The Heterarchy

Patriarchy, matriarchy and the middle way forward

Love

Three years ago, I met the woman I love more deeply than I ever imagined to be humanly possible.

Her name is Kailey. I’ve never known a love so boundary-smashing, transcendent and true, and in fact, it’s the love Kailey and I share that has taught me what True Love actually is. Previously, I didn’t understand love, and neither did the American culture in which I grew up. In my opinion, it still doesn’t. In America and modernity, we listen to top-40 pop songs and watch romcoms that bastardize love, perverting it into something akin to attachment, and calling it “true” if one’s feelings of wanting (or worse, “needing”) the object of his “love” are strong enough. We’re taught that it’s somehow a virtue to believe that another person “completes us,” and a dysfunction to feel so whole that we’re fulfilled being alone.

In reality, the exact opposite is the truth.

I realized what True Love is, and that I truly love Kailey, when I realized how much I truly want Kailey to be happy. I want Kailey to be happy just as much as I want Reiman to be happy, and I don’t just want her to be happy with me; I want her to be happy, period.

The difficult truth is, even though we’ve been together three years now, I genuinely don’t know whether she’ll be happy with me. I don’t know if we’ll end up together. I’m starting a new chapter of life in rural Ecuador, and she’s committed to being in Chicago. I’ve gone there, she’s come here and we’ve talked about living a double-life between the two, but my opposition to the medical tyranny emerging around the world may make the modernity (Chicago) half of that double-life impossible. “Medical tyranny” likely strikes some of you as hyperbolic or paranoid, but this blog post is going to be one of speaking my truth, and in livelihood-destroying lockdowns and other draconian measures of the past twenty months, I do see tyranny. That’s why I’m taking a serious tone in this piece (don’t worry, I’ll sprinkle some morsels of humor in here yet), and that’s why I’m being unabashedly real with you. Tyranny, as I’m calling it, is also why Kailey and I might not work out. I’ve chosen not to take the “vaccine” being pushed on humanity by authoritarian governments, and as such I may lose my ability to travel in the future.

Let’s pause for a second and straighten some ruffled feathers: Whatever your views, and whatever your interpretation of (or assumptions about) my views, I love and respect you. My love for Kailey hasn’t diminished at all since she got the injection three weeks ago, acknowledging immense social pressure as the sole reason for her choice. I respect the free will of all individuals to make their own decisions about their bodies. I love the collective humanity that is currently enduring an incredibly challenging time. I love every part of that humanity — the democrats, the republicans, the libertarians, the Karens pushing masks, the indigenous peoples warding off medical tyrants, the medical tyrants, the crazy “anti-vaxxers,” the fascists known as Antifa, the racist Trumpers, the non-racist Trumpers, BLM, the basement-dwelling QANON gargoyles, the militant green-haired feminists, the butthurt “men’s rights activists,” the true egalitarians, everyone in between and everyone who forms their own views without the need for a label or a tribe.

Control

Tribalism, labels and warring teams are build upon control and the fight for control. In many ways, control is love’s opposite: where love accepts all, control demands that the deviants conform. Where unadulterated love says “be happy,” control says “be with me.” Love is about a unity that respects difference; control is about a unity that annihilates difference, which isn’t real unity. Because that annihilation never quite works (what we resist persists, and what we give attention grows), attempts at tribal control only result in groups, communities and nations divided.

Humanity, and especially our hyper-polarized United States, has reverted to a tribalism sowing heartbreaking levels of division and hatred. I feel it palpably, I want to make it right, and I have a question for you. Riddle me this quandary:

If, hypothetically, I wanted to control all humans, do you think it would be helpful for me to manipulate them into fighting each other rather than fighting my agenda?

Controlling humanity and undermining free will is not my gig, but as you’ve probably inferred by now, I believe there exist beings out there who do want to do that, and who are doing that (with great success). I don’t know why, exactly, they want to control humanity, and I don’t know what, exactly, their endgame is. I don’t pretend to know anything I don’t know, which is why I often find myself jealous of conspiracy theorists and believers of mainstream media narratives alike. In either case, and on either side, I see people who have taken a shortcut to peace of mind in deciding that they “know” what’s going on.

The more I’ve learned via meditation, psychedelics and online rabbit holes, the more I’ve realized how much I’ve yet to learn. I know too much to believe I “know” anything for sure. The more you believe you “know,” the likelier it is that you’re mind-controlled.

I don’t mean “mind-control” as a metaphor that loosely applies. I mean it literally. I mean that a distributed network of attention-capturing mediums — television, movies, advertising, news, media, social media and 99% of the internet — brainwashes us while simultaneously using censorship to suppress the nocturnal rainbows of information that threaten its brainwashing. I could spend this blog post simply sharing such information, but I honestly wouldn’t know where to begin. Further, persuading you that this bit or that bit of suppressed information deserves your attention doesn’t really interest me. What does interest me is questioning why we’re talking about information-suppression, brainwashing and control in the first place. Why do a bunch of elite men (whether politicians, big pharma CEOs, big tech CEOs, wall street banksters, media moguls or shadowy figures we know little about) appear to be controlling our entire society?

