What would you like to be saying to men who are interested in doing work together with other men, work on themselves?
   There may be many men reading this interview who haven't really done any "men's work" yet and who are thinking about it. But as we've talked about, lately it seems that men have been falling away from being interested in it for various reasons: because they read something negative about it and dismissed it, or they didn't know how to approach it, or they didn't think it was for them or they don't have the time, or all those things. Yet it's certainly clear to me that it's totally necessary that men continue to do some work and more work on looking at who they are and how to be wholly themselves, and that this work has to be done to a great extent with other men.
   One of the first things to realize, or maybe one of the first ways to look at it is that throughout the history of human culture until modern times, groups of men have worked together doing what is now called inner work--working on aspects of their inner lives as well as how they connect to other people and community in general. Any culture that you study will usually have private time and ritual time where men on the one hand and women on the other hand gather separately.
   I think the underlying conviction is that women and men see the world differently, experience the work through biological, emotional and mental differences. (Though somewhere in the deeper parts of a person's life these things are similar and even the same, you know, the deeply shared emotions and deeply universal ideas are the same.) So that it is most common throughout human history and throughout the world for women to do certain aspects of their personal and spiritual growth and sustenance as a separate group from men, and visa versa.
   Now, when those, I think very common human experiences and ideas are looked at in contemporary times, you get a completely different situation. There's a fear of these separations, probably because culturally we are so severely separated to begin with that it seems like adding one more separation is just adding to the burden of people. That's, I think, one problem.
   The second problem in that throughout history, men when they function as a separate group have often got involved in wars and attacks and various greedy exploits, so women often fear men going into those separate groups. So, I think, any groups of men that are going to do serious inner work and serious community work have to make some kind of demonstration of a connection to the beautiful and the deeply human in order to ally the fears of women and people in general. And that again has been a traditional characteristic of well intentioned men's groups throughout the world and throughout history. There always has been some expression of beauty along with the work. As a matter of fact, it is one of the main purposes of doing that work.
   I also think that there was a period where the media grabbed a hold of a very simplistic view of what this was about and on the one hand, held it up so that everybody could see it and on the other hand, encouraged tearing it apart. And I think that's often how the main stream media works.
   One result was that people who hadn't had a deep experience of it or a close connection to it were, I think, very quickly driven away from it. So, from another point of view, what we've been calling men's work is back to where it was four or five years ago--quietly doing its work the way people work in their gardens and the way people work away at projects in their houses and the way people work away in their studios producing art for personal or public display.

Now, the next questions that comes to mind is what stops men from doing the work of listening to their souls or listening to the opening to the road they should be taking to--you quoted: "Part of the reasons to live is to find out who you must be."
   In the book when I'm talking about finding out who a person must be, I'm talking about a very difficult struggle in that it turns out that a person is very rarely who their family thought they were or should be. And also that a person turns out not to be who their ideal fantasies of themselves tended to be. Strangely enough the person turns out to have a built-in purpose and aim in life. At least that's how I see, and that's how most cultures throughout time have seen it.
   Another modern idea has been that a person is a blank slate on which culture and family write the story of that person. That's a new idea and it kind of denies the much older and much more widespread knowledge of people, which is that each person is born with an innate purpose; not a completed personality, but certain seeds that are destined to grow out of that person.
   Strangely enough it turns out that what living is about is staying in contact with the seeds and the ground that those seeds are in and watering and nurturing and weeding around those seeds and what grows out of them. Again, a person is like a self revelation as well as a revelation to those around them. There's a lot of surprise in it. Just the way anything that grows has to make its way through the ground and around rocks and sometimes comes out a little too early in the season or a little too late in the season and has to deal with inclement or disturbing weather, that turns out to be what a person's life is like. It's inherently difficult and it's made out of both struggle and surprise and shock.
   In the modern conception of things, everybody talks about individuality and yet there's a kind of denial that the seeds of this individuality are there right from the beginning. It's very easy to get confused and there's not a lot of encouragement for really going through that struggle. And one of the old functions of community was to lend that kind of ground of support so that the individual could struggle its way into the light and be seen by the whole community as well as to experience the spreading out of their own soul and the wings of their own spirit.
   As a I write about it in the book, because we've gone through this elaborate denial of death, we have lost this sense of community which is always associated with a knowledge of death. Community forms around the knowledge not just of individual spirit of each person, which you hear some talk about these days, but it also forms around the knowledge that each individual in the community will die. That's guaranteed, as they say. It's one of the few things that we know. So, in modern culture, when death is denied one of the dark threads that weaves a community disappears and when the community begins to fall apart, what happens is that individuals can't stand up as straight. People individually individuate in contrast to the group; when the group is not solid, neither are the individuals.

