found not in surrendering to a God greater than oneself, nor in an effort to slay the ego through the renunciation of self-centered impulses, but through a personal confrontation with one's own existential questions and a reckoning with the shadow-world of one's unconscious. Keen writes: "My quest . . . is driven primarily by a personal-existential need to discover how I fit within the scheme of things, not by a . . . need to understand how human beings fit within the cosmos. . . . The dignity and meaning of my life involve the discovery and creation of my way, my truth, my destiny." Although some traditional enlightenment teachings do find expression in Keen's work, the ultimate goal of spiritual life as he defines it is not the dissolution of the separate sense of self, but the empowering of it.

During the course of our conversation last spring, Keen related some of the details of his own personal struggle first to prove his manhood and later to shed the rigid notions of masculinity in which he found himself bound. Having spent the better part of his life going against his own deeply sensitive nature, he recounted, it was only when a therapist pointed out to him that his "manliness is [his] sensitivity" that he was able to begin to make his own "journey beyond gender."

Having heard Keen's description of this pivotal moment in his search, it struck me as perhaps slightly ironic that his phone manner seemed to fall somewhere on the spectrum between John Wayne and General Patton. In the course of our conversation, Keen made it clear that he does not suffer fools—or opposing viewpoints—gladly, as he forthrightly shared his informed and often scathing critique of everything from radical feminism to Jungian psychology to the very men's movement which gave him his fame.

And while I can't deny that I was still glad I wasn't interviewing him about enlightenment, there was nonetheless something about the straightforwardness, and even boldness, with which he spoke that I couldn't help but appreciate. For one meets few people who have lived their questions as Keen has. And his thinking on many of the central themes surrounding our inquiry into gender and spirituality showed not only an unusual clarity and precision but a passionate conviction and a refreshing depth and breadth of hard-earned common sense.

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.

WIE: It seems to be common practice today to label qualities such as compassion, receptivity, sensitivity and intuition as "feminine" and qualities such as aggressiveness, competitiveness, ambition and reason as "masculine." Near the end of Fire in the Belly, in writing about what you call "the gender game," you speak at length about these binding polarities that have come to define our conceptions of gender. You state: "Manliness and womanliness are both defined by a process of decision, and denial. Each gender is assigned half of the possible range of human virtues and vices. . . . We do not know what human beings would be like if encouraged to develop their innate promise without the systematic crippling effect of the gender game."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SK: Yeah, yeah. Of course. I mean, you know what they did to build the pyramids—they went out and they got union labor and they asked for volunteers because it was all a "cooperative culture." And in those matriarchal cultures, they also asked people if they wanted to be human sacrifices because they were nice and kindly in those days. You know . . . it's the chalice and the blade.

What all of that really is is a disguised rewriting of history in order to do male bashing. Men and women have been in this thing together all along. If you want to bash patriarchy, you can bring it right up to the modern era and speak about how these brutish men, these terrible men, went over to Vietnam and killed all those people. I mean, they were nineteen-year-old kids who had no more choice about what they did than Mary Daly did. Anytime that you put the blame on one of the genders, you have rendered the other inferior. If it's true that men just dominated women all that time and women had no power, then they probably needed to be dominated.

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

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

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

SK: And they do. They do.

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

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

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

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

WIE: Well, our magazine is about enlightenment.

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

WIE: This is a common argument against the pursuit of enlightenment. But I don't see the question "How do we establish justice?" as being in any way removed from the question "What is enlightenment?" If we look at the human condition, if we look at what's behind the atrocities in Kosovo or Nazi Germany, it seems to me that we have to confront the question: How is humanity's problem going to be solved without individuals making a change, without individuals coming to a reckoning with themselves, with their own motivations? Our magazine is actually founded in the idea that there is a strong moral and ethical component to liberating ourselves from delusion.

In this issue, for instance, we're questioning the core of gender identity because, as you've pointed out, it seems that the strong identification most of us have with gender is one of the fundamental structures underlying the conflict we see in the world. And the idea is that if enough light can be brought to something so fundamental to our makeup, then hopefully we can begin to see, and even respond to, another possibility.

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