Why did the movie The Matrix resonate so deeply within our culture?

Patriarchy

Because patriarchy, obviously.

A mythos of male dominance permeates our culture so thoroughly that we live in the matrices spun by boys’ clubs in their cigar-smoke-filled boardrooms. An ethos of male primacy permeates our very language: (s)he, (fe)male, (wo)man, human, mankind. Could it be the falling apart of that structure, the untenably oppressive patriarchy, that explains the wild instability we’re now seeing in our institutions, currencies, systems, societies and world? Have we finally arrived at the milieu when the male dominator system is collapsing?

Yes.

In fact, patriarchy is so over that we may as well remove the word “male” from that last clause. The dominator system is collapsing.

Wait… could there exist a dominator system without the maleness? A lot of porn, media messaging and tyrannical female politicians would suggest so. So… is maleness intrinsic to the dominator system, or the hierarchical organization of societal structures — the thing we’ve been labeling “patriarchy?”

To answer that question, I need to introduce you to my therapist.

Becca Tzigany has followed her own lifelong spiritual quest to over forty countries around the world, learning from a Hindu Brahmin, Native American shaman, Zen Buddhist nun, an Indian yogi as well as Christian ministers. Her saṃsāric quest as a writer, on the other hand, led to multiple volumes of the book Venus and Her Lover, born of Becca’s 11-year tantric pilgrimage and deep dive into the forbidden history of humanity — the most forcefully suppressed of the suppressed information absent from textbooks. As someone answering many callings at once, I relate to Becca and the many hats she wears: teacher, organic gardener, handicraft peddler, translator and cultural interpreter, relationship counselor, Transformational Breathwork therapist, ceremonialist, ecstatic dance facilitator, mother, doula (birth coach), environmental activist, community organizer, and advocate for women and girls (as well as for restoring a healthy masculine principle).

When Becca speaks about the matrix of mind-control we find ourselves in, she calls it “the dominator system.” She echoes the late psychonaut Terrence McKenna in arguing that we live in a “dominator culture.” McKenna was likely wrong about half the shit he said, but he said it so eloquently that I’ve listened to countless hours of him anyway, and found immense inspiration in some of his ideas, like the evolution of language and a new, visually inspired frontier of language. Another of McKenna’s ideas that’s inspiring to me and echoed by Becca: a return to the mythic, archetypical and earthy sources of our ancestral wisdom. My journeys with Ayahuasca have been a rite of passage into this realm of outside-the-paradigm awareness, but Becca’s knowledge and writing have shown me that I’m still one of the realm’s babies — at most a toddling, sophomoric, over-ambitious youngster. I want to write and speak to liberate the human spirit, but I’m still working on liberating my own spirit. I’ve left ‘matrix central’ (the U.S. of A), but many heavy remnants of the matrix still reside within me. Neuroses, neurolinguistic schemas, desire to dominate and need to be dominated — 29 years of programming ain’t just disappearing overnight. Because countless men like me aren’t actively perpetrating this struggle, but are instead feeling it (or worse, not feeling it, because they’re imbedded in and numb to it), the idea of “patriarchy” is a poor stand-in for the dominator system we’re actually facing.

Becca doesn’t use the word “patriarchy.” It unduly smears all men, rather than the 0.1% of men who are actually at the top of dominator hierarchies. It suggests that the common man was culpable for colonialism (which installed a major pillar of worldwide mind-control — the church — in places like my new home country of Ecuador), when in reality, the common man was usually a peasant eating rocks to try to survive famine. Patriarchy theory equates femininity with love and masculinity with control, when in reality, the healthy masculine and feminine conjoin into love (literally… sex is an embodiment of unity and love) and the shadow sides of masculinity and femininity conjoin into our controlling dominator society. The feminine energy connotes many things (yin, receptivity, stillness, centrality, mother earth, etc.) and the masculine energy connotes many things (yang, action, movement, decentralization, father sky, etc.), but to me, each has a defining value:

The feminine is harmony, and the masculine is freedom. Each side of the polarity can be construed as an opposite of control, and each represents an aspect of love.

Channeling my inner Terrence McKenna and heeding his linguistic inspiration, I often think about the masculine and feminine energies visually rather than verbally. They look a lot like sperms and eggs; the masculine flies freely (ideally toward some purpose or destination), and the feminine sits in harmonious stillness. The feminine holds space, and the masculine moves through it. The feminine nurtures culture, receptive to union, and the masculine chooses either to remain a shooting star in father sky (A) or to engage a given culture (B):

Should the masculine choose to penetrate and engage the culture, he becomes bound to it, flying around it in a protective orbit. His mission now revolves around the feminine for a period of time (e.g. the time it takes to raise a child). I don’t think it’s a mere cultural artifact or an accident that, in today’s modernity and so-called patriarchy, women almost invariably rule the roost decades into heterosexual marriages. On the other hand, should the masculine choose uncompromised freedom, he risks ending up on the outer edges of (or ostracized from) polite society. If he wants to eschew the societal script of a 9-to-5 straight job, marriage and family, he’ll end up falling into the stereotype of the “lonely old man” unless he finds a sense of purpose — a mission, a direction. No one likes a decrepit star shooting erratically, a rambling geezer on a soapbox or a deranged derelict harassing women. The masculine has a choice (as does the feminine, of course), but it isn’t without lifelong consequences. He’d better know where he’s going.

