"Oh, Beautiful, for Spacious Rooms...

"

If you really want to understand what life in 21st-century America is all about,

visit Las Vegas. It's like being on a date with America when she's had one too many -

she's letting her hair down, flashing you some skin, maybe even letting you cop a feel (if

you pay extra). Money doesn't just talk in Vegas - it screams, it blows whistles, it blows

you. If prostitution is an uncomfortably true parody of the classic (read "biological")

male-female dynamic -- male exchanges resources for female's sexual favors -- then Las

Vegas is a parody of the relationship between America and her people. And by America,

I don't mean Mom, apple pie, and family values. I don't mean the Constitution and the

Bill of Rights, either. I mean what it actually is, the creation of a bunch of 18th century

bigwigs wearing powdered wigs, tights, and fake calves (eat your heart out, San

Francisco), the brainchild of a radical gang of freethinkers who wanted to protect their

own interests from overseas meddling, and by the way, had some pretty good ideas on

which to found a nation, if they were applied to everyone consistently. Trouble is, it's

easy to say, "All men are created equal," a lot harder to free your money-making slaves

because you actually believe it.

Which brings me back to Las Vegas. No hypocrisy here - it's the most honest city

in the world, its phoniness forgiven because it knows it's not fooling anyone, just like the
stripper with the fake breasts knows she's not fooling you, but she knows you like 'em

big, so she complies with a pair of silicone-stuffed sacks that you pay real money to see.

Las Vegas knows you love money, too, and it convinces you with lights and whistles to

pay for the privilege of losing it. What you're really paying for is the fantasy of making

the big score, the fleeting hope that you might be the lucky one among all the suckers.

The real winners aren't the ones pulling the levers on the slots, but the ones pulling the

giant levers of the casinos themselves, the master manipulators who rely on seduction and

distraction to milk us dry like cows at a dairy farm.

"But I'm a contented cow," you say. Yes, aren't we all, chewing our cuds by the

roadside, envying the few lucky winners of the American Dream, the freaks among us

who can hit a 100-mph fastball or talk convincingly on the silver screen to a computer-

generated alien.

Las Vegas unzips and whips out into the open what we'd prefer not to see the rest

of the time - our own bloated, Jabba-the-Hutt-like appetites for the bright, shiny, and

unreal. Instead of a real trip to Paris, we take a couple of things we like about the place -

the Eiffel Tower and cobblestone streets - sanitize them (no dirty facilities or rude

Frenchmen here!), then plop the whole thing down on the same block as an air-

conditioned Middle Eastern marketplace, sans flies and exploding pipe-bombs, right

across the street from a mini-New York without gangs or graffiti. Instead of real women,

we take a couple of things we like about women (yes, a pair of things) and exagerrate

those to the point where we're seeing some sort of abstract, gravity-defying representation

of the female form. Instead of real food, we take the salt, sugar, and fat from any source
we can, mix them together, give the concoction the flavor of something real, then saturate

it with chemicals so it'll keep for six months (even the bacteria are pickier than us).

Instead of a movie with a story that has the remotest resemblance to reality, we take an

idea we can plaster on a poster ("Resuscitated caveman wins the Heismann Trophy!"),

add a star or two ("Let's see the Tom Cruise movie with the caveman!"), fortify the weak

plot with plenty of sex and violence ("Non-Stop Action!"), throw in a character actor

("He's so good! What's his name?"), add a dash of social commentary (the caveman's

only friends are a black and a Hispanic), then kick it up a notch with a few explosions

that'll help you show off your new THX-certified, 7.1 Surround Sound speakers, the ones

that make Grandma think a truck has just crashed through the living room.

This all reminds me of a movie I saw a long time ago, the one about the wooden

boy who dreams desperately of becoming a real person. Aren't we doing just the

opposite? Real people trying desperately to keep reality at arm's length while we revel in

artificial pleasures? Aren't we a nation of anti-Pinocchios?

One particular part of Pinocchio's story should give us pause, the part where

Pinocchio and his friend are tempted by a sinister stranger to run off to Pleasure Island, a

place specially designed for easy gratification of desires, full of laughter and

entertainment, thrills and diversions, rich foods and bright lights (sound like any place we

know?). There's one catch - stay there long enough, and you start to grow hooves, long

ears, and buck teeth. In other words, you turn into an ass.

It's only when they start braying themselves that Pinocchio and his friend recall

the team of miserable, overworked mules that pulled the sinister stranger's carnival
wagon. The stranger's the man who runs the whole show, after all, exploiting the greed

and gluttony of young boys for his own ends.

The message of the story is simple: if you never evolve beyond your desires for

pleasure and distraction, you sacrifice your full human potential, becoming something

almost comically predictable (the average U.S. consumer), easily manipulated by those

who know how to pull your strings. And what is Las Vegas if not the string-pulling

capital of the world, run by bigshots who manage their own teams of mules - armies of

dishwashers, bellhops, and parking valets from Guatemala, Cambodia, and Cleveland?

And what does this show us about America itself? We're still being peddled the

American Dream, but isn't the situation in America today more like the World Series of

Poker? We all want to join the tables so we can become a big winner, but how many of

us have a spare $10,000 to buy in? We forget the old adage that holds so true in our

nation: it takes money to make money (yes, even the qualifying tournaments require a

fee). Most of us, denied access to even try a hand in the big leagues, settle for the

consolation prize, watching the contest on ESPN as those who are mostly well-off enjoy

the privilege of out-conniving each other. The tournament itself is like the business

world in miniature - a dead earnest, dog-eat-dog arena, no real human interaction going

on, all eyes shaded or frozen into unreadable reptilian glazes, because letting the other

guy see anything truthful about what's going on inside you gives him the means to take

you out. The object, of course, is to make (or, more precisely, take) money, and though

the competition starts out with the cash spread evenly among all the players (who at this

point are the human equivalents of so many small businesses), the field gradually
decreases as the more canny players (the human corporations) gain more money and use

it to intimidate and swallow up the little guys, then turn on each other in a feeding frenzy

until all the money is in the hands of the most ruthless individual (the human Wal-Mart).

The World Series of Poker glorifies one of the archetypal characters in American

myth: the gambler. The gambler has always been a sort of mischievous imp lurking in

the fringes of our national consciousness, an amoral opportunist in the land of

opportunity, not participating in the American Dream himself, but parasitizing off those

who do. Seldom the main character of the story, the gambler is the snake in our Garden

of Eden, urging the legitimate hero, who has worked hard and earned his piece of the pie,

to go for broke, risk everything he has on the chance of gaining even more. Could our

current fascination with the gambler, our legitimizing of the previously illegitimate, be a

sign that we no longer believe our system allows us to achieve the American Dream

through good old-fashioned hard work, but forces us to rely on lucky breaks and shrewd

manipulation of our fellow American Dreamers?

Before I get too carried away, let's expose the gambler for who he really is.

Concealed behind his poker face, after all, is his ultimate shame. Hidden beneath layer

upon protective layer of bluffing bravado is the sad truth that he is wretchedly insecure,

unable to make it in the real world. Master of the limited domain of the card table, he is

baffled by the infinitely greater complexities of human relationship and responsibility.

The gambler is pitifully dysfunctional, a child who has become so entranced with a game,

he cuts himself off from the people around him and remains forever in search of higher

stakes, passing from saloon to saloon, casino to casino, adrift like a Mississippi riverboat
without a rudder. Why do you never see the gambler away from the card table? Because

he is nothing without the game.

If you buy into the national game of SUCCESS which the U.S. promotes as a sort

of ideal, then this great land of ours becomes less a place to live and more an arena to

play out your competitive shenanigans with the other alpha-male-wannabes. Worse than

this, if you judge yourself based on your ability to play this game, if you truly start to

believe that you need to be a winner to count for anything at all, then you cut yourself off

from your very essence - you give up who you are to define yourself by what you do.

Your drive to succeed has driven the real you, cowering, into a dark corner of your soul.

You are nothing without the game. Your self-worth is now determined by dollar signs

and how many people know your name, not by how the people closest to you feel about

you, or even by what you know about yourself, which won't be much if your spiritual

immune system does not fight back against the endemic virus of our culture, this

desperate, overbearing need to succeed, this idea that if you are not "somebody" then

you're nobody.

