You also know an awful lot about wine. Well, I like wine an awful lot. That might be a better way of putting it. So we're very grateful to have you here today. Thanks so much. I'm exceedingly happy to have been invited by Roshi and by Reb to be here. My ties and contact with Zen Activities have I've been since my teen years, and I know it's a number I look for quite... I tend to represent something in New York for a period of time, and as well have been a teacher of Haitian studies. So, um, like most teachers, I'm myself a constant student. Now, what I would propose to do at the start of things today is a very unorthodox approach to the subject of masculinity, femininity, roles, and things of that sort.

[01:13]

Perhaps because I was exposed to too much mathematics, too much logical philosophy, I find that discussions on subjects of this sort are usually like discussions on most subjects, rather idiotic. in which terms are used that have a personal, highly charged meaning on a felt level to people. And very strong opinions are expressed for or against given points of views or theories. And a great deal of peace and passion are generated.

[02:17]

Then when it's all over, if you're like me, you sometimes find yourself sitting back and saying, what was it all about? What was said? Or sometimes, if you really get involved in the hassle and the fight, you kind of feel What a bunch of ignorant bastards. They didn't see things as I did. In other words, they didn't see things very clearly. And such a bunch of dopes. They just couldn't seem to get the point. Or I knocked them dead, or whatever the case may be. And so the subjects were often discussed in terms of not only prejudices, but deep-rooted emotional investments of one sort or another. And rather like what the Buddha said about involvement during such discussion, there is too much at stake.

[03:32]

There is too much involvement for anything to be heard, for any response to take place, for a speaker to learn, or a hearer to learn, or really sort of a dynamic way to occur. What I'd like to do is to give you an idea of some of my prejudices, perspectives on the whole shoopy match that is a word I don't like at all, reality. And I'd like to talk about how things do and don't make sense. And from a little bit of talk about that, relate it to the concept of masculinity, femininity, opposition,

[04:37]

unification, the self that transcends polarities of life, but in a way in which these aren't just glib terms that one would say, hey, that term feels good, it's a right-on term, and go, man, go, or something like that. Now, as a point of departure, I would like us to consider what Heisenberg called the principle of indeterminacy, and which can be illustrated in a very simple statement such as we know less than we claim we either do or can just as i look down and say hey i knew i would don't have my shoes off and be in my stocking feet i wouldn't have such neat holes showing but i'm not that smart i really don't think that

[05:55]

hundreds of hours or even thousands of hours of training on how to put on socks and look at them before you put them on would make a difference. It would wind up about the same. Heisenberg, in his principle of indeterminacy, essentially said that the viewer... the viewer is always part of his visual field. The viewer is always part of his visual field. There is no perception, no activity, no measurement in which we do not observe ourselves as part of the field that we observe.

[06:58]

We don't observe the field. Rather, there is a transaction that occurs in which we are part of the visual field itself. The rods, the cones of our eyes, the taste buds of our mouth, hammers and anvils of the chambers of the air, and so on, the preconditions of nature and nurture. All of these form a grid, a configuration, such that whatever we perceive, that configuration, or to use the nice German word, that Gestalt, that configuration, and I'm not using the word as the Gestalt psychologist that today would use it, but as it's been used in philosophy and in German psychology through the 30s,

[08:08]

In other words, all that we experience of life are configurations. Now, Heisenberg, in this principle of indeterminacy, suggests that we are not viewers outside of the world. We do not stand outside of the world and regard the world as an object. Although there is a school of philosophers, the phenomenologists, for example, who would say otherwise. But for the most part, physicists or logicians would both agree that it is inconceivable that we can stand outside the world, not only because it's physically impossible, but because it is even logically impossible.

[09:33]

The world includes everything. That includes us. We are part of the world. Part of the world cannot be outside of the world. Rather like Francis Thompson's Pound of Heaven, if you know the wonderful 19th century spiritual poem, in which Thompson attempts to run away from the mystical presence of the divine, but the hounds of heaven keep running after him. Every time, every occasion in which we try to separate ourselves from the world, we are like the poet being chased by the hounds of heaven. Because the world, the universe, is there in us.

[10:35]

We are part of it. And so it not only is a physical impossibility that, for example, someday a spaceship might travel so far out that it will look back at the world, but it's also a logical impossibility because the spaceship and any area in which it traveled would be part of the world. And so it cannot be its own subject and object simultaneously. As a result, then, every perspective, every fact, every feeling, every observation, every awareness, every dream symbol, every bodily feeling, every everything is part of the world, and nothing is beyond.

