Chapter 21

From the Garden to the Grail

By criticizing patriarchy or puerarchy, I do not want to deny spirituality, but only to show that it has been used in ways which hinder giftgiving. One of the reasons for our misunderstanding of giftgiving is that we see God as the greatest giver, and he is male. Thus, we mix giftgiving characteristics with the characteristics of masculation.

If we understood God, the giver, as female, perhaps we could come to consciousness of the paradigm more easily. Perhaps s/he is really pure altruism, a 'you-first' spirit, and that is why s/he is invisible. S/he creates things and loves them in a 'you-first' way and then goes on creating and loving others. If we cannot love each other, we block her movement. Perhaps nature spirits, fairies, and angels are only slightly less 'you-first' parts of the goddess.

Putting giving into the province of the male model hides the fact that women have already been doing it everywhere, all the time. Even the sacrifice of Christ's life distracts our attention from the amount of sacrifice that has been done everywhere by women for their children, husbands and others. Our gratitude is turned towards a male giver as the source, disguising the mother model.

I believe the most harmful aspect of Christianity is the glorification of sacrifice because it does not address the situations which make sacrifice necessary. The system which creates scarcity, war, environmental and human degradation must change, and this need should not be upstaged by the sacrifices of those who are making the best of the terrible situation. We must have the socio-political courage not to sacrifice ourselves, but to recognize the causes of the problems and unite with each other to change them, giving that general gift to all. If we can change the paradigm, which includes changing the reward system and the ego structure of exchange, we will be able to give without self-depletion. During

the transition from one paradigm to the other, we have to create alternative organizations, use our energy, our imagination and our resources. We must decide whether to let ourselves be depleted or destroyed in the process, or to give up, or whether to try to maintain ourselves as models of givers who do not sacrifice.

In a situation of scarcity, it is all too easy to give to one's own depletion because giving is not generalized and, indeed, others may not give to the isolated giver. Women throughout history have been givers, because children's needs require itbut, trapped by the exchange paradigm, we are often crucified, made to give our lives in order to keep satisfying needs, because the situations we are in are so hostile that they murder us. Women are right, giving is the Way. But we have to generalize giving and change the context because, by doing it individually, we are destroyed.

Masculation and exchange put themselves forward, self-validate and call forth the gifts of others. Thus, those who are practicing giftgiving cannot see what they themselves are doing or give it dignity as the norm. They have accepted the ego-oriented values of others; so, paradoxically, they may not have the courage of their own other-oriented values and actions. Women may even believe that giving is wrong, though usually they do it anyway. They are afraid of the paradigm they are practicing and confuse the threat of self-sacrifice due to scarcity (a real danger coming from the social context) with the idea that giving creates the scarcity. Sacrifice for something may be a way of saving it from destruction, giving value to it, or a way of recognizing or naming it though 'paying for it.' On the other hand, sacrifice is often a product of domination by force.

Masculated Giving

The only thing we did wrong in the beginning was to shift from the gift to the exchange paradigm. Perhaps this is what the story of the Garden of Eden was all about. In the gift paradigm, no repayment is necessary. Only when we shift to the exchange

paradigm do we find the necessity to repay. By treating the eating of the apple as a sin of disobedience, which required repayment, the Bible shows humans effectively entering into the exchange paradigm with God, casting Him into the role of punisher, providing 'just' reprisal. A God who was for giving, functioning according to the gift paradigm, would not have required repayment. S/he would have taught the children giftgiving by modeling it.

Perhaps Christ's self-sacrifice was an attempt to model giving and forgiving, but the Goddess (mother) model was canceled by the male model of the Father and the Son. (All those images of Madonna and Child could have shown to us that boys needed to follow their nurturing mothers. Instead, the other-orientation of the mother never became self-validating. We never took the logical step up. The focus was always on her 'other.') Thus the only appropriate place for giving seemed to be in motherhood to a male child. Moreover, women's values were not presented as such for social solutions, but were altered and translated through a male figure.

If Christ was a male model of giftgiving, the exchange paradigm was still the frame for interpretation, so he was seen as 'paying for' humanity's sins. His death 'evened the score,' but that could not get humanity out of the exchange paradigm. Even if he was paying in advance also, for the sins people were going to commit, exchange was still the issue. The exchange archetype underlies everything we do, and influences our consciousnesses to a great degree. Even when our spiritual intuition and our hearts draw us towards altruism, these patterns pull us and our interpretations of religion back to the masculated model. In fact, as we have been saying, our consciousness and the re-ality we live in are formed according to the values of masculation. Giftgiving--the female model--comes to consciousness filtered through masculation and exchange. Now feminism and the worldwide women's movement have allowed us to detach the mother from her 'other' and to see women as the bearers of the other-tending values of the species.

Communicating with the Gods

Humans have always tried to establish co-munication with the gods, giving them innumerable 'gifts' from animal sacrifice to human sacrifice, from novenas to tithes. The 'gift' of Christ's life to God can also be interpreted as an act of co-munication--the Word. Because we have not recognized the gift paradigm and its part in co-munication, we may see our attempt at interaction as a moment in the logic of exchange. We bribe the divinity: "I will give you this, if you give me that."

Perhaps because of our distress over masculation, or because of the ideology of exchange, or even because of a defect of imagination, we consider major sacrifices to be the kinds of gifts which would satisfy the needs of the gods. Maybe our difficulty in communicating is that those kinds of gifts distress the Divinity as much as they do ourselves. The scream of the sacrificial animal whose throat is being cut horrifies Her/Him--or Hum. We need to devise some other, kinder and easier gifts, such as words are for us, like incense, music, flowers and food. Our cruelty to each other makes a toxic atmosphere, where the spirit cannot flow freely from one person to the other.

Maybe our masculated attitudes simply do not allow for large enough collective units to form as a co-municating subject, who can hear and be heard by Hum. If we could really shift onto the gift paradigm, and disentangle the logic of communication from the logic of exchange, perhaps we could find again the garden of Eden. This could be God's or the Goddess's kingdom come. I don't think it will be a kingdom though, or even a democracy, but some new kind of government.

From Complex to Concept

In our Christmas celebrations, we put our joy at babies' being born, our desire for the best humans can be, our salvation, the solution to our problems. We see the solution to our problems in the child. In fact, this is one outcome of the gift paradigm/

exchange paradigm struggle. The woman gives the child. The man gives the name, the inheritance. The child takes the place of the parents. The future is exchanged for the present, or takes its place, and the conflict is handed down, as the 'gift' from generation to generation. This heritage is a strange kind of gift, involving a contorted division of labor, like that between salaried husbands and unsalaried wives.

We exchange in the present in order to give to others in the future. In the future, will the others exchange or give? Now, at the end of the 20th century, we are taking both the present and the future into exchange. We are making the future a present to ourselves, and we are not handing down a good earth. We are creating scarcity, making the gift economy impossible for our children and future generations. We are validating the system, giving a meta judgment in favor of exchange, so the very possibility of giftgiving is destroyed.¹

The mother has been giving the gift of her children to her husband. The ancient right of primogeniture was one form taken by masculation in families of wealth and power. In the logic of Christianity, if Christ was God's son and also a man, and if men were brothers, Christ's one-many relation with them was like that of the first son to his brothers. The one-many relation of God the creator to mankind is equal to the one-many relation of Christ to mankind. In this, the relations are similar to one-many sample and one-many word.

Though the relation of artisan to products (which he made in his image) or father to children is a 'complex' of family resemblance, it can transform into a concept relation when the common quality of the items is discovered. The common quality of humans is expressed in their 'saved' souls, which are related to Christ as the one-many sample Christ is also equal to God in that relation, and is His incarnate word or re-presentative on earth. If

¹Perhaps the "Star Wars" space shield was actually shielding exchange from giftgiving, doing this at meta (above) in space. The metaphor of meta was carried that far, with billions of dollars spent on it, because we just don't understand what we are doing.

Figure 39. God, Christ and the Word.

