About 'All but one'...

I had an answer for Lonely Himalayan Bear that I was going to post up today.

And then someone else pitched up and blew my mind :-)
Ezriel says something that I have heard before. But not quite like this :-)



Ezriel is a MGHOW and a storyteller. And I like this story he tells:



"The others will not come back.

Women only want heroes on their parade.

The women rejoice at their returning heroes. A great celebration is held for the new members of the village. They feel the love, admiration and respect of everyone around them.

All but one.

Quietly a father searches the perimeter for his son. “He’ll make it”, he says to himself. But as the hours pass, he is forced to return home and comfort his mate over what is increasingly obvious even if he won’t admit it to himself. His mate is sad, but resolute. “It had to be done”, she remarks. “Only the strong have the right to survive.” As the night falls and his mate drifts off to sleep the father cries for his son.

When the morning comes, the father’s mate rolls over and finds a cold, empty bed. Sure that he is hunting she busies herself with her daily tasks. As the day goes by, more and more of the hunters return to smiling families, marveling at bounty they provide. A niggling doubt creeps into her thoughts, her mate has yet to return and night has fallen. She asks the other hunters if they had seen her mate to no avail. No one has seen him since the celebration.

Deep in the jungle, a father hunts not for food but for his son. He uses every trick his father taught him but it fails him. No blood, no body, no trace whatsoever. Sure that his son survived after all he rushes to the village expecting to find his smiling son, now a man!

Nothing but emptiness greets him. He knew then that it will never be the same.

Time passes: days become months, months become years but the father never forgot. Couldn’t, no matter how hard he tried. Everyone’s life continued as nothing has happened. Sick of it all, he drifts off to the jungle never to be heard of again.

Even without one of their hunters, the village prospered and grew. Their time honored tradition has served them well. The strong live, the weak are culled. The women prepare for that night’s celebration and as the boys, now men, return. The celebration is held and the men can feel the love, admiration and respect of everyone around them.

All but one…

***

I hope you don’t mind Spacetraveller, I took your narrative and made one of my own. It’s shorter than I wanted it to be but I’ve a limited space. I apologize in advance as English is not my primary language. What I’m trying to illustrate here is that, at least for me, the system becomes unsustainable. It works for a while but it will implode at some point. More and more men are drifting away from the village, if they make it back to begin with.

I turned 30 last month and it has turned my sight inward. I look back at the roads I’ve traveled; that my father traveled and his father before him. The beaten path is familiar to me, but no longer fulfilling. Somewhere along the line, something fell off and broke. Whatever it was, I couldn’t fix it. I had to make something new to replace it with but that something, that elusive thing, is now tugging at me towards a new path. One away from what is expected of me. But I don’t see it as a loss, more and more I see what awaits me at the end. It is not without its peril, to walk this path I must discard everything that has led me this far and remake myself anew. But what awaits me at the end is more precious than diamonds, more beautiful than your child’s first word, sweeter than a woman’s first kiss.

What awaits me at the end is freedom, and I like it."


Ezriel's story is easily recognisable to any man, I am sure.
I know this is every man's story.
I also know that many modern women do not know this story.
I know this story because I was fortunate enough to find it 'by accident'.

I post all of Ezriel's comment here in the hope that women will find it and read it. Again and again.




All but one.


If I didn't know this before, I can categorically say this now:

As a woman, I have never feared being that 'one'.

The one who never comes back.
The one who is 'missing in action'.
The one who is 'lost at sea'.
The one who is just 'lost'.
The one who is no more.

This is not a woman's reality. It just isn't.
Sure, there are women who are truly heroic, but this characteristic is not intrinsic to womanhood. If it happens to a woman, it does add extra depth to her character, to her fortitude and to her sense of self, yes.

But it is not what makes her a woman.

The 'All but one' phenomenon is unique to men, as well you know, Ezriel.
So I cannot pretend to know all about it. But what I can say about it is what it looks like from the other side of the fence. Which is all I can offer on this subject. And I hope it is of some value to you.

Yes, women want heroes. I agree, Ezriel.
It is an essential part of our make-up.
And what's more, we cannot lose this aspect of our wiring.
Because the minute we do, we are no longer women.

You already know the score: nothing new here.
You don't want the 'Strong and Independent' types who don't need men.


So we agree that men actually want women who want men. And to an individal woman, that man has to be something more than a man, to be special. He has to be somewhere between a man and a god. (No exaggeration :-)

And what's more, you do want to be a hero - not necessarily for a woman, but for yourself.

We women do not need to be heroes. Of course we can be, if the situation calls for it. But no-one expects it of us. So we don't seek to be anyone's hero.