[11:50]

Because anything, by virtue of being a thing, part of the world, part of this shooting match. And so we have no God's eye point of view. We have a bird's eye point of view only. This is one of the initial assumptions with which I would like to approach our subject. or indeed any subject that we ever talk about, because this approach makes the smartest of us less smart than we claim to be, and the dumbest a lot brighter. So I think it's in the interesting and very important starting point.

[12:54]

Now, Heisenberg very self-consciously went back to the great German philosopher Kant of the 18th century, whose critique of pure reason is to me the most significant work of modern philosophy. Kant, in the 18th century, analyzed the major fields of philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, all the rest of them, and noted that all of them are rooted in given assumptions, starting points, the given, like in Euclidean geometry. No

[13:56]

field of inquiry, whether factually or speculatively in its orientation, whether physics, biology, chemistry, or ethics or metaphysics, whatever the nature of the field, every field has axiomatic presuppositions that are the starting point of what defines the scope of the field And what is the nature and meaning of truth and falsity and meaning itself within it? And these are arbitrary. And Kant insisted, with one exception that I won't go into, it would be fascinating too if we were talking about metaphysics. Kant violated some of his own logic.

[14:57]

But Kant indicated that there are no factual universal truths that are the starting points of any fields of knowledge. We begin with givens. Or as people are more willing to say now, we begin with conventions. We set rules. Or as Wittgenstein said, we play language games, and each language game has its own rules. You don't play poker when you're playing dominoes. And you don't switch the language of the two. It's inappropriate. It's inappropriate because it doesn't accord to the ground rules. That's about where it rests.

[16:00]

So if you choose to play poker, then two kings and three queens is a mighty strong hand. But it would have no relevance to dominoes. And each of these have rules. that we agree upon by convention. Why? Because we want to make sense of things. That's why. And these rules are rooted in convenience, are rooted in language and the facility of communicating in ways that are shareable. than in any ultimate principles out of the universe or beyond or anything that is outside the range of normal human experience. So, for example, one of the starting points of mathematics

[17:08]

is that a squared plus b squared equals c squared if you are doing the measurement of an equilateral triangle, or in logic you have the law of non-contradiction that something cannot both be and not be the same thing at the same time. These are unprovable but useful starting points, but without them you cannot speak in that language. Otherwise, you shouldn't think. Now, I am not making any comments or appraisals in what I have said about whether or not there are other non-dispersive, non-linguistic, in a sense, non-rational ways of going beyond the limits of language and description.

[18:20]

So I'm making no comments about gods and goddesses or anything that's spooky or anything of the sort. I am saying If there's plausibility to any of these things, the plausibility is not of the same order as that which makes common sense in language and discourse. It's another range of functioning and activity. So this is the starting point, perspective on the subject that I would recommend. And I wonder if anyone has any thought or comment to share about it before we proceed. I'm just wondering what interest in Hawaii region is.

[19:23]

Well, what he means in indeterminacy is that events cannot be predicted totally. The principle came out of an observation in the first atomic reactors in which in 1924, 23 and 24, Heisenberg made photographic studies of the course of of charged particles the first time that this was done. And he very elaborately, combining mathematics and physics, proved that you cannot predict the course or the trajectory of the charged particle when it was emitted from the electrode. So it refers to a very specific set of experiments in a physics laboratory, because he was primarily a physicist.

[20:30]

And needless to say, this made him an exceedingly unpopular person, since scientists are the sacred cows of science. the 20th century until fairly recently when for many a reason they tended to lose credibility. But the whole guiding perspective of the 19th and 20th century from beginning to end up until fairly recently was that all events are predictable. All events are utterly subject to known or knowable laws that are totally knowable, if not totally known. In political forums, Marxism, fascism,

[21:33]

Any of the authoritarian forms of politics usually are accompanied by a belief that total knowledge is available and they've got it. To me, it's a rather ironic thing that we and the Soviet Union both had political leaders who feel that the powers of reality are absolutely on their side. The Soviet Marxists believe that the iron laws of history, as they are called, will cause the contradictions in capitalism to split capitalism asunder and inevitably, note the metaphysical, very religious word, inevitably, and inevitably there will be the triumph of the proletariat.

[22:37]

Well, I would say that as an Anglo-Catholic, my religious faith is not as strong as all that, or as an Anglo-Catholic Buddhist. At any rate, the whole point of departure is that everything is knowable, and especially some people do actually know it all, and they know it all not only for themselves, but for you, me, and everybody else. So that starting point was the dominant theme of political thought, social thought, aesthetic theory, music, social study, religion, all the rest of the 19th and most of the 20th century, that we can have full and complete knowledge. And with that full and complete knowledge, full and complete certainty, I myself would rather see less self-certain and self-righteous people be always within 50 feet of a button that can destroy 2 billion people.