Right, so one of the reasons for men's work is to try to recreate some sense of community, so that there is some support for people to find out what are the reasons that they're alive.
   Yes. Once a person reaches puberty, a person begins to change rapidly and radically and a person is both emotionally, spiritually and physically pulled into their first kind of group definition, which is one of the gender groups and then it continues from there - a person usually keeps defining and refining struggling to find out who they are. Culturally, we're stuck even with that first separation nowadays; it's not understood. Everybody is afraid, as I said earlier, of the separations because we don't have a coherent community, so any separations seems like it might threaten everybody.

One of the themes of your book is the water of life. Would you give us a definition of what the water of life is and why we need it so badly?
   Following those other ideas...The water of life is an image from a story, but it's also an image that appears in many languages, many cultures. It refers to this very deep water of regeneration. It's particularly needed, and people begin to remember that there is such a thing and go looking for it, exactly when everything is falling apart.
   The water of life is healing water that brings everything back together--it's connected to the deep emotions so that when people are having that feeling of sorrow for all of the disasters in the world, when people fall into that kind of deep well of sorrow that you can feel anytime these days, they're already tasting some of that sad water that people share deeply. Interestingly enough though, the deep love of humanity and the feeling that everyone is connected one to another is also part of that same deep water.
   What I'm trying to say in the book is that a person needs to sip and taste and dwell by the streams of these very deep waters of the psyche and the human heart occasionally in their life or else they feel either numb and dead or they go kind of mad, in the sense of feeling completely disconnected, completely isolated, unbefriended, threatened from all directions and alone. So, this water of life connects people through the depths of emotions and through whatever kind of spiritual awarenesses that people have glimpses and occasions of. I'm using this old image of the water of life to suggest those things.
   In the case of men, one thing I'm saying is that until a man finds his way maybe more than once to these waters of life he doesn't know his own heart and, as a result, he's dangerous to himself and to others. The water of life is also an antidote to an excess of anger, rage, fear and numbness--all things which plague men especially in modern times.

I guess I'm still searching for some very concrete examples of what exactly the water of life would be--is it getting in touch with emotions like grief or is it ecstasy--what is it in modern parlance?
   Those are good examples right there: The ecstatic sense that a person can have when they're imbued with the feeling that their spirit in them is alive and they suddenly feel how they are connected to the world of nature and the world of culture and to other people. And they're kind of imbued with love and a kind of sense of their inner vision of themselves and their own beauty and their own...all that kind of thing. That can be one aspect. The image is then one of tasting the water of life.
   On the other hand too, when a person allows themselves to feel all the way into the sorrow of the world, the grief that is a necessary part of each person's life and, many people now believe, of each animal's life, then they are also drinking of this water of life.
   What I write in the book is that part of a person's adult life is growing to the point where they can taste the depth of sorrow in the world and the heights of joy. William Blake said something to the effect that you can only handle as much joy as you handle sorrow. So, for some people at certain times this water of life is a taste of the joy of life that maybe they have not experienced since some few moments in childhood. For other people, it's the kind of falling all the way into the sorrow of the world and sipping at that depth of sorrow. Both are necessary; that's how the book takes its course. I call it the initiation by fire and the initiation by water.