But you, you need to be. Because your sense of manhood depends on this. In an outcome-independent kind of way.
But hey, you wouldn't complain if erm, you get some 'perks' along the way :-)

Unfortunately, not everyone can be a hero.
Indeed in chasing 'herodom' as you are wired to do - and society eggs you on to do it if your own Nature doesn't - you run the risk of losing life or limb, yes.

This is not woman's fault. But woman is designed to take advantage of this need of yours.

So if you come back from your sojourn, life and limb intact, you should be a hero to some woman, somewhere.
If you don't come back, you are the 'All but one'.

It is sad, and I lament this fact of life.
Which is why I think women should be more aware of the natural plight of men and not add to their troubles with unpleasantness, deceit, divorce rape and cuckoldry.

But no-one can help the 'All but one' phenomenon. Not men (who must compete fair and square to avoid being the 'one' and certainly not women who must definitely not meddle in the business of man-ness :-)

So I receive your heartfelt lament in the spirit of shared friendship ("good on you for revealing your inner pain - I sympathise with you, my friend") as opposed to a wistful attempt to circumnavigate an essential pillar of male upbringing.

There must be a reason why all successful societies put their young males through brutal rigorous rituals such as that which you describe.

Once again, it is not women's fault that these harsh sojourns of mind and body are in place for young men like you.

But I agree that at some point, you ought to be rewarded for not being the 'one who didn't come back'.

That is what is missing in today's world for the men who did 'make it back'.
They are not getting any sort of recompense for their fear, their pain, their sweat, their toil.
In fact, very often they are punished for coming back!

This is wrong. This is unfair. This will and is coming back to haunt womanhood...




In my view, before you are 'tested', you shouldn't be asking any woman, 'Will you cry if I don't come back?'
The answer will be 'no'. You already know that.

:-)


But once you are back, you shouldn't have to ask too many women if they will watch your back until the day you die.
The answer to that rhetorical question should be 'yes'.

In fact, it should be a given that you are shown the basic respect and possible affection reserved for someone who is 'back'.

But this part is missing in today's SMP.
I understand that...




Thank you for your story.

But I think your lament should be less about your fears about someone not coming back, and more about what should be your rightful bounty for actually coming back.

Which you do. Over and over again. Day in day out.

In your mind at least, you are a hero. Which means you made it back.
To your close family and friends, you are a hero too, perhaps.
But not so much to the wider society.

And yet, the wider society expects much of you.

This is where I see a disconnect.
And this is where I rejoice with you that you see freedom somewhere in this awful mix.
And I admire you for this, because I find it very difficult to see anything good in this sort of situation, as it currently stands for men.

But in all honesty, Ezriel, I cannot do anything for the man who didn't make it back.

But I think society can definitely do more for those who did.
That is where I focus my energies.

That is what this whole blog is about.



And now I feel compelled to ask you men:

What do you make of the man who didn't come back?

Do you share Ezriel's compassion for him?
Do you have the loyalty of Snoopy?

Or do you see him as a fallen rival, and therefore 'good riddance'?
Or do you, like socety in general, feel that his Worth is in his making it back?

Is this locker-room stuff that I should keep away from?
I shall understand if the answer to this not-so-rhetorical question is a firm 'yes'.

Initiation and the woman in green

In the post about MGTOW, it was brought to my attention that I had got the whole 'initiation' thing wrong. This neither surprises nor perturbs me.

It just informs me that my curiosity on the subject is as yet unsated.

So, here I am turning up for 'Initiation - Round 2'. I really, really want to understand this well.

It is correct that I know next to little about initiation. I am afterall, a woman. Bellita stated a while back that some women do go into their own 'initiation'. I kind of 'get' that. It is possible that I myself have experienced this initiation or seen it in other women, but maybe I have a different name for it.

But that aside, the only other 'initiation' I am familiar with is of the monthly variety where no matter how reasonable and sane a woman might be usually, all bets are off for a few crazy days on a lunar basis :-)
OK, I exaggerate a bit for effect, but there is some truth to this.

I shan't get into why the word 'lunatic' irks me somewhat, but in related info, BeijaFlor does a brilliant job of analysing the etymology of the word hysteria.

Much of what I know about male initiation is what I gleaned from the man who wrote the following (bold annotations are mine):

"As a result of initiation, a man starts his life in the village as a boy, and he returns to the village as a man. His journey has changed who he is and what he does. A man's journey starts in community and ends in community. Yet all his relationships are changed. This new man is given a new name by his elders. His community recognizes him by a new name because he is a new person to them.