[23:59]

But when you have either the historical force of the universe or a God in Christ who caused you to be born again as the authority for your behavior, then you are and must be utterly and absolutely in the right. And so the stance of being within the world, limited by it, conditioned by it, is a point of departure that is alien to authoritarians. But it's a very common point of view. many people who espouse supposedly liberal, progressive, whatever-you-will perspectives have the same conception of their certainty.

[25:06]

By the way, this goes back, too, to an old concept called original sin, that man is born into royalty. It goes back to Christianity and many, many other counterparts. So the starting point here is this. And what Heisenberg himself did, more in response to your question, was to see the implications for all of knowledge and experience of what he found in the laboratory, where lo and behold, science is not a sacred cow. And science itself begins with giving and is demarcated by limit, and each particular science has its limit. When you want to know how to make German chocolate cake, you don't call the plumber or a comic engineer. I think Julia Child would be a lot handier.

[26:14]

But likewise, when the laser device at Livermore went off its footing, and maybe the people who put it there in the first place were off their rocket, I don't know. But anyway, it went off its footing. I couldn't have engineers and Julia Childs and the KitchenAid repairing it. So everything has its own scope, its own limitation, its own usefulness. And as handy as it is to eat with a knife and fork or carrot chopsticks, I don't think that you'd like to play billiards with any of them. Any other thoughts or comments on this basic point of the furniture? Heisenberg was a mystic, but like many mystics, he very wisely didn't say the ultimate is indescribable, and now let me tell you all about it.

[27:31]

Just one big problem with pseudo-mystics. They really aren't. Because there is no mystery if they can tell you all about it. It's precisely when they can't that I at least feel like an inclusive person. Is there any place in this view, with the bird's eye view, of those states, though, you have when you are beyond that, when you do have what is called more transcendent view, and all-encompassing, and you're not just subjectively involved? Like a rapture, feeling of rapture, feeling of... of dissolving language and all the rest. Yeah, it's more sensing of things rather than trying to logically, you know, identify them. Yeah, yeah. The Upanishads speak of Nama Rupa as the most useful of all phenomena, of all phenomena.

[28:51]

Namo-rupa and also the most limiting as well. Does anyone know what Namo-rupa is? Name form. Back in Sanskrit, name, Namo, Namo. The giving of name and form to things is an absolute necessity. And in the Upanishads, as well as in Buddhist logic, you find such an appropriate, I would say, appropriate ambivalence about the entire concept of Nama Rupa.

[29:54]

What Nama Rupa says is that we ourselves do what the traditional mythologies have said the gods do. bit of like there was Yahweh and all the beasts went by and by and he said oh well let's call that one a heplump or an elephant and let's call that one a zebra and let's call that one a penguin and all the rest and uh By the magic of word, word magic, God spoke and it was done. The mystical, mysterious power of language that gods or God gave name and form to everything and thereby not only created them but gave them place, meaning, and distinguishing feature. Well, the principle of Nama Rupa says that we do that.

[30:59]

And incidentally, it was concept that the German philosopher Nietzsche went bug-eyed when his closest friend and one of the first German endologists, Roder, wrote a two-volume work on kind of thought presented to him. He was just bug-eyed over it because it fit so well with what he was saying, that the job of the human life is to do what mythology has ascribed to the gods, to create, to take the chaotic and give it meaning. give it form, give it beauty. And so we would do what traditionally had been ascribed to powers beyond us.

[32:02]

So the giving of name and form places us very much into the subject-object relationship of the viewer and the visual field. Without name and form, that process doesn't take place. So the transcendence of name and form is a strange phenomenon. It requires name and form to reach the point where you can transcend name and form. You have to have language in order to shut up. And at the same time, in shutting up, you're in a different game. You're in a different game altogether. Now, does that game give you... Let's say it gives you, for want of a better phrase, mystic intuition.

[33:11]

Does it give you mystic intuition? the reality? Or does it release you merely from slavery to name and form? Now the Hindus and some of the Buddhists have said that when you go beyond nama-rupa, you enter into direct encounter with God and the divine reality itself. In Zen, going beyond nama-rupa is being right where you were without all the distraction. And it doesn't speak about an out there as opposed to an in here.