Christ is God, and the son is the father, he stands on both sides of the equation between the word and the sample. The Christian mythos can also be read as an exploration of the concept formation process. (See Figures 39 and 40.)

Some of the other elements of exchange we have been discussing are also evident here. For example, Christ is also the general equivalent, and his life is the means of exchange--money--that pays for men's sins. If people are sinful, they are unequal to each other and cannot enter the concept relation with God as 'many-to-One' because they lack the common quality. Many stories in the Bible describe the sins of humans. The sin of Eve and Adam made them different from God and, revealing their nakedness, made them conscious of being different from each other. Cain's murder of his brother, Abel, also made Cain different from other men. The Old Testament is a chronicle of human differences. By paying for and for-giving humanity, Christ implied that humans were equal to each other again in value and able to enter into the concept relation with himself as a sample identical with his Father.

Adam and Eve's disobedience seemed to cause a debt towards God and the idea of debt is part of the exchange paradigm. The

Figure 40. The concept formation process, Old and New Testament.

debt made people feel they should give to God (creating co-munication), which was gift-like motivation, but which was actually payment for a wrong. Maybe it seemed that by paying for the sin, there would be no more debt, and then the gift paradigm would return. However, it was not a sin humans committed, or a debt they incurred, or an act of not-giving they indulged in (not-giving obedience to God). It was just taking on the idea of paying back, exchange, that made humans appear to have to pay back. Unfortunately, as subsequent history demonstrated, Christ's 'payment' did not disqualify the exchange paradigm, even if he was 'for-giving.'

Paying for humanity's sins was an exchange, even though the sacrifice of Christ's life was perhaps an attempt to show the giving model in a situation of scarcity of justice and real lack of kindness. Actually, many women sacrifice in similar situations all the time, not to pay for anything, but to satisfy the needs of those in their care.

Perhaps being born from a Virgin shows Christ as the child of the gift paradigm, outside of genitalized sexuality, as well as beyond the male ego.² Proposing giftgiving as coming from a male model is dangerous, however. Churches organized to honor Christ's teachings set up misogynist, masculated religious hierarchies, which supported political and economic hierarchies, invaded other territories and slaughtered people with other beliefs in order to teach them 'altruism.'

To change paradigms, we must identify the gift paradigm with women generally, follow their leadership, and not repeat the masculated one-many structures which self-propagate, spawn hierarchies, and promote competition and domination. Indeed the over-valuing of the 'one' concept sample position is an important part of the problem. It is an element in the process of masculation, which must be dismantled in order to return to the gift paradigm as the norm. Unfortunately, both the

²In fact, the relation between God, Mary and Joseph, and Jesus is reminiscent of the societies in which the mother's brother (a person who does not have sexual relations with the mother) takes over some paternal roles for the boy.

logic and the organizational aspects of Christianity have merged the image of a giftgiving male god with the 'one' position and with the masculated characteristics of over-taking and domination.

Giftgiving on the social scale is being continually misread, while the gift mode on the individual internal scale is unseen. In fact, internal giftgiving does not just give a static picture, as we mentioned in regard to the homunculus. Internal giftgiving is often paralyzed and rendered unconscious, however, by the lack of validated models of giftgiving on the external. Perhaps the models of Christ's sacrifice and the sacrifice of religious saints do provide a context which, at least partly, validates giftgiving for the individual. However, by making giftgiving sacrificial and the gift paradigm saintly, instead of recognizing its existence in what women and many men are already doing in daily life, we push it out of everyone's reach.

The Authoritarian Father

Patriarchal religion provides a number of false images of the male giftgiver. The Father, who supposedly would not abuse his children, did actually send them out of the Garden of Eden for eating an apple, and therefore, like human fathers, requires our blindness and denial towards his injustice. As a model of the giftgiver, internally and externally, Godliness leaves room for many transgressions, especially along the lines of authoritarianism. How many children have been abused in the name of the will of God, what violence performed upon them in the name of sanctity of their father and the necessity of filial piety? It is really wrong to call the God of these fathers 'good,' because compassion seems to be secondary to what they think of as right action--action which reinforces their masculated egos. Having projected their values onto an all-powerful Patriarch, men use him to justify their reinforcement of their egos, judging authoritarian ways as good.

When we question the presence of evil and suffering in the world, we are told it is beyond our knowledge. Actually, the authoritarian image of God validates abusive patterns in men, and does not validate women's nurturing and compassion--because it says that the male God, who is also authoritarian, is all good, and does not allow for a female image of God at all. This is part of the cause of the suffering. Thinking that we cannot understand it just feeds the denial of the abuse. We have a taboo on the thought that our concept of God might be causing masculated men to continue to create that suffering.

Similarly, mothers often refuse to see the abuse their husbands are perpetrating on their children, and have faith in his good side, and in 'God's unfathomable will.' This lets them allow the abuse and, in so doing, become party to it themselves as well. The image of the giftgiver is thus either assimilated into the image of the authoritarian masculated ego, or is feminine and powerless, nurturing the male, at best interceding with him like the Virgin Mary, humbly pleading the case of her child to the male Authority.

Meanwhile, the boy she is raising is really him, the male authority in miniature. So, our Mother within is transformed into little other-oriented initiatives within or into ineffective twinges of conscience tugging at the coat tails of our masculated will to power. We discount her intercession in favor of others as unrealistic compassion, quivers of a bleeding heart. If she succeeds in awakening some moment of other-orientation in us, credit is given to the Good Father, the 'beneficent' masculated ego. Perhaps we could cancel this illusory father image and have Mary as our model. We would have to change our image of her, redirecting her other-orientation away from obedience and intercession and towards the empowered nurturing of humanity and the planet--especially of women and children. Recently, in fact, the women's spirituality movement has restored to us many female images of the Divine, as giftgiving goddesses who are powerful as well.

The Holy Grail and Alchemy

The Holy Grail is the free source of abundance. The Grail, the cup, is symbolically also the cornucopia or womb. Perhaps the spiritual aspect to this story about the search by legendary heroes for the chalice of the Last Supper tells us again that the problem is not biological but social. The Grail is not a material thing but a logic, a way of organizing our economic behavior. The Grail is the gift paradigm. It is not a physical object--not womb, vagina, breast or penis, not horn nor sword, chalice nor blade--but a refusal to mis-align the microcosm and the macrocosm, a refusal to create the shift into the artificial structure of exchange and its ego, where abundance and nurturing should be. The Holy Grail is the gift that gives, the gift of the gift paradigm which we all receive from our mothers--we only have to overcome our childhood complexes and our masculated misunderstandings of language and life in order to be able to receive it at last.

This social interpretation of the Holy Grail can be supported by interpreting the practice of alchemy in Marxist terms. Any commodity could become the socially-chosen general equivalent, money, though gold is the one that actually did. Alchemy was really posing a question about a social choice. Transforming base metals into gold is the physical projection of the problem, "How does something become money?" This question harks back to the question, "How does a baby become male?" or, "How does a body part become a penis, the mark of the category 'male?'" or the even more hidden question, "How does a body part become a vagina, womb or breast, the producers of life and nurture?" and, "How might the womb or the breasts become the 'sample?'"

Both alchemy and the story of the Holy Grail show aspects of the social problem of masculation interpreted on a material plane. We have seen how the position of sample is socially attributed and is not a quality belonging to the material objects themselves. The special value of gold does not come from the metal itself; rather it is a social quality, coming from the use of gold as the general equivalent--the value sample--in exchange.

We could socially assign that role to specially designed pieces of lead, just as we have with printed paper. The relative scarcity of gold made it a functional means of exchange. That relative scarcity is also made possible by the special printing of paper money in limited quantities. We could just as easily print pieces of lead, though they would be harder to carry in our pockets. Ironically, if the alchemists had succeeded in transforming lead into gold, there might have been so much of it that gold could no longer have served as the general equivalent, and the purpose of the transformation would have been lost.