Who promotes this slavish devotion to material success and achievement? The

ones who massage our brains with the inane television shows, movies, and magazines

which they use to peddle their products, the fat cats and corporations who own the

gleaming, towering steel and glass cathedrals built in devotion to the dollar, our national

symbol of success. It's very easy for the successful to worship success, after all, and

there's no better way of ensuring that the fruits of success are not spread around than to

convince everyone else that we should admire a man's ability to take whatever he can get.
Ironically, it's often the have-nots, the ones who have the strongest reasons to complain

about this societal attitude, who often subscribe to it with the most fanatical intensity.

Stroll through any inner city ghetto and you will encounter the most fantastic dreams of

athletic stardom and rap star success. The pimped-up rides and bounteous bling are

ostentatious representations of the very materialism that fueled the slave traders who

started the whole mess of racial inequality in America in the first place.

The American population as a whole is no different. The average American

worker is like a battered child who hates his abuser and looks up to him at the same time:

"Keep making money off me, rich man - I want to stop you, but what I want even more is

to be you myself."

How does The Man pull it off? Easy -- he relies on The Man's best friend: The

Dog. Not the dog who paws your chest and licks your face when you get home, but The

Dog inside you, The Dog inside every man.

It's a Dog's Life

Why a dog within us? Why not a pig? A goat? While these are all acceptable

species we could use to represent the animal within every man (and I'm almost assuming

you're a man if you haven't tossed this book aside already -- hang in there if you're not),

there's just something very masculine about a dog, any dog. Yes, even poodles, who lick

their balls just as contentedly as do German shepherds.

First off, dogs are slobs. A dog doesn't care half a hairball how he looks. Take a

cat, by comparison. A cat will spend hours raising his hind leg over his head, twisting his
body into a pretzel so he can lick down every last stray hair. A dog will lick himself only

when he's wounded, or he's got something on his coat that smells interesting, or simply

because it feels good (just ask a poodle or a German shepherd).

Dogs are ruled by their stomachs and their dongs. In that order. Men are no

different. If a man is feeling hungry and horny at the same time he will make a sandwich

before he calls his girlfriend. If his girlfriend is already there, he'll have her make the

sandwich before anything else happens.

Dogs run in packs. They spend their time horsing around as they look for food

and females. When a female is found, they invariably fight over her. If things get too

rough, the female will slink away. In dogs, as in men, it is often the lone dog,

unencumbered by the stupidity of males in groups, who will find the female and quietly

propagate the species.

Dogs are hierarchical. In any pack, there is always a clear leader. He is usually

the largest one. If not, he makes up for this through sheer aggressiveness -- he knows

what he wants and will bare his fangs to get it. If this is starting to sound more like wolf

behavior than dog behavior, you are being fooled by your dog's behavior when in the

company of humans. Throw a bunch of dogs together for any length of time and you'll

see firsthand what we mean by "dog-eat-dog."

So far we have described how men are similar to dogs. But how are they

different? Don't ask a man this question. He'll tell you men are smarter and they stand

on two feet. Don't ask a woman. She'll tell you men stand on two feet.

Ask yourself, "What does a dog do all day?" He eats, sleeps, keeps an eye open
for food and females, and fulfills his role in the hierarchy. Ask yourself, "What do I do

all day?" If it's the same thing, welcome to the pack. You're living a dog's life.

"But I do other things, too," you say. "I watch TV, I play football, I don't lick my

balls -- I scratch them, blah, blah, blah..."

"Okay, what are some positive masculine traits? Loyalty, honor, bravery,

assertiveness, honesty, integrity, to name a few. Now, a dog can be just as loyal, brave,

and assertive as the manliest he-man. True, he has no conception of honor, honesty, or

integrity. A dog cannot tell a lie, and he can be nothing other than what he is. It's men

who can lie, cheat, and pretend to be something they are not. In fact, these can be positite

assets in the competitive world of adult men. For the man looking to score with the

chicks and accumulate as much money and power as possible, the act of incorporating

honor, honesty, and integrity into his life has the same effect as chaining a 500-pound

brick to the rear of his BMW roadster.

Honor... honesty... integrity. The words seem almost quaint, throwbacks to a time

of starched collars and ramrod righteousness, a time when we used the word

"forebearance" instead of "suppression," a time when keeping a leash on The Dog was a

point of pride with men. The Dog has always been with us, but our attitude towards The

Dog has changed through the eons.

A Brief History of The Dog (Among Other Things)

You might want to skip this chapter if you don't like history, but I'll try to be as

brief as possible.
 Back in caveman days, The Dog had it made, because men were openly and

unapologetically dog-like in their behavior. Brawny aggression and shrewd manipulation

of human-pack dynamics got you the good stuff -- first dibs at the leg of bear in the fire,

access to the females with the most pendulous breasts. If another guy complained, you

just grabbed the nearest heavy object and conked him on the head with it, or you called

upon your allies to cow him into silence through group intimidation.

Success in life depended on an almost preternatural connection with the natural

environment. Actually, it only seems preternatural to us -- in reality, being connected to

the natural environment is the most natural thing in the world, since we are (physically, at

least) products of nature. We have become so accustomed to city life, so removed from

the natural environment, we romanticize primitive man as a feel-good hippie type, the

original Nature Boy, when the brutal reality is that the aggressive-asshole caveman, who

suppressed his competitive instincts just enough to work in a group with ten other

aggressive assholes, was exactly what was needed to bring down a woolly mammoth and

continue the survival of the line that leads to the cell-phone-toting bipeds of today.

Perhaps that's the secret of the "Survivor" reality shows: you take twenty or so money-

hungry, exhibitionistic nincompoops, throw them together on an island, then sit back and

enjoy the show as you force them to engage in cooperative activities at the same time that

they each try to back-stab and cajole their way to individual victory. The hypocrisy

between seemingly altruistic behaviors and ultimately selfish motives is delicious to

watch and, disturbingly, more than a little reflective of our own lives.

Imagining ourselves as men in prehistoric times (even if only for the space of a 1-
hour TV show), we see it is the strengths of The Dog which aided our ancestors in their

quest for material success: acute sensory attunement to the environment, loyalty and

cooperation in matters concerning the human pack, and aggressive instincts towards

obtaining food, sex, and social position.

These qualities are all very well and good, but they don't necessarily lead towards

the attainment of a stable society or civilization. For that we need the human qualities of

imagination and organization. Let's begin with imagination.

Imagination is first and foremost an act of playing with possibilities. An act of

"What if...?" if you will.

"What if I picked up that rock and threw it at Torg's head? Maybe then Oola

would like me more than Torg, because then Torg would have a hole in his head."

Because of imagination, an inanimate rock has been transformed into a means of

obtaining sex and possible social advancement -- the beginnings of human progress.

Simply put, imagination is the act of making that quantum leap in the mind from

"what is" to "what might be." From primitive tools such as stone head-openers, we

advance to major developments such as animal domestication, horticulture, and perhaps

the strangest and most human development of all, religion.

Religion is mysterious because the spiritual impulse that created it has nothing at

all to do with The Dog, and the pioneers in the spiritual realm were very un-doglike

people, the shamans. Not only did these people tend to be somewhat solitary and aloof

from their fellow hunters, they were more interested in the unseen harmony and order of

the world rather than in the tangible signs of passing game or fruiting trees needed for
practical survival. The combination of introversion and intuitiveness which the shamans

possessed would seem to be a death wish, yet these individuals were highly esteemed by

their tribes because they gave their fellow hunters and gatherers an extremely precious

gift: a sense that there was an unseen dimension to the world which was fantastically

powerful and expansive, an implicit, universal order, like a cosmic chord of music which

one could tune one's life in harmony with and thereby realize one's true nature as an

integral part of the whole. The shaman promoted the realization of this harmony by

supervising initiation rituals of fasting, chanting, dancing, and the use of psychoactive

herbs, all intended to propel the initiate into a state of consciousness beyond everyday

experience, into a direct encounter with the spiritual realm.

The beginning of the end for the shaman and the tribal way of life (and a

corresponding devaluation of The Dog) occurred with the development of agriculture.

The unpredictable, here-and-now world of the hunt began to be replaced by the orderly

routines of planting and harvesting, dictated by the seasons, and requiring planning,

foresight, and oftentimes the cooperation of the entire group. The time of the organizers

was at hand.

Organization is an essential component of all civilizations, for as people become

settled and skilled at producing food from the earth, the population expands and it

becomes necessary to impose order on the whole affair, for now the size of the

community is such that many people are relative strangers to each other, and the sharing

of resources among the whole group is unlikely to happen. At this point, the group must

begin to function like a living organism, with different people playing different roles in
the society, as the different organs of the body serve different functions to maintain life.