Of course, the options laid out above are neither an exhaustive list nor mutually exclusive. Real life contains a neat facet which, before social media and our culture catered to the attention spans of goldfish, we used to call nuance. Some of that antiquated nuance is inevitably missed any time we communicate, even in long-form writing like this. The singular masculine I refer to above represents an idea for illustration; no one is singularly masculine (except maybe Tyler Durden) and facing this exact trilemma. Further, “the masculine” refers not only to individuals, but also to a collective. That collective masculine is bound to a collective feminine in basically any society that isn’t Sparta. I’m not speaking strictly about the collective, nor am I speaking strictly about the individual man; I’m speaking about the yang energy that applies to both.

I’ll break from this strictly male point of view I’ve adopted (insofar as a man can) to acknowledge some important truths for females in our current culture.

The structures of the so-called patriarchy oppress women, no doubt. Objectification of the female body, sexualized imagery, demeaning rap lyrics, implicit valuing of logic over emotion and so many other forces of the matrix have done immense harm to people with vaginas. The matrix is incredibly tricky, though; the fact that the kids these days actually say “people with vaginas” and “people who menstruate” unironically, rather than saying women, is yet more degradation (of women, but also of objective truth, which tends to aid the cause of making humanity believe lies). The matrix is a tricky little bitch (shit! I mean a tricky little asshole. It’s not my fault; blame the rappers). The same matrix that entrapped women into a form of marriage resembling domestic servitude (Thelma and Louise were righteous as fuck, Yas Queens) now entraps them into the idea that wanting to be a mother isn’t ambitious enough. Today, that same matrix tells women to empower themselves by being better men than men can be, which is actually happening, because the dominator system uses its scarily masterful, barely noticeable, trauma-based mind control on men, too. It uses a misandrist American Psychological Association, abhorrent terms like “toxic masculinity” and drugs like porn (ever wonder why it’s all free?) to leave self-loathing men going belly-up. There’s nothing wrong with men learning to be vulnerable, but there’s a lot wrong with men learning to be pathetic. There’s nothing wrong with women channeling their masculine energy, but there’s a lot wrong with estranging women from their Divine Femininity.

Matriarchy

Long ago, matriarchal human societies revered life-giving and nurturing qualities of the feminine, worshipping Goddesses rather than Gods. These cultures understood that women’s greatest power lied not in their business acumen (which can be sharp; more power to them), but in their spiritual wisdom. Elder females were called “crones” (wise women), and they made decisions on behalf of their tribes and communities. Younger females were celebrated for their power as well — the (quite literally spiritual) power of bringing new life into this world, from the spirit world, by birthing children. In modernity we’ve largely disregarded and suppressed the power of crones, but we still have libidos, and the power of a young, attractive woman remains undeniable. I’m grateful Kailey has used that power kindly, and made our relationship healing rather than scarring. I’m also grateful I’ve found a real, live, bona fide crone in Becca, who’s already offered me invaluable guidance (she calls her therapy “crone counseling”) as I navigate these difficult times. Becca knows a lot about our matriarchal past, because it’s a huge part of the forbidden history of humanity that she’s uncovered.

History, his-story, or the dominator system’s story, is a mechanism that’s critical to the control of the matrix. If we view modernity as more “advanced” than any iteration of humanity that existed before, and believe that rationality, technology and scientism have catapulted us beyond the primitive ways of the matriarchal past, we’re unlikely to reconnect with that past and its wisdom. We’re unlikely to heed the wisdom humanity has lost, or to realize that wisdom is an entirely different thing from mere knowledge. In this increasingly secular information age, we can “know” seemingly everything, except for how to live. And if we do look to spiritual frameworks for wisdom on how to live, we find a menu of religions — Islam, the Judeo-Christian tradition, and even much of Buddhism — rife with patriarchal power structures, dogma and mind-control. This is a key way in which the dominator system has taken a massive shit on the Divine Feminine, and all but eliminated her wisdom from our modern zeitgeist. Hope of change certainly exists, as I found in the M.A. thesis I shared on the blog last week; within contemporary American Buddhism, a newly emergent feminine voice is beginning to speak powerfully. Within the rapidly growing spiritual path of tantra, we’re learning to reembrace the sensuality inspired by archetypes of Venus and forgotten Goddess cultures. Yet still, across the vast majority of the globe today, male Gods reign.

To me though, God is feminine.

God is masculine too, but as a man myself, I often experience the divine — Truth, higher power, ego-transcendence, nonduality, or union with any perceived “other” — as feminine. She is in all things, including this earth of which we are residents and (currently poor) stewards. All men, women and things in this illusion of duality are of Her, much like we are all of a woman’s womb. Of course, we’re all of a man’s seed, too, and God is also in the sun sustaining mother earth. Whether the path to one’s realization of nonduality has a feminine, masculine or non-binary flair becomes irrelevant once nonduality is realized. However, I know that some of you reading this aren’t especially interested in spiritual esoterica, and regardless of your interest (or lack thereof) in attaining a nondual perspective, here we are as human beings, living in a world of duality. We seek answers of this world.

