Lars: Well, Bianca can help you. She's got nurse's training. Gus: No she doesn't. That's because she's a plastic...thing. Lars: That's amazing. Did you hear that? Bianca said God made her to help people.
Lars: Well, Bianca can help you. She's got nurse's training. Gus: No she doesn't. That's because she's a plastic...thing. Lars: That's amazing. Did you hear that? Bianca said God made her to help people.
I just migrated this entire website to a new webserver to facilitate updates/changes to the website in the near future. I have been looking at BuddyPress for the tribe I have been planning. I was meaning to go for Ning as the community platform, but then BuddyPress showed up at work and looked like an interesting candidate.
Not only that, I’m also looking into making Masculinity Movies a multi-site environment, which means in effect that any reader who becomes sufficiently inspired can get his own mini-version of the Masculinity Movies framework where he can write his own reviews, articles and blogs for our enjoyment.
I’m really serious about growing this site into a thriving community in 2011.
If you have any input, I would love to hear about it.
Pelle, I really enjoy your writing, even when I disagree or question some things that you write. I think that what you say is incredibly important. This particular blog is interesting, and there are some comments that I might make at another time, but this time around i want to address the comments made on here by EIVIND.
Att’n EIVIND:
Eivind, goodness me, although your saturated self-righteousness would never allow you to see this, your approach is dripping with patronising, smug, self importance, and you use words very cleverly to create exactly the ‘I am right and you are wrong’ energy that you so patronisingly caution others against. I mean, seriously mate, eeeeewwwww! Immature, I know, compared to your skilled mastery of new age vernacular, but that is what I get when I read your passive aggressive drivel….eeewwwwww! It makes my skin crawl. The way you deal with people on here is so disempowering and deliberately (though disguised) humiliating and so horribly righteous, but you have the language skills and self belief (pathalogical!) to frame it in a way that makes you sound so new Age and sensitive and right. Mate, you are guessing like the rest of us, just trying to get through like the rest of us; if you were even nearly as evolved as your self-obsession tells you you are you would learn some humility. True humility, not the false ego version that your ego is right now telling you to respond that you have.
That said, Eivind…… men are here on this plane to serve women?? That is our entire reason for manifesting here?? Man, that is a theory, not a fact. Which I think is what Erik was trying to get at, but you passive-aggressively attacked him (oh yes you did, even though right now your little mind is going ‘no, brother, I don’t attack, I’m too evolved’), and used the fact that you are better with words than him to put him down, and he gave up. I am sure that you are used to that, and see yourself as having made some kind of point to him, but man, in your own new age terms, you are darkening your own soul with your smug continued conviction that you are in the right. (Erik, hang in there, and be true to yourself, don’t feel disempowered by knobs like Eivind). Anyway, ‘men are here on this plane to serve women’….just a theory, and very, VERY similar (in reverse) to the Scriptural interpretations, ALSO THEORIES, that were used to keep women in servitude for so many centuries. Is ’serving women is your reason for existence, brother, if you were really spiritual you would understand’, any different to the crap that women were fed about God placing men above them? Eivind, if you weren’t so damaging, i would just laugh and say eeewwww, what a silly, self-righteous, smug wanker. But you are damaging, and the nature of your righteousness is that you will go through life convinced that you are evolved. Sad.
It was a response to a thread I participated in just about a year ago on my friend Pelle Billing’s blog, sent to my mailbox because I was still subscribed to it.
You can imagine it got my attention. I found myself strangely enlivened – the energy of the words actually gave me energy. My nervous system went alert and I felt alive. And then I became happy. I actually giggled. What was going on? I realized that this dude had actually, although he was clearly swimming in a lot of his own shit, identified some things about my past self which were true. I laughed because the criticism of my past self – just one year back – was so out of line when applied to who I am now. I sensed how much my life had changed in so little time and it made me rejoice.
I just read that thread again and actually find my presence there to be somewhat intolerable. Quite arrogant actually. “A pompous arse” comes to mind. I agree in principle with many of the things I said, but the way in which I said them are strangely out of sync with how I now think and what I now feel to be appropriate communication. My absolutist stance is passive aggressive, the dude was right (I have since learned how absolutist statements are a sign of insecurity). And I was shaming another dude in the thread and saying pretty much explicitly that I was further along on the path than him. That’s not a decent way to communicate in my book.
