Introduction

Patriarchy (The Rule of the Fathers)

In the Infinite Compass, I make the case that it was the desire for ownership as a result of the Agrarian Revolution, that land was fenced off by some, at the expense of access by others, thus controlling the produce coming from that land. This created an ‘us and them’ situation in the population for maybe the first time in history. Was it that fence that created the separation we now take for granted on all levels of Society; the haves, and the have-nots, leading us to then put fences around everything else? We started to catagorise races, genders, animals, plants, laying out stratum of society into which we all fit, but separating us all from each other, labeling us with the standard characteristics to which we have been allocated, with no room for diversification. Or indeed, individualization. In this homogeneity, we were then told how we are to behave, ensuring that we can never be allowed to be seen differently, or indeed get out of where we have been put, for fear that the whole artifice should collapse.

Biologically, male competitiveness ensures that the strongest genes are those that produce the next generation, in humans as in all biological beings. Had this competition remained on that level, male against male, no doubt we would have a healthy gene pool now. But it didn’t. I don’t know why it didn’t, but for some reason the males of the human species started to turn their relationship with all being into a battle for supremacy. We are living the fallout of rampant behaviour today. As a result, the world is torn into pieces by wars. There have been many warnings of the consequences of separation passed down to us through old wise stories of the past depicting what could happen if this lack of co-operation goes too far. But we haven’t listened or understood the consequences. Life depends on a balancing act. Everything has its complimentary opposite, the dance of which keeps that balance in a range where life can not only thrive but actually to continue. The innate co-cooperativeness of the female serves to balance out the need for competition in the male, allowing new to grow from that union. Not just reproductively, but on all levels of social interaction.

Competition on its own requires constant conflict, never allowing for a space to integrate the new potential that can evolve from it. That’s the co-operative phase of an entire process. It’s the stopping and taking stock, assessing where we have arrived before deciding what is required next. If that phase is not fulfilled then we continue to not absorb the lesson, leading us to repeat in never ending cycles of struggle. If our feet were in constant conflict with each other, fighting about who goes next, there would be no space for sitting and contemplating. No space for reassessing. The minute you remove the ‘coming together’ of cooperation from the process, you are left with constant forward movement, regardless whether or not you are going in the wrong direction.

The desire to win over anyone or everyone results in victory for victories sake, with no regard to the resultant ‘collateral damage’. And so, to those ancient stories: Solomon was known to be a wise and just king.  He mediated disputes amongst his people regularly. One day two women came to him with a baby, both claiming to be its mother. He patiently heard them shouting at each other, pulling at the baby, in an attempt to win. After a while with no resolution forthcoming, he told one of his soldiers to take the baby, split it down the middle, giving one half to each of the women. In horror, the real mother stepped forward asking that the other woman be chosen for the whole child, while the other was happy to have a dead half-a-baby. At this, Solomon took the baby and gave it to the woman who was willing to give up her child rather than see it killed. This showed Solomon who the true mother was, as no mother would be willing to see the child they birthed be destroyed.

In this story, the wisdom is clear. Inappropriate competition breeds more conflict, regardless of the damage that is left behind. Co-operation is the process by where we come together to heal. When the male strength began competing with, and overpowered the basis of female co-operation, it took us down a path of destruction that we are now experiencing. Balance in life was destroyed in the forward motion of endless conflict to win, with no regard to the state of the ‘baby’. This is still going on and on, as country competes with country for land and resources, leaving behind only dead people and devastation.

Another story from Aotearoa’s First People, the Māori, is of Maui, who discovered the waka of the South Island, and from it fished up the North Island, always thereafter known as The Fish. Maui was going to leave for awhile and admonished his brothers not to ‘cut the fish’. Allegorically, this seems to me to suggest that he didn’t want the island divided up. But when he came back, that is just what they had done. The division had created separation from each other, and the tribes (iwi) warred for the land ever after. Maui could as easily have been talking about the whole human species and its treatment of the earth herself. Instead of staying as a whole, enjoying the benefits of our diversity, we have cut the fish. And the knife is the competition sought by Patriarchy.

Now it has been divided we have a much harder job to heal and reconnect.  Before we can even begin to contemplate that mammoth task, we must stop the warring. We can then, with co-operation, begin to assess the damage. However, the damage is not only in the way we act, but the unconscious beliefs we hold in our minds, implanted, and embedded over thousands of years since the first enclosure of land. We believe in ownership! Not just as a concept but as a physical reality. We own and we are owned, and we cannot imagine another way of being. This way of being has created a social code that perpetuates its own behaviour from generation to generation. While this is a masculine code, and has required male decisions to bring it about, the weakening of the females in our species has contributed to that Patriarchal thought process being programmed into each of us. It applies to all genders. We all have an inner Patriarch that informs us how we ‘should’ behave, regardless of the devastation it wreaks on our psyche’s, personally and collectively. It is why we find it so hard to find the place of balance internally. We live in an unbalanced culture. What our culture and social settings tell us is ‘right’ can also be completely wrong if we want to heal ourselves and our people. We are individuals not machines.

So, to stop the competitive warring externally, we have to find the opponent parts within us, beginning the co-operative process of personal healing. That, in fact is the hardest part, for it is composed of millennia of layers, pushing it deep inside our subconscious. We must find those neuro-structures and fish them to the surface, where they need to be assessed, just as we must in the aftermath of any conflict, to learn from them, creating new internal systems for ourselves that reposition co-operation as central to the inner process. Once we have inner balance, our lives adjust externally, creating a fertile field for the “Hundredth Monkey” to take effect.  Another name for this is Critical Mass, caused by saturation that occurs when new information floods a system sufficient to create change. This process to allow the formation of a new way of being that rapidly spreads throughout the whole. What [i]has taken millennia to form can be reformed in almost instantaneously.

In the Infinite Compass I have used the indigenous symbolism of the Four Directions or Quartered Circle to illustrate what has happened and how it can be reformed. When the cross of the Yang is held in balance by the circle of the Yin, life continues to thrive. When it the cross escapes its boundaries, then we end up teetering on the edge of destruction. Can we pull it back into its natural position? It’s possible, but it can only happen one psyche at a time. Enough psyches healed, and we have a whole new balanced human race.

For this to occur, we must look closely at change that has taken place in our minds as a result of this programming. We have shifted from the understanding of how to survive through instinctual knowing, to an intellectual process of looking up the installed cultural programme which is designed to ensure that we adhere to a way of being collectively, putting survival of the system before survival of the individuals making it up, and therefore the species itself. This creates a dichotomy, pitting us against the feelings inside that tell us what we need to be well, and the system that dictates what we are required to do for it to be well. And there is the lie. It’s not possible for a system to be well without healthy components parts. We are those parts, each and every one of us..

 

 

[i] [i]The Hundredth Monkey is a book by Ken Keyes1 Jan 1981 9780942024005 outlining an experiment with Japanese monkeys depicting the accumulative effect of individual learning on the collective conscious.