For the past three years I’ve sought answers in meditation retreats, mushrooms and Ayahuasca, and I’ve sought relief (from my sensitivity to the pain of separateness) in cannabis. It’s been two months since I’ve used cannabis, and I likely won’t use it again for a long time, but man did it help me (until it didn’t). The first time I got sky-high on weed, shifts in perspective came a-cascading. They didn’t bother to come a-knockin’ first. There were the typical high school stoner platitudes (“everything is love, mannn”), but then there were revelations that really made me think. I had an insight that the world is just one giant mind, and we as individuals are something like synapses firing and wiring together. Whether that’s true isn’t the point; I was seeing reality in a brand new way. This was back in 2016, before I’d meditated intensively or experimented with any psychedelics. It was edibles on which I was sky-high, which is worth noting because as Joe Rogan said in a Netflix standup special:

“When you eat [cannabis], it's processed by your liver and it produces something called 11-Hydroxy metabolite. That's five times more psychoactive than THC… and it lets you talk to dolphins.”

I unfortunately didn’t commune with any dolphins, but I did have a spontaneous, jarring thought that I never would have expected:

“I’m a woman.”

“…Tha fuck?” I had no idea where the thought of being a thot came from, but it definitely came from somewhere, and something about it felt true. It was so surprising because among all other layers of my identity — white, heterosexual, smart, American, individualistic, playful, adventurous — being male has always been the stickiest. Since a young age I’ve identified extremely strongly, and still today I identify strongly, as being male. The strength of this identity has been very painful, as I think all identities differentiating and dividing us from other humans are, on some level. And yet with THC and 11-Hydroxy metabolite coursing through my veins, I felt like a woman. For a moment, I was free of the pain of that thick male identity, and it felt amazing. I wonder if that relates to why the Wachowski sisters, who co-directed The Matrix (the movie trilogy, not the dominator system), are both trans women.

Spoiler alert: I am not transitioning. I still identify as male, but I’m nonetheless changed by the experiences I’ve had of transcending that identity. Today, I feel like a man, and a woman, inside a man. From that first time sky-high on weed to the last time I got spiritually pegged by Ayahuasca, I’ve been on a journey of reconnecting to my True Self, who is multitudes — male, female and everything in-between. I’ve been on a journey not of renouncing my male identity, but of holding it more loosely. I’ve been on a journey of releasing the gendered neuroses that have tormented me psychologically since childhood — the neuroses that ran through my mind just past midnight on February 12, 2020, in the moments before the most impactful experience of my life. I was journeying with mama Ayahuasca, and those neuroses — pain stemming from my identity — flooded my consciousness with a ferocity I simply couldn’t deal with. I couldn’t do it anymore. “I” couldn’t hold on.

I opened my eyes and looked around the ceremony space, clinging to my reality, my world of separation. Objects in the room started to shake. Their edges started to blur together. Boundaries started to dissolve. Boundaries continued to dissolve, and dissolve, and dissolve, until there was nothing left to dissolve. The room and everything around me imploded into blackness. And then Nothingness.

I died.

You won’t be able to fully relate to this unless you’ve had a similar experience, but when I say “I died,” I don’t mean that I had an out-of-body experience, or experienced some mind-stuff resembling an idea of death. I mean that I experienced death, and learned what it is to die.

Another plot twist: dying is awesome. My ride to death’s door was utterly horrible, but past that door I so feared, I found only relief, release and bliss. The self was gone, but whatever was still present saw a divine light, and the next thing “I” knew, there was an experience of rebirth. “I” had no thoughts or self-activity for probably thirty minutes thereafter, during which I re-learned what being a human feels like, touched my face and body, and looked at my surroundings with a child-like awe. Everything was new and fresh; I had no concepts of anything, and so everything appeared magical. Everything was magical. What is magic, other than the explanation for what can’t be sorted into an explanatory box by the conceptual mind?

My mind was free of its conceptual prison, and free of humanity’s fundamentally incorrect concept of death. After dying, I was blessed with a completely new understanding of death, liberated from my prior delusion that it’s an intrinsically bad thing. My immense sadness over my dad’s passing, which had happened a month and a half prior, washed away like an ocean tide. I understood that he was blissfully free of the suffering that had characterized his final years. I understood that I could drop my fears within this world, because whatever they may be, they’re all built upon a primordial fear of death that underlies all other fears, yet is totally unnecessary. I understood that just as surely as a tide coming in will go out, death follows life, and life follows death. Death is merely the flip-side of a coin that conjoins existence and non-existence, something and nothing, life and death; the two are one.

This insight greatly impacted my perspective on the “pandemic” that would begin unfolding one month later. I saw a media pumping fear-porn down the public’s throat, and while I hadn’t yet realized that the media constitutes the front lines of dominator system’s matrix, something still just didn’t seem right. I saw people so afraid of a virus with a 99.7% survival rate that they were willing to upend their livelihoods, accept lockdowns and wear muzzles in public. I saw governments insisting we avoid human connection, socially isolate and live in a state of perpetual anxiety — all conditions for what Clinical Psychology professor Mattias Desmet terms “Mass Formation”, or the psychological basis of societal manipulation. Most troublingly, though, as the sky started falling in March 2020, I saw people buying into the fear of death (and fear in general) to such a degree that they made their lives about avoiding death. I saw people so concerned with avoiding death that they were actually avoiding life.