The transformation of base metals into gold has actually happened. The only element that has not entered into the process is the physical material identity of lead, and of gold. In the transformation, the physical identity of the items under transformation was actually irrelevant. What was essential was the similarity of items being used as money material to each other (as paper bills, coins, etc.) and their production in a limited quantity. This permitted their social use as general equivalent. The lead that was relevant, finally, was the printer's lead, used for printing paper money. The choice of gold or printed paper as general equivalent is due to many social and historical factors. The fact that we choose any object as a sample of economic value is due to masculation and its psycho-economic expression in exchange.

The search for the Holy Grail demonstrates a similar problem: it is a search for change at the wrong level. The physical object, the grail, is not the source of all abundance. Neither is the womb, as the symbolic equivalent of the cup. While the womb does bring up the idea of the mother, and the sought-for Grail the idea of a privileged object, the solution to the puzzle does not lie in finding that object or contemplating the womb, or in giving men a physical womb or castrating them in order to do so (or giving them a 'vagina' by wounding them). Nor is the answer the search itself.

Rather, the answer lies in changing planes from the physical, and metaphysical, to the social and psychological. By

understanding and dismantling the social process of masculation, we can restore the mothering model for all, providing a nurturing economy (a social cornucopia), which will abundantly satisfy all needs. A nurturing economy would not require any changes in male or female physical bodies--no castration or adding on of organs where they originally were not. Only a change in our interpretations of these differences would be necessary, together with the dismantling of their psychological, economic and social projections. We have been forced to search for the source of all good because we were not asking the (right) question--the right question was not, "What ails the knight?" though it did bring up the issue of castration in its connection with the search for giftgiving. (In fact, that question is a lot like our greeting, "How are you?" which can potentially initiate a co-municative interaction.)

The question they and we should have been asking is something like, "How can we provide abundance for all?" to which the reply, then and now, would have been symbolically the Grail, "Follow the life-giving and nurturing mother model."³ The final question of Percival: "Whom does the grail serve?" is similar to the question, "Who is it for?" which is at the basis of the split between giftgiving and exchange. Is it for the other or for the ego, for the present or future Fisher King or for God? Or shall we apply to the Grail Marx's answer to the question of language and see its infinite creativity in the other-tending logic of human socialization, the logic that has the extra step: "For others, and therefore, really for me as well?"

In a recent book on the Holy Grail, Graham Phillips⁴ connects the medieval French Romance, La Folie Perceval with the Tarot and especially with the 'Popess' card (the figure of a woman in the papal one-many position). Phillips also makes a tentative identification of the Grail with the secret Gnostic Gospel of Thomas Didymus, a complete copy of which was

³The Grail (or cup of abundance) is the symbolic opposite of the 'cap' of cap-italism.

⁴ Dr. Graham Phillips, The Search for the Holy Grail, Arrow Books, Random House, London, 1996. pp.170-171. Dr. Graham Phillips also claims to have found the actual material artifact which was the Holy Grail.

purportedly discovered in Egypt in 1945. A section of the text he cites seems related to the mother model and liberation from masculation:

"Jesus saw children who were being suckled. He said to his disciples, "These children who are being suckled are like those who enter the Kingdom." They said to him, "Shall we then, being children, enter the Kingdom?" Jesus said to them, "When you make the two as one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female not be female, when you make eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and an image in the place of an image, then shall you enter the Kingdom."

Several elements of this passage recall the restoration of the nurturing mother model, especially the unmasculated unity of male and female, and the breast model. The unity of opposites, and the return to substitution of things for things, are perhaps a transposition of material co-munication.

Male Nurturing

Transubstantiation through definition or naming, "This is my body. This is my blood," really proves the point of alchemy. God or Christ as the sample for the concept of mankind transforms the bread and wine into the sample (himself). As the sample nurturing man, he makes himself into food and drink.⁵ Transubstantiation demonstrates the power of definition, as masculation does. The effect of naming is not physical, as it would be in a miracle (as in changing water into wine), but social. The Holy Grail, the mother symbol, is the locus for making a nurturing male, by reinterpreting and reforming the

⁵The Christian idea was not new. For example, in the tradition of the great goddess, the son-god Dionysus in his many forms was also ritually eaten. "As a Vegetation God he was ritually sacrificed, usually on a tree (prototype of the later crucifix). His flesh was eaten as bread, his blood drunk as wine..." from Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth. San Francisco, Harper and Row. 1987, p. 121.

social mechanism of naming, especially the naming of gender. Sub-stance is only under-standing.

Perhaps, in the sacrament of the church, more attention is given to the sample character in the transubstantiation process than to the material bread and wine character. From the material bread and wine, we only have to pass to the sample character of God, not to another physical material. And God is the "human form divine," a social idea, following the process of other social ideas, whether s/he exists as such or not.

'Transubstantiation' is a lot like exchange or masculation. It is a change in the status of something, which takes place by relating it to a new word as its name. The 'sample of samples' names (and points out) something as itself, and the priest repeats this process. If the male God is the general equivalent One, his making himself into food transforms both this matter into the sample and makes the male sample nurturing. Communion is, after all, only a taste, a sample. At the same time that bread and wine change into body and blood, the model shifts from male to female, from over-taking to nurturing--and this is really the taste of a better world, though it is hidden within the tabernacle of author-itarian patriarchal religion.

The symbolic form of the Grail coincides with its contents, transposing real into symbolic sacrifice, giving a gift that can easily be given (bread and wine) instead of a gift that cannot (body and blood). Male priests then potentially have something to give, by their words becoming more similar to nurturing women, modeling free giving. By their words, "This is my body, this is my blood," in the ritual, they presumably change the substance of the things, bread and wine. By changing our gender words, we could change the substance (under-standing) of males into nurturers. Communion points toward the ungendered hum-an, hidden within the model of the nurturing male.

What we need now is the restoration of the model of the nurturing female. Either model or both must serve to change the masculated system to which sacrifice is functional. With that

change, we will create a system by which we will be able to share not symbolic but real food locally and globally, thereby transforming reality. We will understand words as the power of the collective to transform our understanding, and 'ones' as elements of our conceptual processes, liberating the spirit from patriarchy.

Human Sacrifice

At present, we are wasting wealth on things which do not satisfy our needs in order to stimulate the economy, and our gifts of value are therefore given not to each other but to the economy itself. Wasting and destroying products creates scarcity. High prices ensue because goods do not accumulate and thus do not create the abundance which would make the whole system unnecessary. Those who participate as sellers in the cycle of creating false artificial needs and waste receive greater profits in return for their efforts. Not only do they receive the gifts of the surplus value of the producers at home and abroad (and the issue of exchange-rate differential makes the whole economy of one country give to the whole economy and to the individual economic agents of another country), but they receive the gifts of the shadow of all the needs that remain unsatisfied because abundance has not been allowed to accrue.

'Trickle down' cannot happen because the cup which might have been the Grail is never allowed to fill up or to run over. The gifts run out as waste through a crack in the bottom. Meanwhile, the unsatisfied needs of millions of people, including the forty thousand children who die daily worldwide from hunger and preventable disease, are human sacrifices giving value to the 'needs' of the free market. The ritual human sacrifices that maintained the pyramidal society of the ancient Maya involved the slaughter of only a chosen few in view of all. Perhaps the Maya were, after all, both more compassionate and more conscious than we are.

We sacrifice millions of human lives to create the scarcity necessary for our system to function, to maintain the social pyramids, hierarchies, upward chains of gifts, and downward chains of masculated definitions and commands. But these sacrifices for many of us occur 'elsewhere.' The gifts which are given to us are invisible and, if they are seen at all, their interconnection with our economy is not acknowledged. Rebellions 'elsewhere' are quelled by the use of abundant armaments, the manufacture of which diverts energy and money into the means of destruction, and brings more profits to their producers and sellers, while depleting the store of the means of nurturing still further.

