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The Goddess and the Bioneersby Stephanie Hiller
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[This essay was revised on December 7 -- Editor]
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There's nothing like a weekend at the Bioneers Conference to shake the boundaries of one's comfort zone. Held in California for the past eleven years, this festival of creative intelligence brings together innovative thinkers in virtually all the fields of evolutionary consciousness, applying their combined intelligence to the task of redeeming our civilization from its present, destructive course . I almost missed it this year. I was busy, and at a glance the program seemed too similar to last year's. But on a deeper level, I didn't want to be disturbed. I was happy, not a typical condition for me --riding the wave of complacency that has been rolling through this country since the Millennium arrived without a bang or a whimper, bringing unprecedented prosperity instead of the anticipated black-out. The System is definitely working; perhaps, on some astral level at least, the war against ignorance had been won? How I would love to believe that evolving consciousness has penetrated the boardrooms, and slowly but surely we are moving toward a sustainable world! But when a friend reminded me that Alice Walker and Paula Gunn Allen were going to be there, I took another look at the schedule and decided I had to attend at least that session. Spending three days with 2000 or more like-minded people, all committed to finding solutions to the ecological and social problems, is like racing fleetfooted through a lightning storm. Clouds burst, the sky blazes with energy, and the brilliance of the light reveals the garbage that litters the cornfield below. Once there, I wanted to catch every brilliant ray. In his introductory remarks, Kenny Ausubel, co-creator of the Bioneers event with his wife Nina Simons, spoke of the Bioneers' "declaration of interdependence," and concluded, in his fine nasal voice, that "Our ability to create culture very rapidly is one of the most remarkable strengths of human beings." Nina Simons followed with another gem: "The heart is a powerful electromagnetic generator… so scientists confirm what we believe we need: A change of heart." We were off and running. Alice Walker took total possession of her audience the minute she appeared. When she responded to a standing ovation by crossing her arms over her breast and bowed to us, we knew the depth of this tiny princess' devotion to the sacred. "I'm so glad that I love the dark," she said. Everyone seemed to grasp the sense of that statement. But she went on to speak about disturbing things. "I have reached a place of deepest sorrow about our collective emptiness." Not what I wanted to hear. Then she spoke about her message to the Grass Youths, "our youth who are getting cut down like grass." And her concern that women have lost touch with their wombs. "Women are becoming what they call themselves," she said. "They are becoming guys." What we need is a council of the woman elders, she concluded. "Where I come from, God is a woman," began Paula Gunn Allen. "The reasons that we are here in this room is because She's dreaming us. If we heal ourselves, we heal Her. The planet isn't out there and we're on top of her. We're inextricably linked with her; we're all the same thing…" I knew I was in for the long haul. If there's anything wrong with this electric convention it's the sin of excess. There are just too many great discussions going on at the same time, too many uniquely interesting perspectives, too many fascinating people to meet, too many innovative ideas. Should I focus on talks by people I hadn't yet heard of? But wasn't my intention to focus on the work of the women? Should I have my lunch by the lake, or spend every minute networking? My head buzzed with the number of choices. Never one to plan, I followed my impulses, and my three days with the Bioneers became, like travel to a foreign culture, a journey where the real mission was self-discovery. What did I really stand for, and what is the purpose of my work? New relationships were conjured, and new questions emerged.