The two are one, and we’ve signed up for both. Death implies life. Light implies dark. Life-taking patriarchies somehow emerged from a live-giving Goddess. Matriarchies understood the Goddess to be God, to be oneness — a oneness I tasted when I died, only to return to this dualistic life as a man. Now I write these dualistic words — symbols defined only in contrast to one another — to try and say something that words can’t say. “Oneness” doesn’t actually say it, because if “we’re all one,” as the hippies parrot, then what is “one?” It’s a concept whose realization would render itself meaningless, because “one” is defined only in contrast to “two,” or “multiple.” “Oneness” is just more duality. A dualistic WORD. Words suck.

Patriarchy sucks. Yet, to say matriarchy is its remedy is as myopic as saying life is the remedy to death, or saying Goddess is the remedy to God. The only real remedy to anything is nonduality.

“Not one, not two,” says the Zen master. Smash the duality, says Neo.

Heterarchy

Welcome to the real world — life beyond the duality of patriarchy and matriarchy. “Patriarchy” and “matriarchy” are words — words that you learned within the matrix. “Heterarchy” may be the first word you learn outside of the matrix.

The matrix told you that masculinity and femininity are adversarial. They are not. They are polar, but they are of the same whole. Their paths differ, but their fates are intertwined. Just as two are one, the masculine and the feminine are one.

As I’ve awakened my feminine, I’ve only felt stronger in my masculine. I used to shun my feminine side, and shun vulnerability, but I now see that shunning for what it was: the insecurity of a boy. Modernity is full of boys in their twenties, boys in their thirties, boys in their forties and, yeah… boys of pretty much any age. Our recent presidents and most of today’s male world leaders are boys. Every society of our matriarchal past and every culture in touch with humanity’s ancestral wisdom had rites of passage into womanhood and manhood. They had rituals crystallizing these important transformations, and they took those rituals seriously. Modernity? Not so much. Most of the world’s problems today boil down to boys pretending to be men — “men” with closed hearts and feminine sides that are fast asleep. The matrix thrives on these douchebags, because the matrix thrives on suppressing the Divine Feminine, thus rendering the Divine Masculine an imbalanced and undivine child.

Paradoxically, becoming more feminine was precisely what I needed to come into myself as a man. My internal world now includes a beautiful femininity, and I don’t shy away letting my feminine qualities manifest in the external world. I fucking love hot baths. Some of my music is more yin and girly than what I’ve shared thus far. This femininity only makes me more comfortable presenting as a balanced and whole man — more comfortable embodying my masculine energy, which I do not out of obligation to a confining identity, but because I enjoy it. I like being masculine. I like writing short, declarative, true sentences like Ernest Hemingway did. I like when someone tells me my writing reminds them of Chuck Palahniuk. After struggling with my relationship to gender for years, integrating the polarities within me feels truly liberating. Smashing my duality into a synergy and embracing all of me is exactly what has freed me to speak and live my truth. I am a man and a woman within a man, and that’s why I have the courage to write what I’m writing.

Heterarchy is the integration of the masculine and the feminine into an existence of freedom and harmony. It’s what I’ve come to embody on a personal level, and I believe it’s what we must come to embody collectively if we want to move past the pain of our society’s gendered BS. Moving past that pain means accepting our collective polarity — accepting that complementary yin and yang energies live in all of us, no matter which embodiment we personally find most authentic. Yin and yang underlie the most hypermasculine of actualized men as well as the most hyperfeminine of actualized women. Yin and yang underlie someone like Eckhart Tolle, who presents as almost androgynous. Heterarchy is about allowing the complementary dance to flow, both in individuals and in collectives. It retains the room for individualism we’ve evolved within patriarchies while discarding rigid patriarchal hierarchies. It promotes the unity of our matriarchal roots while respecting difference. We don’t need to serve a centralized queen bee, nor do we need to obey a supreme leader atop a dominance hierarchy, in the heterarchy.

Some semblance of leadership or hierarchy is inevitable in human beings, but in the heterarchy, dominance hierarchy is replaced by consciousness hierarchy. The dominator culture is replaced by a conscious culture. Everyone can commune with everyone freely, and so groups come to implicitly understand who among them is competent, skillful, wise and conscious. The direction of those people may be heeded, and will be heeded by those who want to grow, but it will be heeded by individuals’ free choice rather than by compulsion. The absence of such free choice from hierarchies in the so-called patriarchy underscores how the heterarchy will actually do a better job upholding the masculine principle (as well as the feminine principle). While in many ways the dominator system represents a triumph of male values like competition, only the select few at the top actually enjoy the fruits of that triumph. The truck drivers, garbagemen, firefighters, ditch diggers and 7-11 nightshift workers of our society aren’t all that free. They report to “the man.” They must, as we all must, work within hierarchical corporate structures in this matrix that has so successfully removed us from basic survival skills and from our sovereignty. We’re more dependent on “the man” than ever, which has paradoxically weakened our men and eroded our freedoms.