[34:15]

And the I, thou, subject, object is utterly split. Whereas in a way, in traditional religious points of view, it's enhanced. When, for example, good old Moses took off his shoes as we did because he saw the burning bush and said the ground on which I am now standing is holy. He encountered a very specific ultimate personal reality beyond himself. So you see, going beyond Nama Rupa can take many forms. It can be anthropomorphic, as with old Moses. It could take the form of being here in a state in which you have unlearned what has been necessary for you to learn, or any other number of variants in between.

[35:28]

So I'm not answering your question directly. I would suggest that I personally very much believe that there is a mystical vision. But is that mystical vision the nirvana that is right here with me in this samsara? Or is it something on the outside about which I have many intellectual qualms? kind of shook from one foot to the next. And one of these days when I grow up, I might know the answer to it. That's one of the reasons why I don't go around with a dog collar and all that. But also I have an entirely dismissed the point, circumstance, and hard wash as well.

[36:36]

So I'm sort of on all bases in that game. I don't know if it relates to metabolism when I'm had for breakfast, cosmic uncertainty, economic, political uncertainty, cheerfulness about myself, the world, others on a given day, or just... about it all or what, but I really can't, I really can't give you even an answer from me other than it's a grab and I'd rather not be quoted one time for what I've said in the other one this whole match because I really don't know. And I really don't think it's that important to know. But who knows, I might grow up. Anyone else have a thought to share on this general overview?

[37:41]

Now, this has implications that are very direct and immediate. that relate to words that were used very rarely. Words like reality, Is there an objective reality outside of our sense organs? Or Bishop Barclay's example of the tree falling. Everyone puts it in Siberia. Well, that's not in Barclay's text. But the tree fell in Siberia, and there was no one around to hear it fall. Did it make a sound? So that's a profound question. Well, that's really bad grammar. If a tree fell in Siberia and there was no one around, did its fall create sound waves? Would be proper grammar, proper meaningful use of language.

[39:00]

But that blows all the kit and caboodle of partisan metaphysical speculation and debate and all the rest. And people say to guys like me, oh, you're a party pooper. To me, the reason that there are so many ancient questions that have never been satisfactorily answered is that they're lousy questions. questions that are not true questions, it makes sense. It isn't that no one has yet come up with a good enough answer. So, at any rate, reality and that tree, you know, what many good people say, oh, what's real for me and what's real for you are two different things, but if it works for you, it's okay, and if it works for me, it's okay, and Then you wonder what they do when they come to an unmarked intersection.

[40:03]

A lunch. But at any rate, this is to say, of course, that there is no such thing. If you take seriously what Kant, Eisenberg, and more contemporary mathematicians and logicians talked about, The word reality doesn't refer to anything. And if you look at the ways in which the word is used, it's used in such a variety of ways. In any given paragraph by any given writer, the chances are it has six or seven different meanings within that one paragraph. I prefer to talk about our experience, our descriptions of it, our language, things like that.

[41:04]

And since what we are talking about, masculinity, femininity, the masculine, feminine, and especially the feminine component, we're approaching a big issue in the field of thought known as ethics. Now, I'll say right from the start, I put a loaded definition of the term on the blackboard. Ethics is various theories that prescribe the norms of conduct. There isn't one set of ethics. For example, there's Thomistic ethics, the ethics of St. Thomas, which would say that screwing's okay if it produces babies, and if you were married and fully wedlocked, so on and so forth. There are the ethics of eudaimonism, that if you feel morally uplifted, however you define it, then it's good.

[42:12]

Teleological ethics, that if it aims towards a larger good for society or for yourself, whether it's in a social or an individual form, it is good. What's called good, bad, right, wrong, all have different starting points, different clear E's, the plural. There isn't one such thing as ethics. There are many divergent theories of ethics. And here, too, I just find myself so perplexed. I've taught this stuff for 20 years. I've written about it. And I feel more at home here than here, because all the starting points are various theories of ethics, like utilitarianism.

[43:24]

What is good is that which provides a greater well-being for the greatest number of people. as opposed to egoistic hedonism, but that which gives the individual a sense of well-being is the greatest good. Choose between the two. And then add on 40 other theories and choose between 42. I think it would be mighty nice if there were only one. Then I wouldn't have any problem. But with 42 to choose from, I haven't made up my mind yet. So I'm kind of inclined towards some and not towards others. So I'm more interested, though, as a philosopher, in the analysis of the meaning of term. How does a person use words like good, bad, right, wrong, moral, immoral, legal, illegal?