And so the society becomes "organ"-ized, with some people producing food, others

crafting tools, and still others becoming supervisors or bureaucrats to coordinate the

activities of the rest. A ruling class inevitably develops to make the big decisions

concerning the welfare of the entire group. The members of this elite class (the "brains"

directing the activities of the social organism) want to hold onto the power they enjoy as

a matter of course. Traditionally, they have often achieved this through a sort of

symbiotic relationship with the same individuals who would have been shamans in the

old days -- the priests. Sometimes this sharing of power was uneasy and acrimonious, but

when it worked (as in ancient Egyptian society), the religion of the priests supported the

moral order that held society together, an order which included the divine right of the

ruling class to lord it over everyone else. The priests, in turn, were happy because they

had a fairly cushy job of high status.

What the rulers and the priests of antiquity feared more than anything else was the

primal energy of The Dog, which previously had free expression through the violence of

the hunt, but now had the potential of being a genuine threat to a stable society. It is not

surprising that so many religions expressed a profound distrust of the "lower" self (a.k.a.

The Dog) and sought to control it through various taboos and moral imperatives relating

to sex and violence, The Dog's chief domains. Civilizations, of course, are often violent

themselves and will gladly channel the aggressive energy of The Dog into organized

military forces, which they can then use as tools for expansion and conquest. Generally

speaking, however, The Dog is put on as short a leash as possible.

 Enter the United States onto the world stage. The founding fathers saw the

seemingly limitless potential of a huge land with bounteous resources and had a vision of

the continent as one vast arena where The Dog could be set free to frolic. In other words,

they wanted to create a white male entrepreneur's paradise, a place where the right of a

man to amass land and wealth could be given free rein, where a man could compete like a

dog with his neighbors for all that nature had to offer without interference from

omnipotent kings and meddlesome priests. The founding fathers more or less

accomplishied their aim by establishing term limits on their elected leaders of

government and attaining the separation of church and state, among other achievements.

For most of our history, this system worked for the ambitious man as intended --

if you were the right color and sex you could always head west to fresh pastures if all the

wealth was already divvied up in your particular area. Alas, those days are long gone.

Nowadays, instead of carving a new life out of the raw land, you must try to draw

sustenance in some way from other people's money, a situation which makes you feel less

like a creator of wealth and more like a flea sucking financial nourishment from the great

back of America. You might take one of a choice of increasingly meaningless jobs and

become a cog in the corporate business machine, owned and operated by those who have

already succeeded in the American arena. You might become an automaton in the

government bureaucracy, funded by the tax dollars of your fellow citizens. You might

even try to hack out your own clearing in the jungle of the business world, obtaining your

pocket money by providing something people pay for from their own pockets. In any

case, to land a job that's even remotely satisfying, a substantial amount of money is
generally needed in the first place, whether it's the capital required to start up a business

or the investment in education necessary to obtain decent employment.

Meanwhile, there's a huge portion of the population stuck in dead-end jobs

without much hope for the future. Add to these the thousands upon thousands of us who

do have a college education or enough capital to start a business but still can't carve out a

meaningful place for ourselves in the world of work. What is keeping The Dog from

bursting forth from all these frustrated lives and running rampant in the streets?

Certainly religion still plays a part in maintaining the moral order, but everyone

knows that religion receives more lip service than true devotion from most of the

population today. The truth is, The Dog is already running rampant in our schizophrenic

society. We decry the rate of teenage pregnancy and the hordes of young men growing

up without fathers and filling our jails as violent, frustrated felons -- but what do we

expect when our society and culture is run by the merchant class, the hucksters and

sellers among us, a class that promotes and caters to the needs and desires of The Dog?

For these pushers know that the more The Dog runs free, the more the people are no

longer masters of themselves, and the more money they will spend on Doritos,

Budweiser, and Marlboros. In today's America, the man of business is The Man, and as

stated before, The Dog is The Man's best friend.

Thus our modern era is perhaps the first in the history of civilization where The

Dog is encouraged to make the decisions and buy, buy, buy. Every time you watch a

commercial or read a billboard, The Man is whispering into your ear, hoping The Dog

will listen. "Buy that sportscar to feel powerful and sexy." "Buy that ticket to the
football game" -- so you can have the vicarious thrill of "winning," a thrill you are

seldom allowed to experience in real life. By all means worry that your underarms stink,

your breath reeks, and your underwear looks soiled, because the only means to fix these

faults and get the girl is to buy the products The Man provides. Even if you don't get the

girl, there's no need to worry, because The Man has a wide selection of pornographic

material to titillate, but never satisfy, your carnal desires. Whatever you do, don't read a

book, for God's sake, unless it's mass-market brain candy by a brand-name author you

can pick up at the supermarket counter (no danger of you actually starting to think with

those books). Hopefully you don't figure out you can read better stuff for free at the

library.

The Man wants you to feel frustrated and insecure -- not to the point of outright

revolt, but just enough to the point where you need the succor of the distractions and

sorry, artificial pleasures he can provide. The last thing The Man wants is for you to

cultivate your higher self and seek spiritual enlightenment, for then you might completely

liberate your mind and spirit from the warped worldview of purely material concerns

promoted by his high priests, the advertisers and marketers. Even our schools have

devolved into indoctrination centers which spit out obedient, standardized mentalities that

mesh perfectly into the economic machine, rather than creative, critically thinking minds

that seek to improve or even revamp the machine entirely. Our political leaders cannot

save us, for they require money to splash their faces across the media and win elections,

and they obtain this money by kowtowing to The Man and grovelling for handouts,

becoming indebted hucksters in the process. No, it is up to you to break free from the
mental constraints you may not even realize you're suffering under, and to do this you

must first seek to truly know and understand yourself.

Getting to Know You

"But I already know myself," you say, "better than I know anyone else in the

world."

That is exactly the point. You are so used to your own mode of thinking, your

own way of looking at things, your own chosen way of being in the world, that other

ways of thinking and being, ways that may be helpful to you, may be completely

unavailable to your conscious mind, even though they exist inside you. Who you are can

be thought of as a choice, based on inner urgings, to be one way and to not be another

way. Anyone who you find completely incomprehensible represents a road not taken in

your own life, a fork where you went right and they went left, probably ages ago. This

may explain the almost irresistible attraction of opposites when it comes to romantic

pairings. We are curious about the road not taken and the places it leads to, and being

with this strange other person gives us a glimpse into those mysterious regions we have

not explored ourselves.

Throughout history, philosophers, poets, and storytellers have attempted to map

out these "choices" of personality, these forking roads which lead to a person being one

way and not another, though often personality was looked at less as a choice and more as

something innate, perhaps determined by the stars, as in astrological systems, or even by

bodily fluids, as proposed in one of the ancient Greek theories. Today there are a
multitude of theories of personality, but let's use as a starting-off point what is arguably

the most popular and widely accepted current method of dividing the personality into

distinct "types," the awkwardly-named Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI for short),

developed in the 1950s by Isabel Myers and Kathryn Briggs from the ideas of the great

Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung.

According to this system, each individual exhibits a preference for one of a pair of

choices in each of four crucial aspects of personality:

1). Extraversion or Introversion: The extravert is a "people person," the typical

"outgoing" personality prized by those seeking mates in the personal ads. The introvert is

more quiet and reserved, preferring to keep his own counsel and finding many social

interactions to be draining. Introverts are greatly outnumbered by extraverts, which is not

surprising since human beings are essentially gregarious rather than solitary creatures.

2). Sensation or Intuition: The sensing person has a literal-minded, "nothing but

the facts, ma'am" attitude towards obtaining information. He trusts solid realities which

he can gather with his five senses and is observant of his surroundings. The intuitive

person prefers dealing with ideas and possibilities in his mind rather than the mundane

reality of concrete facts. Not surprisingly, intuitives are greatly outnumbered by sensers,

since most of the intuitives, strolling through the woods absorbed in contemplating the

meaning of life, would have been eaten by bears or lions early on in the evolutionary

struggle.

3). Thinking or Feeling: The thinker bases decisions on logical standards -- what

works or what's right for a given situation, according to his rational analysis. The feeler
bases decisions on emotionally-tinged values concerning what will produce the most

harmony and well-being for himself and others affected by the decision. This is the

classic "head vs. heart," "male vs. female" aspect of personality, and it is indeed the trend

in the overall population that males tend to prefer thinking, and females to prefer feeling.

