Mark Matousek

Gotham Salon: "The East," An Eco Thriller

2013-05-29T15:31:32-04:00

What is the appropriate moral response to grave injustice? When do ends justify means, and when, if ever, is violence the right solution for addressing social wrongs? These are the compelling questions addressed in Zal Batmanglij's riveting new film, "The East," about corporate-environmental crime and an eco-activist group that fights them.

The film does a great job of exploring these issues. There is the timely theme of democracy becoming more and more controlled by corporate power, another exploring the nature-based, mind-exploring freedom rampant among radical fringe groups, and still another as the Internet as a tool of power for ad hoc activist groups to find each other and band together. These contemporary themes converge on the age-old moral question of what is right action in the face of injustice. Is it justified to live by "an eye for an eye"? Or was Gandhi right when he said, "An eye for an eye, and the whole world becomes blind"?

Unlike many anti-corporate films, this one is character-driven, suspenseful, and surprising, with a hot love story woven throughout. Ellen Page seems in her element as an eco-warrior. The inimitable Patricia Clarkson is stellar as the cold-blooded CEO of a firm that uses espionage to take down activists. And Alexander Skarsgard is a smolderingly intense leader of the eco collective who, having come from privilege, moves effortlessly between his long-haired hippie lair in the woods to suit and tie (and he sure does clean up well).

An aspect of the film that especially interested us was that director Batmanglij and female lead Brit Marling (his real life companion) prepared for "The East" by spending several months off grid, living among dumpster-diving "freegans," eschewing consumerist culture, not using money, and rarely able to bathe. Their experience lends grit and credibility to this portrayal of life among transient political dissenters, the brave, flawed, utopians among us who reject capitalist excess and are fighting for a world where there's less waste and exploitation, more preservation and honor paid to the natural world under assault. We highly recommend "The East." It opens in N.Y. and L.A. on May 31 and around the country starting June 7. You can watch the trailer here. And check out our Gotham Salon discussion about it below. Till next time!

Gotham Salon: Eve Ensler's New Book

2013-05-21T08:07:11-04:00

Eve Ensler is a triple threat. An artist who is also a performer, who is also an activist, she is the founder of V-Day, her movement to end violence against women and girls, which has raised more than $90 million in the past fifteen years. In addition to opening safe houses and making medical care available to victims of rape, in 2011 she founded The City of Joy, a refuge for women survivors of gender violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where each year approximately 180 Congolese women, who have suffered unspeakable brutalities, receive therapy, skills and communal healing.

As the author of the game-changing play, The Vagina Monologues, which is performed internationally in thousands of productions a year, Eve has always been a radical. Those of us who know her remember that when The Vagina Monologues was first produced, The New York Times refused to print the word "vagina" in advertisements. Eve helped to change all that. She's won a Tony, an Obie and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She's been voted one of Newsweek Magazine's 150 women who've changed the world, and she has produced cutting edge plays for the past twenty years in New York, where she lives half the year (and the other half in Paris).

We think her new book, In the Body of the World, is her best work yet. The most revealing, uplifting, heartbreaking writing she has ever done. It chronicles her journey through metastatic stage IV cancer (she is now three years cancer free) and her recognition of "illness as metaphor" for the cancers of greed, ignorance and violence that are consuming the world. She also explores the power of love to change the course, both personally and globally.

In the Body of the World is a pilgrimage from pain to freedom -- and it blew us both away. Check out our Gotham Salon link below in which we discuss Eve's work and her recent book launch at Barnes and Noble in New York City. Till next time!

Dharma Salon: Leonard Cohen at Radio City Music Hall

2013-04-15T16:42:53-04:00

Seeing Leonard Cohen at Radio City Music Hall in New York City last week was one of the greatest performance experiences of our lives. Of course, we had been hearing about his legendary concerts since 2008 when he began a series of world tours, which have continued to this day, selling out the world's greatest venues, often within hours of tickets going on sale. And of all the older rockers and musicians still on the scene, Cohen commands some of the largest numbers of young people flocking to hear him and his extraordinary band. Not bad for a guy pushing 80.

What is it that makes a Leonard Cohen concert different from almost any other night on the town? As Angelica Houston once said of him, he is "part wolf, part angel." And that spectrum, which pings in most of us as well, is obvious in his music, his lyrics, and his onstage presence. He lets the wild have its day -- the passions and the darkness, the vagaries of love, loss, and death -- and at the same time, there is tenderness and generosity in his view. In just one or two lines of poetry or lyrics, he sums up a lifetime's vague murmurings of the heart.

Surrounded by world class musicians, some of whom he has worked with for over 40 years and most of whom are legends in their own right, Cohen pays homage to each several times throughout the evening and gives ample time for their solo performances. This alone is worth the price of the ticket. Check out their bios here: http://www.leonardcohen.com/us/tour/band.

But finally, it is the experience of the audience that reveals the talent of those onstage. In this case, the concert-goers of New York would simply not let Leonard Cohen leave. Before the final song ended, the entire sold-out crowd was on its feet, clapping in unison, yelps and whistles piercing the air. Three encores later -- at midnight -- it was at last closing time, and we left that great venue with flushed, radiant faces -- a flash mob of exalted strangers. It is heartening to know that in this time of spectacle and trivia, of celebrity voyeurism and gangsta rap, there are still plenty of those who are moved by what can only be described as a class act.

When he first walked onstage that night, Cohen had said, "I don't know when we will meet again, but tonight we will give you all we've got." He was, as expected, true to his word.

Check out our Dharma Salon conversation about this experience in the video clip below. Till next time!

Sexual Genius: An Interview With Esther Perel

2013-03-26T15:21:47-04:00

Esther Perel is a triple threat. Visionary, beautiful, and ferociously intelligent, the Belgian-born psychotherapist and author best known for Mating In Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence, a landmark book that introduced millions of couples to the conflict between intimacy and sex and how to be married and hot at the same time. Perel's TED talk in February attracted more than a million hits in the first month.

In a nutshell, her thesis is this: Intimacy in relationships is frequently -- and inexplicably -- the enemy of sex. The intimacy Perel is referring to is the romantic ideal of semi-conjoined couples who believe that love means quashing mystery in favor of sweet companionship. In order for couples to remain interested in one another, they require distance, transgression, surprise, and play. We must be able to stand back from our partners, to view them as separate, mysterious people, for them to remain objects of our desire.

"Desire is fueled by the unknown," Perel insists when we meet in her high rise New York City office. She's formidable, intense; when she looks at you -- or rather through you -- the experience is unnerving (Perel's jungle cat eyes don't help). "When I work with sexuality in couples, I rarely work on helping them have sex. You can have sex and feel nothing. Women have done this for centuries. I work on the poetics of sex. I work on how they connect to their own erotic self. Basically, I work at how they beat back deadness, which is the prime reason for affairs. "

Deadness?

"The one thing that everyone tells me worldwide is that they feel alive when they have an affair. Many times, it isn't so much that you want to leave your partner as you want to leave who you have become. Often, you're looking for another self as much as you're looking for another person. To reconnect with lost parts of you or to discover new parts of you."

When couples succumb to habit, turning one another into pieces of domestic furniture (every lump and sag familiar to us), desire dies. When we see our partner as 100 percent "other," however, desire has a distance to travel, a secret to unlock, a person to discover. Perel works with couples "to make the partner or spouse someone that you're still curious about."

"I believe that people never fully know the other if they stay curious," she says. "When is the last time you tried to enter into your partner and not by having intercourse?"

Perel believes that marital bed death is a byproduct of the American Dream. "Some aspects of American culture, such as pragmatism, work amazingly well in certain areas but not in others. Organization skills, efficiency, being 'to the point,' blatantly direct, don't really go that well with suggestiveness, mystery, playfulness, seductiveness, and delayed gratification," she says. "Americans don't flirt -- they score. " She smiles at me suggestively. "Flirting means playing with the tip of the sword. It comes from the French word meaning 'to tease'. It's about playing with possibility. It's not about making it happen. Sex is not an achievement. Americans are achievement-oriented, not dream-oriented. That may be great for the business but it doesn't work out so well in the realm of relationships and desire."

She knows the conjugal jungle she speaks of. Perel's been married to her husband, Jack Saul, director of international trauma studies program at Drexel, for 30 years. Nor is frequency of sex the primary issue. "It's about having a certain sexualization in the relationship. It's about a certain gaze. People can have sex once a month -- who cares? It's how they look at each other, how they feel in the presence of each other. It's how connected to how they feel to that part of themselves." The question she asks her clients is not how often they have sex but, "what does sex mean for you and where do you go in sex? What parts of you do you connect to there? What parts of you get expressed in sex?"

She came to her work on erotic intelligence in a roundabout way. One day she asked her husband, "How do you know that a torture victim comes back to life? What does it take for a person to reconnect?" He said, "When they are able to reconnect with creativity and vitality, with the opposite of vigilance."

Perel realized that "you can't play when you're vigilant. You can't play when you're anxious. You can't play when you're fearful. That's when I made the connection. Where I grew up in Antwerp, there were two groups in the community of Holocaust survivors. There were those who were not dead and those who were alive. Those whose lives were gloomy and closed in and those who had reconnected with their vitally and creativity.

"That's when I looked at the couples who complained about the listlessness of their sex lives and saw two groups of couples. I saw couples who were not dead and couples who were alive. Those who are not dead may have wanted more sex, but they mainly wanted to connect with the quality of renewal and aliveness and playfulness that sex used to afford them."

