Natural Passages Newsletter

Gentlemen;

I came across a wonderful article by Dr. Robert Moore that I think will spur some thoughts, feelings, insights, and/or confusion. Much of Dr. Moore’s scholarship was integrated into the medicine wheel we use in Natural Passages, aka Medicine of Men.

I encourage you to find a quiet place and read the article--it is worth your time and effort.

Bountiful blessings
Herb Stevenson

The Dawn of Consciousness

Robert L. Moore

Male and Female Differences

The differing time-scales of male and female development are found at the axis between the Lover and the Warrior. Young females are flooded with Lover energy in adolescence while young males are flooded with Warrior energy at the same age. However -men and women pass each other at mid-life on this axis. This is the source of so many divorces and so much inter-gender misunderstanding. Just as the woman at mid-life is powering up into her aggression, her Warrior, a man is discovering the opening of his heart, his Lover. They pass each other in the night, literally pass each other in the night. I want you to think about how this difference is enormously significant.

After Dr. Moore published his series of books with Douglas Gillette on the four archetypal structures, David Gutmann's (1987) book, Reclaimed Powers, was pointed out to Dr. Moore. This cross-cultural study of men and women through the life cycle showed this movement of women to more aggression at mid-life and men to more passivity is a universal human fact. It is in the hard wiring.

It follows from this that the trajectory of personal development is radically different for men and women. There are a lot of women who have contempt for their husbands because their husbands have moved into a mid-life limbo, the Lover energy, and are confused and disoriented. When women get to mid-life, they say to themselves, "I've had enough of this servant stuff for other people. I've learned about boundaries now. I've figured out how I have been taken advantage of. Now I'm going to get very clear about what I want, and if this pitiful excuse for a man that I'm married to doesn't get his stuff together, I'm going to leave him." And they are ready for that. They have Warrior virtues at the point where their husbands have lost them.

It goes like this. She says, "Just do it, and stop whining." He says, "But I feel, but I want, ... couldn't we..." Then she says, "Just get out of the way. I've got stuff I've got to do." So she decides to take the helm. She is not feeling wimped out and she is not overwhelmed with feelings of "Oh, this is painful," or "This is uncomfortable," or "What will they think?" or "Will he leave me?" When she comes up she has that Warrior energy that says "Let's get the job done. I know what I want. I know where I'm going. If you can't come along, then I'll find somebody else." This is radical asymmetry.

When you look in the world, and when you look at Gutmann's book, you notice that women elders are not having as hard a time facing their responsibilities. They are still having a difficult time, but not as hard a time as male elders. Why? The female initiation is not in much better shape than male initiation. According to Gutmann they do better because they are not in a pool of feelings when challenged with responsibilities, while males at mid-life are in the Slough of Despond.

Four Initiations

We are the social animal. We are the cultural animal. We are the ape that creates culture. You put us down anywhere, and we are going to create myths and rituals. With these four foundational powers (King, Warrior, Magician, and Lover), we are going to create the software we need to actualize our hardware, the potentials in our hardware. If you give us long enough, we will create what we need. We will create initiations through culture which correspond to each of these instinctual lines.

History shows that this is true. In the past, indigenous people created initiations which corresponded to each of these four lines of development. Take the Royal line (King/Queen), for instance. Men did things together which helped them learn how to mentor, and how to be aware of the need for sacrifice on behalf of the whole tribe. However, they did not leave this to chance. This is the key. They did not have the same assumption that contemporary people do, that you just let a person grow up and they will be mature. None of the indigenous people made that mistake.

They also realized - and Gutmann's (1987) book makes this very clear - that the old people of the earth, the tribal peoples, knew that you had better initiate the Warrior in the young man. If you do not initiate the Warrior, then the aggressive energy in a young man is going to damage his community and himself, too. They came up with the software, the tribal initiations, from the Masai to the Zulu to the Zuni, to help the young male learn the proper and appropriate use of aggression. Because he is flooded with it so early in his life, he does not have the life experience to tell him how to use it wisely. The elders must do that.