4). Judging or Perceiving: Judgers like to live their lives in an orderly, organized

manner, knowing what's going to happen next, comfortable that things have been

decided. Perceivers prefer spontaneity, playing things by ear and leaving options open

rather than deciding on things beforehand. Judgers and perceivers are fairly evenly split

in numbers among the population, with judgers doing most of the achieving and

perceivers having the most fun.

When determining which preferences you have chosen for yourself in each of

these four aspects of personality, it's important not to take my "fork in the road" analogy

too seriously, for none of these choices is an either/or proposition. In fact, you may feel

that you're pretty evenly split between, say, your thinking and feeling tendencies, which

you very well may be, or you might want to take one of several MBTI questionnaires

available online to help you clarify things.

Just When You Thought We Were Done with History

Let's review our examination of history and society, but this time through the lens

of the MBTI.

Probably the biggest difference between caveman days and today is that the

spontaneous perceivers had a lot better time of it then than they do now. Life in the wild
was one reaction after another to unpredictably changing circumstances: saber-tooth

tigers popping out from behind rocks, bears moving into your favorite section of the cave,

other guys taking swings at you with mastodon bones. You had to be ready for anything,

and perceivers naturally thrive in uncertain conditions where keeping different options

open is a good idea. The poor judgers who preferred everything to be orderly, in its

place, and known beforehand were not exactly the fittest candidates for a life-long date

with Mother Nature.

But it was the judgers, of course, who wanted something more civilized, a place to

live in that was more predictable and suited to their penchant for organization, so it was

unquestionably they who pressed for the security and order of settled communities.

Agriculture must have been a supremely satisfying accomplishment for the judgers -- to

actually know they were going to have food tomorrow was calming to their jangled

nerves.

And let's not forget the introverted, intuitive shamans, those holy fools wandering

off by themselves with their heads in the clouds. As you may recall, both introverts and

intuitives are outnumbered in the population. To have both these traits in the same

individual is even rarer, and this was exponentially so in prehistoric days, for how many

of these abstracted loners would have survived? They must have seemed like aliens from

another world, and, in a sense, they actually were in another world, for they "saw," or

more precisely, intuited the presence of, another immaterial world lying behind what their

fellow hunters could see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. As stated previously, the more

generous of these shamans developed ways for their tribal peers to also enter this sacred
space through initiation rituals, and the "religion" of shamanism was born. With the

advent of civilization and the rise of the organizing judgers, the unpredictability of direct

spiritual experience, mediated by the shamans, was replaced by the certainties of orderly,

systematized dogma: "accept everything on the official holy list as the truth, then relax

and take a magic carpet ride to heaven." The uncertainty and risk of the personal spiritual

adventure was replaced by the comforting security of religious group-think, sanctioned

by spiritual "experts."

Who Is America?

Fast forward to America in the 21st century. It's obvious that our society is an

extraverted (outgoing), sensing (practical), thinking (rational, male-dominated), and

judging (decisive, results-oriented) culture. If you tried to imagine a man with these

traits, you'd probably think of a no-nonsense boss-type, pushing you to work hard and get

things done on schedule. Sounds like The Man to me.

Now don't get me wrong. I don't have anything against bosses or boss-types.

They're certainly needed in any culture to run things in an efficient fashion. The trouble

occurs when a society goes so far down one fork in the road, it forgets or suppresses other

ways of thinking and being. I suggest that this has occurred in the good ol' U. S. of A., at

least in terms of the way we are "expected" to be in order to contribute to our society.

In the next chapters I am going to push towards finding ways we can balance

things out. It is unavoidable that I am going to sound as if I am against, say, the

extraverted or sensing aspects of being, but it's only that I feel a need for us to push back
against our cultural leanings, to question the thousands of messages we receive from

television, magazines, billboards, even our friends and family, to be sociable and

practical every moment of every day. What you won't hear me railing about too much is

for you to be more in touch with your feelings, since I'm sure you get enough of that from

your shrink or your significant other, and if you happen to be a feeling-type already,

you're certainly being pushed enough in the opposite direction by the male cultural norm.

So bear with me as I bitch for a few pages about our overly extraverted, sensing ways and

the means by which our society isolates and encourages us to either convert or remain

locked into these chosen modes of being, then we'll try to find ways to reap the benefits

of our latent capacities for introversion and intuition.

Driven to Succeed

Every moment of the waking day, the "world" of your inner experience, or

consciousness, is divided into foreground and background. The foreground is that aspect

of reality that you choose to focus on, the background is everything else. If your focus is

outward, on the world and especially the people in it, you are an extravert. If your focus

is inward, on your own inner experience and needs, then you are an introvert. Everone

has at least a slight preference for one or the other ways of being, but no one can be all

extravert or all introvert -- in fact, if you try to completely ignore one way of being, if

you stuff it down into your unconscious, it will pop up in your life in ways beyond your

conscious control. Lean too far towards extreme extraversion, and your neglected,

innermost needs, even the dark ones, come creeping into your life unbidden. Your
enthusiasm morphs into arrogance, while your desire to affect others becomes colored by

power plays and the quest for personal gain. We can see symptoms of this in the smiling,

back-slapping, life-of-the-party type whose behavior actually resembles that of a selfish,

inconsiderate boor. He's not actually a bad guy -- he's just so out of touch with what he

really wants that his needs express themselves in thoughtless, overbearing ways. Ever

meet a guy with a dynamite smile, stylish clothes, and polished persona, but you look in

his eyes and feel like there's no "there" there? This guy isn't soulless -- he just doesn't

know who he is.

Our culture tends to brand the introvert as somewhat weird. Why doesn't he want

to join the crowd and hang out with the rest of us? At best, he is pitied as a meek

wallflower or granted grudging respect as the silent type, at worst, suspected of being

entirely selfish. It's certainly true that the extreme introvert runs the danger of becoming

completely out of touch with others. But think of the extreme extravert, the outgoing go-

getter whose sole goals are to win friends and influence people so he can make it to the

big time. We stand back in awe of his single-minded dedication to our cultural ideal of

success. "He's so driven," we say, which is a very good analogy, because there's a good

chance that this guy actually feels like the passenger rather than the driver in his own life.

He's not even on auto-pilot. He's traveling at breakneck speed on the fast track because

our achievement-oriented culture is doing the driving for him. If the culture is heading

off a cliff, you won't hear him complain, though as soon as he feels the pull of gravity,

moments before his plunging vehicle smashes into the craggy rocks below, you might

just hear him ask, "Are we there yet?"

 Bread and Circuses, Cheez Whiz and iPods

In ancient Rome, the ruling class devised an efficient way of preventing the man

in the street from thinking about how sorry his lot in life was -- keep him fed and

entertained. Free food would be distributed to the great unwashed majority, and they

would be distracted for up to half the year by bloody spectacles at the local stadium

involving the killing of slaves, criminals, and animals, usually by each other. A lion

might feed on a defenseless Christian one day, then be set upon himself by an armed

gladiator the next. The best of the gladiators became the pop stars of their day, drawing

in the crowds to watch them perform socially sanctioned killings on a regular basis.

We may look down our noses at the barbarity of the Roman populace, who

themselves looked down their Roman noses at the "barbarians" beyond their borders, but

aren't there truly some uncomfortable parallels with our own society today? Though

many of our poor are malnourished and in poor health, at least their stomachs are

distended by our cheap, tasteless, nearly valueless sliced white bread. And when they go

home to their meager accommodations, they can try to distract themselves and warm their

lonely souls with a flickering face and tinny voice coming from the $59 TV they bought

at Wal-Mart.

For such an extraverted nation, there's an awful lot of loneliness in America. Our

cities are laid out for maximum efficiency of moving the workers in and out of the

downtown centers of commerce. The areas where the people actually live increasingly

have the soulless ambience of planned "communities" with no common areas where
people feel the urge to linger and interact with others. We shop in giant, impersonal

warehouses where we hardly ever see the same checker twice. It's no wonder that people

are desperately turning to the internet to try and create a sense of community and

personal relationship.

For Pete's sake, people are actually using the movies to try and feel connected to

others, a trend picked up on by Neal Gabler, who studies these things at USC Annenberg.

