PREFACE: WHY “HIDDEN”? THE TITLE OF THIS BOOK is meant to be provocative. Is it true that the spiritual life of men is “hidden,” even secret? What evidence for this is there? If it’s true, why might this be? Also, what are the consequences of this, and is it possible for the spiritual life of men to become more open and accepted by individuals and society?
because we are waiting patiently for an opportune moment to speak up; or because we have retreated into a “quiet heart” — attempting, through solitude and meditation, to stop the busy chattering of our monkey minds.
“most young men in our culture have no spiritual heritage into which their elders are going to welcome them.”
For many men, work itself is often a pursuit of the spiritual, an expression of their spiritual life.
Male artists can be their own type of warriors, trusting the universe to provide economically and trusting the muses to feed them their art.
announcing his or her spirituality, which is giving life one’s all. Biophilia. Love of life. Lovers of life. Lovers. That is spirituality. And yet, so few men would ever call it that. Why have men, to greater and lesser degrees, “hidden” their spiritual lives?
making known what was hidden. It is time for men to grow up spiritually. As a species, we can no longer be stuck in our adolescence. We need to explore ancient wisdom and deep teachings about the spiritual life of men, about the Sacred Masculine, and how we touch it and how it touches us.
Introduction: In Search Of The Sacred Masculine
Progeny were sure to follow. The return of the Sacred Masculine and the Divine Feminine? The return of the Sacred Marriage of the two? One can hope. It was, in the end, a very hopeful and amazing dream.
Research in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and linguistics has found that metaphors are not just images that help to explain things, but rather they are “the way the human brain understands anything abstract.” Metaphors are a kind of sense like hearing or seeing, and their effect on us is such that “the expansiveness of our metaphors determines the expansiveness of our reality.” Cease thinking in metaphors and you cease growing.
The Archetypal Sea While I have spoken of metaphors and archetypes interchangeably, they can be thought of as different things. Metaphors change, but archetypes are eternal. Each society, each person, each age may develop individual and distinct metaphors for the same archetypal energy, and conversely, metaphors can stir up archetypes and archetypal energy.
The archetype is more than everyday human energy. It is energy that bursts through us from some sacred place — demonic, angelic….It bursts into flame from someplace within us, someplace that manifests imagery shared by human beings from many cultures and many eras. The images change because as cultures change, energies shift and their images automatically change, except when people are stuck. An archetypal image that does not change becomes a stereotype — dead energy.
Living archetypes, in other words, jolt us with energy, so that we ourselves feel we might “burst into flame.” They provide the 100,000 volts that are necessary to make cultural shifts, which today our species needs to do for its own survival. I know that working on this book has energized me in many ways I hardly expected. Archetypes, like stories, make demands on us. They are not neutral. They are behind all music, all poetry, all stories, all energizing activities.
Bolen reminds us that “in the inner world, doing is becoming: if we repeat a behavior motivated by an attitude or a principle enough times, eventually we become what we do.”
In addition, all archetypes are available to and inside all of us. Each chapter is about me and you and us. And archetypes intermingle. They do not stand alone;
What is important is recognizing when archetypes and metaphors energize us, which is the signal that we’ve found the adventurous path we need to take.
“God is both Mother and Father.”
Ten Archetypes Of Authentic Masculinity
FATHER SKY: THE COSMOS LIVES!
“To be human one must make room in one’s heart for the wonders of the universe.”
their sky-sized hearts and souls.
Christians sing “Glory to God in the highest” and “you alone are the Most High” in their liturgies. They tell the story of the Transfiguration, when Jesus went to the top of a mountain with three of his friends, and he was shown glorious as they all entered inside a cloud. Christians also tell the story of Jesus “ascending into heaven” after his death and resurrection.
But the spirit is never satisfied. It presses on deeper and deeper into the vortex, further and further into the whirlpool, the primary source in which the spirit has its origin.” The Jewish people tell about Moses encountering God at the top of a mountain, Mount Sinai, and encountering such glory there that he had to cover his face with a veil for the “skin of his face was shining” so. And in Psalm 99 we hear that God “is high above all peoples,” a “mighty King, lover of justice and establisher of equity” who spoke to Moses, Aaron, and Samuel “out of the pillar of cloud.”