The old peoples of the earth did not have ordained clergy; instead, they had initiations for men in this energy. Men learned their ritual responsibilities, their initiation into the Magician. There was no such thing as a man in a tribe of indigenous peoples that did not have this ritual responsibility, that did not take his place in the circle of men in the long house. If you have not been in The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and looked at the long houses men were in prior to the modern era, then you should plan to do so.

They all knew there had to be some sort of initiation, some sort of ritual place and channel for the erotic, Lover energy. They knew a man needed to power up in the erotic, and they knew that this erotic energy was the universal solvent. Without an initiation, it will dissolved everything - personalities, homes, fortunes, whatever.

Initiation at Midlife

The mid-life transition has a different mid-life dynamic for men than women. Research shows that when men move into mid-life, many of them become depressed, passive, suicidal and addictive world-wide. Men in mid-life, in other words, move from the Warrior energy right into the heart energy, into Lover energy, and a lot of them collapse into a puddle, an abyss, a male mid-life emotional swamp. Renaissance poetry used to call this the "Slough of Despond" (for folks who are not from the South, a slough is an old creek that is full of water moccasins, it's hot and wet and full of quicksand). Even if a man had a good Warrior initiation in the first half of life, he is in danger of losing connection with it when Lover energy floods him. At mid-life, the Warrior must be consolidated to balance the flood of Lover energy and allow it to be integrated into the self.

Masculine Initiation

Time is late and we are in a desperate situation. Look at your political leaders and listen for anybody that is going to step up and name masculine initiation, or the lack of it, as a serious world-wide problem. You are going to have to listen a long time before you hear anybody that is even talking about this, and even longer before you come across anybody who really knows what is going on. Those in the echelons of power do not have a clue that it is not merely economics, it is not merely education, it is not merely any particular social location or television show or rap song, that is the source of our difficulties: it is the whole lack of a system of masculine initiation and eldership.

If you look at the Gutmann book, what does he say? He says that in every indigenous culture the older men bonded together as peace chiefs. They bonded together with the young men to help them understand what all this aggression is for. They offered young males a vision of masculine maturity.

Journey to the Center

There are two components to the sacred masculine and masculine spirituality. The first component is for a man to get connected to the great power that he needs for life, that his family needs for him to have, that his community needs for him to have, that the world needs for him to have. Second, masculine spirituality concerns what a man must do to keep his power from turning demonic and destructive in his personality and life, in his family, in his community, and in the world. Masculine spirituality has these two parts: (a) a man has to connect to the power, and (b) he then must figure out how to keep that power from destroying him and his world. In the history of masculine spirituality, we have not done well with the second one. We have at times been very good at powering up, like Nazi S.S. troops, but we have not always been effective in keeping our power from turning demonic.

Center or Chaos

Throughout history all forms of spirituality have understood "the Center" as the source of power for living in the world. The first task of masculine spirituality is locating the Center, connecting with it, plugging into the sources of regeneration and creativity that are needed for life.

The great scholar Mircea Eliade (1959) is one of the most important people helping us to understand human spirituality. He has helped us to understand that when human beings cannot find the Center, they fall into chaos. That chaos has different forms. It can be a cold chaos. You have all been depressed. You have all been without energy, a cold chaos of the wasteland. Or, if you don't know where the Center is, you can have a hot chaos, a compulsive chaos, an addictive chaos, where you have got lots of energy banging off the walls and lighting you up like a Christmas tree, but it is making your life crazy, it is destroying your world. Before you find that Center, you either have cold or hot chaos in some way, and there is no space in the world that is habitable.

Our planet presently has a new form of chaos, a type that has never been seen before. It is a form of chaos that comes, not when the culture has the wrong leaders in its places of eldership, not when leaders need to be changed, but where the whole system of elders has collapsed, and the culture is falling apart and dissolving into chaos. You see it in many places on the earth.

Think of the emerging chaos in our cities, especially the enormous increase in violent crime and murder, particularly among our young males. We are seeing all over the planet a new thing that is more destructive than the Nazi and Japanese war machines. After the war, we sent teams under Douglas MacArthur to Japan in order to democratize existing political institutions. We did the same thing in Germany and Italy. What we are seeing now is systems and structures dissolving in front of our eyes, systems and structures that are needed if we are to hold anything together in order to preserve a humane habitat.

