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Impeach #CRMP

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(Adapted from The Bliss Book, available soon)

im·peach
imˈpēCH/
verb
  1. call into question the integrity or validity of (a practice).
    “there is no basis to Searle’s motion to impeach the verdict”
    synonyms: challenge, question, disparage, criticize, call into question, raise doubts about, cast aspersions on
    “the headlines impeached their clean image”

This acronym #CRMP is pronounced like the name “Crump.” And, I’ll start by addressing the proverbial elephant in the virtual room. Donald Trump is a horrible human being. There is, quite justifiably, a movement to be #Ungovernable under his regime and to impeach him from the position of President of the United States. However, I will attempt to show that removing Trump is not the answer to the problem that we are seeking to solve. Trump is only a symptom of a much deeper and older problem; around 10,000 years old. Getting rid of Trump will only lead to a new version of Trump stepping into his spot. #CRMP is what we must remove if we seek to make a better world and live happier lives.

#CRMP stands for: Capitalism, Religion, Monogamy, and Patriarchy. I intend to show that all four of these concepts were created around the same time, and were meant to support one another. I also intend to show that these four concepts are what stand in the way of peace and happiness for individuals, as well as the world as a whole. Now let me give some more definitions to make sure that we’re on the same page about what it is that we are discussing.

By capitalism, I am referring to the economic system in which maximizing profit is the prime motive for all economic activity. A small number of people control the vast majority of the capital, and they employ human beings and natural resources to produce goods and services which they can use to acquire even more capital.

By religion, I am referring to the type of organized religion that most people in Western society are familiar with; a vindictive God who looks down upon humanity ready to punish people for not doing what He desires — for not following the rules-laws-commandments.

By monogamy, I mean the general idea that human beings are supposed to only be in a romantic relationship with one person at a time. That having a sexual or emotional connection with someone other than your partner is a serious offense. And that this is how things “naturally” are, that there is something “wrong” with you if you don’t or can’t be “faithful” to the person you are in a relationship with.

By patriarchy, I refer to the usually unwritten and unspoken assumption in Western society that men are naturally meant to dominate over women; and that men are more fully human than women are. Men have more freedoms than women and make more money than women because men are better than women. We are taught this idea all the time, whether we are consciously aware of it or not.

These four concepts together create a cultural system that serves to separate people from nature, separate us from each other, and separate us from parts of ourselves. I will show how and why that is by explaining some history.

Human beings have been on the planet, mainly in Africa, for millions of years. One of the earliest fossils of a hominid (a primate walking upright on two feet) dates back to around six million years ago. Scientists generally agree that modern humans with our current anatomy and brain size, homo sapiens, evolved around 200,000 years ago. So over the course of the past couple hundred thousand to couple million years, we have developed some habits as a species.

For the vast majority of our time as a species, all groups of humans lived in what is called the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. That term specifically refers to the combination of hunting animals as well as foraging/gathering whatever plant foods naturally grow from the ground. Anthropologists have referred to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle as being “fiercely egalitarian.” That means that everyone in the group was equal and they shared all of their resources with everyone equally. Everyone got the same amount of food no matter how much work they personally put into acquiring the food. Everyone also got the same amount of love and affection and nurturing that everyone else got. These things held true throughout time and throughout every part of the world that we traveled to over tens of thousands of years. Hunter-gatherer people in Africa and Australia and North and South America and the Pacific Islands and elsewhere have all been found to share these same basic cultural traits. As a species, we made a collective decision that this was the way that we chose to live. Why?

In comparison to other animals, humans are pretty weak. We don’t run very fast, we’re not very strong, we can’t climb very well, and we can’t fly. We’re really vulnerable. However, we found that our greatest strength was our ability to work together. We were able to use teamwork to make finding food and protecting ourselves from predators easier. The more we worked together in these various ways, the more we needed to communicate, the more we developed our capacity for language, which in turn caused our brains to grow, which gave us even more capacity for communication and teamwork. Our large brains and capacity for intelligence is what gave us the potential to become the dominant planetary species that we are today, but it all started with our commitment to communicating well and working together and sharing everything equally.

Because our early Ancestors foraged for whatever food the Earth provided for them, they moved around a lot. They would come to a spot where food was growing abundantly, and they would stay there until the food started to run out, then they would move to another area. Moving around all the time meant that it wasn’t practical for them to have a lot of belongings. When they arrived in a new spot, they would build huts from the grass and sticks that they found there. They didn’t wear very many clothes. They didn’t need very many cooking supplies. When they left a spot and moved on, they left their huts behind and made new ones in the next spot.

No one owned much of anything. Whatever food they acquired all ended up getting consumed. A few clothing items, a digging stick, maybe a spear, and a bottle to drink water from was all that any one person would keep. The idea of having property and inheritances was completely unknown to them.

Starting around 12, 000 years ago, people started experimenting with this new idea of taking seeds from plants that were eaten, putting the seeds back into the ground, and growing new plants from those seeds. In the Near East, it was wheat, barley, and peas. In China, it was rice and millet. In Mexico, it was squash and corn. People also started domesticating cattle, goats, sheep, and pigs; training these wild animals to start staying in one group and moving when and where the humans wanted them to. This development of agriculture between 9 and 12 thousand years ago is what scientists call the Neolithic Revolution.

For the first time, people were able to stay in one place instead of having to constantly move around for food. Apparently, that idea was very appealing to people because the Neolithic Revolution spread very quickly, all over the world. With people now staying in one spot, they were able to now start building more permanent homes made from mud and brick instead of temporary homes made from grass and sticks. They were able to start making and owning furniture and art and clothes and other items. And they began to become attached to one area of land where their food was growing. Suddenly, for the first time, human beings were introduced to the concept of “this stuff is MINE.” No longer was everything shared equally, now people started to have personal property. This was most definitely a revolutionary time in human history. Everything changed in that moment. The seed was sown for #CRMP.