Esther Perel looks directly at me. "That's what most people truly want."

For more by Mark Matousek, click here.

For more on relationships, click here.

Dharma Salon: How to Survive a Plague

2013-01-25T14:20:14-05:00

New York was Ground Zero in the 1980s for the activist AIDS movement known as ACT UP, and David France's wrenching documentary, How to Survive a Plague, captures that time as never before with footage he has gathered going 30 years back. The heroism, heartbreak and raw commitment of a group of raging, dying gay men (and a few straight activists) remains a testament to the power of the human spirit when we face catastrophe together, focused like a laser on a common goal. Besieged by a mysterious virus, stonewalled by doctors who didn't know how to save them and opposed by a federal drug bureaucracy, which took far too long to take seriously their deaths, the first generation of people with AIDS laid their bodies on the line, literally -- from the famous Lie In to interrupt the homophobic sermons of ex-cardinal John O'Connor of St. Patrick's Cathedral to the Kiss In at St. Vincent's Hospital.

France gives us moments of sheer prophetic perfection -- playwright Larry Kramer with Old Testament fury, shouting at a disruptive colleague who was rudely trying to take over an ACT UP meeting, "Plague! Plague! We're in the middle of a plague and this is how you behave!" Or the images of men in tears as they threw the ashes of their loved ones through the openings of an iron fence onto the White House grounds while police on horseback attempted to beat them back, the ashes blowing in the wind and landing on the pristine lawns of power. We were both emotional as we watched this film, flooded as we were with memories and feelings of that time. (Mark was at those ACT UP meetings in New York, while Catherine was in San Francisco watching the epidemic take down dozens of friends -- and eventually her beloved brother -- in those early years of viral Armageddon). The experience of seeing this film was akin to a memorial for those we both have loved and lost as well as for that time itself; those years of terror when the disease was a death sentence spreading like a wildfire. In year one, there were 41 cases worldwide. By year ten of the epidemic there were 40 million.

The film has evidently struck an emotional chord for many others as well. It is one of the five nominees for an Academy Award in Best Documentary and has already won Best Film prizes from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Independent Spirit Awards, and numerous others. We highly recommend it (and hope it wins the Oscar). Check out our discussion of the film in the YouTube clip for Dharma Salon below. Till next time.

The Wayfarer: An Interview With Martha Beck

2013-01-16T10:00:05-05:00

Martha Beck is a force field. Half an hour in the company of this Harvard-trained sociologist, life coach, and best-selling author will plug you into higher frequencies and open the shutters of your mind.

At 51, Beck has been on the international stage as a teacher and memoirist since her breakout book, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith, in which she accuses her father, a church elder and apologist, of sexual abuse. After the birth of her second child, Adam, who had been diagnosed with Down syndome prior to his birth, she published the superb Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth and Everyday Magic about her decision to give birth to and raise Adam.

Her most recent book, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, is both brilliant and filled with life-changing insights. I sat down with Beck for a half-hour phone chat about the book.

Mark Matousek: You write about a particular breed of individual called a Wayfinder. Who are these people?

MB: I borrowed that term from a guy named Wade Davis, an anthropologist who used it to describe the navigators of the Pacific Islands. These [people] were so amazing ... they were able to, for example, interpolate the existence of a chain of islands 100 miles away by watching the way the water broke on the hulls of their canoes. This is how they found all of the islands in the Pacific, which are so widely scattered. I liked the word because we live in a world were the flood of information and technological change is so vast that it has become almost as chaotic as the sea right now. It's very hard to know where to go and what to do in your life. I turned to these ancient skills from a variety of cultures to see if those could help, and it turns out they do.

MM: Part of the Wayfinder path is what you call "meeting your rhinoceros."

MB: This literally happened to me. I was learning to track rhinoceroses in Africa and tracked right up on an animal that really I thought was going to kill me. [In that moment], I let go of my life, dropped the idea that I had a plan for the future, because I thought I was going to die. And what came into the open space was this amazing image of what the rest of my life could be: Joyfully hanging out with people who want to heal nature, heal people's hearts and I could just do that and nothing else. Whatever causes you to drop your plan forward and open to your vision, your own, deeply-personal vision of what your life could be at it's very best, that's what I call meeting your rhinoceros.

MM: You also write about "wordlessness" being important to this process.

MB: It has been so fascinating to talk to people about Siberian shamanism, African shamanism, South American, North American, and find out that they all started the process of Wayfinding ... by getting away from the left hemisphere of their brains. You see this really clearly spelled out in our modern neuroscience, one of the best examples being the Harvard neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, who had a stroke that took out her speech center for a few years. She realized that there's a whole reality available to us -- vast reality that doesn't make it into our verbal thinking. It's like trying to push the Pacific Ocean through a funnel. [Without words] ... she could sense what was going on all around her, and she felt the interconnection of herself as a field of energy with others. When we focus very narrowly on what we know with words, most of that richness is lost. And our educational system teaches us to focus almost exclusively on words ... Bolte Taylor calls it stepping to the right hemisphere of your brain and dropping out of language. There are numbers of techniques to do this. It's the first step toward being able to work what looks like magic (stepping into the place beyond language). The verbal brain processes about 40 bits of information per second, which is impressive. The non-verbal is processing 11 million bits of information in that same second.

MM: Amazing. How does this relate to what you call "sacred play"?

MB: Sacred play is anything that takes you into that right hemisphere of your brain. It turns out that this move away from left to the right hemisphere, that sense of expansiveness and everything, can be accomplished through unusual rhythmic action, or any action that requires so much attention away from words that you cannot think in words. Playing the piano, if you are not yet adept at it, takes too much attention to think in words. If you try to think your way through even driving a car, the thinking brain can't do that. It has to be incorporated into the body ... something rhythmic and slightly difficult is going to put you right into that brain state that people get with years of meditation. Only you can get there very quickly.

I had a client who was a professional baseball player once, and he would go to clubs and dance for seven, eight, nine hours at a time. He wouldn't drink, he wouldn't take drugs, he just danced because he had so much physical energy; he was this amazing athlete. And for him, sitting meditation would have been a catastrophe. He needed dance. And dance will put you into a deep trance, by the way, if you do it the way that shamans do it.

MM: Why is paradox so important to the Wayfinder path?

MB: Paradox is an interesting technique because it's been used by many, many cultures to get people, who are fairly brain-centered thinkers, to think themselves into a spot where they can no longer think. So the classic paradoxes are koans in the Japanese tradition ... they'd say, go and tell me what is reflected in two mirrors that are exactly facing on another. And the idea is to get the brain into such a logical loop that it sort of sputters out, and then you get this puff into pure perception. In my own coaching practice, I have trained many, many coaches to use a form of "paradoxing" where you get people to voice their deepest fear, and then they have to prove to you that the opposite of their deepest fear couldn't also be the truth. And it absolutely boggles people. One man thought he had to rescue all women, and I said, "Give me an example where you won't have to rescue a woman." And he sat there for five minutes. He couldn't come up with one. And I'm like, I'm sitting right here, what am I, chopped liver? But it was a paradox for him to even think that there could be a woman he didn't have to rescue.

MM: What do you mean by the difference between "forming" and "forcing" in the Wayfinder tradition?

MB: If you start with wordlessness and experience yourself as "oneness," then imagine something, you'll find that everything seems to help you create what you have imagined (because you're connected to all things).

I'll tell you a personal story. I had this experience at a basketball game, an environment that's not at all meditative, where people are screaming and yelling and throwing things and sloshing beer. I was with my son, who has Down's syndrome, and his friend, who also has Down's syndrome. They were desperate to catch these gifts out of the air that were being shot through these cannons. My son wanted a T-shirt, and his friend wanted a little stuffed animal, but they were small and slow, and it just was never going to happen for them.

So this was going on, and quite separately I thought, I wonder if I can drop into wordlessness. It took a minute, but then I did, and the whole thing became this explosion of love. So overwhelming and so beautiful that I actually started to cry. I looked around to see if anyone was paying attention and around me in a circle about a hundred across, there was this ripple in the crowd ... And it took me about 30 seconds to realize that from all around us, everyone who had caught a gift out of the air, was passing it hand over hand to my son and his friend.

I came unglued. I was sobbing uncontrollably because the love was so overwhelming ... the boys got what they wanted, and then people were offering each other gifts ... and the whole time there's this basketball game being played. That's how the world of form begins to behave for you if you live and walk in the path of the Wayfinder.

Join me for monthly conversations on this topic at Mark Matousek's Seekers Forum.

For more by Mark Matousek, click here.

For more on emotional wellness, click here.

Dharma Salon: The Warhol Exhibit at the Met

2012-12-18T14:35:57-05:00

If Andy Warhol had never lived -- turning Campbell's Soup cans into pop art icons, injecting the "15 minutes of fame" meme into our collective consciousness -- American culture, as we know it, might never have happened. Warhol's peculiar, vapid genius, along with his obsessions with fame, money, and youth, presaged Facebook, American Idol, the Kardashians, and the thousands of online and print organs dedicated to trumpeting every blasphemous burble and trivial pursuit of celebrities ranging from Brangelina to Honey Boo Boo.