If we had a working masculine principle, men would be standing up to our authoritarian rulers and saying, in unison and resoundingly, “No.” Today’s men, who worry they are intrinsically oppressive products of “patriarchy,” walk around with their tail between their legs and allow tyrants to steamroll their families, communities and culture. Rather than being the force that implants beliefs within us, “patriarchy” is itself the implanted belief, and the force implanting it is the dominator system, which ingeniously uses modern men as scapegoats. Many men certainly earn the blame, but most men suffer alongside women — albeit in different ways — at the hands of a matrix whose goal is to sow distrust between the sexes. On a deep gut-instinct level, no one believes in a man who doesn’t believe in himself. How men have lost trust in themselves, and how we’ve all therefore lost trust in men, is a question broached aptly in the 2015 movie The Intern, when Anne Hathaway’s character asks:

“How, in one generation, have men gone from guys like Jack Nicholson and Harrison Ford to . . . ?” [She gestures at a few frumpily dressed 20-something millennial men]

In other words, how did boys stop becoming men and men start becoming boys? Well, Anne, it’s quite the mystery…

…but I watched more than just Scooby-Doo growing up, so I can tell you how.

From my early childhood, I was faintly conscious of the black-mirrored Psy Ops surrounding me. I remember watching The Amanda Show, and a skit on it featured a few girls using some technology to deliver debilitating electric shocks to a few boys who prank called them. It didn’t seem like much on the surface, but intuitively and somatically in my body, I felt like something was going on — some metaphorical message was being conveyed. Mass media conveys matrix messaging constantly, subliminally, implicitly and sometimes explicitly. To understand what’s happened to men and boys in the past few decades, we need look no further than our screens. Our screens also explain what’s happened to women and girls, and to all of us born into today’s technocratic societies shoveling programming into our brains as we stare, in a stupor, at pixels. Examples of this programming abound, and I’ll mention only a couple significant ones. There were the Disney movies that invariably featured dark feminine archetypes, like sinister witches, and seemed to be undermining the Divine Feminine within all of us in some subconscious way. On Ayahuasca I once had a vision of Walt Disney, at which point it clicked: that crazy motherfucker seismically shaped the minds of generations. Then there was (and is) the trope of the incompetent dad in sitcoms, cartoons and advertising. Good luck finding strong male leads on TV since the 90s or so. The dearth of inspiring men in the media (matrix) of my childhood was something I felt palpably, because there was also a dearth of inspiring men in the home life of my childhood.

Until a few years ago, I spent my entire life searching for a man I could look up to.

Let’s be real: No one thinks and writes this much about gender without having felt an immense amount of pain around it. Since I was a boy disappointed in my drug-abusing father and stepdad, my pain drove my desperate search. I would repeatedly become obsessed with a TV character, athlete or rapper for a stint, but then move on (or have my Eminem CD taken away) before long. Ultimately, no man felt ever like a permanent, true role model. I never found the guy I was looking for, until I started looking for him within instead of without. That’s when the magic happened: Mama Ayahuasca offered me a second chance at childhood, and my journeys with her (along with some other work, like intensive meditation) began freeing my mind. I slowly came to realize that the man I was always searching for “out there” was actually me, and that healing the boy inside was my ticket to that man’s emergence. I forgave my mom for her misandry, which had always made my inner boy feel like he was less-than. I forgave my dad for his misogyny, and for watching porn in front of me, priming me to view women as sex objects. I forgave the teachers at my extremely “woke” school who were overtly sexist against boys. I forgave myself for resenting women after all of this.

It took all that forgiveness and perspective to get to a place where I was emotionally ready to grapple with just how badly I’d been hurting. I knew in my head that the summer of 2011 was a dark, dark time, but it wasn’t until February 11, 2020 that Ayahuasca brought me back to what that summer was like in my heart — the heart of the 19-year-old kid who googled how he would kill himself.

In New York City doing an internship for two months, it was the first time I’d lived on my own for an extended period of time. It was also the first time I’d had free, everyday access to porn, without any concern of being interrupted while flooding my brain with ungodly amounts of dopamine. I was a matrix-minded rat in a maze hitting a “free dopamine” lever whenever I felt like it. As it turned out, I felt like it a lot. The porn I was watching was unearthing all my gendered neuroses and picking at wounds of a vast and scary depth. I felt ashamed and wanted to stop, but I couldn’t stop. I spiraled deeper into self-hatred and desperation with each use of the drug, each night of 3-4 hours of sleep and each day of passionlessly pushing papers around at a hedge fund. I remember trying to write my way out of hell, analyzing what was going on with me in a word document I entitled, “the sickness.” I kid you not, I attempted to write a formal philosophical proof (inspired, I think, by the structure of René Descartes’s Discourse on the Method) for why quitting porn was the “cure” to “the sickness.” I was sick indeed, but logic wasn’t going to make me well. My heart was severely wounded, reeling within the matrix, and lost. My mind was perched on edges of sanity that have become familiar, albeit now less frequented and more smoothly navigable, territory. From those edges — the utterly lonely corners of human consciousness where one’s world consists of little more than the nihilistic void and a miniscule, pixeled vestige of hope (or at least escape) — I just wished I were living a different life, perhaps as a castrato tenor in the sixteenth century. I googled methods to surgically or chemically eliminate my libido. When those results weren’t promising, I googled suicide methods. Then I tried a hail-Mary at happiness, and googled how to get cast on Survivor.