You give another quote: "The cure for the condition of the soul is that which is most beautiful."
   One of the things I was trying to work on throughout the book was the wild and continuing increase of random violence in the modern world. And I described in there a number of personal experiences that I had being in various places of danger and whatever, and finding out that the only antidote to violence is beauty, or in some cases you could say, art.
   From my point of view and from the experience that I've had, the same force that erupts into violence--when it is trained, when it is wound through the care of the community, when it is educated and nourished in certain ways--that same force is what we call the creative force that makes art and makes things of beauty, and makes people of beauty and makes moments of beauty for people. Each person carries within them this kind of force of life that can explode violently and do damage or can implode and do damage in the form of suicide or self destruction or self-destructive acts. That same force, when it is brought into the community, when it is held in meaningful relationships and so on, is what makes things of beauty and immense beauty in people's lives.

So, all hail rock 'n' roll?
   All hail anything that captures the attention of young people and brings them right into the flow of culture. Again, we suffer in this culture of excesses and separations that lack intention. There's a difference between a separation that has an intention in it and a separation that is just random, or as we nowadays fear, the separations that we now have between women and men. I think what's in the air between the two is primarily fear and envy. And then, if you look at the separation between the stages of life, there is an increasing amount of fear and envy between young people and old people.
   Part of what I'm writing about is how to interfere with that, how to put something in these gaping abysses between peoples, between races, between genders, between stage groups in life; how to bring something in there that diminishes the fear and the envy and begins to pull the pieces of human community back together again. And that's another way to look at this image of the water of life; it's like the glue that holds together human communities.

So, is this one of the reasons that you tend to work with both men and women in weekend workshops and groups?
   Yes, although I always have. My own feeling is that certain things can best be done in separate gender groups and certain things have to be done with people of both genders together. But also, I think, if a person isn't somewhat secure, or what I call grounded in their gender, they don't have a sense of their own gender ground and what it means to have the physical and emotional and psychic shape of a woman or of a man. Then, it's very hard for them to successfully reach across and kind of enact or relate with the other gender.
   One of the things that is very very positive and very encouraging is in the last couple of years, (I've been doing work with men and women for about fifteen years and then with separate groups of men for maybe ten or eleven years) I have seen, thankfully, a lot of evidence of the willingness of women and men to try coming together again, to kind of reconcile and at least make attempts at it.
   To me, that indicates two things. One, probably some actual work has been completed or finished or some things have been accomplished by having the groups be separate.
   Secondly, that the big and oppressive problems of culture, such as violence and despair and addiction and so on and so forth, all these great issues in culture are getting so large--or are already so big in the present--that there is no way that they're going to be solved by one gender. I think people are beginning to realize that if there's going to be something done about the increasing number of homeless, about the increasing devastation of forests and rivers, about the increasing violence towards women and the increasing violence randomly exploding throughout the culture, if something is going to be done about all that stuff, it's going to require both genders. There's no way one gender is going to solve it.
   I think for those two reasons there's an increasing desire to find ways for men and women to come closer together and to work closer together. So, it's one of the things I've been exploring in these workshops.

One other thing about this initiatory work. I'm going to quote from your work again, it says: "Too often our experience of personal crises and periods of change lead to paralysis and passivity." And I experience that in myself and I see that as a major problem in the culture to get some fire up about these things.
   The other side of the problem. On some occasions, there's a lack of what I'm calling the water of life, which makes a person feel and actually be part of the human community and part of the community of this earth, a lack of that deep water that runs through the planet, but also runs emotionally through everybody's soul.
   The opposite problem is when life has thrown obstacles and shocks and, for many people, even abuse, in such a way that their systems get stuck. A person gets either unable or afraid of making the next move because of shock or because of unhealed stuff often from the past. So, sometimes, what's really needed is the rekindling of the passion or the variety of passions that are inside each person.
   And that rekindling usually happens amongst other people In other words, when a person is stunned and stuck in their tracks, it's very hard to move alone, to take the next step into the unknown alone. It's another occasion when the community can be supportive and even provide the first strike at the tender to rekindle that fire--the fire for living a life out fully.
   What I tend to do in working with groups of people is look, on the one hand, at the fire. Where is the fire? Is there too much, or is there not enough fire to keep things going, to keep the heat of life going? And then, conversely, has this water of the soul been found? Is the fire now too much for some people, or are people full of such inner rage and some sort of heated disturbance that they need some of these healing waters? 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