When a person dies, this Supreme Being meets and cares for his or her spirit. Thus the spirit, like smoke from the fire, ascends into the heavens and returns to the ancestors there. The ancestors are the stars. It’s worth noting that these stories of celestial supreme beings antecede any presence of Western missionaries among the ancient tribes of Australia.
Today represents a “special window of time that can only happen during a relatively brief epoch in the entire history of the universe: late enough that intelligent beings have evolved who have instruments to observe the distant galaxies, but not so late that the galaxies have begun to disappear. Without this period of overlap it might have been impossible for intelligent beings ever to get the chance to figure out the nature of the universe.”
Our universe is astoundingly creative. In its beginning “there was — and almost everywhere else there still is — nothing but creativity: infinite potential, dense and hot….Creativity was wildly experimenting with every possibility that quantum uncertainty permits. There were billions of events per second expanding from every sparkpoint for all eternity, unlimited by the speed of light or lack of space.” Furthermore, our universe is very imperfect. Space time in our universe is full of wrinkles.
Sky means Breath and Spirit therefore. Each breath we take is a piece of the sky, a “piece” of spirit. No wonder meditation practices focus so often on the breath. Such meditation is acknowledging the intimacy and presence of the sky.
The Green Man
Scientists studying a 807-year-old juniper tree in Tajikistan found that the tree’s annual rings showed a definite slowing down of tree growth with each known date of three supernovas. Thus we can say, “every star that dies in our galaxy is perceived by trees.”
Our throats are meant to give birth to our heart and head wisdom (from the fourth and sixth chakras), and the Green Man reminds us that the color of the fourth or heart chakra is green! The Green Man puts compassion and generativity first, and this generativity, this birth canal, primarily gives birth to green compassion.
If we look inward, we will give birth to substance. (The eyes of many Green Men look inward.) Receptivity, introversion, and introspection are necessary to generate life; these attributes lead to a deeper place than extroverted action. It’s a space where psyche and cosmos, psyche and Gaia, can connect and bear fruit. Fruit that remains.
Male creativity, sexuality, and sensuality emerge from the creativity, sexuality, and sensuality of nature — and are meant to serve it. In this way the power of male sexuality is held in its proper, larger context, not as an expression of individual power, in ego strutting. The Green Man does not repress or sublimate sexuality. He expresses it openly — honoring it, praising it — and yet without aggrandizing or personalizing it. It is a rich sexuality that does not draw attention to itself but embodies the ongoing sexual and creative energy of the universe.
The Green Man reminds men not to live solely in the sky and in their heads. Like a tree, men have permission to reach into the ground, to heed their lower chakras, and grow out of the Earth, arms raised to the sky in worship.
I have kept her secret… I am born in the dark…
Stand for community and compassion rather than individual power and domination. Stand for the children and generations to come.
The Green Man honors intelligence. He is “the cosmic man or intelligence underlying creation.” After all, he is usually depicted as a human head. In fact, he is more than intelligent, he is wise. It takes intelligence to both study nature and relate wisely to it. It is this rebirth of an interest in nature, in ecosystems, that so characterizes our time. Thus, Green Man returns. That is why also he is sometimes identified with the fool — for wisdom, unlike knowledge, finds room for the role of the fool and the trickster. Folly and wisdom wrestle together.
The Sacred Or Cosmic Tree
In the Bhagavad Gita the tree represents the universe, as it does in the paintings of Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century. In the third century in the West, the Tree of Life was described as the center of the world at Golgotha, with a holy spring from which all nations would drink.
Sacred trees abound in human myths, from the Bodhi Tree under which the Buddha received enlightenment to the LoteTree beside which the prophet Muhammad saw his second vision of the Archangel Gabriel. Many ancient stories tell how spirits of trees speak and sing to humans.
Anderson talks of the Christ on the abbey church of St. Pierre at Moissac (carved c. 1130) as being “a powerful, frightening lord or king whose garments are vibrant with cosmic power. The beasts of the evangelists symbolize not only the four gospels but the four elements and the four temperaments of man which are made complete in the human nature of Christ. Their bodies twist with extraordinary energies.”
The tree reaches to the sky and its roots reach into the depths of the earth, so the tree is a powerful reminder of the union of Father Sky and Mother Earth — it is the axis mundi, the center of the world.
There was a “confidence and energy” in the air. It was in this atmosphere of hope that the Green Man returned. The monastic establishment was undergoing a reform movement.