[44:29]

And what are the distinctions in the way in which he uses them? Are they contradictory? Or do they cohere? That's about as far as I can get. Does it make sense? In a very loose way, I have a very infantile that whatever enhances freedom at nobody else's expense, it's fairly much okay. I would have called it good, but it's fairly much okay. Beyond that, I can't go myself. So here, too, it's just like, you know, when I... I was accustomed as a kid to little cafeterias and all that, and then went into a great big one. What the heck do you do in a great big cafeteria? Too many choices. Can everything look so good?

[45:32]

I had dinner on a Friday night at a French restaurant in Berkeley. We had their regular Christ dinner. We had all the desserts when we came by and narrowed them down to about three. Well, after the main course and the salad were taken away, out she came with some diced up yucca. at least for me, are just too broad. And I get too bug-eyed being very childish and self-indulgent to be able to make a choice. So there, too, it'll wait, at least as far as I'm concerned, until I grow up. So I have the kind of ethical commitments that I hold to rather rigorously.

[46:32]

But I'm more interested in this, under the assumption that we clear up at least how people talk. We'll get along better. It makes sense when we talk. Now, these are the basic perspectives from which I would propose to deal with the subject of the role of the feminine component in the spiritual life. It's interesting, when you make a listing like this, the masculine is on the left, man, woman, male, female, masculine, feminine, and the

[47:35]

Left is supposed to be the feminine, and the right is supposed to be the masculine. Which itself is a paradox that shows a point which I will draw to greater attention in this moment. We all know, of course, the yet-chi, the yet-yang. And yet, you know, it's rather interesting. And just to check on my own memory of it, I looked at what is the most commonly reproduced the Yezhi-Yin-Yang diagram in English language publication because of its size.

[48:48]

A very large percentage of Yezhi are photo offsets of this one in Darby Norman's heroic encounter. And she calls it The yin-yang. And note. Here we have the light. And here we have the dark. And it is called the yin-yang. Now, which would you say plausibly would be the yin and which the yang? The woman as yin.

[49:51]

The masculine as yang. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And which way are they depicted in the diagram? The woman down the left here. The feminine down the left. In the diagram. Which is the sun? Oh, you mean the thought in the middle? No. What is this? What does this have? The light have. Which is the light have? The feminine. The feminine. I'm going to say the feminine. I'm going to say the masculine. This is part of the very basic, to me, more than passing, more than passing contradiction in even the way diagrams are made and words are listed.

[50:55]

Well, I guess in terms of names, Mr. Yang, would be appropriate, and Ms. Yin would be appropriate ways of putting it. So that Yin is the feminine and Yang is the masculine. But the light, the sun, the more radiant body, the day, as opposed to the dark, the moon, the night, that which reflects the light of the other body. So this is the active, and this is the passive. Make this the yang.

[52:01]

And there's the yin. So the yin yang is really the yang yin. Just like if you looked in any work by Freud, Jung, Erich Neumann, or any other number of people on dream symbolism, or in art history, the right and the left. The right is always masculine, the left always feminine. In the grades of Christendom, the representative of manhood, of masculinity, Jesus Christ, sits at the right hand of the Father.

[53:05]

In traditional Christian art, the Virgin Mary is at the left. And of course, if you can visualize a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Guadalupe is the moon mother of antiquity on the crescent moon. She represents the night, and her color is blue. Blue in honor of the night, the virgin, in honor of Isis, in honor of the depths of the water, midnight blue. So there is a gross ambiguity and confusion, even in our language and our description, as to what constitutes the male or the female or the masculine or the feminine.

[54:15]

And I'll be separating these two pretty soon. Because in the diagram called Chinese Yin and Yang, Yang is where Yin should be and Yin is where Yang should be. And then our demarcation, man-woman, male-female, masculine-feminine. You may argue, well, the order of precedence is male chauvinism. You read it out. Uh-uh. Is that right? And the role of the feminine is where the masculine is placed. Wouldn't it be odd to say a woman-man, female-male, feminine-masculine,

[55:19]

We are so habituated by our language usage to think and to speak and to hear and to see that way. So I would suggest that there is an inherent ambiguity, not so much in the definitions of these words, but in the way the words are used. the words are used very ambiguously. And if you are a person who at all is inclined to give credibility to unconsciousness and the activity of unconscious processes, There would be a more than passing moment to take strong note of how ambiguous even these basic terms are, not in their definition, first of all, but in their use.