In the 'First World,' if we see the pictures of the starving and the maimed in other countries (or across the tracks), we attribute their condition to local calamities of nature or 'human nature.' However, because in an alternative system, in abundance, their situation would have been otherwise, their deaths, which are the consequence of artificially created scarcity and their excessive gifts to us, give value to our system by giving-way. Our own well-being seems to come from localized good fortune or 'deserving,' and we deny any transfer of wealth and value to us from other countries and classes.

The Mayan civilization ended; rituals of human sacrifice were no longer performed. Much speculation has been generated about the cause of its apparently abrupt end. Drought, disease, conquest have been suggested. I prefer to believe that someone finally changed her under-standing and said the sacred words, "This isn't working. Let's stop now." Then the whole group, in a great act of civilization, decided to go back to the countryside, to live peacefully with their loved ones, to give up attributing value to the pyramid by sacrificing and giving goods and obedience pyramidically. We can do the same.

The Maya originally sacrificed the 'one' as a gift in material co-munication with the gods, who would presumably give gifts of abundance in return. Blood was also let from the tongue (the

word) and the penis (the 'mark' of the one position) of the king. As happened in many other cultures, the Maya sacrificed the privileged 'one' as the representative of the group.

Now we are sacrificing the lives of millions, not to gods, not as representatives, but to give value to a masculated system, which we perceive as nurturing us, our natural and only source of livelihood. The cultural value that we give to profit and wealth is also given by the sacrifice of the children and mothers of the future, since their means of nurturing are now being destroyed through environmental degradation. Cancer, due to nuclear radiation and hazardous chemicals, attacks the symbol and source of women's giftgiving, the breasts. In the US there is an epidemic. One in every eight women is expected to get breast cancer.

Actually, almost half of the population will have some kind of cancer. The disease also attacks the 'mark' of masculation in cancer of the prostate, and even the sperm count, especially in white men, has been drastically reduced in recent years, presumably by environmental causes. Because we do not challenge the incomplete accounts of cancer given by the free market apologists, such as the American Cancer Society and the American Medical Association, the sacrifice of our breasts, our capacity to reproduce, and our lives gives value to the exchange economy. The cancer-causing nuclear radiation and toxic chemicals that free market industries release into the environment remain invisible and continue to accumulate and become permanently abundant, while life-giving resources become scarce.

Those who are trying to heal the diseases receive their livelihoods from the system and give it their gratitude and credence, making it unlikely that they would consider it as the cause of the cancers. Like women who over-value masculation, they give value to the very processes that are causing the problem, while at the same time trying to care for the individuals who have been injured by those processes. The system is not just a beneficent, though sometimes harsh,

husband, whom we must value and follow, doing damage control; it is a hazardous mechanism, which we must recognize, understand and dismantle step-by-step, so as not to destroy all those who live in and around it.

In so doing, we will change our consciousnesses and begin to attribute value, not to exchange, but to the needs of all and their satisfaction at all levels. We will stop sacrificing ourselves, our children and unknown billions of human beings to maintain our system of pyramids, and we will direct our gifts towards co-municating with everyone in abundance. We can begin to fashion the Holy Grail for society at large, the cornucopia of co-munication, by saying the holy words of tran-substantiation, changing our social under-standing: "Let's stop now."

Chapter 22

Cosmological Speculations

Life on earth is an attempt the earth is making to imitate or express the relation it has with the sun. Since the process of life and death has left a humus of the past for the future to grow from, the expression has changed over time. The earth, in all its fertility and variety, is a product of the interaction between itself and the sun--in which the sun gives a constant kind of energy, and the earth gives a great variety of energies. The earth has a history and an evolution; the sun does not, or at least does not seem to, since its evolution is much slower. What happens in the present on earth is based upon what is left from what happened in the past. The layers of earth in which plants grow, and on which people and animals walk, are by-products of past events, all of which included the earth's use of the energy of the sun. Closed systems, such as trees and blades of grass, lift themselves up towards the sun. Having incorporated the energy of light, they are themselves sun rays of the earth, or 'earth rays' reaching out toward space.

Animals and human beings who stand, on four legs or on two, or birds flying up to the clouds, all are earth energy moving outward. But beyond this is our capacity for locomotion toward a goal. Guided by our sight, we move from one place to another, much as the light moves from the sun to the earth. In this dimension, life imitates its origin. Similarly, the sperm moves toward the egg; the egg is produced and moves toward the place in the womb where fertilization happens. But also, in the dimension of consciousness, a self-propelling intention arises. Like a sun ray leaping toward the earth, it moves toward its goal or object, perhaps combining with some other past elements of life to create an outcome, a sun ray incorporated in earth rays, earth energies, bearing fruit.

Our voices and the voices of animals, fish and birds issue from throats and arrive at the receptive ears, where they are incorporated and become understanding and behavior and

sensation. The sunlight of our attention illuminates our past, present and future experience, as well as experience of others brought to us through our senses, or through their stories, or reading and viewing. Our conscious attention shines upon our selves, helping us to plan and decide, clarify our intentions and put them into effect. There has been created socially, however, a sort of mirror game, where we are caught within our reflection, focusing our energy within ourselves.

This has combined with the use of accumulated energy of others, or of the group, to foster self-focusing energy. It is as if the sun ray were incorporated into the earth and came back to itself multiplied, as if the sun's rays were a closed system, too. There is a confusion between life--plants and animals--and energy. Moreover, in this form the self-focused attention of one may harm others, as it appropriates their energy to intensify its own. The sun does not do this. The mirror game creates an insatiable hunger for energy to focus and shine on the ego more strongly, attracting again and again the attention of others.

As human beings of many varieties and cultures, we have tried to understand what we were, what we were doing, or supposed to do and where we were living. Only recently has our astronomy given us any inkling of a correct idea about the universe, our planet and our star. It is not strange or surprising, then, to think that we might have made mistakes in our self-direction and the imagination of our goals.

Freud made much of the fact that in his epoch (it happens in our own, as well) children sometimes have a very distorted idea of what happens in sex--which influences their later thinking and emotions. It would seem logical that a false cosmology might have just as negative effects on our collective imaginings. The idea that the sun is the center of the universe may have influenced our thinking and our social behavior more than we know. And the idea that we are on a tiny speck of dust near a spark of light in the midst of billions of others is mind-boggling and also not healing for the imagination. Instead, the view of the earth from the moon allows us a perspective from which we can perhaps place ourselves

in a productive context. Earth is a very special place, a shining drop of life. We are part of it.

Not Copernicus but Ptolemy was right: the earth is the center of the universe, our universe, because we are human beings. Now that we are beginning to be able to see what earth is, maybe we can see better what we are and what we must do.

First, we must respect our planet, the life of which we are all a part. What is unusual here is not that the sun's rays shine in our direction, but that the earth is able to create something with them. We must see ourselves as incorporated light, incorporated life. We need to be like Goldilocks and find the cosmology of our own dimension, the view of the earth that is 'just right' for us. We need to understand our place on earth and within the solar system, so that we can clarify our relation to each other. One particular problem many of us are having right now is seeing ourselves as single persons, related as individuals to a human race of five and a half billion. It is remarkable how similar this problem is to the one of seeing our earth and sun related to billions of other suns and possible planets, as large numbers of new galaxies are discovered.

We might call this a theory of knowledge through projection. We project a pressing human question on some branch of knowledge, and then we find it there. This is not to say that the knowledge found this way is not true, but that the motivation for seeking it is a social or collective existential problem, rather than an individual purely scientific aseptic motive of 'curiosity,' or even a not-so-aseptic individual for-profit motive. And isn't the avidity for knowledge a sort of translation of the greed or avidity for goods and money that motivates our exchange-based society?

The theory of the survival-of-the-fittest evolution, which was developed at the same time as a survival-of-the-fittest capitalist economy, is another case in point. Perhaps, if we understood the mechanism of projection, we could see why we are doing it, what the personal or social difficulty that we are trying to heal is. Then we could find out how much of our view is caused by the

projection, what elements are seen or ignored because of it. More important, perhaps we could heal our human difficulties, and by doing so become also clearer perceivers of the universe. If we know we are projecting, we can take it into account and understand the distortions we ourselves are creating, and even use this knowledge to consciously plan for a better world, in which the problems that cause the projections do not occur.