Our uninitiated Warriors, our monster-boy Warriors - the men running the gun trade in the world - are making it easy for boys of twelve years old, even of ten years old, to have AK-47's and M-16's all over the planet. Monster-boy gangs are increasingly dominating community after community, city after city, all over the world. It is not just America. Uneldered and uninitiated boys, abandoned by their uninitiated fathers and uncles, are terrorizing people world-wide.

Finding the Center

There is much talk about a habitat for humanity; that is just a new way to talk about the old idea of finding the Center so there can be a world that is habitable for humans who have found orientation. Eliade called that the axis mundi. That is the World Tree. In Christianity, it is the Cross. In Judaism, it is the Holy City of Jerusalem. In Islam, it is the Kaaba, the great black shrine. In Native American traditions, there are sacred mountains that are sacred centers, the Center of the World. If you have been to the Southwest, you have probably been to the Center of the World of some of the native peoples.

The old people of the earth always knew that they had to find the Center of the World. Why? Because they knew that if you did not find it, you would either fail to have the energy you needed to live, or any energy you had would be demonic. It would lead to craziness. So find that Center, and in that Center when you find it, the power of Being flows in through that Center. It is there that creation forms out of the chaos. It is there that the great "I AM" is said. It is there that you return for regeneration when things begin to deteriorate. It is there that the creative, regenerative energies of the world flow in.

In spirituality, and especially in masculine spirituality, the journey to the Center and to the fruits of that Center are imaged as an ascent. There are all kinds of examples of sacred mountains. Probably fifty cultures talked about pyramids and used pyramids to image this ascent, this spiritual ascent, the spiral toward the Center.

The transformative dynamics of that ascent, your experience and the experience you wish for other men, is a walking of this journey, of this ascent. It moves from the wasteland that is seen at the edge of the circle up to the Center where the cosmos, world, shalom, the sacred order of justice and peace is found. What is that energy for? What is the community stewarded for? It is stewarded for the polis, they used to say in Greece, the city and the cosmos, so that there can be a safe vessel for one's friends, for one's family, and for the rest of humanity.

So here is the journey to the Center, and the ascent, the struggle of the ascent, and the goal of getting beyond the self and even beyond the community to cosmos, to world building, to a world of justice and peace.

The Role of the Elder

Elders are disappearing all over our planet. Men that use to carry the eldership of the tribe or community are now alcoholic, in major depression, committing suicide, or on golf courses - or all the above. Our crisis is understandable. It is clear what is going on and why. No longer do we have a problem about figuring it out. But this is not recognized. On the contrary, we have all these people in leadership positions in every walk of life - especially those who have to do with the legal system, criminology, and public administration - who think they can explain this crisis without any reference to male initiation or maturation. It is impossible. It cannot be done. You cannot even identify the problem without looking at male initiation, and you surely cannot fix it.

So what time is it?

It is a time when men have abdicated their responsibilities as elders wholesale. We have all these self-righteous men all over the country who want to put all the young warriors in prison forever and throw away the keys because the young warriors are criminals, "they cannot be helped." This is the situation we face: Men, so called men, who will not face their own shadows, will not face up to the reality of their abdication. They are willing to witness the destruction of the lives of thousands upon thousands of young males all over the world. That is where we are and that is what we face and that is what time it is.

What is needed?

A brotherhood, what used to be called an order. Now what kind of order do we need? We do not need another regressive, tribal masculine brotherhood. We do not need another SS. Why not? They were organized. They knew how to use technology. They knew how to get men committed unto death and how to make men proud. What was the problem? They had a racist, tribal, demonic vision. They made the fatal error that our forebears have repeatedly fallen into. For thousands of years we have not been able to make the unity of our species the basis of our vision. We have made the same mistake over and over. We have taken magnificent young warriors and offered them a bogus vision - a demonic, racist, non-inclusive vision to serve and die for.

We need magnificent young men, middle-aged men and older men serving a vision worthy of them. We need to take that Warrior energy, that which is very likely the most noble thing in the male soul, and bring it into the service of an inclusive, non-racist, non-sectarian, non-cultic vision about a world of justice and peace. We need to warn men against repeating the error of our forefathers in accessing wonderful masculine energy and then using it to serve a tribal, often racist, vision. In the United States, we have so many men today, fine men, who have been seduced into joining right-wing, racist militias. The only elders and guides they have are men who have no other vision except to repeat the errors of the past.

