The Fall of Adam: My Revelation

When I woke up at 5am in the morning, I saw clearly what has happened to men. I saw the differences between men and women. Apologies for the generalisations below, but just wrote it how I recollected the revelation. I am open to being wrong, but much of it felt right. I felt man’s pain.

Stephen Biddulph the guy who wrote ‘Raising boys’ and ‘Manhood’, indicated that men who ‘give’ are men, men who ‘take’ are boys. He spoke of men going to work and disconnecting from families, from women and children. He talked about many of them having hardly any relationship with their dads, only 10% were close. That is significant given their fathers are their main role model in life. So if this person isn’t close to them, what do they think of themselves. Boys were taught to not cry, to be a man. Yet in truth this was never being a man, it closed them off from their feelings. So they learned to suppress emotion and avoid anything painful. Society doesn’t allow men to feel or show what is perceived as weakness. The female is seen as weak and emotional given emotions. Yet in nature emotion is a navigation, the female has to have emotional intelligence to raise children, to protect their physical and emotional wellbeing. Women can multi-task so they can do jobs and watch children, it is an innate gift. Talking is innate as well, they exchange knowledge, they speak about feelings which is facing pain, as mothers have to be stable for children. Now the critical part of the revelation was that men do not face their pain. This has implications for manhood. I read recently about aboriginal society and as part of the initiation into manhood, the boys as teenagers, would go into the bush for 6 months to hunt and be alone. This was to grow up, to be self sufficient, to face fear and pain. For men their emotions are different to women, they feel but not as sensitively, as they do not need to as men. In the tribal society the boys had tourniquets tightened around their arms, so tight that their arm became swollen. The pain was so bad the tribe could hear them screaming all night. Some may say cruel, yet what was happening was the boys were forced to face pain, alone. This is significant for crossing the threshold into manhood. Now when they returned the mothers and sisters came and greeted them, the mothers cut themselves I would guess to show their pain of separation. It was important that boys separated from their mothers, who would protect them always, but the boys have to learn independence and self sufficiency. The girls helped them with their wounds. The men, their role models, then told them about their duties towards women and their responsibility to the tribe. Soon after they selected a mate and bonded with a girl.

Now the above tribal initiation doesn’t mean you torture boys, it means in the present time you help them to face the pain in life when it happens. It is important for this to be faced as boys learn to face lifes emotional or physical pain to become a man, this is how they learn. If they avoid, they don’t mature into men. Facing pain for boys and girls is what grows them. For girls it is easier as society accepts girls emotions, but for boys it is a different story. Society is much harsher.

In our society there is no room or interest in initiations into manhood. There are pockets of mock initiations, ceremonies and mens groups, however most men don’t participate or are not aware. Men go to work, they don’t feel comfortable with too much talking, so they drink together or watch sport avoiding depth conversations, as they don’t know how to deal with deeper issues of life, better to avoid and keep it light. This leaves a lot of men in lonely situations, where they never feel connected or feeling a sense of intimate community. The dominant patriarchy also furthers their separation from women.

Men are typically structured thinkers (linear) and good at building structures, one step at a time. Women have the emotional landscape and I would call this content, they are good with psychology as they are protectors of emotional wellbeing. Men had the tradition of hunting, which gave them a sense of bonding with men and providing for the tribe, a sense of role and responsibility. Today the provider label is slipping as women are taking over in these areas, running families and may appear more capable than men. Men feel increasingly superfluous. They don’t know their role, they try to seek out success in career, to find that doesn’t fill the gap they constantly feel. Patriarchy also has to deny the feminine to some extent, to dominate another you have to feel superior, women also played the role of girls, where they were pretty, laughing to please men. They were fearful of going out alone, as men were seen as a danger to women eg. rape, violence. So women typically play it safe.