It used to be that we were living lives that were pretty full and rich, and movies both

diverted us from this reality and commented upon it in an entertaining way. Nowadays,

movies don't refer to our own lives, but to other movies (or comic strips or TV shows)

and to the people who make movies. Unless you're willing to reduce your mentality to

the level of a teenage boy, you don't watch movies now to be entertained by the story

itself, but by what the movie means in the lives of its stars, director, and other personnel

(e.g. "Will Smith actually acted well in this movie -- maybe he'll get an Oscar

nomination" or "Steven Spielberg seems to be slipping with this movie -- I hope he gets

back on track."). By watching movies, you feel privileged to enter the world of show

business and witness the career ups and downs of its denizens. Add to this the gossip

found in the tabloids and trade rags, and you've really got something to talk about at the

water cooler. There's even a competitive, gladiatorial feel to the proceedings, as new

stars rise up like saplings in a forest clearing, competing for the nourishing spotlight

hogged by the old, established names, and the television news (!) will actually proclaim

whether Brad Pitt's movie beat Harrison Ford's at the weekend box office.

Actors seem to sense that their profession is having even less bearing on the real
world than it traditionally has -- witness their desperate attempt to influence political

reality in the 2004 election campaign, and the subsequent backlash from the voters

("How dare someone who makes $10 million playing a comic strip character tell me how

to vote?").

There's a strange, paradoxical phenomenon at work here. The spiritual impulse in

the general public is still alive and well, though distorted. We want to feel there is

something greater than ourselves, something mysterious and extraordinary, but our

traditional, fatherly notion of God seems too old-fashioned and irrelevant to many of us,

and a lot of the New Age ideas seem too mushily abstract and dare to require us to "get in

touch with ourselves," so we settle for our belief in UFOs, Bigfoot, and in the status of

celebrities as special beings different from ourselves. At the same time, we want to keep

the mysterious at arms' length, because direct knowledge of the extraordinary threatens

our more mundane, 21st century need for dominion and power, the need to believe the

world is a place completely explained by science and devoid of mystery. In other words,

we want to believe in God, or in UFOs, Bigfoot, and the special status of movie stars, but

when someone claims to have had a mystical experience of communion with God, to

have been abducted by UFOs or chased by Bigfoot, or when a movie star deigns to tell us

how to vote, we scoff, because our stubborn urgings towards childlike wonder are

embarrassing to our modern sensibilities and should not interfere with our daily lives.

The Hollywood pantheon must remain safely aloof in their hilltop mansions, God must

stay in the heavens where He belongs, because we will crucify any deity or demigod who

dares show his face on earth. There's ample evidence of this today, for we find nothing
more delicious than to destroy the cherished image of a celebrity when he exposes

himself as merely human (who wants to worship a movie star, anyway?), but then we

venerate him all the more if he's able to rise again from the ashes of our bonfires. This

urge is so strong that we'll even do the resurrecting ourselves, as we've done with Elvis,

ultimate martyr of the American Dream, unwitting hero of our homegrown Passion Play.

You Are What You See

The vast majority of us prefer to obtain our notion of reality from what we can

perceive with our five senses, rather than from what the mind itself "sees" when it notices

patterns, imagines possibilities, or pays attention to hunches from within. In other words,

most of us are sensers rather than intuitives. For most of our history, this has served us

just fine, as our senses were flooded by the very real and mostly beautiful stimuli from

the natural environment. As we began to develop cities, some of which were very ugly,

the largest buildings, whether they were soaring cathedrals or immense palaces,

dominated our field of vision and were meant to daily remind us who was boss. Today,

the temples of the priests and the castles of the rulers have been replaced by the gleaming

skyscrapers of the business class, so huge they block the sun and shame you into puny

insignificance at their feet. Even the White House would look like a country shack in

their presence, and the visual message of these modern-day Towers of Babel is

undeniable: We, the captains of industry and finance, are in charge -- not you, not your

elected officials, not nature, and certainly not God.

That is why the 9/11 attacks were so shocking. Apart from the horrible loss of
life, we gasped in awe as the symbols of the most powerful sector of the most powerful

nation in the world were knocked down like so many houses of cards. Our very sense of

the natural order of things was disturbed, because it was those buildings themselves

which shaped our sense of the natural order.

Think of how far we've come as a civilization, with our shrink-wrapped pork

chops and our shrink-wrapped selves, encased in towering glass-and-steel cages during

the work day, then zipping along in streamlined glass-and-steel cages on Goodyear tires

to our cookie cutter houses or apartment cells. From underground parking structure to

remote-control-operated garage, we need never glimpse the light of day unfiltered by

tinted windows. Drop a caveman into the center of, say, New York City, and watch the

poor disoriented clod, desperate for something he recognizes from the world of nature,

dash for the safety of the nearest tree (if there is one) or skitter down the subway stairs in

search of a cave.

Don't laugh at our Paleolithic friend. At least he's seeking something real. Most

of us don't even realize how lost our souls truly are in this topsy-turvy world, where

nature is a decoration, relegated to sidewalk plantings and manicured lawns. We still

have caveman brains inside our skulls, for evolution is immensely slower than human

progress, and our brains expect to see something natural, not man-made. The modern

urban environment is reshaping our minds, even our spirituality, our sense of what is real

and valuable. When you walk in a sun-dappled forest, then emerge into a flower-filled

clearing and gape at the looming, jagged silhouette of an immense mountain in the

distance, you are struck with a sense of both how small and how special you truly are,
how privileged to appreciate and contemplate these wonders which existed long before

any human set eyes on them. If the spiritual impulse is present at all, you begin to ponder

the miracle of both this landscape and your own mind that perceives it. What's it all

about?

Walk through a city, however, and your sense impressions are dominated by

man's handiwork. Whether in the depths of a city canyon with walls of steel, glass, and

cut stone, or out in the flatland of the commercial landscape, hurtling along at inhuman

speed through concrete chutes with five lanes, the only splashes of color coming from

billboards instead of flowers, enticing you as a human pollinator to propagate the

consumer culture, you might be tempted to believe that there is no greater, all-

encompassing reality than what man creates himself. After all, even the stars at night

have trouble competing against the light which we throw up into the heavens. Instead of

being encouraged to experience what your heart is yearning for, the marvelous, unseen

dimension of the spirit, you are diverted by another unseen dimension, that which you

pick up from the air with your radio or television antenna, or download in bits through

your internet connection. The unrelenting assault of the media is seductive because it

joins our scattered lives together through the shared experiences of listening to the same

songs, watching the same shows and movies, eating the same McDonald's hamburger in

Peoria as you can in San Diego. If you start believing that this is what we truly share as

people, that this is what binds us together as human beings, then the media-controlled

public consciousness can be mistaken for a sort of community soul, a parallel dimension

that holds truth because it unites us from on high through hilltop transmitters, or through
a latticework of cables spread across our civilization like spiders' webs. This network is

dominated more by The Man than by the public, yet it is so pervasive, so quasi-spiritual

in its ability to simulate something real and greater than ourselves, it threatens to replace

our connection with the truly transcendent and all-encompassing reality proclaimed by

the stars and trees and mountains.

Still, the "reality" provided for our senses by The Man is a pale imitation of the

real thing, so it's no wonder that we reach out for the only natural, godly creations still

available to us: each other. There's a reason why so many people have cell phones glued

to their ears 24/7. When everything you see around you is artificial and therefore

completely foreign to who you truly are, when all the people you encounter on your daily

rounds only stop long enough to get what they want from you, you have an urgent need to

hear from someone who has looked into your eyes and seen that you are there. As you

travel through the spiritual wasteland of your local urban landscape, that little voice

whispering through the earpiece of your cell phone convinces you that you still exist.

Self-Defense

I promised we would explore ways to become more introverted and intuitive, not

because they're inherently better than extraversion and the preference for physical

sensations (they're not), but because our culture tends to ignore these aspects of being.

The good news is that introversion and intuition are quite complementary. When you are

by yourself, you are better able to hear that "still, small voice" from the deepest part of

yourself, and when you listen to that voice, you'll find that it often urges you to circle the
wagons around your soul when necessary to protect yourself from those who want to

move you in directions you don't want to go. This is not to say that you're cutting

yourself off from other people -- you just aren't being unduly influenced by them.