[56:37]

I'll talk about ambiguities of definition in a minute. But ambiguities of use. right off the bat, the thing is kind of screwed up, isn't it? The yin-yang is the yang-yang. The male-female is the female-male. The male on the right, the female on the left. Those of you who have bed dates of the opposite sex, I wonder who's on the right and who's on the left. And many of you will say, well, now, is it facing bed forward or bed out? But we won't get into theory of perspective and the use of figures in art. But at any rate, And I'm not advising, by the way, that those of you who sleep on one side or in the other gender should immediately switch to the other side of the bed because it may be that you have an overabundance either of yin or yang that may be corrected by sleeping on that side of the bed.

[58:05]

So it may be very therapeutic. Well, I'm not suggesting that you jump from one side of the bed to the other because of this. It may be that each chain would say, ah, correction invalid. Keep it just the way it is. And I would say especially if it's comfortable. Okay, are there any thoughts or comments before we proceed further? Do you think it's a matter of how we write? Would it make a difference if we wrote women men or men women? Well, it's interesting, though, that in ancient Chinese temples, for example, it's usual that when there are protective deities of opposite genders on either side,

[59:29]

but the male was on the right, the female was on the left. Just as there were, well, this is in the Elephanta in the south of Egypt and upper Egypt. You know, the ancient Hebrews were supposed to have no sculpture, no art. There was a Jewish temple probably in the 6th and 7th century B.C., in which Zedek and Shalom are on either side of the entranceway, and the male, Shalom is on the right, and the female is on the left. Righteousness. Wisdom. So it's sort of the same thing that in artistic representation, this tends to be not an absolute norm, but a fairly common norm.

[60:42]

But I think that this is really a very precious, more clear-cut example, if you will. of the ambiguity, the very basic inherent ambiguity in the way words are used. And then sometimes you hear old, very macho athletes make comments in which they'll flip out cross-gender references to themselves, things of that sort. And very, very neat things when they happen. I rejoice immensely every time something like that occurred myself. But at any rate, let's take these terms, male and female, masculine and feminine.

[61:45]

Male and female tend to mean we Well, in human genetics, at least, the male is the source of the white chromosome. The female are only X chromosomes. The woman is the egg producer. The man, the vermi producer. phylogenetically, going back to plants exposed, but both that receive borers or what have you for insemination. And this is probably a lot of what went into the Chinese yang and yin distinction. Now, from today's point of view, I would call them sexist, chauvinist, all kinds of fascist terms, and I think it would be a correct application of them to a time when they were inapplicable because the concepts had no relevance in that era.

[63:05]

But, active pass out The sense of rhythm in the universe, in the body, blood pressure has its systolic and diastolic. The year has its seasons. the rhythm, the basic rhythm, inhalation, exhalation. One of the Vedic hymns speaks of worlds coming and going, in and out of creation, as Rahman. inhale, thereby destroying all the world, and exhale, and thereby creating our world. And each Mahayuga, each great age, is an exhalation of Brahman. So rhythm, rhythm, whether it's the heartbeat,

[64:13]

Man-made sounds like the tick-tock of a clock surround us, as do fields of force that tend to be polar, light and dark, active and passive, awake and asleep, and all the rest. And the Chinese, at first, very arbitrarily, a whole list of goodies that were strong and powerful and that were very solar. Those were male. And those that were lunar, We're female, and of course, men are very strong, and of course, gals are to look up to their hero with passionate evenings of their bosoms of adoration of their he-man.

[65:25]

And that's the nature of things, isn't it? Isn't it? Isn't it? Isn't it? Oh, it isn't? Well, see, that's the problem with the Yezhi. It makes a point, and it makes a good point, but it drives it to the ground. And without going into it in much detail, the Book of Changes, the I Ching, modifies it with all sorts of gradations and interfusions of yin and yang, and interprets these as always in motion in any given individual, and having a balance in all things, so that all beings, all creatures, male, female, or whatever, themselves are composite of yin and yang forces, so that within yang is this

[66:32]

bamboo that Dot has given, or then Yang as this component of the Yang. Just as the male body produces female hormones, the female body produces male hormones. And going back to the biological origins of life as just sexual before it was male or female, there are vestiges of male and female organism and organ development in men and women that are cross-gendered. whether it be the clitoris, breast, so on. So there was even biologically, even in anatomical detail, the presence of a female component with a male component with a female component.

[67:47]

Don't we all get all present that we produce testosterone? You'd be in trouble if you didn't. And so, in our bodies, in nature itself, there seems to be So they went on from this rather kite-bound, narrow original conception to refined awareness of it, which said that things are in flux, things are dynamic, and these are moving. This is moving into here and into here. And there are seasonings of life experience when one predominates over the other. I don't think, I don't know how many years it's been since I wrote a poem at home.

