The New Role of Women

Whenever I deal with the issue of love, it touches a deep sacred part of me. I woke up this morning with a very expansive feeling. I was thinking about love, and I had a realization, a profound but simple thought, that love is a force from heaven. I got up and started walking around ZEGG and saw as if for the first time something I've seen many times before, the plaque on the wall saying: "The whole biosphere will celebrate when the first people on earth enter a state of unconditional love."

I think that the issue of love doesn't have much to do with just one other person. Being in love is independent from any particular person or thing.

Every human being asks the question, "How do I realize love for myself?" Every human being has perhaps a different key to it. At home at La Massilia I have some dogs. Because they are dogs and not human beings, and we don't communicate like human beings, I am able to learn much more easily what they can teach me about love. I also have a garden. In having the goal of a beautiful garden, green and full of flowers, I have to ask myself, "How do I take care of this garden? How do I love this garden? What kind of contact do I make with all of this around me so that I am successful with this garden?"

So everywhere around we can find inspirations, key thoughts, that answer our questions about how to be successful in love. We can start seeing love as a state of being.

Love has certain qualities. Love has to do with compassion, with perception, with interest, with curiosity, with the joy of living, and with grace. Not long ago I had the thought that love without agape'¹, without grace, without kindness, without helpful support, cannot exit. And suddenly I felt how happy it made me when I can be unconditionally loving and if I can give that to someone. If from there I approach the love between men and women, I have to see love as free, and then it is something very beautiful.

I wonder how the guests here at (ZEGG's) Summer Camp feel. For the women, you arrive here and enter a space where you are allowed to be sexually with many men; you are in an environment where you can learn new things, and you are allowed to think new thoughts. Often, after some time, the questions come up: "What am I doing here?" "Am I too fast?" "Do I really like what I'm doing?" and so on. This happens when we are set free; we get to ask these questions and discover our own true answers. it's a new, very interesting experience.

For myself, Free Love has having more and more to do with being precise in the connections I have with others, both men and women. In the usual outside world, in a normal life, I would have little chance to look at these things. The reason for that is not that I don't have the capability, but it comes from the fact that the systems we have built around love are too small for this heavenly force.

If I am to understand love I also need to allow myself time. I need the time, for example, to not say too early, "You are my partner" or to say "I love you more than all others." I need to give enough time for a precise picture to develop of what the relationship is between me and a man, and it can take years, there is no hurry.

For me, the question of love has very very much to do with my task. Two years ago I made a vow, a personal commitment, that I would do research on an idea, and that it would be a long term commitment. The basic idea can be stated like this: To the degree that you are committed to your task, your passion, you will attract those that you love and that you need. Many know this idea already, but I want to mention it because it is so powerful.

If you work together with others, suddenly you realize that when you share this similar task, this passion, this commitment, you get to know each other at the level of the soul and of the mind, and suddenly love simply arises. You stand there and realize that "I love this person" and that "this person is part of my family," and there's no question about it anymore. It has substance.

A task has to do with giving, and with passion. It means to go fully into this task and also not get lost in it. I realized that if I was going to take this issue seriously, this question of love and task, then I have to give. I discovered how much giving is a key for myself, and how much I prefer giving instead of taking. It's much more interesting to give: I have to think about to whom do I give, what do I give, and how do I give. It can also be love to attack someone, that can also be loving and giving. So don't think that I'm saccharine.

Every man and every woman has a different strategy for getting love. Women often have very crazy and unconscious strategies. It is interesting to ask oneself, "What strategy do I use to be successful in love?" Then you will see if you indeed get what you really want by using this strategy.

Women have become domesticated beings. One lesson we have deeply learned is: If I want something I sit on daddy's lap, and I give daddy a kiss and daddy will put the world at my feet. Daddy was like that. But when daddy got angry suddenly we were shocked. Women have learned the lesson to chum up to men, and they do this just to get a very little piece of what they could really have or what they are longing for. This is a fact, and we notice it when we look at it from a distance. We learned to adapt ourselves and to obey, but we use it as a strategy. We use this strategy unconsciously. As we use it long enough, we start believing that this little bit of fulfillment we are getting is all we want, but what we want is really so much bigger.

To chum up to a man and to fight with a man are two sides of the same coin. I have come to feel that women have a special place in resolving the battle between the sexes. Women are uniquely able to attend to these issues of love, friendship, Eros and peace. There is almost nothing that the world needs more than peace on these issues. They affect everything around us.

Women have also ignored their sensual longings, and their real nature. There is a naturally peaceful, passionate nature in women that we should not expect men to take care of. Men and women have different strengths and abilities, and a natural balance is possible as women trust themselves.