Let's leave intuition on the back burner for a few chapters and explore

introversion. I mentioned that introverts are often perceived as being selfish. It's

important to make a distinction between selfishness, which both extraverts and introverts

practice, and the sort of self-defense which introverts often employ. Selfishness is an

ego-centered outlook, a narrow point of view centered on personal gain and heedless of

the concerns of others. Introverted self-defense, in its pure form, is a sort of vigilant

mindfulness that others aren't always helping you, even when they think they are, because

it's impossible for them to know exactly who you are and what you need at this given

moment. There is often a tendency to be less agreeable when in an introverted mode,

because the need for companionship (which inevitably entails some form of self-

compromise) is not as much of a driving force. This attitude does not preclude

meaningful self-expression and communication with others, though sometimes the

introvert gives up on being understood and does shut himself off. When things are going

well, however, the healthy introvert projects a calm self-reliance which is appealing

because he sees himself and others quite clearly and is not overly needy of attention. If

introverts do not always seem to be the most overtly "nice" people in the room, it may be

helpful to remember that the person who is conventionally nice is often as boring as a

brick, because he's so well-adjusted to his society, such a paragon of what his culture

deems "good," we wonder if he is truly anthing other than what he's supposed to be.
 Every culture is a form of "group-think," and all groups have a natural distrust of

introverts, who seem more involved with their own concerns than with those of the

group. For most of us naturally extraverted types, the security, camaraderie, and sense of

identity we derive from belonging to a group far outweigh any desire to maintain and

defend our own personal way of being. This is why there is such a repetitive, dull

sameness to people who identify too strongly with a particular group, whether they label

themselves as "all-American," a "man's man," a "staunch Democrat" or a "devout

Presbyterian."

The problem inevitably occurs when some part of you feels the urge to hum a

different tune than the group you've identified yourself with. Maybe you'd like to think

you're an Average-Joe American, but you find that you hate Budweiser and love ballet.

Maybe you're a Baptist Republican who's pro-gay marriage. You then have to decide

whether to be true to yourself or true to the group. Staying true to the group will

certainly make your life easier as a group member, but then this means that you've given

up the pursuit of finding out who you are, what you're capable of, and what it is that you

truly love. Your life will not be an adventure of self-discovery, but a carefully performed

sideshow calculated to please others, while the person who should be living your life is

left as a spectator on the sidelines.

One could say that the process of personal growth is a gradual shedding of levels

of identification, resulting in a corresponding enlarging of your being. Today you think

of yourself as an Irish-American-Catholic-Democrat-New Yorker. As you get older,

your New York attitude mellows, you begin to see the Democrats as just another bunch
of sell-outs, and you decide it's all right to use contraception, but not all right to get

sloshed every Saint Patrick's Day. As you get still older, you start looking at yourself as

just another guy, and you start socializing more with other groups of people (with non-

whites, even). After you start noticing your hair turning gray, you feel freer to simply

chat with women even when you have no intention of hitting on them. Eventually you

get so damn old you figure you might as well start thinking of yourself more as a human

than as a man. Then you notice you're feeding the pigeons and stray cats in the park.

The former brawler and carouser is now sympathizing with other species.

I know what you're thinking: "This poor dope has lost all his self-respect. He

hasn't a shred of self-identity left."

Not true. This Irish-American-Catholic-Democrat-New Yorker has finally

dropped his need to cling to the constricting labels of group identification, the crutches he

used to prop his sense of self-identity, that sense of his very existence which was

formerly tightly bound and rigidly defined, but is now expansive as the sky,

encompassing the world. No longer a provincial buffoon, he is now a citizen of the

cosmos.

There are two important things to remember here. First, you need not wait until

you're at death's door to move beyond your current group identifications. Second, you

don't need to drop any of your group identifications at all. You can still identify yourself

as a manly American Libertarian crusader, or a sensitive metrosexual Bon Jovi fan.

There's nothing actually wrong with group identification. The problem occurs only when

your group identification gets in the way of your process of self-discovery, when you
start slapping yourself every time you catch yourself humming a Barry Manilow tune,

because there's no way a macho musical connoisseur like you could like such sappy pap,

or when you find that your reputation as a player is more important than getting to know

that feisty Plain Jane whom you're uncomfortably attracted to, probably because she sees

through your bullshit and isn't afraid to call you on it. There's something grand and

almost Shakespearean in the heroic efforts we expend to avoid learning more about

ourselves -- "Get thee hence, Barry Manilow! Canst thou not see I desire not to explore

mine own cheesy, sentimental nature?... And you, my un-fair lady, get thee to a nunnery!

Out of my sight, unsightly dame, so that I may gaze on mine own true love, smiling at me

from yon mirror... Thou art da man!"

Just Who Are You (Really?)

Do you really know yourself? "Of Course I do," you say. "I'm the one living

inside this bundle of skin and hair." Yes, that's true, but consider the obnoxious poodle

down the street who yaps at you insanely from the window every time you pass by. He's

living inside his own little bundle of skin and hair, but does he have a sense of self? Does

he say to himself, "Gee, I'm really proud that I can keep people away from the house.

Good job, Fifi?"

"Of course not," you say. "How dare you compare me to a dog? I know myself

because I'm human."

This, unfortunately, is where too many people stop when it comes to getting to

know themselves: "I don't get spooked when I see my reflection, mistaking the man in the
mirror for an intruder; therefore, I know myself."

Okay, maybe I'm being a little cynical, but isn't it true that we don't value self-

reflection and introspection very highly? If you invite someone to dinner and they reply,

"No thanks, I want to spend tonight with myself," it's considered the ultimate slap in the

face. "You mean, you'd rather be alone than be with me? You must really hate me!" Of

course, this example is not very realistic, since most of us are living such isolated lives

(not by choice) that we jump at the chance of companionship. Perhaps that's why we hate

our own company so much -- because we're forced into isolation by modern life. You

walk alone on the city street even when you're surrounded by people, for they don't see

you, and that voice in your head can be a damn pesky nuisance... "Did I leave the hall

light on?... I wish I had a car like that... Is that woman staring at my zit?... I wish I had a

bag of Cheetos." It's no wonder we stick an iPod in our ears to drown out the never-

ending stream of inanities, self-put-downs, and imaginary worries. Why would you want

to spend quality time with yourself when your "self" is a nagging, sniveling dumb-ass?

Hold on a minute. Did you ever stop to think that this pestering voice in your

head is not the real you, the true you?

You're probably thinking I'm talking baloney, so I'm going to have to explain

myself, or, more appropriately, my selves.

Adam and Eve and You

You might find it curious that after expressing a seeming distrust of organized

religion, I now turn to the Bible for help in discussing the idea that there are different
selves within us. If you do not find this surprising, I commend you, for it shows that you

do not equate the Bible with religion, or perhaps you've simply noticed that I like to

overstate my case to the point where I come across as a total anti-American, anti-

consumer, anti-corporate Unabomber-type misanthropist.

The Bible holds such a sanctified status in our culture that it tends to elicit "all-or-

nothing" attitudes that indicate little more than our ingrained, habitual reactions towards

perceived authority. Either we bow in total obeisance to every sacred word or we dismiss

the whole document as a collection of outdated stories used for controlling the minds of

the gullible. Both stances reflect an emotional response to the Bible's reputation rather

than an active engagement of our minds with the text. Stop for a moment and truly

"listen" to the Bible on its own terms and you may find yourself transposing your own

thoughts onto the templates provided by the stories ("Would I eat the Forbidden Fruit if I

had the chance?"), for these stories were designed to resonate with experiences

encountered by every person, the meaning expanding as it bounces back and forth

between you and the page like the sound of strummed strings amplifying inside an

acoustic guitar. Read the Bible with an open mind and you may discover that it is not so

much a key to spiritual truth as a lock which inspires you to search for a key you already

possess.

Let us be free and easy then in contemplating the Bible and "play around" a little

with the story of Adam and Eve to explore the idea that we are made up of different

selves.

Imagine Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Life is good. All their needs are
taken care of by a benevolent, protective being watching over them. They don't have to

work, and they get to spend their days frolicking around, naked as the day they were

born. Sounds like a dead-accurate description of infancy, doesn't it? It's hard to even

contemplate adult human beings in such a state of innocence, probably because we all

mature emotionally as we grow physically, whereas Adam and Eve were "born," so to

speak, as fully-grown adults. If you had a normal upbringing, infancy was your brief

taste of paradise on earth, when you were at one with the world, simply responding to it

with your infant drives -- rooting around for Mama's nipple, crying when you couldn't

find it, and smiling at her huge Mardi Gras head making silly noises just to amuse you.