That's why we decided to kick off our new vlog/blog Dharma Salon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, talking about what art is -- and isn't -- to bring our two very different perspectives as spiritual authors and teachers to Warhol's quintessentially-superficial and thought-provoking moment in American cultural history. We wanted to momentarily immerse ourselves in a worldview that glorified the external and the trite by way of contrasting that view to a love of the subtle and profound. Our goal with Dharma Salon is to be the "eyes and ears on the ground" for culturally-minded dharma bums around the world who are interested in artistic and intellectual events in New York, the city still unparalleled for its sheer volume of creative talent and exciting ideas.

As a special treat, Mark reminisces in the video here about his days working for Andy Warhol at Interview Magazine and meeting many of the artists represented at the Met show, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel, and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Till next time!

Mark Matousek is the bestselling author of two memoirs, Sex Death Enlightenment: A True Story, The Boy He Left Behind: A Man's Search for his Lost Father, as well as When You're Falling, Dive: Lessons in the Art of Living.

Follow Mark Matousek on Twitter: www.twitter.com/markmatousek

Journey to the Sacred: An Interview With Mark Nepo

2012-12-14T07:20:08-05:00

Mark Nepo is a philosopher, poet, and teacher whose work has inspired millions of readers to take the spiritual plunge. Best known for The Book of Awakening, a No. 1 New York Times bestseller (and Oprah favorite), Nepo has taught poetry and spirituality for more than 30 years, advocating "the usefulness of daily inner life to help us stay close to what is sacred."

As a cancer survivor, Nepo is most concerned with what he calls "the great ordinary things that all of us have to face: the prospect of dying without having truly lived and the prospect of living without having truly loved. And the joy of discovering this with others." I recently caught up with this modern-day magus at his home in Kalamazoo, Mich., to talk about his new book, Seven Thousand Ways To Listen.

Matousek: You talk about the "unending pull to center" being our greatest teacher, which I thought was just a beautiful phrase. Could you tell me what you mean by that?

Nepo: Sure. In the way that I experience life, the physical world is really just the tip of the iceberg of reality. Whether it's trees or stones or water or animals or stars, everything has an ineffable interior quality. Indigenous Polynesian cultures use the word mana to refer to the luminous glow of spirit that's in everything, and Jung appropriated and defined mana in a psycho-spiritual way as the unconscious influence of one being on another -- like the sun giving off warmth and light where things grow toward it. When we can be fully present, we grow toward each other. I feel that at the center of all life and traditions there is a common well of being that informs all of our lives and how we interact and live out in the world. For example, in the Bodhisattva tradition, being informs everything from the inside out, and it helps us be here together in the world.

Matousek: And the Bodhisattva takes a vow not to leave the world until everyone has achieved liberation.

Nepo: Yes, and what's so touching to me about the notion of a Bodhisattva is that given the way life is, I don't believe that we're going to get to that place. We're here with the beautiful flaws, the amazing majestic mess of it all. So when the Bodhisattvas say, "I'm not going until everybody can go," in a way they're agreeing to keep each other company and find that amazing state right here.

Matousek: So choosing to stay in samsara is like how the Dalai Lama talks about keeping your heart open in hell.

Nepo: Yes. I think at that level of full being and compassion here on earth, those dualities fall away. It's all right here wherever we are. I'm a cancer survivor for 25 years, but it feels like yesterday -- and a lifetime ago. But I remember about 10 years out, I had this really special bumpy day where my car broke down and I was caught out in the rain. Then I stopped, dripping wet in the rain, and I just thought: This is perfect.

Matousek: Right. And you felt gratitude instead of, "Lord, why me?"

Nepo: Absolutely. The only bad weather is no weather.

Matousek: Well, that's what I always say to people. It beats the alternative, you know, when they say how terrible their lives are. Have you always been a seeker?

Nepo: I think so. Before I knew any language for anything, even as a child, the world and god, nature, Tao or whatever you want to call it, always spoke to me, in metaphor. Before I knew what spirit or poetry was, I felt that when I did have solitude, I was in conversation. I was already listening to things larger than me and I felt at home there, and that's what opened me more deeply and turned me toward that center. So when I went through my cancer journey in my mid-30s -- I'm 61 now -- I was blessed to have people from many different faiths and traditions trying to help me. For the last 25 years, I've been a student of all paths and really committed to trying to discover where they meet and emanate from and how that translates into a daily kind of practical spirituality.

Matousek: Nothing could be more important. Or more complicated. Many people have very idealistic notions about what enlightenment is and what it means to lead a "spiritual life." They think it doesn't include vice and darkness and brokenness and mess and all the stuff that any real spirituality knows is the fuel that keeps you going. It sounds like you have a much more organic mystical view that includes the earth, and it includes some sorrow.

Nepo: Absolutely. I don't personally believe in an arrived state of enlightenment. I feel that being human is a constant practice of return. We have moments of clarity, and then we're confused. We have incredibly sensitive periods of being awake, and then we're numb. Being human is a very universal and a very personal practice of learning how to return when we can't get access to what we know. This is acute in our world of judgment and duality and good and bad and left and right and up and down -- none of which is very helpful or specific enough to let us live into a practice. And this opens up a whole terrain of learning how we listen. In the last 10 years I've been trying to understand, in a very real way, the Buddhist sense of seeing things as they are. All we have to do is look at relationships. A certain kind of pain comes from insisting that people be what they're not, or holding onto the hope of what a relationship should be.

Matousek: In Seven Thousand Ways to Listen, you write about "staying in conversation with all that is beyond our awareness." How does listening help us stay close to the sacred?

Nepo: I think that paradox is a great teacher. But the paradox here is that we have this amazing capacity in our minds and hearts to learn and gain insights and then to build a kind of personal storehouse of knowledge. The underside is that those insights harden and fill the spaces in our hearts and minds. They become assumptions, conclusions and judgments. When we learn to listen, we can meet life completely anew, everyday, but that is hard practice. Let's go back to relationships: My wife and I have been married 18 years, and I know her well enough that I can finish her sentences -- but listening means I don't. Listening means that I say, "Who are you now?"

I know how she thought about this or that, or about me or us, or about life or death. But if I ask, "Who are you now? How do you see this now?" I have to be willing to put all the information in my storehouse away and truly respond from where my heart is this instant. I think this is what meditation practice is all about -- trying to put everything down and simply breathe and return to what it means to be alive now, and then move from there. The real challenge is to remember to see clearly when everything's flying around us and we're wrapped up in our wounds and traumas.

Matousek: Intimacy only happens when we learn to listen?

Nepo: In the moment. The moment is the doorway -- the ever-present threshold to staying in conversation with everything that's larger than us. When I can be fully present and lean into whatever moment is before me, whether it's blissful or difficult, that is a doorway to oneness -- it's the sweet ache of being alive. I think happiness is overrated, but joy is the key to the thousands of possible moods we can feel. And when we can rest in that joy, then peace is the moment of openness that holds all feeling. As a kid, I would have this depth of feeling that somebody labeled sadness -- and I was told that I should get rid of this sadness, but I've never been able to. Then I realized that it's a much deeper feeling -- it's the sweet ache of being here, and it's one of my oldest friends. It's how I feel the pull of the universe and where I'm connected. So, how do we listen to where we're connected, because that opens up our compassion for everything?

Matousek: It sounds like you are describing the state of longing.

Nepo: Yes. Longing is often the thing we feel when we're awakened. But we often confuse the longing, which is sacred, with the object or experience that prompted it. It's like the romanticism of early first love. The first time we fall in love, our heart is opened and we say, "Wow, it must be this person. I can never be away from this person." It could be the same feeling for a teacher, a worldview, or a set of principles. Just substitute "first love" with anything, and our deeper listening practice becomes, "How do we honor both what is awakened in us and the things that awaken us, because we do need each other to become awake?" Plato said, "We're born whole, but we need each other to be complete." Think of it like a match: It has the capacity to make light, but that can't happen until it strikes something. We constantly need to strike against experience, and each other, and the world, to release the light that we carry within. The underside of that is addiction -- believing in the striking and not the light.

Matousek: You took the words out of my mouth. I was just going to say that. Jung called addiction "a prayer gone awry." We mistake the stimulus for the sacred longing itself.

Nepo: And knowing the difference is the first step to pulling out of it.

Matousek: When you talk about being "worn open by the world," what do you mean?

Nepo: There are many ways that we grow, but there are two major ways: We shed what no longer works, or we're broken open. If we're unwilling to shed, then we will be broken open. Through shedding, we are worn down, just as nature is eroded to its beauty. I think that through suffering, human beings are eroded to our beauty. We travel vast distances to see cliffs that are beautifully worn and hollowed by the sea over thousands of years. The original definition of sacrifice means, giving up what no longer works in order to stay close to what is sacred. There is a creation story in The Book of Awakening from the New Hebrides where it was believed that humans maintained their immortality by shedding their skin like snakes or crabs. In the story, Ul-ta-marama, which literally means Change-skin of the world, was a chief of a tribe in the New Hebrides. One day she went to shed her skin as she'd done many times before, taking it off and putting it in the river. But as she went back to her family, her teenage daughter saw this beautiful young woman and said, "That's not my mother. I want my mother." She tried to tell her daughter that in time she would have to teach her how to shed her own skin. But the daughter was getting very anxious and afraid and angry and said, "No, you're more like my sister. I want my mother." To appease her daughter, Ul-ta-marama went back to the river and put on her old skin. But when we put on an old skin -- something that no longer works -- in order to appease the conflicts, fear, or anger of a loved one, we give up our access to the eternal.