The right balance between peace and chaos has to be found. Eros carries inside itself both chaos and peace. The Greeks defined Eros by three aspects: one is chaos; the next is peace; and the third is Kairos which means "the right place at the right time." I think it is very exciting to think like this. I see love as a very important and noble task.

Women need a new role and self-concept. I see us on the one hand being very damaged by how we have been programmed throughout history, and on the other hand I see us as very healthy. When women meet amongst themselves, they are often quite healthy, and they talk very differently than they do when with men. I think that men should hear women talking like this; they want to hear us.

The thing is to develop oneself into being a pole. (See box.) It's time for women to develop to be this pole. If a woman fully embraces her task, for example, if she's passionate about conducting a chorus, and if she does this, all of a sudden she becomes a center of interest. She gets love, and a lot of energy gravitates toward her, and suddenly she becomes very sexually attractive also. You can see it. The woman becomes very powerful. Then she get a taste of what it means to be fully connected to her task. Then the next question is of commitment to the task, and that is something that you give birth to over and over inside yourself.

I myself took on the task to give birth to the issue of Eros. It's not one of the easiest, but I couldn't avoid it because it is mine. If you have found the right task, nothing gets in your way. You also develop yourself through the task. You end up arranging your life so that you gain more and more energy and support. As a woman you end up standing in a position of responsibility that you are not used to. And so all these tasks that are very close to what a woman is, if women would take on these tasks, the tasks that excite them, and meet each other at this level, then life would become completely interesting for them.

This is the women's field² getting together about what excites them. The women's field is the place for the awakening of women. Women have to do this themselves. This awakening has much to do with the question: "What picture do I have of a woman?" I see that many women almost walk around like mythological figures. For example you are the vamp, the little girl, the cool woman, the mama, the aunt, but these aren't really grounded. If I really ask, "What pictures of my roles really satisfy me?" For me I can't say that I really want it to be the little girl. I can find what it is I really want to be, there may be several roles, but they can be the roles that are truly satisfying.

In the end the question that remains is: How can I develop the relationships between myself and men, women, animals, nature and the whole world that I long for? I don't want to try to give this relationship a name. This is the path of free love. It can't be simply defined. I'm very grateful for this space we've created that enables us to think these new thoughts. Otherwise, every time I met a man I would find myself asking, "Is he the right one?" and I'd have to always be wondering what qualities the "right man" would have.

I feel one of the tasks of women is to build sensual spaces that are not about power but about love. I've been reading this book by a woman who loved Henry Miller. She went through a painful process by which she became a woman. After an evening with Henry Miller when they were together very intimately, she went back to her husband. She found that she had a sexual opening with her husband, who she had distanced herself from sexually many years earlier. She was able to have an experience with him that she had never been able to have with him before. That seems to be how sensual love functions. But she could never tell her husband about the source of their new coming together, even though she knew why it had become possible. If we accept that this is how things happen in the area of love then we can fully include these things into our lives and not deal with them secretly. They are normal parts of life. Women can be the ones to encourage men and women coming together sensually, as an important part of life.

No woman wants to leave a man just because she also loves another one. If we were healthy we would not even think thoughts like that. In the same way, no man would think of leaving me because he also loves another woman. Looking from that space jealousy also looks absurd=97but this has been programed into us from the culture, so we need not blame ourselves.

I want to thank Jergen for what he said, in his technology talk about energy, with his analogy of men being aroused around a woman who resists. For women this is often a big issue. They pretend to resist because they think they have to, although their real longing is often not to. Iris gave a talk about ecology where she also referred to free love. We see that if we take these things seriously, that love is involved in all of life, and that's why the concept of Project Meiga is so big and deals with so many aspects of life. We are involved with some of the most important work on the planet.

So, before I end I want to read a short excerpt from the book Eros Unredeemed. It's called "A World Process of Love Being Born":

"Successful love is the coming together of a world that has broken into two. There has been a break between the human being and creation. The human being has literally fallen out of connection with life--with the real source of love. This is behind all feelings of loneliness. When the human tried to build a framework for his love life, his experience of love got smaller and smaller. The structure did not fit the laws of creation, it ignored how love really works. It didn't fit with his real longings and didn't allow them to come to life.

"When he, after a long time of feeling lost and lonely, finally leaves these small structures, he will come back home to a much bigger world. He feels at home and experiences this as love. Love means being fully, deeply connected; the woman with the man, the man with the woman and heaven in the human being.

"All life waits for this to happen."

(1) agape': unconditional, self giving love
(2) women's field: an effort to establish what is new with women. To deal with conflicts and longings and other difficult things. When women are 14 they are friends, but then when men come they are in conflict. So it's understanding the new roles for women and really living it. The women's field is one way to do this and to create an environment where we can trust each other and communicate about our deep selves.