Let us return to the view of the earth that sees her in relationship with the sun. In our atomistic and individualistic society, we have begun to degrade the importance of relationships, seeing the well-being of the individual person as the important goal of interaction and the social process, as well as the individual's own reason for being. Therapies for co-dependence and dysfunctional families have a wide public following and acceptance in the US and produce both money and social validation for their purveyors.

Our distress about relationships shows just how important they are to us. Love songs fill the radio waves, love stories fill the magazine racks, bookshelves and movie theaters. Relationships really are important to human beings; they are (part of) the way we become human. We just don't know how to have them. We don't have many good examples. It is my hypothesis here that the best model for a relationship that we have is the one between the earth and the sun. We can project our problems out there, then look at them more clearly in ourselves.

But why not look at it from a more intentional stance? The Gaia Hypothesis¹ considers the earth as a living being. In this case, we are Herself coming to consciousness. She is coming to consciousness of her relationship with the sun and of her own part in it, of her creativity of the precious miracle of life. Perhaps, then, we are her projection of her problem. Humans play the roles of lover and beloved, of sun and earth. We internalize these roles in our consciousness and our being objects of attention (giving and receiving attention). Do we receive our own or others' care as

¹James Lovelock, The Age of Gaia: A Biography of Living on Earth, Norton, New York, 1988.

the earth does light, using it for creativity, or do we reflect it back (as does the moon) in a sterile mirror game of who is brighter, bigger, hotter?

Is the sun the source of life or is the earth? As men and women, we act it out: men are active, suns; women are passive, earths. This is the perennial stereotype. Yet, if we look again, both roles are earth's creations. So, the earth produced the ones who play the sun and the ones who play the earth. In fact, the whole play is being put on by the earth.

It is the earth who has made the sun a life-giver by receiving the light creatively. As far as we know, other planets have not done this. Similarly, male animals produce billions of sperm, but, if there is no female's uterus or egg to meet them, no life is produced. Seeds fall from trees or are borne by the wind but, if they are not lodged in earth, they are lifeless. But, of course, sperm and egg, seed and humus are all earth-produced.

As it happens in many of our heterosexual relationships, we overvalue one person, usually male, and we undervalue the other, usually female. A woman, by her creativity, attributes a solar importance to a man, and he is seen as the source of life, income, creativity. Receiving this attention (like the earth), he becomes more actively creative, seeming to confirm the truth of the attribution of value. The whole society participates in a system, which privileges one pole in the relationship and hides or ignores the other. We women define the definers as definers. Then we cover up our own active role, and men are only too happy to usurp the credit for it.

If we are playing the earth's role, why should we not recognize our/her power, creativity, life-giving and value bestowing qualities? Loneliness perhaps? It is so far to any other planet or sun. Is the sun alive, too, and of a different order? Does the earth just want not to realize that she is doing it all by herself? Could we human beings ever love her enough? Could she ever love herself enough to make up for the sun's not being alive? But maybe the sun is alive, as alive as she is and in the same or a different order of reality and alone.

Our attention imitates the sun, but when we concentrate on a star, the star is in the position of the earth. And the same with space. Surely this dimension of receptivity around her comforts our Mother Earth, and the knowledge we have gained puts her in a context, gives her a home. The confusion arising from the existence of millions of galaxies dissipates when we realize that there must be other living beings out there.

Mother Earth, like ET, someday may be able to phone home to her sisters. Meanwhile, we must keep up hope, learn to live with one another and not ruin her exquisite beauty and harmony before she meets other life. Are we being destructive so as to better play what we perceive as the role of the sun, continuing to discredit the role of the earth? Have we created a male-sun-patriarchal God to keep us company as well, projecting our and her problem beyond the solar system to the universe?

I think that we might accept the fact that we still do not know much about the universe. What we have immediate access to, however, is our perceptive apparatus and our social context. We need to shine our sunny conscious attention upon our psycho-social mechanisms, in order to find out why it is that we are seeing what we are seeing. There are unacknowledged mechanisms of selection that come from our motivation, that make us look for and find some things rather than others. These then feed back into the contexts in which the motivations arose, reconfirming the problems that created them. Only when we heal our motivations can these mechanisms function as clearly as they should, creating an alignment of the various types of reality of which we are a part.

Perhaps our conscious attention corresponds to the sun, and our subconscious corresponds to the earth, because of the internalizion of a social polarization between active and passive. But our earth side, as we have been saying, is only seemingly passive. It actively receives, not only giving content to consciousness, but also giving it a context and a value. It gives consciousness its potentiality to know, as part of a human being, where many things are going on.

Consciousness is like the light of the sun refracted through the atmosphere. There are so many more things for it to pass through and touch upon than meet the eye. Since humans are social products, there is a contribution by the many and the past to each of us. Our sunlight consciousness not only illuminates many aspects of this in succession, but is also defined by it. Perhaps, like the earth, and like women in our giftgiving ways, our subconscious produces consciousness, while not acknowledging its own part. Thus, consciousness seems not to come from the earth but from heaven.

In this century our knowledge (and through us the earth's knowledge) of the solar system, the galaxy and the cosmos has increased greatly, while the knowledge of the nature of the earth and her relation to the sun has not yet become clear. Similarly in our human relations, we do not understand the mother-child, nurturing one-to-one relation, before we venture into relation with the 'many.' We do not understand what is going on at home before we venture out into the world. The relation between the earth and the sun, which has produced so much miraculous life, is not a dysfunctional relation. The solar system is not a dysfunctional family. By identifying the sun with the father, however, we have reproduced the social self-similar masculated image of the sample under-emphasizing the activity and creativity of the 'passive' female 'receiver' and the many while overemphasizing the initiative of the 'active' male 'giver.'

The need is essential to the gift, for without it the gift is nothing. Thus, the earth has created myriad needs, which the sun can satisfy with her light--light which otherwise would be unused and barren. The interaction of these needs with each other recreates the giving-and-receiving interactions of the sun and earth. The asymmetry is the key. The sun only gives, while the earth both receives and gives again, though presumably she cannot give back to the sun, since the sun is too far away and presumably cannot receive. What happens, then, is that many of the relations of life are really self-similar images of the relation between the earth and the sun. They are role-plays, ways of acting

out giving and creatively receiving. The baby receives the loving gaze of the mother--then, as she grows, actively relates herself to the mother, taking turns.

The amoeba encounters some piece of matter which it can receive and use creatively, as the earth on her voyage in space encounters the light of the sun. So does the blade of grass use the sunlight for her processes. The caterpillar actively finds the blade of grass, this earth ray made of creatively incorporated light, and uses it for her processes. The bird, on her more active paths, finds the caterpillar.

But we and perhaps the earth herself (Does she have a problem of self-esteem?) attribute more importance to the male, identifying him with the 'one' and the sun (the son), because we do not see the receiver as creative--and needs are seen as lacks and not what is necessary to bring gifts to completion.

We could even consider most life relations as a metaphor for the relation between the sun and the earthan enormous variety of replays of that asymmetrical relation of unilateral giving and creative receiving and giving again (and leaving the by-products and waste from the process, which then become the gifts for another order, or orders, of life). All of life could be seen as an attempt the earth has made to give feedback to the sun, to relate to her. To give as the sun does, she must create the needs which can receive the gifts, that is, recreate something in her own (earth's) position. Then she takes the sun's position giving to satisfy them. Through life, she says to the sun, "This is what is happening between me and you; this is what is happening."

All of this is taking place on the surface of the planet, where the sun is shining, present (a gift) to its 'view.' Life in its variety could be seen as an immense proliferation of images of the relation between the earth and the sun, what in human terms could be seen as an immense joyous philosophical investigation into this relation. And, in human terms, this relation would be called love. Perhaps it is the earth's attempt at co-munication with another order of being, her labor of gratitude for that

warmth that caresses her in the deep night of space, an investigation into their identity and relationship with each other.