Getting back to your question about how we are worn to who we are by the world. I love the analogy of a flute. Flutes were originally carved from bone and wood, so no two were the same, and therefore no two could play the same song. So each being on earth is such a flute, unique, and experience carves holes in us. It doesn't feel good. It hurts. But once the holes are carved, the breath of spirit can move through each one of us and we can discover and play our song. This is a deep form of listening. Whatever holes are ours, we have to let them be carved all the way through. Otherwise we will never get to our song. We have a choice: To meet life through compassion and discover our song and listen to the songs of others, or wind up playing out the need to do that by carving holes in things smaller than us.

Matousek: What do you mean by that?

Nepo: I mean that if I don't face what is mine to face, that need doesn't go away. I will play it out on you. This is projection. We tend to do it on things that are smaller than us because it's easier. I think listening is the first step to stopping violence for two reasons. If we want to lessen the violence in the world, the first thing we can do is face what is ours to face, and not play it out elsewhere. And the other is as Longfellow said, that if I were to truly listen to my enemy's sorrows, they would stop being my enemy. Listening is the beginning of peace. We need to meet, embrace and work with what we're given. For what we want and what we're given often serve two different gods. And how we respond to their meeting determines our path.

Matousek: How would you characterize these two different gods?

Nepo: It's the god of want, the god of "I think I know what's best for me and the world" vs. the god of what is. I learned this very starkly on my cancer journey, because I was trying to change the world and all of a sudden, life was changing me. Sooner or later, every one of us who is alive, no matter how gifted, bright, lucky, or thoughtful, will not get what we want. Sometimes it's not important. But I could lose my wife. I could lose my sight. When we don't get what we want, there's a legitimate grieving, and then the spiritual journey truly begins, because not getting what we want breaks our self-reference; and once that is broken, we are aware that we are a part of a larger whole and this is where relationship begins. It changes everything.

For more by Mark Matousek, click here.

For more on emotional wellness, click here.

The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Waking Up at SAND12

2012-11-05T13:00:12-05:00

The philosopher orders the pancakes and sausage. The shaman asks for the egg whites with cheese, the Jungian waits for her unbuttered toast, and the mindfulness teacher -- a paragon of amusement and patience -- stands next to me on the breakfast line beaming like a hundred-watt bulb.

We're here with hundreds of fellow scientists, spiritual teachers, academics, artists, and seekers for the third annual Science and Non Duality (SAND) Conference in San Rafael, Calif. Part think tank, part ashram, part arts festival, part Doctors Without Borders, SAND is a unique melting pot for interdisciplinary dialogue among groups that don't ordinarily mingle to compare notes on what it means to be a 21st century human and how we can close the unnecessary gap between scientific knowledge and the world's most ancient wisdom tradition, known as non-duality.

Science and spirituality have always been odd bedfellows. Since the Scientific Revolution, when empirical discoveries began to undermine religious doctrine, tensions have steadily grown between those who sought truth through rational inquiry based on observation and those who accepted truths based on the authority of religious dogma. "While the liberation of science from religion resulted in tremendous advances in science and technology," according to one of SAND's founders, Maurizio Benazzo, "it also led to the fragmentation of knowledge, and to a science no longer engaged with the big questions: what it means to be human, to be conscious, to be a seeker of meaning amid the vagaries of life."

"We realized that we are at a dawn of a new spirituality, which is beyond the religious traditions, beyond dogma or any certain belief system," continues Zaya Benazzo, a Bulgarian-born engineer and environmental scientist who co-founded SAND with her husband. "This new paradigm emerging in spirituality is grounded in cutting-edge science and consistent with the ancient wisdom of non-duality."

What is non-duality? Described by Aldous Huxley as the perennial philosophy, non-duality focuses on the simple idea that humans exist together in a unified field and that all phenomena are interconnected. Non-duality teaches us that there are no borders, boundaries, or true separation in nature, and that all of creation is One, arising from the same non-dual source. Like a vein of pure gold, this fundamental mystic vision runs through all world religions and has been mined by sages and saints since the time of the Vedas (and by indigenous shamans before that).

Non-dual awareness -- known as nirvana, satori, communion, "no self," enlightenment, moksha, liberation, and other names -- is the state of union aspired to not only by meditators, yogis, and people who pray, but also by people making love, artists seeking absorption in their work (the "flow" state referred to by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), as well as hard-nosed scientists pushing the envelope of human knowledge. Indeed, many scientists are closet mystics who recognize the parallels between quantum awareness and transcendental knowledge. Albert Einstein insisted, famously, that "The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical," "the power of all true art and science," and that a person "to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead."

That is why SAND may be at the cutting edge of a revolution of consciousness in the coming century. Philosopher Ken Wilber, considered the godfather of the non-dual movement (and whose books Bill Clinton used to read on vacation), calls this imminent convergence "the marriage of sense and soul." Unlike traditional religion, which asks followers to take things on faith and bend to ideology and authority, non-duality is purely experiential, addressing the mystic awareness that we are all born with. In an age dominated by scientific materialism at one end of the philosophical spectrum, and fundamentalist Bible-, Koran-, and Torah-thumping on the other, garden variety mysticism has gotten a bad rep. To be called mystical these days is to conjure images of astral colon cleansing and aura massage instead of bona fide spiritual mastery.

Mysticism is a formidable, time-tested approach to investigating the nature of reality, however. A glance at Evelyn Underhill's classic book Mysticism, for example, with its rigorous studies of modes of perception, varieties of consciousness, and intimations of a non-dual world, is more than enough to silence accusations of fatuous, woo-woo dilettantism. From Kabbalah in Judaism, to Sufism in Islam, to the great Christian mystics (Teresa of Avila, et al.), Advaita Vedantists of Hinduism, Zen and Madhaymiya of Buddhism, as well as Taoism shamanistic traditions, the mystic vision has survived across the ages. According to the folks at SAND, this non-sectarian, non-dual approach to awakening is the way of a more enlightened future free of religious quarreling and focused on human brotherhood, liberation, and the relief of suffering on this planet.

"Mystics describe their experience in many ways," says Maurizio Benazzo, who was brought up in Italy and worked as an actor, model and filmmaker (Short Cut to Nirvana) before embarking on the SAND adventure. "They speak of non-dual awareness as loving, open, and lacking any sense of separation. More than a feeling, the experience also conveys a deep and liberating insight into the truth of life, death, self and world. To see the turnings from the perspective of these non-dual insights is the beginning of a fuller, freer, happier life."

"Non-duality gives us a deeper understanding and experience of the interconnectedness of life," Zaya says in agreement. "We can no longer live as independent individuals driven by our egocentric concepts. We are all connected, with the stars, with one another, with all the species within and around us. We are a link in an evolutionary process that includes all, from the smallest particles to the largest galaxies. This process is the timeless dance of the cosmos that has been described by mystics of all traditions, the mechanisms of which now start to be explored by modern science. The non-dual approach will help us, as individuals and as a species, go beyond the myth of separation and be more in tune with life itself while having a momentary glimpse of the eternal dance."

Most of us long to join this dance. After breakfast, the Jungian stops to chat with an astrophysicist in the hotel lobby. They are joined by a priest and a Reiki master. A writer-poet approaches a Zen abbot to talk about the presidential race. For a moment, this feels like a taste of the future. We can only hope.

For more by Mark Matousek, click here.

For more on consciousness, click here.

Poetic Justice: Marie Howe Named New York Laureate

2012-09-20T15:50:08-04:00

Marie Howe is nobody's fool. She isn't a woman with grand illusions about things like awards, career, reputation, or the mawkish vicissitudes of the book world. Still, she's grateful to have been chosen this month to be New York's new poet laureate and determined -- passionately -- not to waste this opportunity to vitalize awareness of poetry in the age of Twitter and Hello Kitty.

Howe has long been a poet's poet, a cult favorite, the Rita Hayworth of the poetry world. Born in Rochester in 1950, Marie was one of 11 Catholic children, the kind of girl who read The Lives of the Saints in the bathtub and dreamt of a visionary life. A protégé of Stanley Kunitz (whom she remembers lovingly here), Howe is equally loved as writer, teacher, and mentor in the writing program at Sarah Lawrence. Her first book, The Good Thief, was selected by Margaret Atwood as the winner of the 1987 Open Competition of the National Poetry Series. In 1998, she published her best-known book of poems, What the Living Do, centered on her brother John's death from AIDS, and in 2008, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time. She has received honors from National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships among others.

When I caught up with Howe to talk about her new job, one sunny afternoon in Greenwich Village, she was sending her 12-year-old year daughter, Inan, off to a friend's house, and preparing to teach her first class of the fall term.

MM: What was your reaction to the phone call?

MH: I was just stunned! Then, after I calmed down a bit, I realized that this was a huge opportunity to serve what I love so much. The foremost thought in my mind is: How can we bring poetry more into the public world than it already is? Bookstores and libraries are closing and people have fewer places to just go and browse. When it comes to poetry, lots of people don't even know where to start. I think of my brothers and sisters. Smart, interesting, wonderful, committed people and many of them don't know how to read poetry. We live in a country in which the academics have inadvertently taken over and many people don't feel as if they know how to navigate the world of poetry. Walking around New York on any given day, we bump into, maybe, a dozen Gap ads, 20 ads for various TV shows on channels I don't even know about. All that information is constantly entering our psyches, souls, and bodies, and I've been thinking: What would it be like if people bumped into poetry like that? When they didn't even mean to look for it and there it was! Poetry doesn't always have to be printed. It can be said.