With people now having these new thoughts like “this is my tree” and “that is my garden” and “those are my cows” and “this is my stream”, it naturally led to disputes over ownership. Is that tree really mine or is it yours? We didn’t have any experience with how to answer a question like that because previously nothing belonged to any one person. In fact, the Earth as a whole didn’t belong to anyone. The Earth was sovereign and all of us were just thankful that the Earth was gracious enough to share her fruits and vegetables and animals with us. But now, we needed a system for handling disputes. And the answer to “whose is this?” came to often be answered in the same way that it is in the rest of the animal kingdom. “I’m the strongest, so it is mine!”

Instead of sharing and compassion and communication being the supreme cultural values as they had been for many thousands of years, all of a sudden strength and dominance and the ability to coerce became the most useful characteristics. The strongest person became the leader of the group. The strongest group became the leader of the region. The strongest gender became the leader of the species. Physical strength and mental competitiveness were everything.

In hunter-gatherer life, no one was in control of anyone else. Males and females were equal in authority. There were no governments and employers, all people made all group decisions in a purely democratic way. Even children were not under the domination of adults. Children directed their own education and did what they chose to do, for the most part — adults still took the necessary minimum precautions to ensure child safety.

But now that the strongest people began to own things, they had to come up with ways of keeping the things that they owned. Even after they died. Men owned their home and their land and their women and their children. It became custom for a father who owned his daughter to one day “give his daughter away” to the man who would become her husband, in exchange for some money. This was what we call Patriarchy. And when a man died, he was able to pass down his belongings to his children, usually with his firstborn son getting more than all the other siblings. But the practice of passing down inheritance from one generation to another caused another conflict with the old hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Hunter-gatherer people had very few rules about who could have sex with who and when. Almost all hunter-gatherer societies were matrilineal, meaning that people traced ancestry through their mother and their mother’s mother and so on. That was because no one could ever be sure of who their father was. Sex and affection was one of the things that people freely shared with one another. People would often share a hut with whomever they were “in love with” at the time, and when the feeling passed, they would both move on to the next person whom they felt drawn to. Sometimes those pair bonds would last for several years, sometimes for months, and sometimes just for one night. All adults in the group shared the parenting duties for all children born in the group. There was absolutely no concept of a nuclear family, with one husband and one mother and several children, separated from everyone else.

But in the new world of personal property, a man had a need to know for sure that his children belonged to him, so that his property could be passed on to those through whom his life continued after he went to the grave. So it was necessary to come up with the idea of Monogamy — that two people would be wed and then it would be against the rules for them to have sexual relations with anyone else. However, those rules were mainly only applied to women. Men would sometimes have more than one wife, sometimes men would have concubines or women who live with the man but have lower status than his wife or wives. Whatever the details were, men could do whatever they really wanted to with their sexuality, but women’s sexuality became the property of their husbands.  In every post-Neolithic society in the world, the culture has built-in outlets for men to freely explore their sexuality (prostitutes, strippers mistresses, etc), while women are tightly confined in using their sexuality only for the pleasure of their husbands.

The new culture that came along with the rise of agriculture produced a need for new forms of social cohesion. Previously, the values of cooperation and sharing held everyone in a group together. The team was strong because it needed to be in order for everyone to survive and thrive. With the rise of agriculture, people still had a need for groups to work well together. Those with the power needed to make sure that everyone played by the rules and played their parts in creating wealth for those with power. This was accomplished by the creation of what we have come to know as Religion.

Priests came to fill a myriad of roles within the group. Priests were often the judges who settled disputes between people that couldn’t be solved by simply showing who was the strongest. But the two most important functions of the priest were: 1) telling the people the instructions from God, and 2) overseeing the social rituals that made everyone feel like a part of the group.

A very effective way of getting people to go along with all the new rules in society, which people didn’t really like very much, was to tell them that there was a very powerful God who would punish them if they didn’t obey. Hunter-gatherer people didn’t believe in a God who controls everything and has the power to bless or punish people based on following the rules. But in the agricultural world, Gods now had extreme authority and very strong opinions about the behavior of people. These new Gods were very useful in controlling the sexuality of women and also in making sure that workers went to work everyday without rising up and overthrowing their bosses.

Groups like fraternities and militaries and street gangs all demonstrate the usefulness of ritual in bringing people together around a common identity and for a common cause. Religions developed rituals like animal sacrifice, human sacrifice, circumcision, tattooing, and other things that require some level of physical or mental pain in order for people to show that they are willing to sacrifice in order to be part of the group. Thereby showing that they can be trusted to go along with the rules. Anyone unwilling to get the tattoo or drink the blood would face expulsion from the group, or worse. Societies built on power and obedience must have rituals like this in order to measure everyone’s level of obedience.

A 19th century British politician known as Lord Acton famously said that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” When human beings moved from having collective ownership of all things to having personal property, the seed of corruption was sown. In hunter-gatherer life, people get a sense of security from the group’s sharing. The more you willingly and lovingly share with other people, the more secure you can feel that other people will always share whatever they have with you. The natural tendency for competition is neutralized by the social values of cooperation. But if the only safety net you have is your own personal wealth and power, then the only way to increase your sense of security is to pursue more and more wealth and power.

And thus began the Game of Thrones. That popular television series is actually a very accurate visual representation of what world history has looked like for the past several thousand years. A small group of people seize power over a large group of people. That small group makes the rest of the people work ridiculously long and hard hours to generate more wealth and power for the small group. Meanwhile, some other small group is plotting on how to take over the seat of power for themselves. And whether by political cunning or military force or covert assassination or other means, eventually most kings get their heads cut off, as Basquiat said. And there is a seemingly never-ending cycle of powerful people overthrowing other powerful people, or joining forces with other powerful people, and the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.