The idea of your individual existence was not even a possibility in your mind (just watch

a baby stare in amazement at the wondrous sight of his own moving hands), nor was the

idea of the past or the future. Everything was simply marvelously present, in the present,

and you were a part of all of it, and all you had to do was scream your head off to make it

better if it wasn't as nice as you wanted it to be.

Certain realities slowly began to intrude, however. For example, you found out

that you couldn't always do what you wanted to do. Mama snatched things away from

your mouth before you even got a chance to use your tongue probe, and it seemed that the

smaller and more insignificant the things were, the more she didn't want you to taste

them. Very strange.

It got to the point where you finally realized that she didn't automatically do what

you wanted her to do, that she even wanted things that went against (impossible!) what

you wanted. In other words, she was she and you were you. Could this be true?
 Adam and Eve were the same in that they wanted to put things in their mouths

that God didn't want them to put there (I'm talking about the Forbidden Fruit, in case your

dirty mind is headed in another direction). And just like you, they put those things in

their mouths anyway, and just like that, Adam and Eve (and you) realized that you each

were separate, individual beings, that you had your own will and could make your own

choices even if God (or Mama) got pissed off, because who are they to hog the good

stuff? So gimme what I want. Now. Why? Because I want it.

The Miracle of Me

Thus begins your great love affair with yourself. The "Terrible Twos" are nothing

more than the antics of a child hopelessly smitten with the most wonderful and

fascinating new acquaintance, who happens to reside in his own body. The identification

of "me" with the ferocious will contained in this small bundle of skin and hair, separate

and distinct and more important than the rest of the world, has been achieved, and now

it's time to test the limits, to see what this baby can do, and no one (not even Mama) is

going to stop you.

But hold on. Maybe Mama can be useful. After all, since you've just discovered

yourself through the realization of your separateness, and she's the main thing you've

separated from, she defines you, in a way. She's the dull, drab background that sets off

flamin' hot you, the incandescent foreground.

"Look, Ma! Look what I can do! I said look, dammit!"

This is the strange paradox of the ego: just when you create your own sense of
separateness and individuality, you find that you need other egos to prove to yourself that

you exist, or more precisely, that you're worthy of existence. Mama's smile can inflate

your ego to fill the heavens, but her frown can pop it like a toy balloon. And what about

Dad? What kind of a circus juggling act do you have to perform to get a human response

from this joker? It's enough to make a baby cry.

You'd better get used to crying, and if you're a boy, you'd better get used to doing

it on the inside. It's not easy to please Mom and Dad and be a kid at the same time. A lot

of us tend to choose one extreme or the other, either becoming a Mama's boy or a little

rascal. As adults, we side with society's standards or with our own ego, either becoming

repressed prudes or amoral players of a self-refereed game with no meaning.

"Yes, but the key to life is to balance the good boy and the bad boy, to work hard

when you have to and raise hell when you've got time off."

This is the most tired cliché in the male playbook. Do we really have to live our

lives like modern-day sailors impressed against our wills into a corporate navy, enduring

the relentless drudgery of life on board a three-masted savings and loan or slinging hash

in the galley of the Sloop John Applebee's Monday through Friday, then whooping it up

at our favorite downtown-dive port-of-call on the weekends? When we finally drop

anchor long enough to raise a brood of kids with a buxom lass, we get an itch to escape

rather than suffer through the unending harangue of listening to them whine about how

we're always at sea.

Isn't there another way?

I believe there is, and it hinges on seeing a deeper aspect of yourself, more central
than the angel and the devil of your personality, those two impostors who take turns

making you feel guilty or deprived. There's a good chance you're already in touch with

this core part of your being. But if you're not, I have to assume that you're too distracted

by the illusions created by The Man, or by your own mind. You leave me with no

recourse but to take off the kid gloves and slap them across your face. Put up your

mental dukes, because I'm coming after you.

Terms of Engagement

My beef with you is dependent on my supposition (totally unjustifiable, but

simply irresistible to my pugnacious heart) that you are either an amoral egotist or a

hopeless goody two-shoes. In order for you to see another option that is not simply a

balance or mean between these two extremes, I must do nothing less than engage in a full

frontal attack upon the worldview that keeps you trapped in this two-dimensional, either-

or reality.

As you may recall, I said that my aim in writing this book was to provoke.

I've changed my mind. I am going to land a blow to the solar plexus of your

head.

Airing Out the Brain

My aim in the next few chapters is to land a blow to the solar plexus of your head.

"Ain't gonna happen."

Well, okay. Your mental defenses have been toughened through years of
vigorous sparring with other points of view. But little did you know that I've been trained

in the esoteric ways of the East. I will redirect the force of your intellectual power

against you so that you trip over your own logic. Impudent Western man, can you not

see that your rigid faculties of reason are no match against the fluid force of my intuitive

methods? Mwa, ha, ha, ha!

Okay, I'm bluffing with the Far Eastern trash talk. Realistically, my only hope is

to give you pause, to help you put your customary frame of mind on hold for a split

second, just long enough to let something else enter your consciousness, not something

from me, but something from you, something that through force of habit has tended to

remain quietly in the background, bullied into obscurity by the certainties which hog the

spotlight.

In the next pages, if you grow tired of my taking sides against everything we're

"supposed" to believe in, just recall that I'm not seeking to damage the vigor of our

cultural point of view, which provides us with solid foundations for the mental house we

live in -- it's just that it's beginning to feel stuffy in here because we've painted the

windows shut. We can see what's going on outside, but we can't feel it. If we smash the

windows first to air out our brains, maybe we'll find that the weather's not as cold as we

thought. And then maybe, just maybe, we'll actually step outside.

Absolutely Wrong

The Yoruba people of West Africa tell a story about the illusory nature of

absolute certainty. The tale involves the trickster god Eshu, a devious deity if ever there
was one.

One day Eshu decided to have some fun with the inhabitants of two neighboring

villages. He strolled down the road between the two villages, wearing a hat that was

black on the left side, white on the right. The villagers on the left side of the road

commented to their neighbors across the way about the man with the black hat.

"You are mistaken," the neighbors replied. "He was wearing a white hat."

"You must be blind as bats. It was black."

"You must be crazy fools or liars. It was white."

"How dare you call us liars!"

Things quickly got out of hand, and in some versions of the story the two villages

wipe each other out in armed conflict over the color of a hat.

You can glean from this story whatever moral you want, but I'm interested in

exploring why each village was so certain they had a lock on the truth. It's not just a

matter of each village looking at the hat from different points of view. Both villages also

had to make an assumption that the hat was all of one color. But for the villagers, this

was felt to be a given rather than a supposition, something taken for granted because it

was backed up by countless previous experiences with solid-colored hats.

Some would call this inductive reasoning. You take a given set of observations

("Every hat I've ever seen has been of one color.") and infer a general truth ("All hats are

of one color."). This process of assuming something to be true from experience tends to

close off even the possibility in your mind of an exception. This is a useful tool for

negotiating your way around the world because it gives you the confidence to "know"
things without checking every side of every hat you come across, but it also puts a

blinder on your consciousness of the world, because it prevents you from checking the

other side of a hat when it just might bring you closer to the whole truth of reality. After

all, two-colored hats really are possible.

Common Nonsense

What blinders limit our own conceptions of reality? What assumptions have we

made that prevent us from seeing beyond our own certainties?

Before we begin to explore these self-imposed limitations, I ask you to keep in

mind two things:

1). Much of what we take for granted as common sense is taught to us.

2). The truths we most take for granted are also the most limiting to our

consciousness of reality, as well as the hardest to see beyond.

In support of the first claim (we'll investigate the second claim in later chapters), I

present an experiment conducted by Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten at the

University of St. Andrews. In it, both chimps and children were shown by an adult how

to open a puzzle box by a series of steps involving pushing on rods and poking through

holes. Both chimps and children learned the steps and succeeded in opening the box to

get a treat. However, when presented with the same puzzle box, but this time made of

transparent plastic, the chimps immediately saw that all the steps except the last were

confined to a section of the box that had no influence on the section with the treat, so they

immediately skipped to the last step to get the goody. The children, on the other hand,
still went through all the superfluous, nonsensical steps to get their treat. Whether you

interpret this experiment as showing that children are trusting innocents, eager brown-

noses, lazy good-for-nothings, or easily intimidated mini-conformists, one thing remains

clear: given the right conditions, incredibly silly things with no bearing on reality can be

passed by humans from one generation to the next.