What it is important for us humans to do is to align ourselves with this relationship, not misinterpret it, as we have so often done, because parts of our social organization and language have created the deep patterns of masculation which obscured it. Since we could not see the earth from space, we did not even know she was here or doing anything. We were too close to her; we could only look outward. We thought she was passive, just receiving the light, as we thought women were passive. We covered up our giving, her giving, and saw only the sun, the privileged light-sample as giver. Patriarchal patterns spawned phallic self-similar images of themselves everywhere, and validated each other.

The moon and the sun seemed to vie with each other as dominators of the heavens, each privileged 'ones' for their allotted times. The moon changed through her phases and was many with respect to the sun. The idea of reflected light came to appear to be the women's, the moon's, identity. We forgot that the great dark creative earth was the proper image of the mother. But reflection which we attributed to the moon really was the province of the ego which did not give, the false, static, un-giving meta image of life and of the earth-sun relation.

We saw the earth and sun, women and men, children, mothers, things and words, citizens and presidents, commodities and money as not equally actively related to each other, but caught in a more or less static imaging of reflection. Where one was real, the other only served to give back that reality. Yet, the moon does provide a sort of cosmic meta level for the earth. It simply says, "The sun shines here, too, though I do not receive it creatively like the earth. And dark and light happen here, also." The moon has influenced the way earth developed life and consciousness. Her beams elicit our imagination. She seems to be a sort of self-referential aspect of the earth. Her light touch moves our tides.

For centuries, for humans, the moon took the place of the earth as the 'other' of the sun, whereas the earth was really the sun's life-giving other. It seemed that the reflection of the sunlight was the opposite and complement of the active giving of the sun, whereas it was actually its creative use in life-making. Thus, it could also seem that exchange, based on reflecting back what was given, honored the sun more accurately, enhanced it.

What was given was given back in an equivalent. Reflection validated exchange as a way of life, and masculated ego patterns, over-taking and competition, seemed ways to play the roles of the active sun and the passive moon. Then the sun was seen as taking the initiative towards the earth, seen as passive. The earth does not give back just a reflection or an image of the sun but many living images of her relation to the sun, many images of the sun and herself and their relation to each other. There are also images of the moon, reflections of the reflection of image-making itself, imagination.

The fact that there are two heavenly bodies in the sky suggested to us the importance of the two-fold relation, even when we thought the earth was flat, because we saw the two in the heavens and looked at them in terms of our gender relations, which already were earth-made life images of the earth-sun relation. We thought the sun-moon relation was the same as the sun-earth relation and identified the moon with women, as 'lesser lights,' losers of the competition to be brighter. Perhaps, when we began to know the relative sizes of the earth, sun and moon, we began to think of the earth and moon as children and the sun as father. So the image of the woman-child was superimposed over the woman of creativity, concealing her.

Not only did individuals enter into and play out these relations, but different kinds and orders of living images of relations had themselves to relate to each other. This may seem complicated, but it is really easy enough to follow if we see the sun as unilateral giver, the moon as reflector, and the earth as both giver and receiver, repeating (embodying rather than reflecting) the relation. (A complete meta level would not be

made of the simple reflection of the other but the reflection of the giving and receiving relation to the other, including the self, and the reflection of the relation of reflection.)

If we are the earth, coming to consciousness of herself, we have had some major misconceptions due to our inability to see ourselves in our (and her) real context regarding the moon and the sun. If humans are images of our immediate cosmology, it behooves us to understand it and align ourselves with it. Aligning ourselves with the misconceptions is bringing us to grief and our creative Mother to destruction.

If the life principle is in the creativity of needs to use the gifts, we must not let the needs and the beings that have them die because we are reflecting or trying to act like our idea of the sun, falling into the patterns of masculation our society has created. The needs form a sort of gravity, towards which our gifts must flow--like water, the liquid gift which flows towards the center of gravity, and rain, like transformed sunlight falls on thirsty plants. Wind moves from high pressure to low pressure areas. Giving to needs is the answer that is blowing in the wind.

The misinterpretation of our sexuality extends and fits into the misinterpretation of our cosmology. We see our earth as somehow lacking, rather than as the great creative receiving and giving source she is. In fact, by ignoring her creativity, we over-value the 'independence' of the sun, which, as we saw from pictures of the moon, did not 'independently' create anything there. Rather, it was the sun in relation to the earth that was creative, and the earth in relation to the sun. Because of the eminent presence of the sun, her visibility, and even that of the moon, the earth was seen as 'less than'--because she did not give light (she did give fire, however, which, like words, can be given away while keeping it). All of this fit into (and resonated with) the sexual and social pattern of men as active 'ones' and women as passive 'manys.'

Perhaps the earth herself has felt incapable when compared to the sun or the moon, and estranged and lonely, so far away from other planets and stars. As her children, humans have contributed

to this feeling. We have not only ignored and misinterpreted her, attributing value to everything but her, including ourselves, but with the same mentality that has taken us to space and finally allowed us to see her from beyond, we have trashed and degraded many of her greatest most delicate creations.

We consider ourselves children of the universe, and we long to see the life on the planets of Aldebaran, if there are any. We are willing to spend trillions of dollars on space programs with that eventual aim in mind. Yet, the amazing variety of species of beetles in the rain forests of the earth are so unimportant to us that we render them extinct without lifting a finger in their behalf. We must learn to attribute value to our creative Mother--both our human mothers and our Earth Mother. We must see that needs are not lacks, re-evaluate the symbolic vagina as the great hidden creative place, where life grows and continues on, and we must see that the type of single-shot creativity that the symbolic phallus represents is based on the denial of the value and the on-going labor of the feminine. Everyone must become nurturing of everyone else and of the earth. We must restore needs to a place of honor and fill them.

As the consciousness of the earth we must be her self-esteem, letting our love flow like water towards her centers of gravity. She is suffering, as are so many of her people and creatures. We must act in her behalf. How un-compassionate we are when we long for outer space, while we do not care for this miracle where we live. It is only our patriarchal mind-set, our misalignment with the earth-sun relation, that bores us with the present and blinds us to the Garden of Eden, causing us to be toxic to each other and to blight the land. Poor people everywhere are forced to play the part of the denied and exhausted mother, exploited, wasted, and despised. They are the self-similar image of Mother Earth being destroyed by a patriarchy whose healthy bright son goes forth in his phallic space ships to 'fertilize' other planets.

We must realize the gravity of this situation and turn our love and our money towards needs. In this way, we can follow the Earth Mother's commandment, "Nurture one another," imitating

her clear, creative, cosmic relationship. We can liberate ourselves and her from the false enchantment of the reflection and the aggrandizement of the sample.

The multiplicity which earth has created with life rivals the multiplicity of the galaxy. We must begin to value 'many-to-many' relations, which other-oriented egos can promote. First we must turn our attention to the world we live in, honor and bless our Mother, satisfy her needs, the needs of the folks at home.

Perhaps it is really true that we are able to say on one level what we have learned and felt on another. I have often been far away from those I loved, and now for many years I have loved another woman unilaterally. Receiving no response to my co-munication, I became more creative, as I went on giving to projects for social change. I know how both the earth and the sun must feel. I am in alignment with one part of the image, then another. Of course, when human love is requited, we each can take turns at being sun and earth to each other.

May I accordingly suggest that, as we liberate ourselves from masculation, we return to our roots in our cosmology. Perhaps our term 'hum,' which would unite males and females in childhood with their caretakers, their nurturers, and each other, could be replaced as they grow up, not with 'woman' and 'man' but with 'earth' and 'sun.' This could only be a healing thing when the earth herself is restored to her rightful place as creative source of both male and female human beings, and the sun as unilateral energy giver. Perhaps, indeed, we could take the cue from those who now see us as androgynous, containing both male and female, active and passive, and call ourselves 'earths' in the moments when we were creatively receiving, and 'suns' when we were unilaterally giving (in both cases, we would have already consciously detached our selves from the one-many structure of the concept and the distortions of the definition of gender).

