Being childless is something I don't think about much. I see my work as being my great creativity in life, rather than raising children, although I do have a step-son. Janelle has a son who has lived with us only intermittently, so basically we're a childless couple. The desire to have children is not very strong in me at all. I am happy to be around other people's children from time to time, and maybe once or twice a year I think, "Wouldn't it be nice to have a child of my own." That's about it. The thought passes very quickly.

I've always been this way. I've always enjoyed the idea that I'm living my life for myself and not for any biological children. At the same time I am aware of the fact that throughout my life my work has been directed in a larger sense to the evolution of humanity. If I were to try to concept-ualize what my life's work is about, I'd say it's being a midwife to the soul of humanity.

With my first book, The Roots of Consciousness , I really had a sense of giving birth. Right after the book was published, I felt that if I died that moment, my life would be complete. It gave me a sense of completion. The purpose of that book was to show that when we look into the roots of our own consciousness, we will find a great mystery. The content of the Roots of Consciousness is material that hasn't been acknowledged in our culture until recently. I think that in the physical conception and birth of a child one also walks up to the edge of that great mystery.

Since April 1988, "Thinking Allowed," has been out over the satellite to PBS Stations. So I have given birth again. That's exactly how I feel at this moment. It's in place. It is broadcast weekly now. We have already produced enough tapes for several years. Last April I had a feeling that I could die and would feel complete. The creative project was completed. Then, of course, comes the raising and the nurturing, but it's as if the birthing and the nurturing are two different phases.
Another moment in which I felt as if I had given birth was after I had received my doctoral degree at Berkeley in parapsychology. It is the first and, to my knowledge, in seven years the only such diploma to be awarded by an accredited American university. It's just come out as a paperback called Psi Development Systems. Again, I felt that same feeling upon the completion of my dissertation, that I could just die at that moment and my life would be complete. I imagine mothers feel that after giving birth.
There's a real sense of completion when that occurs. Of course it is short lived. After that, one settles in to nurturing the child that was just born, or getting pregnant with the next one. For example, I will be nurtur-ing the television program along. At the moment, I am working on writing the business plan which will create a corporation to carry the television program out into the world. I have a feeling that when I complete the business plan, I'll again have that feeling of having given birth.

My programs have been broadcast locally for the last year on KCSM-TV, and they have had the largest positive audience response in the history of that station. One Japanese man wrote, "I am just an ignorant ordinary person, but your program fills me with such awe and humility. I feel like I am a part of something much larger." When we get responses like that it makes me feel like we are doing the right thing. Someone else wrote in and said,"This is like a cool drink in a desert of studied ignorance." So we're giving people nourishment for the soul.

I would like to ask, "How many of the people who are doing the kind of work that I do are childless?" I know that some of the people we have interviewed on the program do have children. But I know for myself that my life is very, very focused on this work and this career, and there is a sense that this career is not so much for my own personal gain, because I haven't made a lot of money. There's something larger about it that is propelling me. In a way it might be instinctive, just as people are instinctively led to have children.

I don't have a great sense of what it is to be a father; I've had few typical fatherly feelings. I feel more like a mother through my creative products, because I feel intimately involved in the creation of the things I create. In terms of my television work, my partner is another man, and in a sense we gave birth to this product together. You'll find many men who are not gay who have creative partners, Lerner and Loew, Rogers and Hammerstein, where it's as if with creative energy, two men can produce something. It happens all the time. And in a way, I suppose they both act like mothers.
When I think of this, what comes to mind is a scene in Woody Allen's movie "Sleeper," where he goes into a clothing store, and there are two robots who wait on him, acting like Jewish business partners, bickering with each other. There's a certain amount of fussing and clucking in my creative partnership that goes on over things. Sometimes I think, you know, this is not very masculine. But it tends to happen; it's a part of the creative process.

I have always felt comfortable with role reversals. I ignored the traditional roles. You know Janelle, for example, she's not your typical feminine woman. She and I are the same height. She has earned more money than I. And she is out in the business world, while I spend time around the house working on my projects.

Here's something you might find interesting. It's a little esoteric. What you're looking at are people whose lives are somewhat impersonal. They aren't living their lives for themselves or their immediate family, or their children, but for all of humankind. And in astrology, there is a sense in which this distinction is made. Mercury, the planet of intellect, Venus and Mars, the sexual planets, the moon, the planet of emotions, Jupiter, and Saturn, which are concerned with one's personal life. The outer planets, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, deal with impersonal things, they affect whole generations. As I understand it, people who have very strongly positioned outer planets, planets that are dominant in their charts and have a lot of aspects and rule the other planets, will be people who will live their lives for the whole of humanity. In my case, Uranus is strong. Uranus is the planet of the Age of Aquarius as well, and the sign of Aquarius.

My chart is dominated by an opposition between Mars and Uranus. Normally Mars would want to oppose Venus, but I've got Uranus there. I've reviewed this with Arthur Young, who's an astrologer as well as a cosmologist. He has the same Mars/Uranus opposition, and he found that in his life there are certain key events that shape the course of his life, and they occur when there is an important transit occurring over that Mars/Uranus conjuction in his chart. I gave a talk at his institute not too long ago called "Asking the Great Questions" where I described how my life was shaped by this search, this questioning, "Who am I?", "What is my purpose?", "Why am I here?", "What am I doing?", "What is the meaning of life?", "What is consciousness?", "What is reality?" When I asked these questions intensely, I got answers sometimes that came in the form of precognitive dreams, synchronicities that would shape my life, and in fact have led me to do my radio work at KPFA, to get my doctoral degree in parapsychology, and to do the television work that I'm doing. Arthur said, "What days did these dreams occur?", and he noticed again that the events that shaped my life, the milestone events, occured when there was a transit on the Uranus/Mars opposition. So, there might be something there.

The spiritual life has always traditionally been thought of as the impersonal life. Priests don't have children. To push it a little further, if we accept the metaphor of astrology, (not that there's scientific validity, although Lord knows, there seems to be some applicability in my personal life) we can view it more as a way to contact the world of mythos, or mythology. And if we're moving into this age of Aquarius, to be dominated by the outer planet of Uranus, one would think that what you're writing about now is the forerunner of a transitional phase...the age of the many, many people who will choose not to live so much for themselves, but to live for everyone. In a sense, this is the ideal of communism.

Parents at their best do not live for themselves, but they often live for their biological families. So perhaps these childless people who don't live for themselves are indeed parenting the whole Earth, including all humanity. We're experimenting with new childrearing practices. What will we look like 100 years from now?

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