Now let's get to the nitty gritty, the bedrock truths that have been passed down to

us by our forefathers, and we'll begin (where else?) with the Bible, literally the Genesis of

our beliefs.

"In the Beginning..."

How fitting that these first three words of the defining document of Western

culture hint at one of its primary characteristics. The key word here is "the," which

should be underlined, capitalized, and printed in boldface. This is not just a beginning,

it's the beginning -- of everything, including time. The emphasis is on definitiveness.

There is just one beginning of time, as there is just one God. We love certainty and

decisiveness, the marks of a good ruler, which is what we expect God to be. The fact that

the Bible is what you might call the most complete narrative ever (it begins at the very

beginning and ends with a prediction of the End of Days) gives it a comforting sense of

closure for those who hate the open-ended. No loose threads here.

But let's get back to the beginning, when God creates his creations and, perhaps

even more importantly, imposes order by separating his creations in both space ("God...

divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above
the firmament") and time ("Thus evening came and morning followed -- the first day").

God also categorizes his creations by giving them names ("God called the light Day, and

the darkness he called Night").

In less than the space of half a page, the specific flavor and drive of Western

civilization -- its intellectual and spiritual style -- is laid out clearly. We seek to

understand the universe by dividing it into discrete categories, differentiated by their

unique characteristics and their separation in space and time. We name and define things

and events, just as God did, breaking up the world into comprehensible chunks. We also

work in linear time with an aim towards progress, just as God worked in a steady,

accumulating progression, creating light on the first day, Heaven on the second, and so

on. Last but not least, we judge ourselves based on our achievements, just as God looked

on his Creation with satisfaction and "saw that it was good."

Oops, there's something I forgot to mention, probably because it's something I

take for granted when reading the Bible -- God is unabashedly male. In fact, there's a

characteristically masculine thrust to just about everything he does. For instance, God

imposes himself decisively on the void in order to effect Creation. He is the "first cause"

rather than the ground of being, the seed rather than the soil, the guy who does unto

rather than is done unto.

Think for a moment of the sex act (just for a moment, now) or of a sperm

swimming headlong into a waiting egg, and you will see why we think of masculinity as

defined by "penetrating" qualities (dominating, aggressive firmness) and of femininity as

defined by "receptive" qualities (yielding, accommodating flexibility). Since we consider

God the one and only "Supreme Being," the specifically male qualities we've attributed to

him at the outset of the most influential book in the Western world can be looked at as

either reflective of, or leading towards, an inflation of the masculine and a devaluation of

the feminine in our culture.

"I Speak, Therefore I Think"

The first page of the Bible also points out the fundamental importance of

language. God speaks before he creates ("Let there be light") and also after he creates

("God called the light Day"). In other words, language is essential for both creation and

the comprehension of creation. Though you can argue the truth of this attitude, you can't

deny its influence on our cultural point of view. It's therefore a good idea to explore the

nature of our own language, for it influences our thinking in insidious ways.

English is a language that is frequently linear and fragmented, much like the

linear time and divided world presented on the first page of the Bible. Let's examine a

simple phrase in our Anglo-Saxon tongue: "The mailman kicked the dog."

When comprehending this sentence, we immediately think of a "doer" and a

"receiver": a "subject" (the mailman) does something to an "object" (the dog). Besides

the obvious separation of the subject and object in space, there is also a linear progression

of cause and effect through time; the mailman initiates a kick at one point in time, which

is then received by the dog at a later point in time. We take it for granted that this

"subject/object" mode of speaking is reflective of reality as it actually is, and not simply

of a worldview we have been taught to accept.

 One individual who does not take this worldview for granted is F. David Peat, a

physicist who became frustrated by the inability of the subject/object style of English

sentences to describe and explain the weird world of quantum physics, that wacky

domain where the scientist's very act of observing seems to create the reality he observes.

Quantum phenomena like this make little sense to our discrete, linear modes of thought,

yet appear to be perfectly real when examining an overwhelming body of experimental

evidence from the laboratory. Peat believes that the study of the Algonquian family of

Native American languages can be helpful in achieving a conceptual understanding of

these experimental results, because he feels these languages represent a completely

different way of thinking. Quantum phenomena, which seem frustratingly intangible

when described in our tangibly precise language, do not seem so far-fetched in the

Algonquian tongues, which are perfectly suited for describing the intangible, since verbs

are more important than nouns in those languages -- which is another way of saying that

interactions are more important than things for the Algonquians.

Peat explains the differences between the two languages (and the two ways of

thinking) by presenting a phrase in the Montagnais language, "Hipiskapigoka iagusit,"

translated into English as "the medicine person sings a sick man." This translation

doesn't make sense, because we are trying to force our linear, fragmented mindset onto a

language which prefers to think in terms of "timeless" process and unity. In the

Algonquian worldview, it doesn't matter who is singing to whom. The central, living

reality is that singing is going on now, and this singing, as an active process of mutual

interaction, unifies the medicine person and the sick man in a healing way.
 Process vs. Progress

In encountering a culture such as the Montagnais that stresses process over

progress, perhaps the hardest thing for us to understand is a phenomenon that the Hindus

call "non-attachment to the outcome."

A Montagnais healer is perhaps better called a "healing," for he does not actually

think of himself as doing any healing -- he merely participates in a process called healing

to such a total degree that his very self is subsumed into the activity. His identity or pride

is not attached to the outcome of the process, because in the end the outcome is not up to

him, but to the process itself, which includes the sick man as an equal partner. The healer

understands that the more he is able to let go of his own investment in the outcome, the

more of his self remains free to give over to the healing process (because it's not "stuck"

on results), and the more effective the healing will therefore be.

In our culture, we place such an emphasis on successful outcomes that we often

sabotage our own positive results with distracting anxieties about whether or not we'll

achieve those results. We do have people like the Montagnais healer, however. Ask any

top-notch surgeon if, in the middle of a triple-bypass operation, he spends his time

worrying about whether he'll succeed or fail. The reason he's a top-notch surgeon is that

he gives himself over totally to the task at hand, just like the healing Montagnais.

Ask this doctor later about what it feels like to be "in the zone" while he's

operating, and he's liable to tell you that he's in such an utterly different place mentally

that time has no meaning -- he can't be sure whether minutes or hours have passed. This
is the same sense of time we experience when an intense two-hour conversation with a

friend feels like a few minutes. It's the reason why browsing the internet is so addictive,

and it might be even more important than adrenaline for adrenaline-junkies. It's also the

"time out of time" that native peoples have lived in as a matter of course for thousands of

years.

Where did we go wrong?

Perhaps "wrong" is too strong a word. Our antsy ambition has taken us to the

moon and back, after all. We actually expect to make the world better over time. After

all, God made improvements to his Creation every day (except Sunday) of his first week

on the job. It was inevitable that we would make progress part of our ethic of interacting

with the world, because now the improvements are up to us. Unfortunately, we've made

a fetish out of progress by equating it with materialistic achievements, such as making

more money, and by narrowing its focus to include just our own lives ("As long as I'm

better off, the rest of you can jump in the lake.").

There is a peculiarly male flavor to our notion of time, which becomes

immediately apparent when we compare it to the alternative vision of time, which is

circular and repetitive, just like the cycles of the sun, the moon, the seasons, and, yes, the

monthly cycles of women themselves. It doesn't take much imagination to view our

linear arrow of time as a phallus, or to see the circle of cyclical time as a womb. And

since our arrow is meant to hit a target, we don't so much live in the present as in

anticipation of reaching a future objective, which, increasingly, is a goal we're supposed

to want rather than a dream we feel in the marrow of our bones. Life takes on the
character of a race -- reach your goal before you die. Instead of asking yourself, "Am I

happy now?," it's always "What have I done and what will I do to reach my goal?" Lord

help you if you suffer the ultimate anti-climax of actually achieving your goal and finding

out that the brass ring you've been reaching for looks like it came out of a Cracker Jack

box.

Since so many of us are stuck in this future-oriented, "let's make tomorrow better

than today" mindset, perhaps we should try simply being present in the world, responding

to others with unassuming goodwill, unencumbered by the obligation to have an impact

or help in some tangible way, though these options still remain open, of course, should

the occasion arise. Perhaps fathers will then feel free to spend more time simply being

with their wives and kids, rather than overworking themselves so they can buy the family

a new car to "prove" how much they care. The sad fact is, we don't always take the time

to adequately love one another. We're too busy contributing to progress.

[Author’s Note: Still a work in progress. Hope you found this interesting so far.]