For Saturday's workshops, I had narrowed my choices to three. I very much wanted to luxuriate in the pure pleasure of Kathleen Harrison's talk about indigenous shamans, but there was also a meeting of Native American women, which seemed more to my purpose. On the way, I stopped to catch my breath at the session on global economics. There Jerry Mander was assessing the accomplishments of the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization. "The WTO was wounded in Seattle," he said, and as a result, many critical, irreversible decisions were not made. But the organization wasn't crippled, and we are still faced with its continuing agenda: "It is still harmonizing products to the lowest common denominator, it is still making it impossible to stop trade with human rights violators, it is still lobbying to privatize the world's water supply…" It was, to say the least, depressing. Mander traced the origins back to the Bretton Woods Conference in 1945, in which leaders of the west decided that the way to avoid a third world war was to develop a global economy. This was a "click", a piece of information I had been looking for. "They saw themselves as altruistic." The result, however, has been "a shift of gigantic proportions, with economic power moving away from governments to corporations and the banks that serve them." He painted a picture of a world of deadening uniformity, with a Macdonald's and a Target in every village and town. While profits are the highest in history, social services are in decline in all countries, with the gap widening between rich and poor. 475 billionaires are worth the combined incomes of 50 percent of the world's people, and the 50 largest economies in the world are those of corporations. Staggering. The talk by Arundata Mittal put the fire into the fury we all must feel. Of the world's 800 million poor, 250-300 million are in India. The government has 40 million tons of surplus, but in 1998 only 10 million were distributed. Meanwhile death by starvation has risen since 1990. Two million small family farmers have been driven off their lands by dams or luxury crops; they have been committing suicide by consuming pesticides in protest against the Green Revolution, which made them dependent on expensive chemicals while destroying their soil and water. Family farmers in the US are also committing suicide, but they are trying to make their deaths appear accidental, she said, so their families can get their life insurance… She totally explained the steady decimation of India's agricultural resources by industrial agriculture. "The Punjab still grows grain but it goes to feed dogs and cats in Europe." Land is used to grow tulips, or crops people cannot afford to eat, like beef and coffee. Now it takes three calories of energy to produce one calorie of food, and thirsty cotton is grown in dry areas, with water stolen from the rest of the country. "We're told we need genetic engineering to feed the third world that cannot feed themselves. That is the biggest lie we've ever heard. "There is enough food to make everyone fat in this world."
The speakers had transported me into the Brave New World I fear, where the rich rule with a gilded hand and a merciless police force, where free choice is an illusion on our television screens and everyone is brainwashed or drugged into mute acceptance of the existing regime. I was shell-shocked; it was the way I felt after watching Hiroshima Mon Amour many many years ago, a great movie which forced the audience to feel the devastation of the first nuclear bombing. Like a refugee from the battlefield, I went on to "The Restoration of the Feminine" with a knife in my heart and a bitter challenge. What would the women say? What were we doing, any of us, travellers in the ancient realms of the goddess, to avert the awful, imminent future? The Restoration of the Feminine is an annual feature at the conference, perhaps the only place where women's voices are specifically featured and women's issues sometimes addressed. Nina Simons hosts the panel which this year included Susan Griffin, China Galland and Paula Gunn Allen, to speak to the topic "where women lead, environmental and social improvement follow." Good. Let them address the global economy. Susan Griffin is one of my favorite female geniuses. Author of the classic feminist book, Women and Nature, and many other brilliant exegeses of the sordid alliance of patriarchy and sadism, Griffin penetrates the layers of contemporary illusion with a sharp scalpel. At the Bioneers three years ago she had jolted an optimistic session on women's empowerment in business and government into fearing for their lives by describing how her recent bout of chronic fatigue syndrome had brought the grim specter of homelessness to her doorstep. I had been so grateful to her for bringing the audience down to that awful reality, so necessary, I felt then, to balance the blithe confidence that women have broken through the glass ceiling in the house of patriarchy. This year she looked flourishing; I was glad to see it. She spoke about the mechanization of society, with concomitant loss of women's intuitive ways of knowing. She wove a delicate fabric drawn from her consummate knowledge of the history of Western culture. To establish the Cartesian dialectic which defined valid inquiry as scientific objectivity, the alternative, embodied in the European witches, had to be tortured