But this cycle can only be maintained as long as the masses of the people continue to willingly give their power to the masters. When the masses get fed up and decide to use the power of their numbers, then the wealth of the masters matters very little. No matter how many dollars or coins you own, if the workers will no longer work for you, then your power is gone. The primary concern for the masters is: “how do I constantly convince the masses that they don’t actually have ALL of the power because they are the majority?”

An analysis of 2016 data found that the poorest half of the world’s population own about $410 billion in total wealth. As of June 8, 2017, the world’s richest five men owned over $400 billion in wealth. Thus, on average, each man owns nearly as much as 750 million people. It is #CRMP that allows these men to sleep at night without being in paralyzing fear that the masses of the people will rise up and slaughter them.

To be clear, you don’t have to belong to any particular religion or have taken any particular classes in school or have any particular kind of family upbringing in order to believe in #CRMP. The culture of the entire post-Neolithic world with its masters/masses relationship makes #CRMP omnipresent, permeating every aspect of life, whether we realize it or not.

To reiterate an earlier point, the fiercely egalitarian hunter-gatherer cultures shared not only resources, they also shared authority. There were no governments in these cultures. There were no police in these cultures. Even parents didn’t exercise authority over their children… I know that sounds like crazy talk. I must be mistaken, right? To give you a sense of hunter-gatherers’ parenting philosophy, here is a sample of quotations from anthropologists and others who have lived in various hunter-gatherer societies and observed them closely:

  • “Hunter-gatherers do not give orders to their children; for example, no adult announces bedtime. At night, children remain around adults until they feel tired and fall asleep…. Parakana adults do not interfere with their children’s lives. They never beat, scold, or behave aggressively with them, physically or verbally, nor do they offer praise or keep track of their development.” —Yumi Gosso et al., “Play in Hunter-Gatherer Societies”
  • “The idea that this is ‘my child’ or ‘your child’ does not exist [among the Yequana, of South America]. Deciding what another person should do, no matter what his age, is outside the Yequana vocabulary of behaviors. There is great interest in what everyone does, but no impulse to influence—let alone coerce—anyone. The child’s will is his motive force.” —Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept
  • “Aborigine children are indulged to an extreme degree, and sometimes continue to suckle until they are 4 or 5 years old. Physical punishment for a child is almost unheard of.” —Richard A. Gould, Yiwara: Foragers of the Australian Desert
  • “Infants and young children [among Inuit huntergatherers of the Hudson Bay area] are allowed to explore their environments to the limits of their physical capabilities and with minimal interference from adults. Thus if a child picks up a hazardous object, parents generally leave it to explore the dangers on its own. The child is presumed to know what it is doing.” —Lee Guemple, “Teaching Social Relations to Inuit Children”
  • “Ju/’hoansi children [of Africa] very rarely cried, probably because they had little to cry about. No child was ever yelled at or slapped or physically punished, and few were even scolded. Most never heard a discouraging word until they were approaching adolescence, and even then the reprimand, if it really was a reprimand, was delivered in a soft voice.” —Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Old Way

Notice that these quotations are from people living in what we know as Brazil, Venezuela, Australia, Alaska, and Southern Africa; all over the world. How did we go from a situation in which people all over the world shared this sense of equality among all human beings to a world in which inequality is so extreme that five people own as much as wealth as 3.5 billion people? How is that even possible?

Most people are conditioned to believe that what “feels right” is not a sufficient basis upon which to choose your actions. Our childhoods are chock-full of daily reminders that our primary responsibility is to follow the rules. Your parents incessantly tell you what you cannot do. Your teachers follow that up with another set of things that you cannot do. The media adds to the list of cannots. It starts with rules about not being too loud or not running too fast or not climbing too high; all things that you have a primal drive to do just because it feels good.

It feels great to meet up with your friends and then burst out of the house and yell as loudly as you can while running at top speed and maybe or maybe not adding in a game of Tag or Hide-And-Seek. It feels good to get up and walk around after obediently sitting down in the classroom for forty-five minutes. It feels good to play House with the next door neighbor and “I’ll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours.” But eventually, most of us get told how wrong we are for doing these things that feel just as naturally to us as breathing.

A major part of our conditioning to be servants comes from the attitudes that we are taught to have around sex. During puberty, our bodies are SCREAMING at us that it is time to have sex sex sex sex sex. While society, whether it is preachers or parents or teachers or media, is telling us to either fear sex because of pregnancy and STDs or because God will send us to Hell for doing it before marriage. This is a major training ground for our ability to deny our own desires in the interests of being obedient to the rules. Religion and Monogamy and Patriarchy all play roles in reinforcing the prohibitions on doing what naturally feels good and right to do.

So then when you’re thirty years old and you hate hearing your alarm clock go off in the morning and you hate the clothes that you have to put on for work and you hate driving in morning rush hour traffic and you hate way your boss talks to you and you hate that your lunch break is so short and you hate that so much money comes out of your paycheck in taxes etc etc etc, you have a whole lifetime of training on how to ignore ALL OF THAT and just keep repeating the cycle everyday. And guess who decides what the schools teach and what the media portrays and what the churches teach and how the corporations are set up?? The small group of masters who overthrew the last group of masters who overthrew the last group of masters, going all the way back to the beginning of agriculture and personal property ten to twelve thousand years ago. They teach their children how to maintain control over the masses, while the masses are taught how to be better servants.

We are conditioned to believe that we are not the kind of people who are supposed to have authority over our own lives. We are conditioned to believe that other people having the power to tell us how to be and where to be and what to be is just the way things are. Our hunter-gatherer Ancestors chose for themselves a lifestyle in which all activity was self-chosen, self-directed, and imaginative or creative. If most of what you do with your life is chosen by someone else and directed by someone else, with someone else telling you exactly how to do what they have chosen for you to do, then maybe a big part of what makes you truly human is not being fully expressed. Maybe that’s why you’re not happy with your life.