I share this dark chapter of my past because I want to share my heart with you, and help any of you dealing with relatable struggles to feel less alone. I don’t share this to present myself as any sort of victim. In the grand scheme of the dominator system — of demolished matriarchies, so-called patriarchies, war, murder, rape, famine, disease, fear and mind-control — I’m no victim at all.

Ayahuasca has taught me a lot through my sixteen ceremonies with her, but she’s also taught me a lot — and taught me to not be a victim — through my dreams. I have a vivid dream life that has included lucid dreaming, practicing meditation while lucid dreaming (it’s like meditating on monk-steroids), traveling to otherworldly planes, meeting and receiving advice from entities, and yes, conversing with the spirit of Aya. She’s only spoken to me directly in a dream once, but she’s had a hand in many a dream-realm metaphor, including that of a pivotal dream from about a year ago.

In this dream, I found myself canoeing down a river into the Amazon jungle alongside two other men: One (named TJ) was leading the Ayahuasca retreat we were embarking on, and the other (I forget his name, but we’ll call him Billy) was a fellow retreatant. At one point our canoe got stuck on some brush, and we had to push off of a log to free ourselves. As TJ started doing it, pushing off of the log looked like a hard task, so instead of joining him, I started an easier task of untying extra canoe paddles, thinking more paddles might somehow offer us extra leverage. While stuck, we were talking about what brought us to plant medicine — our woes and struggles. I was sharing that I felt victimized by gendered double standards, e.g. applying the term “female genital mutilation” to circumcision procedures that, 90% of the time, are less impactful than the routine “male circumcision” that I’d had. Boo hoo, wah wah WAHHH. Billy nodded emphatically, resonating with the victim mentality I was spewing. TJ just slowly shook his head, continuing to work on pushing us free. I turned toward Billy, who was also undertaking the easy, less important task of untying canoe paddles, and I took a second to get my first good look at his face. He looked unfit, unconfident and scared; I was looking at a lost boy in a man’s body. In that moment, I realized that the subconscious mirror of Billy wasn’t someone I wanted to be. My calling was to become more like the subconscious mirror of TJ, foregoing the easy task of the small personal ego, and instead taking on the difficult task of improving our situation. I stopped bothering with the knots tied around the paddles, and joined TJ to push off of the log. Together, we freed ourselves and carried on with our journey down the river.

I’m a leader, not a victim. My calling is to rise above the wounds and agendas of my personal ego, and to do my part to heal the wounds of humanity. We all hurt, because the dominator system works against all of us, and the particular story around my pain is no more important than the story around yours. I share mine because it’s what I know, but I share it from a place of wanting to help you. I’m not here on this planet for my personal ego gratification, and I’m not here to write what tickles the fancy of my small self. I write about the heterarchy to put forth a positive vision — a vision of gender dynamics that serve all — because I’m here for all human beings.

Ten years ago, when I barely cared to live anymore, the pain and “problems” of my personal ego seemed absolutely insurmountable. I couldn’t have fathomed the relative peace that now graces my life. No matter how insurmountable your pain might seem today, or tomorrow, or anytime, let my story remind you that everything changes. Let my story convince you that transformation and healing are within your grasp. Whatever it is, you can get through it. You are getting through it. If you can get through this 8,351-word blog post, rising above oceans of tweets and quick dopaminergic distractions, you’re already doing something right in this matrix of modernity.

Heterarchy is the cure to modernity’s patriarchal pain — a return to matriarchal harmony that leaves intact the valuable individuality and freedom we’ve evolved. Sure, we could also transcend the dominator system through a return to matriarchal unity, and to the oneness of God(dess). That would be chill. Having died, tasted that divine oneness and shared the perspective of Goddess for a hot second, shouldn’t I want nothing more than to return there, drop my male ego forever and sit in eternal peace?

Nah.

The experience of unity with God is peaceful, perfect, feminine (for me), flawless and… boring. Smashing duality is liberating, but after Goddess has had her fun, after God is whole once again, Goddess feels the itch. She wants to do something again — to experience some other thing as a self. Fortunately, duality is no irreparable Humpty Dumpty, and so God is in luck; He puts duality back together again.

We live in a dualistic world, like it or not. Neither matriarchal oneness nor patriarchal madness is sustainable for us… so now what? Can we play in duality, yet integrate a nondual understanding? What’s a humanity to do?! We are to tell a new story, and to create a new earth.