out of existence. That legacy still dominates the cultural mind. "We're constructing a society without this other way of knowledge [which women have always shared] -- and it's very scary." The answer, then? Griffin spoke charmingly about the birth of her granddaughter, which she witnessed, and the "intimacy of knowledge." She quoted Emerson, and then Einstein. "In order to speak the truth, you have to be in love," she concluded. It was lovely; but for me, in my bullish oppositional state, it was not enough. China Galland is the author of The Bond Between Women, an interesting book which explores the profound question of how to reconcile our spiritual convictions with the cruelty that abounds in the world. It's a very interesting book, but I remember feeling unconvinced that she had fully answered the question she posed. Now, the example she offered of a woman engineer whose unique contribution was the invention of a simple water-purification filter for Indian villages left me completely cold. Here the demon is let loose upon the land and we are making home water filter systems. All to the good, but not proportional to the challenge. Should not we, like Durga, be making arrows? Admittedly, I viewed the proceedings through a singular lens. What I would have enjoyed at some other moment now struck me as dangerously inadequate, soft, tangential. All I could see was the behemoth of corporate domination of the world, our planet sucked dry and discarded, while a few wealthy white men, well aware that their policies were stripping the earth of her remaining treasures, were prepared to travel to Mars in luxury rocketships, conveying the pollution of their apparently limitless greed into the far reaches of outer space. Paula Gunn Allen turned our attention to a consideration of the theory of memes, "thought forms created by people but they live independently" which "can be translated from one brain to another." Memes are "what you learned from the time you learned to speak. It's an entity. You could call it god. It's what gives you the sense of having meaning." But it limits your perceptions; "you can't see around it." Memes, I have since read, are like tiny self-replicating viruses. To restore the feminine, said Allen, we change the meme. How to do that, exactly? I'm not sure she had time to address that question. But changing the meme is not unrelated to changing the paradigm or the gestalt. Creating that opening usually entails doing the inner work of some kind &endash; meditation, ritual, shamanic journey, psychoactive substance. Isn't that what we have been doing, many of us, for the past thirty years? I left the session in the same state of shell-shock, now aggravated by an overlay of irritable dissatisfaction. While Rome is burning, we are playing the sweet strains of self-transformation on our violins! Women's work seemed stuck in the kitchen; it was nurturing, it was tantalizing, but it did not confront the wolf outside our door. The women on the panel did not know that I expected them to answer my burning question about how to rescue the planet and its poor people from the steel claw of the global corporations and so they can hardly be faulted for choosing to be loving and sweet. But if we can't address that question, all our efforts toward self realization will be overshadowed &endash;- no, extinguished &endash;- in the shadow of the next nuclear bomb… No one -- not a single woman on the panel or in the room -- even introduced the dread word patriarchy! I went on to hear more confirmation that the corporations are killing us. Samuel Epstein spoke about the medical oligarchy, the collusion of government with the medical industry, the dangers of birth control pills and mammograms, and the inefficacy of most cancer treatment. There again loomed the corporate monster. As a result of that workshop, I was late to the panel on Nature and Spirit, which would likely have been my favorite, albeit the one with which I was most familiar. I missed the invocation by Luisah Teish, one of the great priestesses of our day, but I did manage to hear Starhawk speaking about the volcano that has been exploding inside her since the first demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle, just one year ago. Using her consummate magical skill to oppose the corporatization of the planet, she is doing the work. Does she have the expressed support of the women's community, I wonder? While nonviolent protest certainly has an effect on the powers that be, who rely on good PR to protect their dirty work, it also brings forth the riot police. Protest sounds the alert; now where do we go from here? My weekend with the Bioneers convinced me that there is one burning issue in this huge tangle of disturbing trends: how to free the world from the corporate giant. We are facing the total masculization of our universe, with its inevitable consequence: the end of life. The polar ice cap is shrinking -- it has melted into an ocean a mile wide -- and in less than 50 years, the ocean will be coming ashore... A new highway will soon bifurcate the rain forest from Ecuador through Brazil. Everywhere, the same invidious pattern, the planet ravaged by the black cloud of American locusts. Yes, it is the intimacy of knowledge we are fighting for, the sacredness of experience, the value of an intuitive, earth-based way of life. But we are also fighting for survival, and there's no time to waste.