The claim that “the nature of your righteousness is that you will go through life convinced that you are evolved” had just enough truth in it to wake me up and was so out of line with reality that it made me feel freedom and joy inside.
HOWEVER, I realized that this is likely to happen more as my audience widens – I will be criticized for words both past and present. What better way to deal with it than starting the “Humble Pie Project”. Whenever someone says something nasty about me, something that will make me look like shit, I will post it here, provided it was published in a public forum. Don’t let that scare you off from criticizing me – I invite it.
I had a great conversation with a Brother at lunch today about the Warrior archetype and the ways in which we have been naive and held back. So when I read the following passage in Iron John at a pleasant cafe after work, it crystallized as something of a theme today. Robert Bly is always worth quoting. Here are some of his sage words on the naive man:
A naive man acts out strange plays of self-isolation. For example, when an angry woman is criticizing him, he may say, quite sensibly, “You’re right. I had no right to do that”. If her anger turns to rage, he bends his head and says “I’ve always been this way”. In the third act, he may implicate his father. “He was never there; he never gave me any support”. Her rage continues and he bends over still farther. He is losing ground rapidly, and in the fourth act he may say: “All men are shits.” He is now many more times isolated than he was a few minutes ago. He feels rejected by the woman and he is now isolated from all other men as well. One man I knew went through this play every time he had a serious fight with a woman, about once a week.
The naive man will lose what is most precious to him because of a lack of boundaries. This is particularly true of the New Age man, or the man seeking “higher consciousness”. Thieves walk in and out of his house, carrying large bags, and he doesn’t seem to notice them. He tells his “white light” experiences at parties; he confides the contents of last night’s dreams to a total stranger. Mythologically, when he meets the giant he tells him all his plans. He rarely fights for what is his; he gives away his eggs, and other people raise the chicks. We could say that, unaware of boundaries, he does not develop a good container for his soul, nor a good container for two people. There’s a leak in it somewhere. He may break the container himself when he sees an attractive face. As an artist he improvises; as a poet his work lacks metre and shape.
Improvisation is not all wrong, but he tends to be proud of his lack of form because he feels suspicious of boundaries. The lack of boundaries will eventually damage him. The naive man tends to have an inappropriate relation to ecstasy. He longs for ecstasy at the wrong time or in the wrong place, and ignores all masculine sources of it. He wants ecstasy through the Feminine, through the Great Mother, through the goddess, even though what may be grounding for the woman ungrounds him. He uses ecstasy to be separated from grounding or discipline.
The naive man’s timing is off. We notice that there will often be a missing beat a second or so after he takes a blow, verbal or physical. He will go directly from the pain of receiving the blow to an empathetic grasp of the reason why it came, skipping over the anger entirely. Misusing Jesus’s remark, he turns the missing cheek.
Anyone recognize themselves in these words? I sure as hell do. In fact, when it comes to the last paragraph, I experienced exactly that about two years ago. I had started martial arts practice understanding that my Warrior archetype needed to power up, but I was still naive as fuck. One day, there was a deranged man on the train platform who walked around saying stuff that scared people. For some crazy reason, I thought it was in my power to handle this dude by talking some sense into him – trying to protect the others from their discomfort (though of course it was really my own I was concerned with). I addressed him and he came right over to me and punched me in the face “I’m just trying to win friends,” he told me.
I was flabbergasted. I had no response. So he landed another punch. My glasses flew across the platform and my lip cracked. I was still flabbergasted – my martial arts skills nowhere to be seen. And the fucked up thing was that my first feeling was empathy – “oh, you must have a rough life to treat my like that”. Afterwards when I started thinking about it, I realized my “empathy” could have got me killed. I thought about this at a friend’s funeral – because that’s where I was headed. Worse, it could have got my family killed (if I had one). This became somewhat of a dilemma for me (similar to the one which got me to take up martial arts in the first place). These thoughts made me upset that I hadn’t had a knee jerk reaction of anger and high physical alert. I was frightened by my apathy and that twisted willingness to feel soft compassion for a man who just attacked me in a most violent fashion. There’s a time and place for everything. That wasn’t it.
