blog023 Man, Who Are You?

Layers On Soul by Emelie Dupree
www.kunstnet.de

If your self-image is based on what you see when you look in the mirror, your woman is on the way to being very bored.

Sure, it makes sense to think of yourself as hair, skin, meat and bones, with clothes on, a solid, visible personality. After all, there you are in the mirror. You see that reflection with every wrinkle and pimple. The feedback is undeniable. Your own father probably imagined himself to be something very similar. He is your role model.

Think about it. Either you want to be like your father, or you want to be nothing like your father.

Either way makes him your role model!




You look at yourself in the mirror and you think, I am the bread winner. Or you think, I'm failing to be the breadwinner.


Disk of Nothing by Timo Wuerz
www.timowuerz.com

You think, I bring security, stability and protection, or I fail to bring security, stability or protection.

You think, I know the way, I have the answers, or you think, I don't know how it goes because nobody ever cared enough about me to show me.

You think, I am a strong reliable leader, or you think, I am weak and ineffective as a husband, father, leader, I am not reliable.



We ongoingly know ourselves to be successfully fulfilling our self image, or failing to live up to our self image. And that is exactly what makes us boring to women, because we insist on seeing ourselves as someone who must be knowable.


Possibility Lab
www.nextculturetrainings.org

If we can be known, then we should know who we are, right? Do you know who you are?

If we can be known, then we must exhibit predictable behavior, hold steadfast opinions, maintain old decisions, not change our tastes. Herein lies the conflict. We imagine that we should identify ourselves as the content of our lives, and as soon as we identify ourselves as content we are killable.

For example, as soon as our woman has an opinion that is different from ours we think we are supposed to defend our position stronger than she defends hers or we are not men.

As soon as our child disagrees or argues with us we are forced to prove ourselves right or win by force, or else we are not the parent.

In neither case does the idea cross our mind to change the game.



By now most men have stopped reading this article. Yet this is exactly the point where it becomes interesting.

We stop reading because we have already paid full price to join the patriarchy. We have exchanged our souls for the illusion of safety and power defined by the hierarchy of godfathers. We cannot comprehend that we could regard ourselves as anything other than what we have always been: needy, greedy, sucking little boys, chasing after mommy for the goodies, trying to one-up each other for favors, being exactly what looks out at us from the mirror each morning, with emotional justifications to match.


WHAT ELSE?
If you are knowable then you can be projected upon. You are a target for expectations. Expectations kill intimacy. One unfulfilled expectation is enough to generate resentment. Then whenever you touch her you trigger her resentment. She doesn't feel you; she feels her resentment. It is a mess.

I am saying that you, as a man, can have a completely different quality of self image. There are many additional options to play with. Each format opens an entirely new world of relationship with your present, with your destiny, and with your woman.

What if who you are is not what you see in the mirror? What if that thing is only a vehicle or antenna for who you are?

For most of us this seems like an absolutely insane line of inquiry. What else could there possibly be than what we see in the mirror?

What else indeed!



Emerging by Sharan Ragan
www.facebook.com/sharronragan

Below is a list of alternative options to the question: What else could I be?

Regarding the options on the list below as concepts or as good ideas cements you into your mind, which makes you even more boring that being flesh and bones.

The proposals listed below are not concepts. They are invitations to experimental action.

Each experimental orientation starts with the word "I". But the experiment is not about "I". The experiment is about what is there instead of the "I". So forget the "I" part. The "I" just gets in the way.




NEW ABILITIES
Shifting from representing yourself as a knowable, visible, solid, stable man who brings home the bacon, to being one of the spaces listed below will involve going through some initiatory processes and developing some new abilities.

For example:

You need the ability to declare what is - which only comes after the ability to accept what is, because you first need to start where you are with an accurate assessment of current reality before you can shift the details into something else, otherwise you are merely another fool in a fantasy world.

You need the ability to go nonlinear and make right-angle turns at light speed - which only comes after seven to ten deep healing and growing-up processes to change your relationship to what happened to you in your childhood and some past lives (www.nextculturetrainings.org) so that you can lighten your load and drop energetic, conceptual and emotional baggage.

You cannot change what happened to you in the past because it happened in the past. But what happened is not what determines how you show up now. You show up now according to the tricks you figured out for surviving through what happened to you in the past. However, you already survived, but you have not gone through the initiation of recapitulation, so you still function reflexively in your survival strategy. You are trapped in what was once a very good plan.

RECAPITULATING
Recapitulation is systemmatic neutral transformative introspection.

Recapitulation distinguishes your survival reaction triggers from what is actually happening to you right now so you get immediate new options for behavior.

Recapitulation springs you from an ancient prison that you long ago forgot you locked yourself into.

Recapitulation starts with new thoughtmaps of feelings so you can be painfully clear about what happened to you in the past without being a victim of it anymore. Then you can freely detect what meanings you gave to what happened back then, and decide if you want to keep or change those meanings in order to reclaim your power of present attention, your inalienable authority, your unique contributory talents, and your free spirit.

This takes efforts, of course. It requires re-prioritizing the energy that you may presently be using up trying to represent yourself as being a "sane" and "successful" "man," as if you knew what those things are...


EXPERIMENTS
Each experiment below invites you to center yourself in a non-knowable self-image. Choose one and use it for a full week (or the rest of your life) without ever shifting back to being something knowable: (Remember, forget the "I". )

I am a distinction-framework, establishing spaces of adventure.

I am a map inventing new territories to explore.

I am stage lights illuminating high-drama.

I am a space navigator for three worlds.

I am a context of radical responsibility.

I am a place of delightfulness, clarity, and transformation.

I am a nonlinear gameworld pirate.

I am a source of unending humor and possibility.

I am a gateway to evolution.

I am a space of mystery.

I am nothing - the kind of  nothing so big that everything fits into it.

Forget the "I".

I am not here to provide you with safety, predictability, peace, calm, and comfort.

I am not an emotional garbage can. I am not a doormat. I am not a good boy. 

I am an ongoing nasty question, noticing without attaching meaning, attentively here, in a very small now, without believing my own reactive stories and incomplete emotions from my past.

I am the space through which a unique set of bright principles can do their work in the world.

Starmaking by NASA JPL Caltech Artist R. Hurt

And you might be also...

If you connect the origin of your self-image to a new source, then your woman might have something a little more interesting to play with.

She's probably been waiting a long time for you to get this...