MM: What do you mean by saying that academia has taken over the poetry world?

MH: I don't mean to say that academia is this evil force (laughs), but many of us have had experiences in school that suggest to us that we need an interpreter to read poetry. People are always saying to me, 'Ok, here is a poem by Robert Frost. Where is the symbol? What is the theme?' Well, I really don't know a poet who writes like that! It was a function of modernism to make us believe that the poem was a riddle that one had to solve -- that the poet was keeping something from us -- and that if we could just figure out the symbol and the theme, we would get the poem. So often I will be sitting on an airplane and someone asks me, 'Well, what do you do?' I tell them I'm a writer. 'What do you write?' And I'm very reluctant to say poetry, because often what follows next is 'Oh, I don't get poetry.'

But remember after 9/11, when those big sheets of cloth went up in Washington Square and Union Square, and people put up the missing posters, and poems, and all sorts of personal messages. Remember those big sheets?

MM: Sure.

MH: I remember being so moved by those weeks when those sheets were up and everyone -- all different kinds of people -- stood side-by-side, reading what had been written there. In the morning, in the afternoon, in the night, people stood there reading. What they were looking for, and what they found there, was poetry. We're so hungry for what poetry offers us. It is, I think, the deepest song of human consciousness and we go to poetry at the crucial moments of our life. When someone dies. When we fall in love. When we get married. When we have a child. When we lose a child. When we experience the great passages of our life, we often turn to poetry. And I just remember those days and thinking, 'If only these sheets could be up all the time.'

MM: Instead, we have Twitter and Facebook. How is social media affecting the poetry world, do you think?

MH: In really wonderful ways. People post poems on Facebook, they share poets they love, they share videos on YouTube. Writing a tweet with 140 characters is not unlike the rules for a haiku poem. I asked students in a class to text poems to each other once a week that were only written as texts. And they were gorgeous! I think that a lot of the new media can absolutely be a real pipeline, a crucial heart line, for sharing poetry with one another.

MM: Most of the writers I know are grumpy about the invasion of social media, and the sense of our work being devalued by so many open channels.

MH: The great thing about poetry is that it is simply not 'commodifiable.' Materially speaking, it's worthless in this culture. There's very, very little money to be made from writing poetry. In that way, it's subversive since anyone can steal it. Anyone can take it. Anyone can learn it by heart. Anyone can whisper it, can carry it into a jail, through borders, across all sorts of state lines. Poetry is that which can be carried anywhere. It's invisible. And that makes it very, very precious in a culture where everything has a price. It still has a purity. It has not been co-opted. And as I say, a poet wants you to learn his or her poem by heart. They want you to copy it. They want you to steal their work. There's no greater pleasure than knowing that somebody has taped your poem to the refrigerator door or sent it to five friends. That's the greatest joy in poetry, having it passed around and read and heard.

MM: Do you consider the writing of poetry a sacred practice?

MH: Yes, in that poetry involves a deep receptivity to something beyond myself. Beyond my ego. It requires one to be in that state of receptivity, which is often difficult. It may take days or weeks or months to enter that state but it's one of the greatest joys of my life. Sometimes, in that state of receptivity, something occurs (is said or spoken through a writer) that the writer never could have imagined beforehand. The act of writing itself brings one into a relationship with imagination, memory, music, silence, diction, syntax, language, and history, all at the same time. To write not knowing where you're going is an act of faith that something will come of it that is more than one could have hoped or imagined.

MM: How do your poems come to you?

MH: It's like feeling along a wall -- along the panel -- till the door opens. But this 'feeling along the panel' can take twenty years! In my work, it's really about disappearing... some voice that wants to speak through me. I have to be completely there, and ready, but it doesn't feel like I'm expressing myself really. When a poem occurs, writing becomes an experience right then and there. I'm not writing about an experience, I'm having an experience.

MM: Is Catholicism an important part of your work?

MH: I grew up steeped in a Judeo-Christian tradition where the stories of the Old and New Testament, or of the Torah, affected me very deeply. Those stories and those characters serve as archetypes or mythological characters in my life. Some people grow up with the Greek gods and goddesses and stories. I grew up with Noah and Moses and Isaac and Abraham and Mary and Martha. And these characters are very alive to me. They carry so much human complexity and mystery with them that I would be happy to spend the rest of my life thinking about them. In their company.

MM: You once told me a wonderful story about Stanley Kunitz helping you after your brother John had died of AIDS.

MH: Well, Stanley was a great friend. We were walking down Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. This was in the fall, my brother had died that summer. Stanley asked me how I was doing, and I said, 'I feel as if something has me in its mouth and it's chewing me. ' And he said, 'It is. And you must wait to see who you'll be when it's done with you.' It was the most comforting thing anyone said to me. Because what he was implying was that I was undergoing a critical, essential transformation. Stanley always looked at change as transformation -- all his poems have that quality in them. It was a great, great comfort to me when he said that. So many dear friends would say, 'Oh, I wish I could take it away from you' or 'Oh, I wish I could make it better.' And I didn't want anything to be made better. You know about this, Mark, you've written books about it. One doesn't want anything to be taken away. But you don't know how to necessarily negotiate it, either.

MM: That's true. Tell me, what do you say to young poets who want to give everything to their work, but don't know how to make a life out of poetry?

MH: I say: You lucky, lucky person! You get to be in relationship with this. Every artist knows what it means to be in relationship with the ineffable, and that that relationship is its own reward. The poems are their own reward. I tell them that in spite of appearances, our culture does need poetry. Remember those sheets in Washington Square Park? That's a sign of what poetry can do. We only need to remember.

What to Do With the Animal Self?

2012-05-11T10:32:00-04:00

The following was a talk I delivered at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, May 1, 2012.

Raise your hand if you've ever been cheated on in a relationship.
Raise your hand if you've ever cheated on someone else in a
relationship. How many of you have ever done something in bed that
you would not want your mother to know about? OK, so this is a pretty
"animal" crowd.

Ever since the 18th century, when a French anatomist named Meinard Simon du Pui declared us "Homo duplex" due to our two-sided brains, we have understood that humans are "not one but two." We are divided creatures balancing impulses ranging from the saintly to the bestial, starting with our sex lives.

Germans say that when the penis gets hard, the brain goes soft. Robin Williams says that God gave men both a penis and a brain, but not enough blood supply to run both at the same time. Our bi-hemispheric brains are, in fact, running
different hardware for different tasks. The job of the older part of our brain, aka the reptilian or limbic brain, is to make snap judgments about what we want and don't want, whether to fight or flee, or what smells good and therefore should be touched. The newer, much weaker
part of our brain, the cerebral cortex, is in charge of reasoning and takes a slower, more methodical approach to choices, considers options, weighs consequences, and makes what we think of as rational choices. Ethical life is a tradeoff between our primitive and evolved natures, our comparatively feeble powers of reasoning struggling to cut a deal with our
unyielding animal appetites.

Some psychologists call this design gap between reason and emotion "the
enemy within." A marked feature of human psychology, experts tell us,
is the inability to bring our motivation in line with what we know to
be prudent. So often in life what we want to want and what we actually want are at odds. The "gut mind" contradicts the "head mind," which contradicts the "groin mind," which leaves us all in a heap. We tell ourselves stories about who we are, but they're mostly fabrications built from the oughts and shoulds we absorb from our culture, and which have little impact on desire itself.

Some experts use the analogy of a rider on the back of an elephant. The
puny rider, the rational mind, kicks and screams in its efforts to
steer the emotional elephant the way it wants to go. Most of the time,
once the elephants wants something, the efforts of the rider are completely futile. If
you have ever tried talking yourself out of something you crave, you
know that this is true.

In fact, studies show that our reasoning abilities decline in
proportion to our passion. The more intense the feeling, the more
ineffectual the rational mind becomes. As a way of testing this
hypothesis, behavioral economist Dan Ariely asked a group of teenagers
a series of questions about how they make ethical choices once they're
aroused. The results were shocking. When asked about their
propensity to engage in questionable activities, such as unsafe sex,
the youths' predictions were off by more than double (136 percent)
once they were in a hot, aroused state. When asked about sexual
preferences and the likelihood of engaging in "somewhat odd" sexual
activities, their predicted desire was nearly twice as high (72
percent higher) when aroused than cold. In other words, once we find ourselves in
heat, we become even more predictably irrational, as
Ariely puts it. What people say they will do in a cold state fails
miserably in predicting the influence of arousal on things like sexual
preferences, morality, and safe sex.

For gay men inventing our own rules, this can present a serious
problem. I know a psychotherapist with intimacy issues who gorges on
anonymous sex. I met a judgmental, straitlaced Tea Party couple who
host gang bangs in Guadalajara, a cancer doctor who does porn
films anonymously on the Internet, a yoga instructor who gives blow jobs in the Rambles, and a philosophy professor who can't seem to stop
himself from seducing his undergraduate boy students. For gay
couples this sort of carnal feasting all to often leads to
sexual famine. Conjugal bed death is as common in gay
relationships as it is in straight relationships. Four of my friends who are
devoted to their lovers have stopped having sex with them completely. They take their lovers back when they cheat and sublimate most of
their own desire into work or therapy, tranquilizing their own
libidos with excuses about being middle-aged. Instead of taking
the risk of asking questions and finding out how to solve their
long-term ennui and risk finding out too much, perhaps, they withdraw
into a sexual no-man's land. What I'd like to talk about tonight is
why this happens, and if there's anything we can do about it. How can
our animal self not sabotage the rest of our lives?