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The Bliss Book goes into more detail of how #CRMP separates people from nature and separates people from each other and separates people from parts of themselves, thus making it possible for the masters to be safe from the (not) unified masses. We also go into detail about what literally happens inside of our brains and bodies when we live lives of self-denial, and how those effects are the root of the deep sadness, depression, and hopelessness that so many of us feel.

More to come.

Young, Wild, and Free: Native American Sexuality

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arawak

Soundtrack: Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa “Young, Wild, and Free”

In the course of doing my normal nerd routine, reading and shit, I ran across something that piqued my interest. The story of York, the African man held as a slave by William Clark, of the famous Lewis and Clark expedition. The tidbit of information that I ran across was about how York was the first dark skinned Black man that most of the Natives had ever seen in the states of the West along the Missouri River. At first the Natives didn’t believe that his skin was so black. They tried to wipe it off. Once they saw that that wouldn’t work, they were enthralled by him. Word is that he was given his pick of the Native women.

Say what??

I definitely couldn’t just read that and move on with life like it was nothing. I had to look a little deeper into it. What kind of freaky deaky were these Native people on? (I hate the terms “Native American” and “Indian”)

It turns out, that the Native people of this land had some very progressive views on sexuality. It is a bit difficult to speak of the Natives in general because by the time Europeans started invading this hemisphere there were hundreds of different tribes of Natives with separate and distinct cultures. However, there were some commonalities that we can look at.

Generally speaking, the Natives believed that Nature is perfect, just the way it is. What is natural is what is supposed to be. Sex, of course, is a pretty big deal in nature. For people born and raised in Western culture, it is difficult to conceive of a society that had zero shame or guilt around sexuality — any and all kinds of sexuality. But, in fact, the Natives encouraged all people to act on their sexual desires and they recognized sexuality as a great gift from Nature with power to heal, to create, and to bring people together. (Many Native languages didn’t even have a word for “innocence” or “guilt”, meaning they couldn’t even understand the concept of shaming someone for their behavior. Many also didn’t have a word for “prison” or “jail”.)

Another part of the foundation upon which Native sexuality rested was the belief that all people are equal. I’m talking specifically now about the positions of men and women. Native men didn’t have any desire to dominate, control, and subjugate their women. Therefore there was no reason for them to fear female sexuality in the way that other cultures do. So Native women were free to be horny, choose the man who makes her womb jump when she sees him, bring him to the crib, and ride him into Heaven. European “settlers” of the 16th and 17th centuries were outraged when they saw (with their own two eyes) Native women actually being ON TOP during sex. For the Europeans it was a matter of necessity that the man be on top during sex because a woman should never be over a man under any circumstances.

For the Natives, once they reached puberty, it was on and crackin’. Consider these two quotes from different authors about observation of the Huron people from the 1600s:

“The Huron did not place great importance on the difference between married and not married. They encouraged various stages of experimentation and growing commitment.”

“Males had the liberty of giving themselves to evil from their earliest years, while females prostituted themselves as early as they could, and fathers and mothers were panderers for their own daughters.”

Now, among other things, this shows just how stupid white people were 500 years ago. The priests who lived among the Huron in the Great Lakes area (Michigan, Quebec, etc) specifically for the purpose of converting them to Christianity were so wrapped up in their own mythology that they couldn’t fathom the idea of other people just choosing to live in a different way. But check out the content of the words though. Not only were people in their early teens having sex but their parents were actively finding good sexual partners for them. The parents wanted their children to have pleasurable and knowledgeable introductions to the world of sex.

Among the Pawnee people of Nebraska and Kansas, when a boy reached puberty, his mother’s brother’s wife would take charge of him and initiate him into sex. He would continue having sex with her until he married. For a period of four or five years the young man, and perhaps his brothers as well, would be a junior husband for this woman, creating a temporary state of polyandry. Polyandry is when one woman is married to more than one man at a time. There were many other places and ways where polyandry was practiced across North America.

Most Native houses didn’t have bedrooms. They lived in longhouses, which is generally just a long building with no divisions in it. The kitchen and dining room and bedroom is all the same thing. So when mommy and daddy had sex at night, everyone in the house knew exactly what was going on. As a result of that, group masturbation sessions among “tween” age children were common. When their pre-pubescent bodies matured enough to start feeling sexual arousal, they explored their bodies — sometimes in groups of just boys or just girls, and sometimes the boys and girls together. Once they matured to the point of having full use of their sexual organs, the experimentation turned into full sexual encounters, often in the woods, which was the only place to get some privacy.

Sex was seen as a way of strengthening the bonds of friendship between people. It also strengthened the bonds between families. Marriage was seen as more than just a union of husband and wife, it was a union of family and family. For people who placed such high value on sharing, adding a whole new group of people to share with was huge cause for celebration. When Europeans came to live and trade among the Natives in peace, they were confused by the Natives offering them sex. For the Natives this was no more strange than offering food to someone who you wish to be cordial with. Sex brought people together.

Sex was also believed to be a source of great spiritual and healing power. As such, engaging in sex and abstaining from sex were both used in various ways. Abstaining would allow for the power of sexual energy to be stored up and increased, then the energy could be put to use in several ways.

Women would often abstain from sex for the entire time that they were breastfeeding a baby. Motherhood was seen as a sacred duty of women, similar to the sacred duty of men to be soldiers in defense of the community. Abstaining would allow women to channel the power of their sexual energy into raising strong and healthy babies.

For the Huron people, abstinence was usually believed to bring dreams, which were essential to all sacred rituals. Prior to a ball game, the players from each village fasted, abstained from sexual intercourse, and sought dreams that would bring them victory.