Nature as a “kindly ally of man” is Gaia.
The Green Man is recognized as the One who Manages the Forest when not at war. He blends into the forest and is seamless with it.
Many poets and others have died in prison for telling the truth through their art. One sculptor depicted a sleeping mother with a thorn in her ribcage and a rifle barrel for a spine.
Their courage and their commitment to telling the truth (fifth chakra work) are testimony of that.
Icarus And Daedalus
Notice that Daedalus is trying to coach his son to follow the middle path, to avoid too much yang energy (the sun) and too much yin (the sea). His son, maybe due to the adolescent surge of masculine hormones, is overly attracted to yang energy and pays the ultimate price for it.
If we think of pure spirit, symbolized by the sun, as masculine, we can see that, released from the feminine the masculine spirit is death. The feminine is what holds the masculine in life.”
Quite the contrary, Daedalus represents the shadow side of the teacher or parent; he is the elder who cannot abide being outshone and overtaken by the success of youth. How ready was Daedalus to watch his son take wing and fly successfully, to someday fly farther without him?
Seen this way, the story becomes less a direct condemnation of the excesses of youth (which is a convenient stance for adults who have grown fearful of winged flight — that is, their mystic self— and envy the bravery of the young). Instead, this story is a tragic parable about the importance of intergenerational wisdom and intergenerational communication, without which there will be no wisdom.
Putting On Wings
“Putting on wings” is itself an archetypal image, and it is a powerful one for mysticism. Every youth wants to put on wings and fly, to emerge from the cocoon of childhood and “reach for the stars.” This is altogether natural. Adolescents want to soar beyond the known, beyond the parental home, beyond the given and the labyrinths and the prisons of society — to reach for the heavens, to stretch to the sky, to fulfill the emerging adult soul that is truly capax universi, capable of the universe.
To fly and soar like the eagle is to journey nearer to Father Sky, to make contact with the divine mind and to leave earthly cares temporarily behind.
Archetypally, in teachings around the world, the bird is symbolic of the soul. Among the Egyptians, the bird had a human head and signified how the soul flies away from the body after death.
It is said that when Muhammad went to heaven he found the Tree of Life restoring youth to all who ate of it.
They are imprisoning the young in a variety of cultural and economic labyrinths: of consumerism, of the cult of the individual, of materialism, of personal and national debt, of war-driven economies. These things do not supply the wings that satisfy the heart’s desire to soar close to Father Sky.
Gaston Bachelard puts it this way: “Of all metaphors, only those pertaining to height, ascent, depth, descent and fall are axiomatic. Nothing can explain them but they can explain everything.”
The sky beckons us, but we also need grounding, which is what a good father or parental figure can provide.
Like Icarus, Alfredo falls; that is, his love fails, it falls from the sky, he tumbles from the soaring ecstasy of life with Violetta.
Hunter-Gatherers
Notice the universality of this fact: Every one of us comes from huntergatherer stock. To be a human is to be a hunter-gatherer. To be a man is to serve the tribe and the survival of the community through the skills of hunting and gathering. This has been the case for about 90,000 of the 100,000 years of our most recent ancestors — and for millions of years before that.
“La joie. They experience more joy in a day than my people do in a lifetime.”
“the essence of the Western mind, and particularly the Western male, upper-class mind, was its ability to resist the contagious rhythm of the drums, to wall itself up in a fortress of ego and rationality against the seductive wildness of the world.” Among hunter-gatherers, ritual insured a “kind of spiritual merger with the group,” and this in turn healed and brought joy.
“They impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is.”
New Guineans are actually smarter: they are more alert, which means more awake and more curious and seeking after knowledge — eager even; they are more expressive, which means more in touch with one’s creativity and the artist within;
As Diamond makes clear, the intelligence level of hunter-gatherers needn’t ever be questioned. Studies indicate that they were and are “walking encyclopedias of natural history, with individual names (in their local language) for as many as a thousand or more plant and animal species, and with detailed knowledge of those species’ biological characteristics, distribution, and potential uses. As people become increasingly dependent on domesticated plants and animals this traditional knowledge gradually loses its value and becomes lost until one arrives at modern supermarket shoppers who could not distinguish a wild grass from a wild pulse.”