[69:07]

And by home, not only meaning my health, but the United States. I think that I'm in very, very close touch with my feminine component. Sometimes a little bit too much, though, in terms of getting into trouble, but that's fun too. But there is one aspect of it. I can't write a successful poem at this stage in my life in the good old USA. And I just wrote a couple of poems. And I kind of think it would be something I'd feel glad to do. I could put together some verse that isn't too worse, and, you know, I wouldn't have to yellow nurse or be very terse and still do it and mistake.

[70:26]

But there's a bit of a feminine component that I can't quite express on familiar terrain, if that is a feminine component. We'll get to it in one of the poetry books, which is very feminine. Most people write poetry in that. But at any rate, male and female are not masculine and feminine Now, male and female are biological terms. Masculine and feminine are social, societal, or if you like, sociological designation. They're culture bound terms. Pete Franklin Frazier.

[71:30]

one of my close professors put it very nicely without saying very much in saying it, but he said that what is masculine is what a society or a culture, now he used the word culture. He was a sociologist, I'm not. He wouldn't have said society. Masculine is the manner in which a culture or a subculture expect males to behave. Permanent is the way in which a culture or a subculture expects women to behave. You know, the simplest definition that I've ever heard And I can't say that I've come across a better one. Does anyone have a suggestion for a better one?

[72:34]

In other words, one is biology. The other is culture or subcultural knowledge. that takes us to ethics, to a particular value system of cultural and subcultural group. Now, we think of fancy dress as being feminine, dark dress as being masculine. Well, like Mother Nature, With birds, most of the pretty birds are the males. And most of the birds without the multicolored plumes and all are the females. With fish, it's divided evenly. With sea mammals, the females have the more notable

[73:48]

decorations, if you will. And with plants, the female tend to be more multi-viewed and what have you than the male. So in Mother Nature, there is no norm that would say that star decor is male. and multicolored flamboyant decor is female. But different cultures may say that dark decor is masculine and multicolored or flamboyant is feminine. Now, take a walk down Well, I find myself on California Street occasionally. I am in the business district, and I notice the men there wearing suits of all kinds of colors and ties and a lot of fancy hankies in their pocket and things of that sort.

[75:05]

And these are supposed to be very male-male. And take a walk on Balsam, around the gay bars, or on Castro. And cambric shirts and curtains are it. And utter minimum amount of decor. And it may have been a cliche of years ago that screaming queens were all gussied up with all kinds of flamboyant clothes and jewels and all the rest like Oscar Wilde. But that most surely would get you beaten up if you walked down on Castro Street, and not by gay bashers, but by... So what is male, what is female, what is masculine, what is feminine?

[76:08]

The prescription for homosexual dress on both of them is essentially very macho, as our culture defines macho. And I won't forget how amusing it was when I lived in Sarasota, Florida, and when you another gay magazine, Huncho, first came out. It was a big stack of a magazine shop, and a guy was in the magazine store with his girlfriend and saw Huncho, a magazine for macho males, and he says, hey, that's for me. And then he picked up and laid through it, and was quite a bit taken aback and did quite a bit of pointing and pointing at being him to his girlfriend.

[77:21]

So what is masculine, what is feminine, is what is determined as appropriate by cultural group and cultural subgroups. Of course, that automatically means that at any given point, With an energetic culture, there can be endless different norms, depending upon the subcultural norm. There are much more of a macho male. In El Barrio, if you have a low rider, goes bumpy, [...] bumpy. That's a 48 convertible, but the chrome just perfect, the paint just perfect, and all the rest. Then if you had a 1980 Ferrari, that would be very un-macho.

[78:32]

That would be very yuck. It would be a girl's car. On the other hand, if you were for Sutro, like Mr. Feinstein, the mayor's husband, whatever his name is, I don't think that a lowrider would be regarded as a very macho car, but a Ferrari or a Maserati would. So these things are defined as masculine, feminine. In these cases, not by culture, but by the subculture. The subculture of the business and brokerage community, the subculture of the barrio, and then let's say the subculture of the barrio ascendant,

[79:36]

would not be a low rider in the subculture of a stockbroker who had made so many bucks that he doesn't give a damn, would be to do what one of our prominent friends who has a seat on the New York Stock Exchange does, goes to and from the exchange in his office on his motorcycle, and he has a big heavy chain with a padlock worked off. and that's the way he conducted it in Ballard, well, pretty brokerish for him. So these are all defined, and they have little to no relationship to male and female. There isn't directly of length between masculine and feminine and male and female, because many times what is regarded as the one is the opposite of what is regarded as the same at another time.