We need an international network of men to hold up a vision worthy of all these magnificent young males, red and yellow, black and white. We need to have that vision lifted up and nurtured. But we do not need to simply put out a vision. We need more than a vision. We need an order, a brotherhood, that is willing to do what is necessary to steward that vision and to provide the containment that is necessary for initiation into such a comprehensive vision.

We do not need an organization that simply provides a place for men to go through their mid-life crises and leave. Instead we need an organization which will take young men and power him up and introduce him to how magnificent he is and the nature of the male heritage which is his.

We need an organization that, when he hits the white water of life at forty, will have men in it that love him, and will help him understand what is happening to him. We need an organization that, when he gets into his fifties and sixties and starts running into some health problems, will be there for him and will help him understand ways in which he is still strong, maybe even stronger than he was when he was physically strong.

We need an organization that will love men while he is dying and be there for him while he is dying. We need an organization that he trusts to carry on the work that he was committed to after he is dead and buried. We need an organization that will help that man's family bury him.

This is an inter-generational vision. Is this new? This is the way men used to do it. This is the way it used to be done in the tribes. And what do we need in order to offer such leadership for men in community? We need a group of men that know how important initiation is. That know what happens to men when they do not get it. A group of men that are doing their best to be inclusive across economic classes, across religions, across races - a new kind of warrior and potentially a new kind of brotherhood.

So the question is very simple. Could it be that you have a wider mission? Are you the man that we long for or shall we look for another? Are you that man who desires to be a man and be part of that Order - the inclusive Order, the non-racist Order, the non-classist Order, the non-sexist Order, the committed Order that we long for? An Order willing to steward an inclusive masculine initiation?

Could it be that in the twenty-fifth century, some elder historian is going to be telling stories, where he might say that it came to pass that in the early years of the new millennium a small band of men of different races, from different walks of life, woke up. They looked around and they saw what time it was, and knew how desperate the situation was, and how bad the odds were that they could do the work that needed to be done. Nevertheless, they said yes to the challenge. Children, though we cannot remember their names, we are eternally grateful to them.

References

Eliade, M. (1959). The Sacred and the profane: The nature of religion: The significance of religious myth, symbolism, and ritual within life and culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.

Gutmann, D. (1987). Reclaimed powers: Men and women in later life. New York: Basic Books.

Moore, R. (1997). Masculine initiation for the 21st century: The global challenge. The New Warrior Handbook.

Moore, R. (2001). The archetype of initiation: Sacred space, ritual process, and personal transformation. Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris Corporation.

Moore, R. (2003) Facing the Dragon

The Quartet of Books: The King Within, The Warrior Within, The Magician Within, The Lover Within.

Dr. Robert L. Moore

Internationally recognized as one of the foremost psychotherapists in the optimizing of masculine selfhood and leadership, Dr. Moore offers individuals Structural Diagnosis and Integrative Psychotherapy in Chicago, Illinois.

As a Jungian psychoanalyst and spiritual theologian, Dr. Moore focuses on the powerful, grandiose 'God energies' that burn fiercely in the heart of every human being. Faced consciously in faith and with authentic respect, these energies reflect in us the numinous, creative and transformative power of the Divine Presence. But if the human ego engages in a pretentious 'unknowing' of the reality and significance of this Presence, existential denial of the Divine Presence, a demonic alchemy occurs in which the sacred energies of the soul are twisted into destructive powers that have a 'hideous strength.' This power of aggressive non-being manifests itself in addictions, ritual violence and war, political oppression, racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and the ecological destruction of our planet.

Through individual psychotherapy Dr. Moore assists individuals in learning how not to retreat into despair in the face of radical evil, but to have faith, courage, and the skills to confront it effectively.

Consultations with Dr. Moore may be arranged by calling him directly at 773-288-7474.

Dr. Moore is also a guest lecturer at many workshops and conferences across the United States, see his Events Calendar for upcoming events.