Unplugging the Patriarchy

“I knew I had an appointment. I just didn’t know with whom. I was, however, certain of the place and time. My intuition had been clear: Be in New Mexico on the solstice. It was June of 2002. I had just returned home to Los Alamos, and my suitcases still stood at attention in the foyer, demanding to be unpacked. A storm was brewing, and the somber house - neglected during my three-month absence—was filled with the clanking sound of unruly wind chimes.

Ignoring the luggage, I walked to the patio door and opened it. A warm blast of air careened past me, unsettling the dust on the terra cotta tile floor. Ominous dark clouds churned in the skies as the wind whipped the branches of the pines back and forth. As I made my way to the fence above the red-rock mesa, the thought came to me clearly: Something important is going to happen.

I suddenly felt compelled to go to a place of power called the Valle Grande, in the Jemez Mountains above Los Alamos. Locals call this area the Caldera, which means cauldron in Spanish—in this case a cauldron of ancient volcanoes. Surrounded on all sides by peaks and ridges, the land there resembles a gigantic, grassy bowl. Most visitors comment on its size, snap pictures of the grazing elk, then return to their cars in pursuit of more exciting destinations, but for those who can peer beyond the third dimension—our physical environment that we call the “real world”—the Caldera is a place of magic.

A shiver of anticipation rose up my spine. I spun around, strode inside, and phoned Anders, a young Scandinavian friend who lived nearby. “How would you like to go to the Caldera and meditate?” I ventured. Anders loved nothing better than meditation. His shaved head and disciplined demeanor were suggestive of past lives in Zen monasteries. In this life, he had recently sacrificed the job security of his military career in Norway, moved to Santa Fe, learned to meditate, and enrolled in the University of New Mexico at Los Alamos. We had met a year earlier at a meditation gathering and had bonded instantly. He had been keeping an eye on the house while I was away.

“Right now?” he replied in his engaging Norwegian accent. “Well, yes. The solstice is only a few hours away. I thought we might do a sunset meditation.” I had regaled Anders with tales of the Caldera’s magical qualities, but he had never been there. “On my way,” he said, and I heard the click as he hung up. By the time he arrived and we began driving to the Caldera, the wind had eased up a little. Leaving the Los Alamos mesas far behind, I navigated the hairpin turns of the mountain, and we ascended through groves of pine to almost eight thousand feet, where we saw the Caldera stretching out to our right. Previously part of a private ranch, the land had only recently been sold to the government and was not yet open to the public. We risked a fine if we trespassed, so we decided that our safest option was the hiking trail farther west that wound along the Caldera’s edge.

I stopped the car in a small parking area near a wooden gate that marked the entrance to the trail, and we began our hike. Anders, wearing army fatigues and sturdy canvas boots, took the lead and practically sprinted up the mountain. His physical frame was slender, but every part of it was muscular, the result of rugged training with the Hærens Jegerkommando—the Norwegian Army Special Forces Command. Occasionally he paused, turned, and shot me an encouraging smile. The climb doesn’t faze him, I thought as I stopped to catch my breath. But after all, he’s in his early thirties. God, I wish I had that much energy!

At the summit overlooking the Caldera, we took shelter from the wind in a small grove of pines. I diligently cleared the rocks next to a boulder, spread my outdoor meditation blanket, and struggled to find a comfortable sitting position. Anders dropped down onto the dirt some distance away, closed his eyes, and was immediately absorbed in meditation. Life seems so easy for him! Why is it so difficult for me? Tears welled up in my eyes, and I took a deep breath to calm myself. I hadn’t realized I was feeling so emotional. Looking for solace I turned toward the Caldera, now bathed in the light of the setting sun. It was vast, silent, and completely devoid of emotion, which helped me feel more balanced.

Before beginning to meditate, I reached out to Spirit with a prayer. As the summer and winter solstices are the two most powerful days of the year, I hoped I would have a better chance than usual of getting an answer. “I’m really in need of some guidance down here,” I murmured softly. I hesitated, sorting through the events of the past few months and groping for the words to describe my feelings. My father had just passed away in March. When I’d returned from his funeral and gone back to work, I was unexpectedly fired—and all that was within one week! It was like having the rug yanked out from under me. Then my father’s affairs needed to be settled. That had taken three months— three stressful, exhausting months. Now I’d returned to New Mexico, a place where I would never have moved had my former company not transferred me here, and for what, I didn’t know.