[80:55]

In the court of Louis XIV, the time of Madame Pompadour of the famous hairdo, women's hair was piled sky-high. Men paid great attention to their hair. In the 40s and 50s especially, women wore page boys and simple hairstyles, and men paid much more attention to their hair. And nowadays, Men don't go to barber shops. They go to hairstylists. And many a guy would be afraid to tell his wife how much he spent as a hairstylist for fear of getting a bop on the beam. And so, on the other hand, in the 30s and early 40s, oh, the crew cuts. no attention to hair. The other thing was very masculine, considered very male thereby, because of the confusion of masculinity and maleness.

[82:09]

I guess my days would be the 30s and early 40s, of not having too much of a bother to work on anyway. At any rate, These terms are relative, but relative in a very specific way. They are relative to the norms of a cultural or subcultural group. Many a person will say of things that are relative, oh, well, they're relative, so differences don't matter. You send a guy walking up Mission Street and 22nd with a rouge on and dangling earrings and he won't walk very far. So the fact that something is relative is not to say that it doesn't matter.

[83:18]

It's to say that it applies to groups that are larger or smaller, more dominant in the culture or more subordinate within the culture. They are relative to those groups wherein they are norms. There's nothing that looks freakish to one person that isn't the norm, not only to the person whom the individual may think to look freakish, and not only to that person, but to those like him, however few they may be. So when one says that these are relative, it isn't to say that they don't count or that they are unimportant.

[84:21]

They count so much that they literally can be matters of life and death. So masculinity and femininity are terms that have no intrinsic no inherent fixed meaning. Their meanings are always their meanings within given contexts, but that doesn't say that they don't count for much. I'm not saying what they should or shouldn't count. That's another matter. Shouldn't, shouldn't. With 40 cents, we'll get you a cup of coffee at a cheap greasy spoon. Your shoulds and shouldn'ts have very little bearing on the matter. But it's what is and what ain't. Okay, is this a merry-run which anyone would like to share their thoughts?

[85:29]

Now I'm going to get to, in a while, is a bunch of different viewpoints about people, what we're all supposedly like, according to people who know us better than we do, or at least who think they do. But I think this is another very important round-roar level of perspective. from which we can look at things that people have said with a bit of clarity, good logic, and common sense. Let me note, here we are at

[86:50]

something which is easy to define, but essentially is a biological description of the way a person happens to be built. Here we have what societies, cultures, subcultures, moral and ethical, religious, and other types of traditions have done with it and have said there are corresponding sets of behavior, appearance, and activity that are masculine, that are fitting for males, and that are feminine and are fitting for females.

[87:52]

But what I would like to state before we proceed further, right off the bat, is how wise, especially in the refined neo-Confucianistic view, but looked upon to be achieved as active and interactive. How far ahead they were of the wise guys of the 19th and early 20th century in the West. who believed in laws of progress and succession, like Hegel's and Marx's stages of the dialectic that the thesis stage of historical development or natural development as Engels expanded it would be followed by its opposite and in turn out of its opposite would come a new synthesis which in turn would give rise to other contradictions.

[89:06]

Opposites, opposites, opposites, antagonisms. Now the ancient wisdom of China... and the ancient wisdom of the Western occult tradition both saw things very differently, very much closer to what today we would consider dynamic and humanistic perspectives. For example, the In the ancient Kabbalah, the Hebrew occult tradition that developed in the early Middle Ages and in turn influenced many of the Islamic mystics, Christian mystics, and the central image of which, the tree of light with its ten centers,

[90:16]

is the guideline motif in the construction of Chartres Cathedral. And if you found yourself at Chartres, I could show you how the ten separate themes, the ten reality centers of the Tree of Light are incorporated in the very construction of pillars windows and doorways of the Cathedral of Chartres. But in the essentially Middle Ages, clear through to the Western occult tradition of today, there was what was originally the Neoplatonistic, much older view that ultimate reality is a nameless void, a nameless void, very much like the reality before and after Nama Rupa that we talked about.

[91:28]

Ainsa was actually threefold, but I won't go into it. That the ultimate reality manifests itself in ten stages called the Tree of Light. And for our purposes, I will simplify it by yelling, By leaving off several of them, a very nice way to simplify things. Let's see. Am I seeing the tree of life? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. There we go. OK, now. These are actually built here and these are actually built here.

[92:36]

It's much more complicated than I'm drawing now. But the Tree of Life is saying

[92:45]

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