We should try to co-municate with the earth, not with the stars. If Gaia is alive, surely she has a language. She is the goddess who speaks to us through synchronicity and nurturing and in other ways as well. How can we speak to her? She is an 'other'

order of being. We are like cells in the body trying to communicate with the whole body. What gifts can we give? First, I think we can give her the gift of peace with one another, healing our societies. And this will help us give her the gift of our respect for her beauty and creativity, ending pollution, healing the devastation we have caused. With our gifts, we will find our common Mother tongue.

Since all our focus has been on the 'one,' the many have been in the dark, unknown and unrecognized, like stars in other galaxies, where our answers might seem to be. The stars are so many, like our brain cells. Are they images of the stars? Are the stars the neurons of the earth, except outside it--like us but backwards? The earth would be a tiny body within an immense brain of stars.

I saw the stars this morning as I woke up. There seemed to be so many. This is the problem, 'one-many.' The earth is finding herself within this huge array of others before she knows what she is--or the sun and moon are. Similar to us, with the 5.5 billion people on earth. We humans can form groups to relate to larger groups, but can the earth form a group with other planets? Aren't the living ones too far away? Is she the only living child of Sol? Are the other planets alive, even though they don't have life on them? Is earth trying to reach out to them through our space travel? We need to form a co-munity with her here. We need to comfort her in her being alone.

Chapter 23

After Words Practicing the Theory

There are many different ways of creating a transition towards a paradigm shift. For example, there would be immediate and far-reaching effects if the First World institutions would for-give the 'Third World' debt (which has actually already come back to the 'First World' many times over). We could begin by for-giving the interest. This positive step could be accompanied by our beginning to co-municate materially with the 'Third World' in respectful and life-enhancing ways. We could also give abundant money to the ex-Soviet countries, recognizing that our capitalist tendency to plunder has not caused them to create a better society but has only reduced them to dire poverty. Most importantly we could stop wasting the world's wealth on arms production and the military--and use the resources instead for a nurturing economy.

In the US we could change the punitive prison industry and mentality to an understanding of the social causes of crime and an attempt to give children and youths lives worth living. We could recognize everyone's need and human right to be grateful for a good and joyful life, and the right to have something to give. We could stop some of the terrible wrongs which are being committed such as the sexual trafficking of women and children. We could recognize that most immigrants coming from the South to the North are simply following the path of resources which have been drained from their countries by the North as unpaid gifts. We could stop that drain, and welcome our sisters and brothers. (If we weren't spending the money on armaments there would be plenty for everyone). We could stop the devastation of the environment, considering it a gift for our children and our children's children. We could elect many more women with compassionate values to public office. Progress in any of these areas--and there are many others--would have a positive ripple effect everywhere and would bring forward the values of the gift paradigm.

The point of view of the gift paradigm needs to be consciously put into practice. I have tried to do this by creating the Foundation for a Compassionate Society, and the more political (not tax deductible) group, Feminists for a Compassionate Society. Actually, I have been practicing the theory expressed in this book since 1981, by using my resources for social change. Before developing the theory, I practiced the gift paradigm less consciously, as a wife and mother.

For me personally, one positive effect of the theory has been to liberate me from psychological and social pressures which kept me from giving to needs outside the family, and I believe that taking on a more activist giftgiving role helped to heal some psychological problems with which I had been struggling. It has now become clear to me how much giftgiving is going on all the time everywhere, convincing me that giftgiving is the normal human behavior. In fact, everyone's giftgiving practices are being blocked by exchange and made difficult by scarcity, but also by patriarchal values, which interpret giftgiving as exchange, dismiss it as ineffective and weak, or over-emphasize and sentimentalize it. Finding giftgiving in language makes it possible to consider giftgiving as what makes us human. It is my hope that affirming giftgiving as the human way will promote its conscious practice.

Unfortunately, giving to satisfy the needs of individuals does not in fact change the social system which creates the needs. After the system is changed, giving to satisfy the needs at the individual and at all other levels will be the guiding principle. For the present there is a huge need for resources to be devoted to social change. And each of us needs to give at both the individual and the social change level while shepherding our various energies to keep ourselves from exhaustion since we are still living in the exchange paradigm.

One reason givers also hide their own giving is that it may appear that they are giving in order to achieve the ego-dominance that masculation requires. The logical contradiction in such 'ego-oriented altruism' casts doubt upon the altruism itself, making it appear non-existent. The people involved in the

giving and receiving interaction can get through this contradiction by developing the radical trust and forgiveness that are possible in the feminist social change movement. Another reason people do not give visibly is that religions and moral preceptors promote hidden giving and sacrifice as morally superior. While this tactic may have the effect of avoiding the pitfall of ego dominance, it also effectively keeps the model from becoming visible and from causing a ripple effect.

A great deal of psychological sensitivity has grown up around giftgiving and receiving, perhaps because, for most of us, it has such deep connections with childhood and has otherwise been blocked and stunted. Our gut reactions about it are extreme and uninvestigated, our defensiveness and discomfort immediate. We find exchange easier to deal with, more respectful, 'cooler.' Our psychological reactions validate a habit of mind about 'appropriate' giving--giving which does not go to excess--and therefore, of course, does not really change anything.

As would-be givers we tiptoe in politically correct ways through a society which is devastating the planet and creating daily hunger and death for millions who live 'elsewhere.' Our aplomb is salvaged at the cost of our effectiveness, and the negative drift of the status quo prevails. Those who continue to be awake to the suffering of the many and the sickness of the system plummet in despair because they do not see the whole gift-based side of life that continues to exist or the glimmers of social change that are actually happening. Religions and governments co-opt giftgiving, making it appear to be one more masculated ploy, often a tool of greed and corruption. At best, there seems to be a civic duty to 'give back' to the community--within the pre-established parameters of the system.

Given all of these considerations, I decided to practice giftgiving visibly for social change by creating the organizations I have mentioned. I created and supported social change projects, using exchange--salaried work--for changing the system towards giftgiving. The Foundation and Feminists for a Compassionate Society are both hybrid solutions of this kind. I also used the

money I inherited to fund progressive and feminist projects for social change that were already existing. For several years I enlisted the help of my cousin, Sissy Farenthold, who had made a career as a feminist political leader and activist, and who 'knew the ropes' better than I did. Sissy helped me find groups to which I could give. Then I acquired physical locations (land and buildings) in which on-going woman-led projects were implemented. I started or supported activist and educational projects, as well, hiring a number of women to manage and carry them out. Some of the women had already started projects of their own or created them later, with or without my collaboration and input.

I have grappled with the contradictions inherent in practicing giftgiving to change the system which gave me the resources to give. I have also grappled with the contradictions in using exchange--giving women salaries--to change the exchange system towards giftgiving. And I have had to make a policy not to give to individuals for their own benefit because it was essential to devote the money to social change projects. Perhaps someone else might have thought of other ways of practicing the theory. This is what it occurred to me to do, aided by the Goddess's gifts of good timing and good fortune.

Sometimes, the women of FFACS did not agree with me or with each other. We had long and at times painful discussions, but we usually got through them with our friendship and feminism intact. I have been committed to making the Foundation as diverse as possible, and it has indeed been a place where women of color and white women, old and young, gay and straight, local women and women from other countries have worked together. In fact, I believe it has been an environmental niche for peace, where a multitude of voices can be heard and the thinking of the many is in evidence. I am very grateful to the women who have been involved with the FFACS over the years, and I feel very blessed to have been in their company. At the staff meetings, which take place every Wednesday, we listen to each other's reports. The amazing variety of information and experience, commitment and

courageous imaginative action confirms and inspires our sisterhood--and gives hope to even the most jaded visitor.