Huron shamans also observed periods of sexual abstinence. Like other shamans around the world, these were men AND women who had control over the forces of nature. They obtained their special potency through visions or dreams in which a powerful spirit had revealed itself to them. Such visions required prolonged fasting and the avoidance of sexual intercourse – similar to the period before the ball game. However, these periods of abstinence only lasted for some days or weeks. There was no concept among them of abstaining from sex for life like monks or priests in Western traditions.

Sex played a central role in many healing rituals. In one particular ritual, andacwander, any ill person could call for a number of young people to come and have sexual relations in his or her cabin. Andacwander was described in great detail by Gabriel Sagard, a Recollect (French missionary) who lived among the Huron between 1623 and 1624:

There are assemblies of all the girls in a town at a sick woman’s couch. When the girls are assembled they are all asked, one after another, which of the young men of the town they would like to sleep with them the next night. Each names one, and these are immediately notified by the masters of the ceremony. All come in the evening to sleep with those who have chosen them, in the presence of the sick woman, from one end of the lodge to the other, and they pass the whole night thus, while the two chiefs at the two ends of the house sing and rattle their tortoise shells from evening till the following morning when the ceremony is concluded.

Notice that it was the young women who did the choosing, not the young men.

But Sagard didn’t mention the name of this ceremony. The first one to do so in writing was Jesuit Father Jerome Lalemant, writing in 1639. He wrote of an old man, Taorhenche, who was dying. He wished (through riddles that people had to guess) for a White Dog Ceremony, sufficient cornmeal to feed the people involved in the festivities, other unnamed ceremonies. At the end there was to be:

“The ceremony of the ‘andacwander,’ a mating of men with girls, which is made at the end of the feast. He specified that there should be 12 girls, and a thirteenth for himself.

“The answer being brought to the council, he was furnished immediately with what could be given at once, and this from the liberality and voluntary contributions of individuals who were present there and heard the matter mentioned, – these peoples glorying, on such occasions, in despoiling themselves of the most precious things they have. Afterward, the Captains went through the streets and public places, and through the cabins, announcing in a loud voice the desires of the sick man, and exhorting people to satisfy them promptly.

“They are not content to go on this errand once, – they repeat it three or four times, using such terms and accents that, indeed, one would think that the welfare of the whole country was at stake. Meanwhile, they take care to note the names of the girls and men who present themselves to carry out the principal desire of the sick man; and in the assembly of the feast these are named aloud, after which follow the congratulations of all those present, and the best pieces … then ensue the thanks of the sick man for the health that has been restored to him, professing himself entirely cured by this remedy.”

The name of the ceremony was endakwandet, which literally means “they (many people) are enveloped in sex.” If you wished for the ceremony, you would say “tayendakwandeten” – be enveloped in sex for me.

William Clark wrote of a ceremony called the Buffalo Dance that he witnessed in the winter of 1805 among the Mandan people of North Dakota:

The old men arrange themselves in a circle and after smoke a pipe, which handed them by a young man, dress up for the purpose.   The young men who have their wives back of the circle go to one of the old men with a whining tone and request the old man to take his wife, who presents naked except a robe.   The girl then takes the old man, and leads him to a convenient place for the Business.   We sent a man to this medicine dance last night, they gave him four girls.

This gets to the reason why York was so popular with the Native ladies….

Elders are, of course, associated with wisdom. This Buffalo Dance was an expression of the Native belief that sex can be used to transfer one person’s attributes to another person. When the Natives saw York with his black skin and his muscular body, they believed that he possessed a lot of “medicine” or spiritual power. The men jumped at the opportunity for York to have sex with their wives because the wives could receive York’s medicine and then transfer it to them — just as the old men at the Buffalo Dance could have their wisdom transferred to the young men.

The same kind of stories are told about Estevanico. Estevanico was a young Black man from Morocco who was held as a slave by one of a group of Spaniards who went to explore and crash landed in Florida in 1528. Permanently separated from their support vessels, the group marched up the inner Florida coast and by late summer arrived near the mouth of the Wakulla River in the Florida panhandle. At that time, the surviving Spaniards and at least one African numbered just less than 250 men, the others having died from hurricanes, accidents, or been killed by Natives. They chose to slaughter their horses, build five makeshift barges, and attempt to sail along the Gulf Coast toward Mexico. The five rafts left Florida on September 22. After a month at sea, the raft that Estevanico was in landed on Galveston Island in Texas. By spring 1529, Estevanico and two other men —the only survivors from their craft— had traveled on foot down the Texas coast to the area of Matagorda Bay. They were later captured and held by Coahuiltecan Natives who lived southwest of the Guadalupe River. In fall 1532, the three men were joined in captivity by one sole survivor from a second raft. By early 1535, these four castaways had escaped their captors by fleeing south along the inner coast and entering Mexico near the present-day Falcón Lake Reservoir.

Throughout their travels in both Texas and Mexico, the three Spaniards and Estevanico gained fame and material support as healers. We can see how that worked. These foreign men obviously had many qualities which were different from what the Natives had and therefore they were welcomed to share their medicine by having sex with the women. The Black man was especially well received in that way.

However, Estevanico misunderstood this custom. He didn’t realize that his sexual encounters were offered out of respect and friendship and appreciation for what made him unique. He began to think of himself as a God among the Natives who was welcome to anything that he wanted at any time.  When he was sent back north from Mexico City to lead another expedition in 1539, Estevanico didn’t make very many friends for himself. Traveling ahead of his group as an advance scout, he approached the Zuni pueblo of Hawikuh in western New Mexico where he was killed by numerous arrows fired into his body. Francisco Vazquez de Coronado, upon reaching Hawikuh one year later in 1540, reported back that “Estevanico’s death could be blamed on his cruelties and assaults on Indian women.”