The initiated man returns with a boon, often described by his name. This boon is his newfound identity and the talents and vision he finds in his ordeal. The boon is for the renewal of the community, which can atrophy in patriarchal rigidity. His gift, as well as giving his life meaning, is also meant to transform his community. Indigenous societies waited excitedly for the new man and his boon.

If a community is not open to his gift, as happens in an elderless, modern society, his message can bring estrangement, ridicule, even danger and death. 

So, this is what is happening in the current SMP? This is why some men are not coming back (again)?

Because they came back once and all they got was 'this lousy tee-shirt' and so they left again, saying: Veni vidi verti (I came, I saw, I turned around and kept it moving)?

 Correct?

He continues:

For instance, modern societies do not particularly want mature men. Mature men are not blindly obedient.
 Society: True alphas are a threat to society. Let's shame these alphas and keep the betas toiling.
(And then the betas are not rewarded for their good behaviour by this same society).

Am I getting it right so far? Or am I missing something crucial?

It gets better:

Yet a man who has been to the other side has a certain peace that is untouched by fear of death or its counterparts, scorn and debasement. This is because he has already faced death and found deep, inner values unshaped by popular opinion.

The mark of an initiated man is a deep peace that could be described as otherworldly. This is the peace that the Bible says passes understanding. This is Yoda's 'calm.' There is a detachment that seems like despair. Actually, it is a detachment that comes from a vision that the community does not yet understand, especially a modern community."

I think I saw this in Mark Wahlberg. And I was shaken to the core by it, in a good way. It was scary but familiar.

It starts to get a little fuzzy for me here:

A mature man seems to know that a higher power, at least a higher wisdom, exists because he has experienced it. Through initiation he has learned more and more of the topography of his inner life, the terrain of the Self, the wilderness within. This is the place of the soul. He has found that soul yearns for otherworldly answers, as a boy yearns for manhood.

Indigenous people saw the wilderness as the place where their higher power, their Spirit, dwelled. Initiation not only introduced a boy to his soul, the message from his elders was that his soul was intimately connected to Spirit. Elders experienced Spirit, assumed Spirit, taught about Spirit. Part of the initiatory experience was the explanation of how their people existed through the action of Spirit. Elders always taught this spiritual context, the myth of their people. In the elder's eyes, their people were continually upheld by Spirit, as each man's life and life direction would be connected to Spirit through initiation.

I believe that a modern man going through this ordeal of transformation takes a psychospiritual journey that finds both the potential of soul identity and the existence of something sacred beyond the ego's ability to understand. This something is sacred because it has the effect of bestowing a goodness to a man's life.

It is up to every man to go on this journey alone, to find out for himself. Then he can define Spirit for himself. As a psychologist, I can talk of the steps that a man has to take to painstakingly get himself ready for the wilderness. As an elder, I can tell a man he is meant for the wilderness. As a counselor, I have observed that most every man who has struggled with ordeal has emerged with a spiritual sense. As a man, I can attest to the Spirit that dwells there.

This Spirit is not the Spirit that is automatically in a church or in a religion, though this power can also be there. This is a bigger, more powerful, more mysterious Spirit who cannot be contained by one church or one religion. This is a Spirit of paradox. This is a Spirit who seemingly doesn't go by his own rules. This is the Spirit who teaches the mystery of tranformative pain. This is a Spirit of the wilderness, without and within. This is a Spirit only accessed from deep inside every man, from his own soul. This is the Elder of the elder.

OK, I won't try to understand this bit too much.

But I can identify with this part:

The journey of manhood is a psychospiritual one that demands modern man's attention. Society's and the world's survival depends on men consciously taking up this mission toward inner wisdom and purpose. Men who do not take the journey are dangerous men...

A man, though alone, never makes the journey just for himself. Though he may not realize this while in the midst of loss or ordeal, many will need the wisdom and active courage that he finds on the other side. Many will be lost, with less of a chance for healing, because he did not risk. A man's initiation is not a luxury for himself, like the holodeck of the Enterprise, with little consequence when the game is over. People are waiting for his presence though they don't know it. Many are counting on him though they've never met him...

Initiated men and women are the last real hope that we can save the earth and the dignity of every being on her. I believe we are in the middle of a tragedy for earth and its people. And this is a tragedy of our own making. In this case, it is not only men and women and children who are being wounded, even destroyed in their spirit. The earth itself is being grievously wounded.

Is he talking about...gulp...Red Pill men and women here?

I personally feel that the village has failed the initiated man if he does NOT feel the need to return.

But that's just me.

This is where I REALLY get lost:

"Out of nowhere, in place of where the tree had stood, appeared a tall woman dressed in black from head to foot....Never before had I felt so much love... There are no words to paint what it felt like to be in the hands of the green lady in the black veil." - Malidoma Some, Of Water And The Spirit.