I've been thinking about this problem since I was a boy. The animal
ran the show in our house. My mother had been a promiscuous girl who
married two men she didn't love (including my father) in
hopes of respectability, all the time being in love with another
woman's husband. When my father found out, he disappeared, and this
left me with the unshakable sense that sexual freedom could ruin an
otherwise happy life. Our erotic natures endowed us with enormous
pleasure but also cursed us to follow them wherever they led, even if
it was off a cliff. When I entered gay life at a very young age, I
saw adventure, skin hunger, and plenty of lust, but very few
successful relationships. As men we seem doomed to stop wanting
the ones we care about and wanting those we don't. Once the glow of
attraction cools, there seems to be three basic options for
couples: We can cheat, we can stop having sex, or we can
become creative ("monogamish," as Dan Savage calls it), having threesomes,
foursomes, or pre-agreed-on sex with others. These arrangements did
not appeal to me. The couples I knew who went this way seemed more
like best-friend "fuck buddies" than lovers of the kind I wanted to be.
They cruised together. They seduced together. But where was the
romance? Romantic love requires the illusion of exclusivity in order
to thrive, the willingness of two people to act as if they only have
eyes for each other, at least when they're together. But maybe this
wasn't possible for gay men? Maybe we couldn't be that way long-term, I started to think.

When I was 45 my lover of 10 years became a crystal-meth addict.
After I was forced to throw him out, I found myself single for the
first time since I was 20. For years I'd been hearing adventure
stories about online dating, and now I found myself in the thick of
an alternate universe. It was like a funhouse with distorting mirrors,
a smorgasbord, a candy shop, a bottomless cookie jar. The online
dating world was both amazing and vapid, seductive, intriguing, and
terrible. I had no moral qualms about the promiscuity, but I did
question the emotional toll of so much hooking up. Did having sex
with so many people, so easily, so often, handicap the ability to be
personal? When you shop for sex like a gastronome at an open market,
targeting your search with labels -- top or bottom, drugs or no drugs, LTR (long-term relationship) or looking for sex only -- what did that do
to your sense of self? Not understanding the online etiquette, I
made constant, embarrassing faux pas. I found myself having
more graphic conversations on the phone with total strangers before we'd
even met than I'd ever had with my lover. I did not know that
foreplay in the sense of flirting was considered rude. Instead of
meeting in person, talking, and letting desire build to a physical
connection as it might in the natural world, there was the "gimme!"/"hurry up!"/what's your problem?" impatience of people on a crowded
cafeteria line, eyeing the dishes, feeling the pangs, wanting to get
something on our plates already. I underestimated how quickly
people want to hook up and how quickly affection can turn to
aggression, especially when they're drinking or drugging. Sober
men on the hunt can be ugly. Drunk or tweaking men looking for sex
can be ridiculous or worse.

I felt torn. As fun and indisputably hot as this online dating could be, I realized quickly what a trap it could become, as well, how it
could desensitize a person and play to men's natural tendency to have
sex and run, to overindulge, to keep their distance, to be limited by
labels and pre-choreographed dances. Fast-food sex could be both
liberating and imprisoning. I was filled with admiration for gay men's
ingenuity, brazenness, and erotic specificity, and I was demoralized by the
shallowness. You could order up sex the way you ordered chow mein --
only the sex got there more quickly. This new sex technology enabled men to get laid like kings but unloved like paupers. A friend
of mine, a perennial bachelor, became a sort of Schwarzenegger of online
dating: unstoppable, voracious, but unable to meet a single man, out of the dozens and dozens and dozens with whom he had great, sometimes
mystically bonded sexual experiences, whom he could take seriously as a
potential partner. Still, he wants one, he says. Were his voracious
sexual habits inhibiting his ability to connect emotionally? Was it
possible to so so habitually and so completely disregard what I believed to be the natural
order of things -- meeting, getting to know each other, perhaps even
seeing each other more than once before being physical -- without losing your emotional bearings? What about things like
courtship? What about not knowing too much too soon? Or what if you
met the love of your life, like I did, in the thick of the sexual
game and then had to struggle to step back, together, to the quieter,
more protected place where emotional relationships can actually take
root and grow? For me, this wasn't always easy.

The truth is that gay men are connoisseurs of pleasure and geniuses
of animal satisfaction, but there's one area where we haven't moved
an inch: emotional intelligence. Though sexually sophisticated, many
of us are emotionally naïve. Gay men have a blind spot against self-restraint; on principle, we rebel against the notion of limitations,
because our lifestyle is supposed to be about liberation. But
liberation is just a beginning; what you do with the freedom is
another story. This is a tricky and unpopular piece of news. Though
men resist admitting it, we can't really have it all. We can't, and we
shouldn't be able to, because then we wouldn't learn anything. In
addition to being about fun and love, relationships and intimacy are
about learning to open the heart and become real. Fucking 500 men on
Manhunt will not make you real. Tolerating one imperfect person's
presence beyond your tolerance, because you love him, can make you
real. This brings us to an old-fashioned word that makes a lot of
people uncomfortable: sacrifice. For many people, "sacrifice" is an
ugly word, but it shouldn't be. To sacrifice is to make something
sacred through conscious choice. Our relationships increase in value
and intensity when we choose them over passing fancy, like aiming a
magnifying glass at a piece of paper till it starts to burn.

This is a paradox. The sexual self survives on paradox. Sexual
wisdom lives in paradox. Mark Epstein, a Harvard-trained Buddhist
psychologist, explains that our willingness to engage in mystery keeps
desire alive. Another teacher explains that passion in a
relationship is commensurate to how much uncertainty you can tolerate. Esther Perel, who wrote an amazing book called Mating in Captivity,
writes that eroticism resides in the ambiguous space between anxiety
and fascination. What makes for good intimacy, she explains, rarely
makes for good sex. When people become fused, sex no longer happens.
Aggression, objectification, and power all exist in the shadow of
desire, components of passion that do not necessarily nurture
intimacy. Desire operates along its own trajectory.

In relationships we often castrate ourselves and one another with
puritanical ideas of what's loving and what's not, what's permissible and
what's not, and wonder where the heat goes. We force one another into
squeaky-clean boxes and wonder why we're suffocating. The "Madonna/whore complex" is as polarizing and destructive for gay men as it is
for straight men. That's because while few of us want to marry "whores,"
most of us still want to sleep with them. Sex happens on a spectrum,
from the most intimate to the most objectified, the most unique.
There was a time in my life when this bothered me, when I thought I
should be more elevated, somehow, more enlightened, that love meant
taming the animal, till a therapist finally set me straight. At the time I was
complaining to him that I was bored out of my mind with my married sex
life but didn't know why. I told him that I was trying to
be more conscious, more sincere, more tender, slower, because I wanted to show my
lover how much I cared, but it was killing my libido. I thought maybe
there was something wrong with me. The therapist just laughed and
explained that that's not how men connect. Testosterone likes to
attack first, then cuddle later. I needed to honor the beast. We all contain a spectrum of desires, behaviors, moods, appetites.
The challenge is to make relationships where what happens in the
bedroom is allowed to stay there, to allow ourselves a forbidden zone
so that we don't have to look for it elsewhere.

One of the problems with being in love is that we forget that sex isn't
about a person, or that it's not only personal. Romantics resist this fact, but it's
true. Your lover wanted men before he wanted you; he was attracted to
a certain flavor of sex before he had it with you. In other words,
you are, in addition to being your own wonderful, unique self, a thing to
him, an animal, a type, a tool, and that is exactly how nature
designed it. By demanding that our lovers treat us too personally, all the
time, we kill their appetite. You want your partner to be able to see
you as an object, or he won't be able to love you erotically as a
person. It is healthy to be able to slip out of your mundane,
work-day self into something more forbidden with the person you
love. When couples stay plugged into this archetypal level of
things, this lust source, they can keep desire alive forever. They've
connected to something larger than themselves, mastered the art of
putting the general into the specific, the type into the specimen.
The animal inhabits this archetypal realm, the shadow self, the
primitive side of human nature that wants to be bad so that it can feel
good. One of the things our puritanical culture does is polarize
virtue and the shadowy parts instead of understanding that they
are integral to one another, that much of what we do in bed is healing
the psyche by enacting the shadow. In the same way that we would go
crazy without the ability to dream, we go crazy when prevented from
embodying this primitive animal self somewhere in our lives, and the
bedroom is the natural backdrop for stepping into this parallel world.

This could not be more important. When we make the animal the enemy,
we set ourselves up for disaster. As conscious, well-read, flossed,
and polished as you are in most of your life, when the lights are low,
you are still an ape. I was doing an interview once at the BBC,
talking about sex and enlightenment, when a young producer
cornered me by the drinking fountain. He told me that his girlfriend
wouldn't sleep with him because she said he treated her like an
object. This boy was very upset, because that was how he liked to have
sex, but his girlfriend would have nothing to do with him until he
learned to behave himself. This guy, who looked like the love child of
Daniel Craig and Ryan Gosling, didn't know what to do with all his
animal energy. He wanted to pound his chest. He wanted to make her
scream. I've never forgotten how lost he seemed, how self-hating and
utterly confused. I hope his girlfriend came around or he found
himself a woman worthy of his ferocity.