So many general social needs have arisen, due to the psychotic practice of patriarchy, that social-change activists have their hearts and hands full. The truth is that every need is connected to every other--environmental needs are connected to human needs, hunger to militarization, respect for single mothers to world peace, domestic violence to racial violence and to international violence. Pulling a thread at one end of the tangle of problems touches all the other problems. Satisfying any need for social change--'making a difference' as it's often called--provides the possibility for everyone to visibly and intelligently practice the gift paradigm at a general social level.

The model of women giving to satisfy social needs, giving of time, intelligence, creativity, commitment, and money demonstrates the potential of the generalized gift paradigm as the solution to the whole complex of problems caused by the practice of the exchange paradigm. The gift paradigm visibly practiced for social change by women can have a wide-reaching ripple effect. While there are many activist projects now going on in the US and in other countries, many of them still operate according to patriarchal structures and thus perpetuate the problems they are trying to address.

Projects which deal with violence in the United States often try to change the individual or attempt legislative reform without changing the society as a whole. The connections between domestic violence and international violence, for example, are all too often ignored. Nevertheless, all the people who are now involved in the movements against sexual and domestic violence, for social justice, peace and human rights, and for ending hunger, war, racism and homelessness, as well as those dealing with healing from addictions and psychological problems due to patriarchal violence, are moving towards the gift paradigm--whether they are male or female, and whether they know it or not. I do believe it is

important to promote women's leadership in this transition because women are originally unmasculated, with a model which is already so different from the 'privileged one.'

1997 is the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Foundation for a Compassionate Society, though many of the projects began much earlier. Stonehaven Ranch is a retreat center near San Marcos, Texas, which began to operate in 1984. It is open for retreats by peace and feminist groups every weekend, free or at a low cost. Literally thousands of people working for social change have been nurtured in its woman-led atmosphere over the years. Margie First and Nancy Wilson presently manage it, 'nurturing the nurturers.' Other projects begun in the 80s, such as the Austin Women's Peace House, had a lifespan of several years and then closed for one reason or another. A weekly program on Austin Community Television, "Let the People Speak," hosted by Trella Laughlin, was part of our activities from 1985-1994. Several other regular community television programs, including one by myself, "Feminist Values," one by Sally Jacques, "Arts and Activism,' and one by Frieda Werden, "Women's News Hour," have taken its place.

Practicing giftgiving in an exchange economy depletes the giver if she is acting alone. Since, except for a few relatively small contributions, I am the only person giving money in this organization (though the other women give time, energy and imagination) my financial resources are being depleted. I have had to close the donation program which functioned from 1981 to 1994, and some of the other projects. The Grassroots Peace Organizations Building housed the Foundation's offices and provided office space for many other peace groups, including both women and men. Located on Austin's main downtown street, this little building was an outpost for social change in the flow of the mainstream. I sold it in 1996 to continue to maintain the Foundation. A beautiful facility on Lake Travis, our second retreat center, called 'Alma de Mujer,' was part of the Foundation from 1988-1996, when I donated it to the Indigenous Women's Network. It continues to be

successfully managed by indigenous sculptor Marsha Gomez with the help of Esther Martinez.

In 1985, I was able to fund and 'woman'--together with a group I helped originate, 'The Feminist International for Peace and Food'--the Peace Tent at the Nairobi, UN Decade for Women Final Conference. The tent was very successful, providing a safe space for debate and discussion between women whose countries were at war with each other. Thousands of women attended the events there. Two of the women who helped to organize the tent, German Ellen Diederich and Afro-German singer Fasia Jansen, have worked with the Foundation for many years, first womanning a Peace Caravan to the Soviet Union (before the fall of the Berlin Wall) and later creating the Four Directions store (an attempt at cause-related marketing). They continue their on-going work for peace. Many other groups collaborated on the Peace Tent, including WILPF and WIDF. It was a successful model of women's dialogue which has been imitated many times thereafter.

Peace Caravans were also organized in the US, in which women went from town to town talking about the Nairobi meeting. US Quaker Alice Wiser and German Gertrude Kauderer drove them every summer for several years. Meanwhile, we also did a lot of support work for the Central American self-determination movements, sending delegations to El Salvador to investigate human rights abuses, death squad activities and the US government's involvement.

Ellen and Fasia organized a tour of the Salvadoran Mothers of the Disappeared in Europe, which was useful in disseminating information. We sent a fact-finding delegation of attorneys general from the US to Central America (I was part of the delegation as well). I supported women from the global South to travel through the US, talking about the realities in their own countries (through the 'Third World' Women's Project of the Institute for Policy Studies organized by Chilean, Isabel Letelier).

All of this work culminated in two meetings between women leaders from the US and women commandantes from El Salvador's FMLN. In these friendly encounters, it was quite clear that women's values could overcome war and antagonism. We talked about our children and about the future. We had serious political discussions, but we also danced and sang together.

I have had a long-term commitment to women from the Global South and to international feminism. I have supported women in international groups and conferences and helped with publications and computer networks. Over the years, I have supported a number of projects in the South and of women from the South living in the North. Presently Filipina activist Charito Basa is on the staff, working with immigrant women living in Europe.

I think that media are especially important for providing the point of view of women to the public. In 1991, I started FIRE, the Feminist International Radio Endeavor, a two-hour daily program presented from a women's perspective, one hour in English and one in Spanish, on Radio for Peace International, a short wave radio station in Costa Rica. Maria Suarez, from Puerto Rico, and Chilean Katarina Anfossi are the instigators of these programs.

WINGS, Women's International News Gathering Service, was started independently by Frieda Werden and Katherine Davenport in 1986. After Katherine Davenport's death, Frieda returned to Austin and joined the Foundation staff in 1992. Since then she has continued to produce WINGS weekly programs, with the collaboration of many volunteers whom she also trains. Frieda also provides radio training at WATER, Women's Access to Electronic Resources, a facility in Austin which was birthed and is being freely nurtured by videographer Fern Hill. At WATER, women receive free training in video, radio and computer. Amanda Johnson and Felicia Hayes provide training and are on the Foundation staff. A large community of women has grown up around WATER, using its resources and volunteering many woman-hours. A particularly exciting

collaborative effort is the yearly International Women's Day Media Festival, a 24-hour multimedia event put on entirely by women and involving several other media facilities throughout the city.

An indigenous resource center and museum, Casa de Colores, is open to the public on the border between Texas and Mexico, under the care of Helga Garcia Garza. Festivals of Danza, gatherings of youth and elders, traditional medicine and healing unite ancient spiritual traditions of the indigenous peoples of the US and Mexico. These meetings and the museum of art and artifacts allow people from the North and South to reconnect with their cultural heritage.

Part of the effort to change values flows into the movement for alternative spirituality, especially the Goddess movement, and support for indigenous peoples' earth-based spiritual traditions. The Stonehaven Goddess Program, organized by spiritual activist Pat Cuney, has been ongoing, and many of the authors and teachers of the Goddess movement have given workshops there.

I built a temple to the Egyptian Goddess Sekhmet in the Nevada Desert near the nuclear test site to honor the birth of my daughters and to take a stand against nuclear testing from the point of view of women's spirituality. The statue of the lion-headed Goddess by Marsha Gomez bears a plaque which reads, "May women be as strong as a lion in giving birth to the future." The statue of 'Madre del Mundo,' also by Marsha Gomez, shares this sacred space. Wiccan priestess Patricia Pearlman cares for the temple and welcomes meditators, nuclear protesters and celebrators of mysteries. I was able to give back the twenty acres of land on which the temple is built to the Western Shoshone, to whom all of that area originally belonged.

One particular area of concern has been the damage done to the environment and health by nuclear radiation. The women who work in the (more directly political, not tax deductible) part of the organization, Feminists for a Compassionate Society, have created excellent and effective projects in opposition to the proposed nuclear dump in West Texas in the little town of Sierra

Blanca on the border with Mexico. Erin Rogers has been particularly effective in organizing against the dump and in collaborating with other activist groups.

Susan Lee Solar has created a Peace Caravan, a mobile anti-nuclear museum, and travels from town to town discussing the nuclear issue. The transportation of nuclear waste is very dangerous, and the m