Initiation brings a man to a different view of all his emotional and spiritual connections, especially to his relationships with women and the feminine...

Malidoma experienced Spirit as woman in his initiation. His elders expected this epiphany. They knew because they had found her before him. This is why they laughed at him when he made up a tree story about seeing an antelope on its hind legs. He was so embarrassed at being behind the other initiates that he made up a story after fruitlessly sitting in front of the yila tree for three days. The other initiates had all seen long ago. Many elders felt because he was raised by white men, so contaminated by our Western cultural values and even literacy, that he had lost the power "to see through the veil". One of the first things Malidoma saw when his vision pierced the veil was the loving green woman.

Who exactly is this green woman who replaces a tree?

Has any man seen her?

Could this be the Face of Mercy Bellita talks about?
Why is she in green?
Is she representative of Mother Earth?

Is the point of masculine initiation an attempt to connect with the feminine, in the truest purest sense or to get as far away from it as fast as possible with the result that the feminine comes seeking the initiate in an unsolicted manner?

On a related note, I notice that some men who would fit the description of 'mature' are known for acquiring inanimate objects later in life that are promptly 'femininsed'.
By this I mean the typical 'mid-life crisis' man who acquires a boat/yacht/fast car/luxury property and lovingly describes it as 'she's a beauty'.
Is this a symbolism of sorts or just a quirk of language?

 

MGTOW - good or bad for women?

There are three phrases that strike fear into the hearts of modern marriage-minded women.
'Marriage on the decline', 'MGTOW' (Men going their own way), 'Marriage strike'.

A woman's greatest fear is abandonment. Or worse, never to have been approached in the first place.
Feminism encourages women to hide this fear.
Some do it well.
But here-in lies the problem: a fear will always remain as a fear unless it is resolved.

A quirk of Nature results in the following observations:
A man does not need a woman. He is capable of being a solitary entity his whole life, and he won't care.
His work/passion/hobby is his primary focus.

A woman needs people around her. The most efficient way to increase the entourage who share her DNA is to team up with a man. So technically, a woman needs a man.

A man's greatest physical need is sexual fulfilment (according to Dr Kevin Lehman). A man's greatest social need is his freedom.
These two needs are in direct conflict with each other. Marriage (read: a woman) satisfies one at the expense of the other.
But in the old days, men often chose marriage and hoped for the best with the other need. Sometimes it worked out well.
Other times it did not.

Then feminism separated 'woman' from 'marriage'.

All of a sudden, a man could eat his cake and have it too. A win-win situation!
Being a logical being, he did.

A woman's natural reaction to MGTOW would be something like this:
"Oh no, don't go! Stay!"

Because MGTOW reduces the number of men in her 'parade'.
Because she is a good communicator and needs people around her to communicate with.
But it is a counterproductive reaction.

Because MGTOW is a natural part of manhood. It is a form of 'Initiation'.

In some cultures in the world, initiation practices are still encouraged. Men have their obligatory journey into the forest and women have their preparation rites for womanhood.
There are still remnants of the original deal in modern culture, but usually in a religious context, such as 'Bar Mitzvah' and 'Bat Mitzvah' and 'Confirmation'.

But in the real deal, a boy on the cusp of manhood  would be forcibly taken literally from his bed at night and dumped into dangerous terrain, usually by older men from the same village.

His mother and sisters would cry out, "Oh no, don't take him away" but to no avail.

Because the village elders knew that a man who had not been initiated was not a man.
He posed a risk to the whole village if he did not possess the skills of manhood. He might as well be one of the women, but without her function, either. So this man was useful to all concerned.

The women would protest, of course. But they knew thay had to let the boy go. Because, assuming he survived the rigors of initiation, he would come back a fully-fledged man, a useful member of society.
If he never came back, they would miss him. But he had not made the cut. It was a stigma for that family. They were better off in the long run without him.

There are many false imitations of initiation in today's society. Inner city gangs are a prime example.

Under feminism, many men lost their male 'elders'. Because he was taken away from them by a dominant matriarch. There was no-one to raid their homes in the middle of the night and yank them from their beds into the terrifying unknown, so necessary for the development of their sense of masculine self.

MGTOW might be one of the natural retorts to this male crisis: the lack of initiation.

The motivation for MGTOW in this present clime is certainly not for the purposes of benefiting women.

But in a roundabout way, it could be the best thing a man can do.
It could be the best demonstration of 'inner Game'.

Let the initiation begin.

The heroes will return to the village, with a lot to offer the village.
The women and children and of course the elders will be there to welcome them back to the fold.

The others will not come back.

Women only want heroes on their parade.