“Spirit, every single support structure in my life is gone. I feel completely alone. My mother is gone, my father is gone. I’m an only child. I’m single, I have no children, and I have no long-term friends in this area.” Feeling helpless, I stopped and took another deep breath. “I have no idea where to go from here.” I continued slowly, closing my eyes. “If you have some guidance for me, I would be grateful.” I held my breath, listening. Spirit was silent.

Later I asked Anders to drive us back down the mountain. Climbing into the passenger seat, I pulled down the mirrored visor and ran my fingers through my shoulder-length, sandy-blond hair, then turned my head slightly and wondered who had decided that graying temples looked dignified. I scrutinized my reflection more closely. Tired hazel eyes peered back at me, with dark circles underneath. I had lost fifteen pounds while struggling to liquidate my father’s estate, and my face now looked gaunt.

Women in their early fifties aren’t expected to look like they’re twenty, I reassured myself. And besides, why should I care how I look? Snapping the visor back in place, I stole a glance at Anders—in his prime and smiling to himself. Perhaps he was imagining being the proud owner of a Mercedes. Sighing, I reclined the passenger seat and gazed sightlessly out the side window as dusk blanketed the mountain.

This was not the first prayer of mine that had gone unanswered. Over the years I had entreated Spirit countless times for guidance; always asking to be shown how I could discover, align with, and prepare for my life’s work, something I felt certain had to do with being of service to the planet and all her peoples. I had prayed in the desert and prostrated myself on the tops of mountains. I had clocked thousands of hours meditating and ruined my knees sitting in the lotus position. I had poured over ancient texts and studied ardently with spiritual teachers, learning arcane methods for working with the subtle energies beyond the third dimension. For the past month, I had been feeling a nagging sense of urgency, as though some distant bugle was playing reveille, urging me to line up, stand at attention, and receive my orders. Surely, after all these long years of preparation, the time was at hand. It had to be! I had actually expected to get those orders two years earlier, after an experience I’d had in South Africa.

Before traveling there, I’d learned that South Africa was colonized by the Dutch and English who had taken control of the land and the country’s wealth, dominated the indigenous black population, and implemented strict racial segregation policies that became known as apartheid. Once in Capetown, I made it a point to tour the colonial fort built by the Dutch upon their arrival in South Africa. As our tour group entered the central courtyard, the guide gestured toward the white, three-story buildings surrounding us. “They built the fort in the shape of a pentagram,” he explained, “and construction proceeded in a counterclockwise direction. Nobody knows why they did that.”

I had a guess. I recalled that the five-sided pentagram is sometimes associated with the practice of lower mysticism—what some call the dark arts—and the counterclockwise direction could have indicated that the designers were pulling an inter-dimensional force down into the fort. A clockwise direction radiates energy outward; a counterclockwise direction drills down. Did they summon some malevolent force, then anchor it into the Earth? I wondered. Could it have been done with the intent to subjugate South Africa?

It was a mystical puzzle and I was fascinated. I left the tour and walked to the center of the courtyard. The security guards glared at me, but I ignored them. I sat on the bare ground, closed my eyes, allowed my awareness to drop down into the underlying feeling, and merged with its vibration. Almost immediately my body began to feel strange. I hadn’t felt it before because I had been standing on the paving-stone sidewalk, a walkway that was inundated with the thoughts and impressions of thousands of tourists. I had been feeling the tourists, not the fort. Now a wave of nausea rose from my stomach into my throat. My stomach was fine before!

It happened a second time, and I fought the urge to leave. Unexpectedly my emotions spiraled out of control. Anger arose. Depression set in. A haywire mix of negative feelings engulfed me. I scrambled to my feet, twitched like a dog shaking dirt off of its coat, and made a beeline for the nearest exit. During my next two morning meditations in my hotel room, I attempted to investigate the energy I had felt in the fort, but each time I approached it a wall of nausea blocked me. I knew that sudden nausea sometimes indicates negative mystical energy. Repeatedly I tried to push beyond it and then, finding it too uncomfortable, backed off, but something inside of me refused to give up.