In my conversation with my Brother today, I talked about the Warrior archetype and how there’s a knee jerk component to him. A true Warrior is prepared to defend himself and that which he is assigned to protect within a moment’s notice. Otherwise, he may die (in a bloody mess), and that which he was meant to protect with it (including the goodness and beautiful innocence of our own innermost nature).
Being punched in the face on that train station platform was a huge learning experience. I lost some naivete that day. And it forms a background understanding for why the Warrior archetype is exactly what this naive man that Bly speaks of so desperately needs.
Finally, the first paragraph pinpoints why I claimed that last years Manifesto for Conscious Men was a hurtful (and, I feel inclined to add right now – dangerous) document in the wrong hands. I wonder how many naive men liked that text on Facebook thinking that they were protecting the Feminine and doing some true and beautiful thing, whilst really being in the unconscious process of trampling on all that was beautiful and worth honoring in themselves. I hope it wasn’t too many. Though the danger was acute.
Aaron Frater, a reader of the site, sent me these words spoken by Martin Luther King today:
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.
A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
Faith is taking the first step, even when you don’t see the whole staircase.
I thought you might like them. He apparently got them as a subscriber to the newsletter of a woman named Linda Graham.
If ever the King archetype was more obvious in a man, please tell us about him below.
On January 4, I sent out a newsletter about setting our intention for 2011. I ended that newsletter with these words: “In a few days, I will provide an essential tool that I use every day to facilitate progress in my life to help you maximize the likelihood of manifesting your intention.”
It’s been more than a few days, but here we are. The tool? A list. Yes, simple – and oh so potent. Here is a video testimonial I just recorded for “The List” which I did with the Authentic Man Program at the end of 2010, which only strengthened my belief in the value of lists.
There are many ways to think of a list. You could think of it as a way of getting things done. Though that isn’t so potent in my opinion. A better way to think of a list is as a way of maximizing your energy. Time-management is a misnomer. I don’t remember what dude on the New Man Podcast who said this, but he said that the truly successful and happy are into energy management. That fits. We don’t want to work until we drop and then drag our depressed, lethargic asses through life. No, we want a list to be generative – to nurture and serve us. So that’s why the list should also include action items consciously chosen to rejuvenate us. Relaxation done consciously is much better than just collapsing on the couch and unconsciously picking up the remote.
To that end, I recommend you approach list-building in a truly Integral fashion. That means you should include several areas of your life in it. A minimum is physical, intellectual and emotional, as Eben Pagan pointed out in his Wake Up Productive course that I did a long while back. I go farther than Eben though – I include spiritual as well. I couldn’t go through a day without addressing my spiritual dimension.
Checking your list becomes a nice little daily ritual. You get to tick off the things you did and you get to say “you did well” to yourself. I think you will find that completing an action item consciously and then ticking it off your list gives you more energy than just flowing from job to job randomly. Every little tick mark actually feeds a little energy into your system. Maybe this is only true for us masculine people. Or maybe it’s only true for me. Try it out though. We humans love the carrot on the stick as well as that little reward when we deliver. We also experience guilt when we don’t follow through so you may want to install some rituals for restoring rightness with yourself when you fail to live up to your aspiration. What I did with AMP was two-minute ice cold showers. Don’t think of this ritual as punishment, think of it as giving the gift of a clear conscience to yourself.
I include below the list I just wrote for the next phase of my life. This list, as you will see, isn’t really a goal-achievement list (I will probably make one of those too). The purpose of this list is to install habits into my life that facilitate happiness and vitality as a means for the realization of my goals. So with this type of list, I focus on the current, not the future. You may choose to include more concrete goals. That is also an important function of a list.
Bottom line is – you do whatever you want. Just try a list and see if it works for you. You may come to love it.
Register below and I’ll send you this *powerful* and much loved introduction to the masculine Archetypes (complete with exercises). I think you'll love it! – Eivind
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