It's peculiar that the issue of global warming was conspicuously absent at the conference, along with prostitution in Thailand, the growing AIDS epidemic, the new diseases that climate change is about to unleash, the accumulation of radioactive waste… It may be that there are some demons the Bioneers are not prepared to wrestle; or it may be assumed, in the interest of sanity, that the audience must not be overwhelmed -- not frozen into the presumed paralysis that would render us impotent if we were to stare frankly into the mouth of the dragon. But sanity is not what's called for here. We want passion. We want outrage. We want people to stop shopping, stop talking about the weather, and become obsessed with the demise of the species. Death is imminent. The situation is urgent. We must enter the war zone like Arjuna; we must fight like Kali! Are we wasting our time, then, speaking of the Goddess? I think one can spend too much time examining the bones of the past in the midst of a crisis, yes. I think one can become too precious about one's own soul searching. Preoccupation with ourselves -- never the path to enlightenment -- is becoming moot in face of threatened extinction. But to worship the Goddess is to find our way out of the labyrinth. Yet the burning question remains: We are becoming, we have become, empowered. What will we do with that power now? Saving the world is a big assignment; choosing it may be the ultimate hubris. We can only proceed in a state of complete surrender, for we can only succeed by Her Will; it is for lack of trying that we may fail. One can only do one's part, whatever that may be; but our parts must be conjoined. We have been awakening from the spell of ignorance. Now -- together --we must cast the spell of wisdom. One's personal journey never ends. I have continued to think about my adventures with the Bioneers for many weeks. As I listened to the tapes of sessions that I missed, I am stunned by the brilliance and commitment of some of the other speakers at the conference. Terri Swearingen's fight against the installation of the WTI incinerator pouring lead into the air less than ---- feet from a grammar school on the shores of the Ohio River exhilarates the listener with courage, determination and wacky humor. Kat Harrison's eulogy to the work of Mezoamerican shamans invoking the sacred with ayahuasca is as strong and inspiring as it is delicate. And there's nothing to match the resonant eloquence of J.L. Chestnut, the powerful Southern lawyer who fought for Black farmers deprived of their right to equal treatment by the USDA, and against all odds, won. The work that good people are doing to rescue the planet from the cliff where its fate dangles precariously above a black and thrashing sea is ultimately more persuasive than all the evil perpetrated in the name of Mammon. We can win, and, if we don't forget to fight, we surely will triumph over the inflated fire breathing dragon that yearns to devour our world.
I love the Bioneers. Administering manageable doses of news good and bad, this conference keeps waking us up, year after year. Nina Simons and Ken Ausubel are doing their part. We cannot ask them for more. Revolution may be coming, but it is not the preferred course; history has shown that after the bloodshed and chaos, fascism is installed. And we are already on that course. Given the recent election, it seems possible that Karl Marx' fine prophecy is fulfilling itself. The state is crumbling, its somber edifice is cracked with its own deceit. Mightn't that be a stroke of good fortune? We have been awaiting this moment. And what will we do, now that it is upon us? We need a government that will respond. I was raised by Jewish parents who were in opposition about almost everything except perhaps one: they loved FDR. And so I think often of him, of his Fireside Chats during the World War, of his deep resonant voice on the radio exhorting the people to be united and face the challenge of the day. We are in crisis: let's fess up, and deal. Our planetary problems are immense, but they are solvable. Fear is indeed the only thing we have to fear. United, we could rise to the challenge and turn the world on a brave new course. Once we have met the enemy, we are capable of creating a new culture, the one of which all cultures have dreamed for centuries. It is nothing less than the return to the garden of Eden, with computers doing the labor while we savor all the fruits of Creation. Let's go there, now.
More information about The Bioneers Conference, sponsored by the Collective Heritage Institute, may be found at http://www.bioneers.org/ Stephanie Hiller is the editor of Awakened Woman. She may be reached at editor@awakenedwoman.com/
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