But this is a slippery slope. To deny the horrific, disgusting, subhuman, self-destructive, genuinely heinous things that the overindulged or repressed animal can be capable of is not intelligent. Think of Jim Baker preaching the gospel of hypocrisy, praising the anti-sodomite Bible with one hand while fondling a call boy with the other. Or Coach Jerry Sandusky raping boys in his care in the shower room at Penn State. Or Congressman Larry Craig in that bathroom stall with his "wide stance." When we suppress the animal, it grows fangs. If we try to ignore it, it becomes a monster. That's why Eros follows his sister Chaos in the Greek myth; the animal holds both power and madness. As gay men we are part of an experiment in erotic evolution on this planet, to see where two sets of XY chromosomes will go when unchecked by female wisdom and restraint, how far we will let ourselves venture, what works and what doesn't in the dance with our own unruly natures. Because the sexual impulse, the animal self, has no morals. It doesn't live in that side of the brain. But that doesn't make it evil; it makes it a riderless horse. Describing the human psyche, Plato compared it to a charioteer driving two horses, one dark and one light. The rider, the "wisdom mind," can't go anywhere without the animal, appreciates the animal, enjoys the animal, knows that as consciousness, it stands apart from the animal. It is greater than the animal, extra-animal. It animates the animal. The "wisdom mind" enjoys the animal but is free of it, too, and that's the point, the response to the riddle of how spiritual beings can love with a body, how "Homo duplex" can live peacefully as one creature. Being conscious that we are more than the body allows us to ride it without becoming its slave. This is the master stroke, the bridge between the animal and the spirit, recognizing that the beast is a beast and stopping trying to turn a Rottweiler into Mother Teresa. You can train a dog to do new tricks, but you'll never train it to be a saint.

What's Your Metaphor? Shape Shifting in 2012

2012-01-20T11:37:00-05:00

One wintry afternoon last month, I was strolling through a forest with a philosopher friend when she stopped dead in her tracks, all of a sudden, staring up through the trees at a patch of blue sky. "This is exactly what my life feels like."

"What is?" I asked.

She held out her hands to mean the forest. "I spend my days on this tiny path, surrounded by overpowering things, hoping -- praying -- that if I keep walking, I'll find my way into some kind of clearing."

She sounded like Dante with a mid-life crisis. "In the middle of the road of my life/ I awoke in the dark wood/ where the true way was wholly lost," he wrote in The Divine Comedy. I had often felt this way myself, lost on the road of my own existence. What struck me hardest on this particular day, though -- with 2012 looming and the annual question of how to shape the new year in the air -- - is the great power our metaphors have over us, how we use them to symbolize, contain, and explain our existence. Our metaphors create us, I thought, as much as we make use of them.

With this in mind, I started talking to family, friends, colleagues and neighbors, about their chosen metaphors, most of which weren't chosen at all, but formed from habit, temperament and the unpredictable hand of fate. My metaphor, I realized quickly, is that life is a kind of cosmic, wonder-filled schoolhouse where learning and attention are the point, and looking for the truth. From this I had created a value system where terrible luck could be a lesson instead of a curse and where self-expansion, beating the odds, being a quick study, and changing my mind were the priorities. But we live with different metaphors. Here are some of the ones I came across:

1. Life is a battlefield. The man who told me about feeling like a soldier is a high achiever, a bad loser and had difficult childhood. He is also pessimistic and dreams of being a hero.

2. Life is a river we must cross. The young girl who told me this seems to be patient, cooperative and hopeful. She dreams of traveling.

3. Life is a gift for us to enjoy. The middle aged guy who reported this is humble, materialistic, ambitious but unfocused, self-centered, spiritual (on a good day) but not religious and well meaning. He comes from a poor childhood and dreams of satisfaction.

4. Life is a cross to bear. This family member is depressed, unhealthy, compassionate, lonely, defeatist and dreams of being forgiven.

5. Life is a mystery to solve. This teenage boy is intuitive, nature loving, esthetic and curious. He dreams of becoming an inventor.

6. Life is a terror to survive. The neighbor who said this to me is traumatized, brilliant, a world traveler, adversarial, apocalyptic, the survivor of an abused childhood who dreams of being safe.

7. Life is a legacy to forge. My colleague is persistent, optimistic, highly creative, history-loving, sober-minded, companionable, patient and dreams of reaching her potential. She reminds me of the young Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady.

8. Life is an artwork to create. This student is high-minded, mystical, deeply inquisitive, pattern-seeking, chronically rootless, goal oriented and dreams of being free.

9. Life is a banquet for pigging out. This 20-something male acquaintance is high-living, nihilistic, comical, shallow in thought and deed, professionally lost, spiritually bankrupt and comes from a pampered childhood. He dreams of being able to love someone.

10. Life is house to be built. This older lady in my neighborhood is unpretentious, unimaginative, accepting, conventional, empathic, religious, civically active, faithful in love and friendship and appears to have self-esteem issues. She dreams, she says, of belonging.

11. Life is a problem to mull over. This teacher is intelligent, curious, optimistic, agnostic but open-minded, pro-active yet skeptical, cerebral and dauntless. She was taught to be a success as a girl and dreams of solo victory.

12. Life is a mountain that must be climbed. This colleague is grandiose, religious, pessimistic, visually gifted, athletic, long-suffering and self-doubting. She comes from a conventional background, had an isolated childhood, dreams of being left alone.

13. Life a journey to follow. This middle-aged seeker is non-committal, resists attachment, agnostic but cynical, hope-resistant, fearful, physically active and intellectually vague. He had a neglected childhood and dreams of coming home if he can find out where that is.

14. Life is a sin to redeem. This female colleague is judgmental, self-hating, conservative, narcissistic, politically rabid, angry and hard to count on. She calls herself "anhedonic" and dreams of being in heaven.

15. Life is a cause to serve. This 50-something male friend is generous, self-questioning, community-minded, unambitious, spiritually strong and had what he calls a "solid upbringing" with doting parents and dreams of being able to help.

We all use different metaphors, of course -- they may shift back and forth in a single day. But we also have our core images, the metaphors that really stick, sometimes long after their due date expires. It's fascinating to learn about yours. But then again, I see life as a classroom.

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Speak, Penis: Erecting the American Male

2012-01-20T10:47:57-05:00

For the past few months, I've been talking to men about their penises. White men, black men, gay men, old men, youngsters, transgender men, singletons, and fathers. I spoke to a bus driver, a monk, a jock, a hooker, a nursing home resident and a web designer. I've heard stories about impotence, triumph, betrayal, revenge, cock-blocking, and botched circumcision. There were tales of embarrassment, sagas of doubt, and chronicles of nagging performance pressure: the number one complaint of men the world over in spite of Cialis and marital aids.

My reason for assembling these penis stories is personal and professional. On the personal front, I have always been fascinated by how men identify with our equipment, and how disproportionately critical this penis-attachment can be in a man's life. The professional purpose of this survey has been to create (with actor-playwright, James Lecesne) a theatrical piece for V-Men, the male arm of V-Day, Eve Ensler's organization for ending violence against women and girls. We thought it would be enlightening to record the travails of the male genitalia, the love-hate relationship of men and their bipolar members. We hoped to answer a quiver of pointed questions. What does our manhood have to do with Manhood? How do men really feel about their bodies? Were hung men likely to have more courage, confidence, risk-taking nerve? Did the mini-dicked suffer the torments of hell with Napoleonic bitterness, as well as the sheer embarrassment of lovers wondering, Where's the beef? Or was penile comparison oversung as a socio-psychological factor? We wanted to hear how men treated their organs. Was the penis a pet, a toy, or a weapon, an adversary or a comrade in arms? Was erectile dysfunction the end of the world or, in fact, a door to the pace di sensi -- the peace of the senses rumored to be the gateway to inner peace for celibates?

Here are some of the things we've heard:

"It's hard for me to think about my penis cause most of the time I'm thinking with it."

"Men who don't turn into rapists are like alcoholics who figure out how not to drink."

"When it comes to the pecker, less is not more. Whoever said, 'It ain't the meat, it's the motion" was lying or on excellent drugs."

"I only feel as big as my penis. My cock is a metaphor for my psyche. My self-worth comes from being virile. If I lost my bone, I would open a vein."

"Penis envy is a more a male problem than a female one. Most women don't want to have dicks. They just want dicks to have a brain."

"I would never circumcise my son. It's genital mutilation. We lose 60% of our sexual sensitivity when the foreskin is cut off. For what? I lost mine but I will never do that my child."

"My wife laughs when I lose my erection. It is the only time that I could become physically violent toward her. Her vagina has pathos. My prick is just comedy."

"The Germans says, When the penis gets hard, the brain goes soft. That is my experience."

"My faithful servant. My trusty steed. I wouldn't go anywhere without him."

"As a men's studies professor, half of my career has been spent defending this half-foot of gristle from the ignominy of feminist scorn, defending the notion of the good male, rescuing our image from DSK, Herman Cain, and the rest of the scoundrels in the news.

"Being well-endowed definitely cuts both ways. I never know if chicks like me for myself or my attributes. In high school, I was very popular. They called me Kong.