So what this comes to is immaturity was what I saw. Interestingly, in the book The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, the author speaks of the older cultures (ancients) and the younger cultures (present day), inherent within this was a younger culture that doesn’t know itself. People (men and women) are so focused on playing the role of gender, doing what is right, obeying what they are told (disempowerment), that somehow they forget or lost themselves. If they spent a lot of time denying their pain, avoiding it, ignoring it, they suppressed themselves and they wouldn’t mature, as they don’t learn from life, they bury it, and emotionally they disconnect from themselves in truth. Steve Biddulph’s thoughts here of men who ‘give’ are men, men who ‘take’ are boys, is true, you only have to look at men who sit on the couch waiting to be served, expecting women to meet their needs, rather than love propelling them to work side by side with their partner as a team, to do the dishes, to share the children equally, to take full responsibility for issues. If they are in pain they deal with it on the spot, owning their feelings and finding ways to solve the problem. Most men, in this western culture, don’t do that. They go and have a few drinks and laugh it off, stating they are in the bad books with women. Or they may say nothing, just ignore it, hope it goes away. That is very common. That is called denial.

In this revelation I could see the link to war and where we ended up as a world community. Where men traditionally hunted, they found their manhood in facing fear. Men are active, they like being physical, so hunting was a wonderful expression of manhood. Today there are few really good role models for young men to learn from. The role models we have are pretty much warrior characters. I remember Scott Ritter’s lecture speaking of being a warrior and the fact that he would kill anyone who threatened his family. Yet that action in itself brings on greater threats. I recall Douglas Rokke (Depleted Uranium expert in Pentagon), telling me in an interview that they were warriors, I asked him why men killed, he said they are trained to be killers period. They both said war was disgusting. I wanted to know how men can disconnect emotionally as probably close to a 231 million people died in the 20th century in unnecessary wars due to this ability to disconnect or rationalise killing. My former partner used to stop breathing in the middle of the night given the trauma. He was a solider. He had been shot and told me about the atrocities in Afghanistan, they make you shudder. This is real and it has impacts on world peace.

Anyway, what I was shown was the violence is like the hunting, it is a way of facing fear and pain, as an initiation into manhood. The difference is hunting is to provide for a tribe to ensure health and survival, murder in war is killing. Governments dress it up as protecting the nation, similar to hunting, yet in reality these days it serves national interests or special interests, it has no place in protecting people. The rules of war give credence to ‘defence’ but as was seen in Iraq, clearly offensive tactics were employed. So I saw this search for manhood in the act of war which was destructive and not life affirming. The post traumatic stress is a sign that this is not manhood but insanity, as mental illness results and men carry terrible burdens for the rest of their lives, as they followed a lie. These are the main role models boys and men have of being a man. A woman cannot help a boy into manhood, that is the job of men who are good role models, who show courage in the face of fear, who face pain and overcome it and show boys how to treat women and live in harmony in society. This is what I feel is missing.

I also saw that when women are put down, the feminine in man is suppressed. When women criticise men they are blaming men and suppressing the masculine in themselves. I’ve seen my mother suppress her feminine most of her life by seeing crying as weakness. She thought a man was weak when he served or was gentle, as my step father was. Only recently is she getting the importance of acceptance of men as they are, to not change them but to understand them as friends. If a person exhibits gentle and kind behaviours it is not weak, it is a great strength.

The battle of the sexes in truth is a misunderstanding where the strengths of each – emotional intelligence in women and structured thinking in men help society build a civilisation that is healthy and balanced. When people mature (facing fear) then they don’t fight they assist each other, they grow in love for each other and take on something of the other. This blending is the feeling of oneness between men and women and is the most beautiful unity you can imagine.

The revelation I had goes deeper but I will end this now. It gave me a sense of compassion for men, as they are not living or feeling deeply as I have done in my life, many are blocked and still behaving as boys, just taking what they can when it is offered. They are lost and unsure outside of the structure of work and what to do. Many have been in jobs all their lives and have no idea what to do outside of work, so they try to avoid themselves and keep busy.

I feel the world is going through a re-think these days. The desire for happiness and a future will evoke this renewed thinking. As we start to question who we are and what life is for. In my view, we are here to learn to love ourselves and each other.

So with that sending you love.