Coming Full Circle to Love

The morning after that first date with Kailey three years ago, I woke up infatuated. It wasn’t quite love yet, but damn did I like this girl. I’d just ended a different 3-year relationship to dharma bum off to Nepal, and I knew that I wanted to leave Chicago after finishing my M.A., so I wasn’t looking for anything long-term. And yet, as you already know, she got me. The wily feminine claws were already sinking in. I knew she liked me back, because she kept testing me, teasing me to gauge my reactions. She said a lot of things designed (not necessarily consciously, but at least subconsciously) to see how secure I was in my masculine confidence.

“Ooh yeah, you were on Survivor! Hmm, I forget… did you win? I feel like I remember you losing really badly.”

I heard the words of this teasing, but to me they simply translated to, “hey, I like you. If you’re gonna be a reactive little bitch, please show me that now before we proceed further.” On the heels of meditating in monasteries and trekking through the Himalayas, I was in a pretty strong frame of mind, and I passed the tests. I’d just laugh, join her in making fun of myself and move on. My confidence hadn’t waned once that morning, and the feels were all good, until Kailey dropped the teasing bomb that actually scared my ego:

“The future is female!”

She said it pretty out-of-the-blue, and thankfully from another room, so the drop in my stomach wasn’t noticeable, and I was able to “laugh it off” from out of sight. I knew that if I wanted to win at the dating game I was stuck playing, I couldn’t channel my inner Billy (from the Aya retreat dream) and tell her how I felt about that loathsome phrase — the phrase that triggered me most. The phrase that somehow migrated from a 1970s lesbian separatist movement to the mouth of Hillary Clinton and the t-shirts of fourth- (or fifth-? Xth-? hard to keep track) wave feminists. My least-favorite phrase was coming from the lips of the woman who would go on to become my favorite human being on earth.

I buried the sensitive side of me reacting internally to what Kailey said, and maintained the suave mask of masculinity that she was falling for. Eventually, though, once the dance of the dating game had cooled down and we were in a monogamous relationship, we had some conversations about this seemingly gendocidal turn of phrase. Those conversations led to questions like, “what does ‘the future is female’ even mean? Men going extinct? Masculinity becoming irrelevant?”

Kailey didn’t know; she’d never really thought about it. She just liked feeling good about herself as a person with a vagina, and thought “the future is female” had a nice ring to it. Granted, it’s got solid alliteration going for it. Ultimately, though, the phrase is yet another product of the matrix — a mantra widening the chasm between the sexes and amplifying their distrust of one another. The control of the dominator system relies on a humanity divided. It’s been on more of a race kick the last couple years, but with the long view of history Becca Tzigany has helped me see, I recognize the matrix’s decades-long arc of separating men and women. Make women feel superior, make men feel obsolete, make women scorned, make men sexually perverse, make women feel abused, make men feel evil, make women insecure in their bodies, make men perturbed in their minds, make women feel distrustful and make men feel worthless — this is how you tear a culture apart, victimized ladies and oppressive gentlemen. We’re numb to how we’ve allowed ourselves to be torn apart because our Divine Feminine is asleep. We haven’t stood up and stopped the madness because our Divine Masculine got his balls chopped off.

We must reclaim both. We must reclaim our humanity and renounce the matrix. That matrix exists outside of us and on our screens, but it also lives within us, suppressing the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine that are our birthright. We must awaken both — the feminine principle and the masculine principle within each of us — because both are vitally necessary for us to live as balanced humans. I see a heterarchical future before us, and that future is one of wholeness. It’s also one of forgiveness — forgiveness of ourselves, of our parents who were just doing their best, of our oppressors and of our fellow men and women. If I’ve written something that’s offended you, or if I’ve written one hundred things that have offended you, I sincerely apologize. I ask for your forgiveness. I forgive everyone who’s ever said “the future is female” or tweeted #KillAllMen. These behaviors are just the gendered bullshit of the matrix. Nothing we say from our partial human perspectives, ultimately, represents the love of our True Selves.

When I say that I love Kailey, I’m not just referring to her body, her programming or the stuff her small self has said. I love Kailey’s True Self. I love her heart, I love her essence and I love the color of her soul, which I had the privilege of waking up next to for three years. I don’t give two shits about anything either of us said when we were playing the matrix’s dating game; I care only for the infinitely dimensional, divine human being I came to know. Her caring nature, her patience, her whimsical playfulness, her feminine presentation and her masculine side — I love all of her, because I love her truly. I love who I’ve become alongside her, and I love how she helped me love myself — my authenticity, my fearlessness, my sometimes-excruciating ego, my masculine presentation and my feminine side. Today, in stark contrast to how I felt a decade ago, I love the whole of me.

I feel the same way about you. I feel the same way about free men and harmonious women, and about people who don’t identify with that binary. I feel the same way about yin energy and yang energy.

We are both. We are multitudes. We are all of it.

We are the patriarchy and the matriarchy, the sperm and the egg, the emptiness and the fullness, the sky and the earth, the ether and the substance, the performance and the presence, the movement and the stillness. We are the healing masculine and the healing feminine, the man and the woman, the both and the neither, the warrior and the Goddess, the Gods and the priestesses, the celibate monk and the tantric yogini, the striving yogi and the female Buddha. The future is everyone.

We are a heterarchy. Harmonious, we are together. And we are free.

(meditative mic drop)