"Prostate cancer changed my life. I make love in a totally different way. Now, instead of shooting off I shoot IN. It's weird but it still feels good."

The biggest revelation is how eager men are to talk about their private parts and unzip their own ambivalence. Being male, all agreed, is a mixed blessing with serious down sides and hidden costs, nearly-unmeetable expectations, pressures to be (and stay) on top, and perform -- always, always perform -- at the drop of a hint or a frilly panty. Listen to what happened to one Hispanic newlywed on his wedding night:

"My wife was a virgin when we got married. I did not know this till our wedding night. Even though we agreed not to mess around before the honeymoon, I always assumed she had some experience. It turns out that I was wrong.

"So we get into bed and start messing around. When she sees my dick, she starts cracking up. She tells me it's crooked. I tell her it's not crooked, it's curved, and there's nothing abnormal about a curved penis. Doctors call it Bent Nail Syndrome. My wife refuses to touch it. She tells me I have to get it fixed.

"We end up fighting the night of our wedding. She calls my penis damaged goods. I tell her I was born this way and no woman I've dated has ever complained. I ended up sleeping on the couch. She wanted to see a therapist -- a woman, of course -- who asked me why I had kept such an important secret from my fiancée. I told her I didn't think it mattered. Did I ask to inspect her privates before we said 'I do'? I told the shrink that it made me wonder if my wife really loved me at all.

"The shrink called that a manipulative question. She told my wife she would have to "Make do." How do you think that made me feel? Finally, she agreed to have sex with me but she wouldn't go near it otherwise. I was so pissed off that I had an affair. Now, I'm cheating on her and hating myself, but I also feel kind of ... justified. If she hadn't made me feel like a freak, I wouldn't be seeing another woman. I had to keep my self-respect. You probably think I'm a total jerk."

I did not think that he was a jerk. I thought that he was a confused soul like so many of the men we've talked to, struggling to feel happy in their own skins. I thought of Achilles and his heel, and how hard it is to feel compassion for men in a patriarchal world. Mostly, though, I thought about sex and how easy it is to forget that we're human while focusing on our animal parts. That's what we're talking to men about next. Stay tuned.

The Atheist Menace: Worse Than Rapists, a New Study Shows

2011-12-27T10:14:51-05:00

At a moment when religious zealotry poses a greater threat to Western civilization than planetary warming and Wall Street combined, it's logical to ask ourselves: Why are we so scared of atheists? Why are we so phobically threatened by people who don't believe in God when faith itself is causing the terror hanging over our heads like a toxic menace?

A revealing new study at the University of British Columbia and the University of Oregon provides some startling clues. Attempting to understand why people need religion, psychologists asked 350 American adults and 420 Canadian to answer a simple question: If a fictional driver damaged a parked car and left the scene, then found a wallet and took the money, was the driver more likely to be a teacher, an atheist teacher or a rapist teacher?

Weirdly enough, participants in the study (who were from religious and nonreligious backgrounds) most often chose the atheist teacher. Indeed, atheists are among society's most distrusted groups, "comparable even to rapists in certain circumstances," in participants' minds.

"It's pretty remarkable," said Azim Shariff, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the study, which appears in the current issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. "People find atheists very suspect." Why? " "They don't fear God so we should distrust them. They do not have the same moral obligations as others. This is a common refrain against atheists. People fear them as a group," he explained.

This makes no sense to a rational person but does tell us a great deal about why religion exists at all. In order to evolve as a moral species capable of interacting with individuals outside our immediate kin group, early man faced a life-or-death challenge: how to open our doors to strangers; how to mingle with those-not-our-own. The most immediate solution to our instinctive, us-against-them distrust, was the creation of religious systems (some 40,000 of which have existed in recorded history). Uniting individuals under the Big Tent of Faith served to bridge the us-vs.-them divide and created a new kind of family: one joined by belief in a common deity (or deities). As new-minted siblings in these extended religious families, taught to obey the rules of our fathers' houses, we learned to trust one another by fearing the wrath of the same gods, toeing the same sectarian lines, performing the same rituals, marrying by the same traditions, and watching each other's ps and qs according to a particular gospel. By aligning ourselves with this Family of God, we assumed a common identity with something larger than ourselves -- a system of moral recompense and heaven/hell rules to be obeyed. Jonathan Haidt, the moral psychologist, refers to this process of religious connection as "turning off the 'I' switch and turning on the 'We.'"

Atheists challenge this family system. We stand outside the big tent, wondering why the faithful have so little faith in the inherent goodness of human beings. Why are these godly types such disbelievers in our species' natural gifts for compassion, altruism, mercy, generosity, cooperation, elevation, harmony and love? How profound their pessimism must be to imagine that without God-fear, left to our natural devices, we are wanton, untrustworthy, savage beasts without the capacity for self-control, comparable to rapists! Yet this is how deeply we are brainwashed into imagining that without faith, we have no integrity; that without the terror of divine punishment, we cannot be trusted.

If believers took a moment to consider this argument's absurdity, they might also consider that fear fosters nothing but more fear, and that we really don't need God to be good despite centuries of churchly propaganda dedicated to pitting man against his own character. We don't need cosmic fear to be good neighbors either, any more than a well-adjusted horses need a bullwhip hanging over their heads to graze well with others. Though conflict persists between tribes and peoples, faith-competition will never bring peace (as the Inquisition proved long before today's islamofascist challenge). Only by getting faith out of the picture, and learning to our human inclination tolerance, cooperation and (godless) genius, will religious terror come to an end by returning self-faith to human ife.

Atheists aren't scary. What's scary is religiously induced self-loathing that teaches us to view ourselves as fallen, unredeemed creatures in need of God to love one another. What frightens me is the shameless trashing of human nature that religion fosters to keep itself in the salvation business. As Azim Shariff says, "If you manage to offer credible counteroffers of these stereotypes (of atheists), this can do a lot to undermine people's existing prejudice. If you realize there are all these atheists you've been interacting with all your life and they haven't raped your children, that is going to do a lot do dispel these stereotypes."

We, the faithless, can only hope.

Testosterone Kings: Herman Cain, DSK, and the Dirty Dawg Defense

2011-11-30T15:17:32-05:00

If Michele Bachmann were accused of fondling a male employee, she'd be off the GOP hopefuls list before you could say perimenopause.

How is it, then, that married studs like Herman Cain, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Silvio Berlusconi, and Bill Clinton -- to name a few -- get away with their lechery for as long as they do without being marched off the podium?

The answer is: testosterone. Our society operates on the unspoken principle that biology is destiny. We tell ourselves that men just can't help it. We convince ourselves that the dominant male hormone is to be blamed -- not men themselves -- for abusive or stupid behavior. This is like saying it's okay for women to kick in the windows at Saks because their hormonal selves crave some new shoes.

It's true that men are programmed for promiscuity. It is a fact that nature has created us to be, as zoologist E.O. Wilson puts it, "moderately polygynous" (meaning we like more than one sex partner) and that, from a purely reproductive standpoint, "it pays males to be aggressive, hasty, fickle, and undiscriminating... [and] for females to be coy, to hold back until they can identify the males with the best genes... " in Wilson's words. 1 But the notion that biology excuses villainy -- including sexual harassment, betrayal, or lying through our married teeth -- is ridiculous and insulting to both men and women.

The trouble is that testosterone is king in our culture. We're trained to worship its virile endowments -- aggression, stamina, strength, bravado, clarity of mind and purpose -- while excusing its pathological side effects of promiscuity, violence, hyper-competitiveness, and female subjugation. When this contradiction is slapped in our face -- as when Ginger White confessed this week to a 13-year affair with Herman Cain, who arrogantly denies the charge -- many in the public domain react with less contempt than we would if Cain were accused of lying about anything other than sex -- a criminal history, say, or not really being born in this country.

This has given rise to what I call the Dirty Dawg Defense. Like the insanity defense, the D.D.D. operates on the principle that physiology exempts us from guilt. While the Dirty Dawg Defense is not on the books (yet), it wields great credibility in the court of public opinion. "Oh, that Herman Cain," many apparently think, "he can't really help it if he's such a stud. What's a hot-blooded pizza magnate to do? Cut the pepperoni?" While going through the motions of contempt and blame, we exonerate liars like Herman Cain by allowing him to remain in the running for an office that ought to stand for the truth. Our cultural crush on testosterone as both sexual hormone and metaphor (for strength and power) blinds us to sexism and double standards. It fosters the unspoken belief that what men do with their bodies is their business. It even suggests that abuses to boy children (testosterone carriers) are less noxious than offenses against girls, as Daniel Mendelsohn pointed out in a recent New York Times editorial, suggesting that if Jerry Sandusky had been sodomizing a girl in that Penn State locker room, the authorities would have been called in sooner. According to this magical thinking, testosterone makes boys less vulnerable -- more in control -- than their female counterparts. Under its sexual influence, what's more, the minors might even be enjoying it.

As a man, I'm appalled by the Dirty Dawg Defense and the notion that we can't control our own actions. I'm offended by the argument that we're helpless puppets in thrall to a renegade hormone. Herman Cain needs to fess up to his lies (as Bill Clinton and others have been forced to) or be escorted out of the public arena with his tail between his legs. Perennial puberty is no excuse for violating the public trust.

1. Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature, Harvard University Press, 1978, p. 125.