I sensed that I was tapping into the unbalanced energy of apartheid and that it was really a microcosm of the unbalanced energy that animated the power structures of our male-dominated, fear-based Patriarchy. I was determined to merge with it to find out. This was something that had haunted me for the past twenty years. Why was the world so horribly out of balance? What was the underlying cause of all of the poverty, injustice, and violence... the starvation, rape, and endless war?

If I investigated any one of these cultural phenomena on a spiritual level— if I grabbed hold of it and followed the line of energy attached to it back to its source— I always found the same root issue: the imbalance between the masculine and feminine energies on the planet, an imbalance born of five thousand years of female oppression by men. It expressed itself through male conditioning that assumed superiority and sanctioned dominance, female conditioning that imposed second-class citizenship and counseled passive compliance, religious teachings that degraded women as chattel, and misogynistic attitudes that permeated all our social systems.

Over the years my investigation had made me first angry, then depressed, and finally determined. There had to be a way to reconcile masculine and feminine energies. There had to be a way to shift the balance and bring sanity to the world!

In my meditations in South Africa, I suspected that if I could merge my awareness with the energy of apartheid, I would be able to merge with the essence of Patriarchy and comprehend, on a much deeper level, this imbalance that had obsessed me for so long. Maybe then I could see some way to help rectify the imbalance. Maybe helping to correct the imbalance was the way I was supposed to be of service to humanity. During the third attempt in my hotel room, clenching my hands in my lap and exerting all my will, I succeeded in pushing my awareness through the wall of nausea. I crossed an invisible threshold, merged with apartheid, and found myself at the core of the patriarchal regime.

I was seized by a ruthless intent to control, an unscrupulous need to dominate, and intense hatred of the feminine. I became the Patriarchy and felt it in every cell of my body. It was difficult to know how long I stayed there—perhaps only four or five seconds—but within that timeless moment I experienced the mindset completely. As my awareness returned to my physical body, I doubled over in pain. Every cell was on fire. Tears streamed down my face. My mind, stupefied with horror, had stopped functioning. Taking deep breaths, I gradually managed to sit up. Slowly the burning sensation subsided, and as it did I sensed some emotion rising to the surface. Initially the feeling was so overwhelming that I failed to identify it. Then it registered. I was infuriated. I was a woman sitting in a hotel room, in the midst of a patriarchal system that had beaten women into submission for the past five thousand years, and I was filled with rage.

Without thinking, I raised a lamentation to Spirit: If there is anything I can do to change this, let it be known that I volunteer! There was silence as I watched my projected thought travel into the cosmos. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, I heard a voice cry out: “Prepare to do battle!” Time stopped. Space changed. I felt confused. All around me a hundred invisible doors flew open. A hundred dimensions stretched out through space. A hundred beings snapped to attention. The sound terrified me. It was the sound of a hundred soldiers on a military parade ground, slapping their rifles to their chests in one synchronized gesture…”

~ Lucia Rene, Unplugging the Patriarchy
“Just below the surface of our modern world lurks a hidden energy structure created purposely, during the 5,000-year Patriarchy, to limit the consciousness of each and every human being. When three women trained in the mystical arts unite to take this structure apart, they are catapulted into the corridors of power, the recesses of their own minds, and the expanding consciousness of a new age. Unplugging the Patriarchy reveals an x-ray view of the world in which we live. It is a testament to feminine power, service, and love - an unforgettable novel that will inspire you to unplug the Patriarchy within yourself…”

"Lucia Rene communicates complex spiritual ideas in crystal-clear terms and uses the sacred voice—a voice that sooths but carries a punch—to help you navigate into dimensions in consciousness you’ve never experienced.

When you sit with Lucia, you enter a multi-fractaled field and, to whatever degree you are ready, willing, and able, you absorb the remembrance of your own Universality."