FROM THE SPEAR TO THE PLOW When humans moved from hunting-gathering to agriculture, they and society changed. Some of these changes we would consider “positive” and some “negative,” but nearly all have led to unintended consequences that now trouble modern life.
No wonder shame plays such a large role in men, leading them so often into aggression. The modern world is full of tribal groups, so that the weight of tribal expulsion weighs as heavily on us today as ever.
So his work on shame really looks at how living in a postmodern culture is an experience of alienation because so many ties that are ours from the past have been lost. We go around with a sense of alienation, and this leaves us in a position of being easily shamed — and especially men because men have gone through experiences of being shamed so intensely from the time we were very young. FOX: HOW do you define shame? NICHOLSON:In Gordon’s work shame is the opposite of belonging. Shame is the experience of not belonging. I would go further. I think there is appropriate shame when you commit harm — we need that to regulate our social structures. But the secondary shame is the feeling of not belonging, that who we are is not okay.
NICHOLSON:Carol Gilligan’s research of young boys is giving us this extraordinary insight that boys get shamed for their vulnerability at a very young age, right around kindergarten, and that’s the time at which they really learn to hold off from expressing their feelings and experience.
NICHOLSON: Aggression in men is very tricky, because as men we have so much anger about the way in which we have been treated or dismissed or rejected by other men. This whole culture lives within a story of war, and to go to war the culture takes so much away from men. We carry with us so much, not just natural aggression, but carried aggression. In most men a lot of anger has built up that never gets an outlet. Anger is really marginalized in this culture and produces lots of destruction.
Thomas Aquinas observed back in the Middle Ages that the “lover is not content with superficial knowledge of the beloved, but strives for intimate discovery and even entering into the beloved.”
Louis J. Ignarro, from the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine, writes that “one tiny molecule produced by the body may do more than any drug to prevent heart attack and stroke….Nitric oxide helps prevent heart disease and stroke.” Dr. Joe Prendergast, who works at the Stanford Medical School, has created an L-Arginine complex and formula that combines with L-citrulline, another amino acid.
Many of my friends are artists, and I see firsthand how artists are always on the hunt.
spoke with psychologist John Conger, and this was his perspective on it: I think the demands on us are very intense now. Because on the one hand there is this Odysseus world that is competitive, and you are meant to throw the discus farther than someone else. And if you don’t you are not considered a man. There’s a lot of pressure in this culture to be very narcissistic. We are not worth anything if we lose. Men are meant to win. Men are meant to get the best grades and become doctors and be successful, whereas if you’re a loser, no woman will want you because women want you to be successful so they can have a nest for their children. There is a lot of pressure on men to just look after themselves and be very successful. Then they are attacked for the very same reason — that all they care about is themselves. But what is going on is the shame if you don’t become a winner. If you are not number one, then you should be in the first 10 percent. Getting to the right college.
This is a very wonderful thing, and we should always compete with ourselves and strive for excellence. In an entirely different context, I suspect that this understanding of competition with
oneself comes closer to Muhammad’s idea of “jihad” than does righteous warring with others. Muhammad himself said that the first meaning of jihad is jihad with oneself. The principle of competition with others, if left to its devices, very often leads to war. It leads to overfeeding the reptilian brain. And that is a very serious matter for our species at this time in history. The reptilian brain is about action/reaction, “fight or flight,” win/lose.
is in fact their favorite and most effective spiritual practice, one that gets them into authentic stillness and quiet and solitude.
And ancient energies are awakened, including the thrill of the hunt and the excitement of the “kill” (that is, the sale) as well as the camaraderie of coworkers and associates who comprise a “team” or community of hunters.
The Great Work is “not a role that we have chosen. It is a role given to us, beyond any consultation with ourselves….We are, as it were, thrown into existence with a challenge and a role that is beyond any personal choice.
Chögyam Trungpa talks about the “sad and tender heart of the warrior” and this is very real. The warrior is in touch with his heart — the joy, the sadness, the expansiveness of it.
“You can become a horseman carrying your heart through the world like a life-giving sun, but only if you and God become sweet lovers.” The warrior, unlike the soldier, is a lover. The warrior is so much in touch with his heart that he can give it to the world. The warrior loves not only his nearest kin and mate but also the world and God. The warrior relates to God as a lover.
We cannot afford this ignorance and confusion any longer. Nothing could be further from the truth.