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As we can see, the Natives of this land had a social system that consisted of polyamorous relations and a rather advanced Tantra system. You can see previous posts on this blog if any of those terms confuses you.

In the near future I’m gonna be addressing a continuous theme dealing with how our future will be determined by to what extent we are willing and able to start living by ancient wisdom. These customs of the western hemisphere Natives is a great illustration of this theme.

There are many people today doing think pieces and hosting conferences and symposiums on how to incorporate Tantra and polyamory into your life, and making a lot of money in the process. These Native people just did it. It wasn’t anything deep to them. It was just what made sense given their cultural values and their way of looking at the world. We can all learn from their example.

The basic thing that made it all possible for them was the freedom of their women. The total lack of any efforts to control women or make their natural sexual desires a sin/crime made their whole culture flourish in beautiful ways that modern people can barely fathom.

Me personally, I’m striving everyday to be bout that Indigenous Egalitarian Sex-Positive Sustainable Communal Tantra Poly life.

Why Polyamory? (Why Monogamy Is Stupid)

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Soundtrack: Mtume “You, Me, and He”

Cognitive Dissonance: This is the feeling of uncomfortable tension which comes from holding two conflicting thoughts in the mind at the same time.

Dissonance increases with:

  • The importance of the subject to us.
  • How strongly the dissonant thoughts conflict.
  • Our inability to rationalize and explain away the conflict.

Dissonance is often strong when we believe something about ourselves and then do something against that belief. If I believe I am good but do something bad, then the discomfort I feel as a result is cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is a very powerful motivator which will often lead us to change one or other of the conflicting belief or action. The discomfort often feels like a tension between the two opposing thoughts. To release the tension we can take one of three actions:

  • Change our behavior.
  • Justify our behavior by changing the conflicting cognition.
  • Justify our behavior by adding new cognitions.

Monogamy is a major source of cognitive dissonance for most people. You are told from birth through various sources that you are supposed to grow up and fall in love and spend the rest of your life with one person, forsaking all others. Society spreads the idea that one man mating for life with one woman is the “natural” way. That our nature is designed to connect with this soul mate and if you can’t live up to this standard then you are less than a real man or woman and you are morally depraved. The vast majority of us either fail a little bit or we fail horribly at this. Is everybody morally bankrupt or is there something wrong with the standard? Maybe we need to grade our monogamous abilities on a curve.

As with all things, this belief has an origin. What is it? Agriculture. Around 12,000 years ago, human beings started practicing agriculture, planting crops and staying in that place long enough to harvest those crops. Prior to that time, all human beings were hunter-gatherers. They constantly moved as nomads, from place to place, foraging for whatever food they could find. Agriculture involves intensive cultivation of large tracts of land, often requiring ploughing, irrigation, fertilization and other soil improvements. As agriculture spread, arable land became more scarce – and more valuable. I’ll return to this in a second.

Scientists conservatively estimate that modern humans evolved around 200,000 years ago. Assuming that that number is true, those humans didn’t just pop up out of thin air at that time. Even those earliest humans inherited some cultural traits from their ancestors. So we can confidently say that human ancestors have been developing some kind of cultural habits for as long as we have used tools which is around 2.5 million years ago. That’s millions of years of hunter-gatherer life followed up by the past 10,000 years of agriculture.

In those early hunter-gatherer days, one of the habits that we developed was the habit of sharing everything. Human beings are not as physically strong as a lot of other animals in nature. If humans live in an environment where they don’t have the technology to bulldoze forests and kick all the animals out of their habitat, then the humans are in a vulnerable position. In that less technological state, it is also advantageous to take advantage of all the food that naturally sprouts up out of the earth. And when the food in your immediate vicinity is gone, you move onto another spot. Also, it is a natural tendency of all living beings to self-preserve, to keep yourself alive and to see to the survival of your offspring. Early humans determined that the best way for them to stay alive was to move in groups and share resources to make sure everyone had what they needed.

The way that our bodies and brains have evolved since the beginning of our history is a direct result of the environments we have had to adapt to. We have perfectly fashioned ourselves to handle the particular conditions that we have found ourselves in. This is how evolution works. It becomes very difficult to get any living being to live in a way that contradicts its millions of years of evolution. It’s possible, but it’s very difficult. It’s difficult to get lions and bears and elephants to perform tricks in the circus. That behavior is not what they have been evolved to do. And even if you successfully circus train a lion, you never know when its nature is going to come out and the circus gets a rude awakening.

Our early human habit of sharing, which I like to call fierce egalitarianism, included sharing sex. Sexual pleasure was a resource to be shared among the people just like food, clothing, and shelter. There weren’t yet any rules about who sex should happen with and for what reason or how often. They were able to use it much like how modern western people use pills. Need to relax? Have sex. Need to perk up? Have sex. Need to mourn? Have sex. Need to celebrate? Have sex.

Human beings are evolutionarily accustomed to being polyamorous. Monogamy goes against our nature. Polyamory means “many loves”, it denotes the practice of forming sexual and romantic relationships with multiple people. This is how we have conducted ourselves for most of our existence. The practice of one woman and one man forsaking all others is a very recent development.

It is important to point out that our Ancestors weren’t going around sleeping with a bunch of people they didn’t know or didn’t love. It wasn’t like that at all. They lived in small, close-knit groups of 100-150 people. Their sexual partners couldn’t have possibly been strangers or one night stands. Everyone they came in contact with was someone who they were around all the time.

Our closest relatives in nature are chimpanzees and bonobos, even more close than gorillas, gibbons, and orangutans. The behavior of our cousins provides clues of what comes natural for us. Ovulating female chimps have sex with all males who are willing. Bonobos, our closest relative of all primates, enjoy group sex as a way to appease conflict between members of the clan and promote social bonding.

The human body itself shows us that we are evolved for polyamory and sexual promiscuity. Body-size dimorphism (the difference in body size between males and females) is about 10-20% for humans. That is a very small number when compared with many other members of the animal kingdom. Body-size dimorphism reflects male competition for females, so that if the males are significantly larger than the females, this indicates that the males of that species have evolved to have fierce competition for females. They need to be big in order to compete. The 10-20% body-size dimorphism of humans is the same figure as that of chimps and bonobos, who are promiscuous. Moderate body-size dimorphism is therefore an indicator that our ancestors weren’t fighting for attention. They were sharing

Small testes, which gorillas, orangutans and gibbons have, are a sign of limited sexual activity. Larger testes are associated with more promiscuous behavior, since species that copulate more will need larger testes in order to house more sperm for ejaculations. Chimps and bonobos have the largest testes, which is unsurprising considering how much they get it on, while humans have moderately sized testes, although not anywhere near as small as a gorilla’s. Our sperm volume is still far beyond what is needed for monogamous mating.

Within the adult testicle, there is 700 feet of tubing, termed seminiferous tubules, within which sperm is made. Sperm is made from precursor cells termed germ cells that give rise to approximately 120 million sperm daily in a process termed spermatogenesis that takes approximately 64 days in humans. This is equivalent to making about 1200 sperm per heartbeat. That’s a lot.

Even the shape of the human penis has evolved in response to the fact that females will have multiple sexual partners. The glans of the penis (the head) are shaped as they are to remove any previously deposited sperm. It functions like a scoop. During ejaculation the man’s glans will then shrink to ensure that his own sperm are not removed by the same process. Sperm also contains chemicals that defend against and attack sperm from other males. Semen has built-in spermicide, the same stuff they put on condoms. Also, the large ejaculate that men have (the largest of all the Great Apes) is a sign of sperm competition. When we skeet skeet, we skeet a whole lot. All of this sperm competition evolved as a way for males to do the natural job of trying to keep themselves and their lineage alive. They were evolutionarily trying to increase their chances of paternity certainty (being the father of the child which is eventually born).

Another thing to consider is the fact that women are capable of having multiple orgasms with little to no refractory period (the recovery phase after orgasm before being able to go back at it) whereas men lose interest in sex after ejaculation. There is also the fact that men generally cum quicker than women unless they have some tantric training on how to make it last forever like Keith Sweat. Naturally, women who haven’t developed social taboos about having multiple partners aren’t gonna stay sexually frustrated after their partner rolls over and goes to sleep. She’s gonna kick that first dude out the bed and call another one over. Which leads to my next point.

What also runs counter to the standard narrative of human sexuality is the fact of female copulatory vocalization (FCV), which basically means that females vocalize (make loud noises) during sex. If humans were meant to be monogamous, then why would females draw attention to themselves by making these vocalizations? The answer is that the groans and moans are invitations for other males to come along. This is exactly the same evolutionary phenomenon as what female cats and dogs do when they are in heat. They make all kinds of noise so all the males in the area know that it’s time to come handle business. Our less promiscuous primate relatives don’t have any FCV going on. FCV is therefore associated with promiscuous mating, not monogamy.

It is helpful to observe societies that live today much like how our pre-agriculture ancestors lived. So-called primitive societies are the best example we have of how things used to be. There are societies all over the world who still have value systems based on fierce egalitarianism which includes the sharing of their sexual resources. Among the Siriono of the Amazon, jealousy tends to arise not because one’s spouse has lovers, but because he or she is spending so much time with other lovers that the home becomes neglected. Among the Canela people of Brazil, husbands encourage their wives to participate in rituals that involve having sex with twenty or more men in front of the whole community. Among the Mosuo people of China, children are raised by their mothers’ and the mothers’ family because no one can be sure who the fathers are. Women choose men for the night and those men go back home in the morning. Men take more responsibility for their nieces and nephews than any children they might have sired.

Agriculture changed all of this because it led to the development of the idea of private property. When no one individually owns anything, there is no motivation to develop ways to pass things on after you die. With the advent of people staying in one place, claiming ownership to tracts of land and homes and animals, the question of paternity became very important. Mama’s maybe-Daddy’s maybe is not something that can be tolerated when a man wants his possessions to somehow stay in his possession after he dies. That happens by him passing on his genetics to his offspring.

This interesting turn in the course of human history had a huge impact on our sexuality. A woman has no question about who her children are. A father can always question until and unless he gets a DNA test. It became advantageous for men to use their physical dominance to regulate female sexuality. If a man can ensure that his woman is having sex with no one but him then he can be sure that her children are his and he can confidently allow those children to inherit his cows and his crops. This was the origin of monogamy as well as slut shaming.

Women and men had to be told that women are not supposed to want sex, not supposed to think about sex, definitely not supposed to have sex with anyone other than her husband. The extreme power of female sexuality with her ability to choose any man she wants as a sexual partner and her ability to have sex all day long without stopping had to be shut down by the force of muscle and false teachings.

The language that we speak reflects the deep-seated negative attitudes about sex arising from this need to control female sexuality. Sexual jokes are “dirty” jokes. An older man who is interested in sex is a “dirty” old man. A woman or girl who has sex for the first time has “lost” her virginity, she is “deflowered”. We insult people by calling them a “pussy” or telling them to “fuck off”. Nearly always, where sex is concerned, the language used is the language of loss, dirtiness, pollution, or destruction.

The greatest thing that we can do to restore the equality of the sexes is to let go of our ridiculous demands for sexual fidelity. Women who are set free from the horrors of sexual taboos find themselves developing sexual cravings in ways that many of them never thought possible. It’s amazing what your body will ask for once your mind believes that it’s ok to ask.

Why polyamory? Because monogamy is in violation of our entire history as a species. Because sharing sexual pleasure bonds human beings on a level that not many other things can compare to. Because there are other ways to pass things on from generation to generation besides artificially shutting down female sexuality. Because countless lives and careers are ruined everyday by trying and failing to live up to the monogamous standard. We can choose to just stop it with the cognitive dissonance. We can choose to change the conflicting cognition. The truth is, that monogamy doesn’t work because monogamy doesn’t work. We can choose polyamory because monogamy is stupid.

Love Without a Limit

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Soundtrack: Mary J. Blige “Love No Limit”

The Isley Brothers “It’s Your Thing”

I am in love with three women. Saying that now takes me back to 2009 when I first broke the news to my closest friends that my wife and I had decided to have an open marriage.

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People told me that it’s impossible to truly love more than one person at the same time. People told me that my wife couldn’t possibly be ok with this; she must just be repressing her true feelings so she won’t lose me. People told me that one day, one of us would explode in a jealous rage and they didn’t wanna be around to witness it.

None of those objections have turned out to be very valid in the five years since then. A couple of years ago I began a long distance relationship that remains very loving and serious to this day.

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And the impossible happened. That woman and my wife (along with a couple of other wonderful polyamorous women) became best friends. The two of them probably talk to each other more than either of them talk to me. They have a rare and beautiful sisterhood bond.

A year ago, my relationship with my wife became a long distance one as I moved to Atlanta from Houston. We will be reunited in Atlanta very soon but the past year has been an emotional challenge and a proof of our love and commitment. She and I have both developed very serious relationships with local lovers during the year that we have been apart. I can’t imagine how we would’ve survived this year emotionally if we hadn’t had love to sustain us from other sources.

About three and a half months ago I met a woman in Atlanta who changed my life.

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During our first in-depth, face-to-face conversation, while eating seafood, I felt that Source had brought her into my life for us to work together as a team. I knew that my life had changed that day. I hadn’t felt an instant bond with someone like that since my first date with my wife. Over the course of that day I went from thinking that she and I would be excellent business partners to business partners/friends to business partners/friends/lovers to Life Partners who share in every way possible. That day turned into like three days before we separated from each other. But we’ve been together ever since.

My relationship with my newest lover and my life as a full time entrepreneur started around the same time. She has helped me with every aspect of laying the foundation for The SOL System as a brand and a business.

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And now all three of my lovers are fully involved in the business with me as a team. And it just so happens that we make a really good team. Between the four of us we have pretty much every skill that we need in this business from the healing practice to marketing to accounting to product development and more. I am completely overwhelmed with how blessed I am and how obvious it is that I couldn’t have assembled a situation this perfect if I tried.

I was inspired to write about this because I’ve felt bombarded with messages about how difficult/impossible polyamory is, from those who shun it and from those who practice it. My life is a testimony that open relationships can be healthy and loving and functional. When love is multiplied, it only gets better. It gives me joy to share random laughs and conversations with my lover’s husband. It gives me joy to have a Skype conversation with my lover while she sits in the bed with her ex-boyfriend. It gives me joy to know that even though I’m hundreds of miles away, my lover is able to share her bliss with another man who cares for her deeply.

There are two philosophical points that I want to make on this subject.

First, your life is a product of what you believe about yourself. I won’t go too deep into trying to prove that point. I’ve done that in other posts on this blog. But the Law of Attraction is just as real and omnipresent in our lives as gravity and electromagnetism. You attract to yourself whatever you think about most often. If you believe that jealousy is a basic part of life; if you believe that people who share the same lover cannot peacefully co-exist; if you believe that monogamy is the natural way of relationships and polyamory is an “alternative lifestyle”, then that is what you are going to get. However, if you believe that love can truly mean freedom and joy and honesty and abundance, then that is what life will give you.

The vast majority of people who practice open relating meet with all kinds of challenges because they are not clear about their beliefs. They only sort-of buy in to the idea that open relationships are ok. They have a lot of residual monogamy in their subconscious minds so they manifest confusion. Polyamory, or any new way of life, can only be successful to the extent that you fully remove the beliefs that you used to operate under. Becoming healthy can only work to the extent that you remove the beliefs that used to reinforce an unhealthy lifestyle. Becoming peaceful can only work to the extent that you remove the beliefs that used to reinforce a life of violence. My life in open relating has blossomed as I have successfully brought all of my beliefs about love and relationships into alignment with this new paradigm. I truly believe in this, and it is working for me.

Now moving on to my second point. As I said earlier, two of my relationships are long distance. I’ve been separated from my local lover for the past 8 days as she is taking our #TantraTour2014 to the west coast. None of us could make it if we were relying on someone else to be the source of our happiness. And now, a message from Osho:

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We are able to operate from a place of Abundance because we find our happiness from within Self. If your partner’s love is the source of your happiness then it can be very scary for your partner to share their love with someone else because it feels like now you have less of the source of your happiness. But you have a neverending source of joy/peace/love/bliss within your own soul. You are a piece of the Ultimate Reality. You are one with the Universe. Any limitation that you think you have only comes from losing sight of the fact of who you really are. When you know that you are one with The All, then you have nothing to worry about. It is impossible to lose a lover because there is nowhere to go. We are connected to everything else in existence.

Because we have our happiness from within Self, we can only add to each other’s happiness, not take it away. This is why interacting with all three of my lovers feels so damn good. Happy on top of happy on top of happy. This is heaven. This is bliss. This is what life is all about. I really want everyone in the world to feel what I am feeling. That’s why I can’t be quiet about this any longer. I have to share my joy with the world. Come get some of this.

hearttat (This tattoo with the infinity sign going through the heart is generally considered to be the symbol of polyamory. I’m serious about this)