Maxplorer

I just finished the book Iron John, A book about men, that Karmachick gave me based on a strong recommendation from her shamanic teacher. It was a very interesting book. A mix of fascinating ideas and very far-out spiritual and mythological concepts that I couldn’t relate to. The author, Robert Bly, is interpreting the old fairytale story Iron John and finds the hidden messages in it about boys and men and the old initiation rituals that are long gone.

Karmachick also sent me a link about Swedish parental leave and how it has changed the father role in Sweden, and I find it a very good combination to this book.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/europe/10iht-sweden.html

With a risk of making this post too long, I will retail some parts that I found good.

The outward warriors in some women are today strong, sometimes stronger than those in men. Forces in contemporary society recently have encouraged women to be warriors, while discouraging warriorhood in boys and men.

I find this true. It is a good thing that women are strong.  However we as men must also be strong to balance it up. To get there in the old days the boys went through initiation rituals with the older men.

The Wild Man doesn’t come to full life through being “natural”, going with the flow, smoking weed, reading nothing, and being generally groovy.

In this book Robert argues that the soft non-conflict approach of the contemporary man is not the way to go and that we need the help and support from older men to get there.

By the middle of the twentieth century in Europe and North America a massive change has taken place: the father was working but the son could not see him working.
Throughout the ancient hunter societies, which apparently lasted thousands of years – perhaps hundreds of thousands – and throughput the hunter-gatherer societies that followed them, and the subsequent agricultural and craft societies, fathers and sons worked and lived together. As late as 1900 in the United States about ninety percent of fathers were engaged in agriculture. In all these societies the son characteristically saw his father working at all times of the day and all seasons of the year.

When the son no longer sees that, what happens? After thirty years of working with young German men, as fatherless in their industrial society as young American men today, Alexander Mitscherlich, whom we spoke of in the first chapter, developed a metaphor. A hole appears in the son’s psyche. When the son does not see his fathers workplace, or what he produces, does he imagine his father to be a hero, a fighter for good, a saint, or a white knight? Mitscherlich’s answer said: demons move into that empty place – demons of suspicion.

The demons, invisible but talkative, encourage suspicion of all older men. Such suspicions effects a breaking of the community of old and young men. One could feel this disrupt deepen in the sixties: “Never trust anyone over thirty.”

The older men in the American military establishment and government did betray the younger men in Vietnam, lying about the nature of the war, remaining in safe places themselves, after having asked the young men to be warriors and then in effect sending them out to be ordinary murderers.

The fact that older male mentors is important for boys development into men became apparent to me when I read The Dhamma Brothers about meditating criminals in maximum security prisons in Alabama and what had initiated their criminal path. Many times it was the lack of fathers or mentors.

So many roles that men have depended on for hundreds of years have dissolved or vanished. Certain activities, such as hunting or pirating, no one wants him to do anymore. The Industrial Revolution has separated man from nature and from his family. The only job he can get are liable to harm the earth and the atmosphere; in general he doesn’t know whether to be ashamed of being a man or not.

I don’t know about pirating but the idea that the male role is vanishing seems true. The typical protecting and food producing role is not needed in the same way anymore. In the article about Swedish parental leave it says:

Birgitta Ohlsson, European affairs minister, put it this way: “Machos with dinosaur values don’t make the top-10 lists of attractive men in women’s magazines anymore.” Ms. Ohlsson, who has lobbied European Union governments to pay more attention to fathers, is eight months pregnant, and her husband, a law professor, will take the leave when their child is born.

This is funny as Robert Bly mentions in his book that the “attractive men” in contemporary culture and womens magazines are more like clean shaved fashionable boys. Not men. The typical strong male character is out of date. However the article also says:

Sofia Karlsson, a police officer and the wife of Mikael Karlsson, said she found her husband most attractive “when he is in the forest with his rifle over his shoulder and the baby on his back.”

Which brings back the more typical make role as a hunter, protector and strong father.

Perhaps we, as industrial people, secretly want chaos to come in and loosen up our rigidly stratified lives.

Why are we so obsessed with zombie movies and post apocalyptic tales?

Some naive men and women do not want to choose, but want events to choose.

This is me right on target. And I feel a bit ashamed of it.

During all the time we were busy going to college, or setting up a career, or longing for purity, a mysterious force was invading the kingdom. How often men and women in their twenties feel suddenly in danger. A secret voice says, “You must make a change now. If you don’t, it will be too late.”

When it comes to relationships between men and women the Iron John story with Roberts interpretation has a lot to say about that as well. I like the distinction he makes between the “divine” and the human.

“If the ancient Greek saw a man who had Zeus energy, he would never say, “That man is Zeus”. His mythology distinguished the layers. Now that mythology has collapsed, contemporary men again and again confuse a living woman with the Woman Who Has Golden Hair. A living woman with stomach, small intestine, and a disturbed childhood is not the woman of light. A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.”

That paragraph is taken from a section about how some men are hunting for the woman with golden hair. The divine feminine, a being not of this world and that will never be in this world. He philosophies about the importance of realizing the difference between human being and their divine sources of energy.

Lovemaking in India and Tibet sometimes goes on within ritual space. Religious teachers help a man and a woman to set up such a heated space in which the pair joins sexually, but in neither man nor woman goes on to orgasm. The lovemaking may last two or three or four hours. Ceremonies, some very elaborate, prepare the space. The man prepares with knowledge and needs imaginative energy because his task is to visualize several goddesses in detail as he looks in the womans eyes, and the woman prepares with knowledge and uses her imaginative energy to visualize several gods in detail as she looks into his eyes. The two persons ride on their instincts as on a horse; that horse holds them in ritual space, even if their instincts before that moment have enjoyed a lifetime of plunging on towards their goals.

The idea of seeing the divine in a person but not confuse him or her with being a god or goddess.

Here comes another great part of the book that I find true in myself. The ignorance and fear of conflict.

Conscious fighting is a great help in relationships between men and women. Jung sad “American marriages are the saddest in the whole world, because the man does all the fighting at the office.”
When a man and a woman are standing toe-to-toe arguing, what is it that the man wants? Often he does not know. He wants the conflict to end because he is afraid, because he doesn’t know how to fight, because he “doesn’t believe in fighting,” because he never saw his mother and father fight in a fruitful way, because his boundaries are so poorly maintained that every sword thrust penetrates to the very center of his chest, which is tender and fearful. When shouts of rage come out of the man, it means that the warrior has not been able to protect his chest; the lances have already entered, and it is too late.

And finally, to wrap it all up, is an idea for the future.

She [Marie-Louse von Franz] remarks that she has noticed in dreams of both men and women in recent decades a figure who is spiritual but also covered with hair, a sort of hairy Christ. She believes that what the psyche is asking for now is a new figure, a religious figure but a hairy one, in touch with God and sexuality, with spirit and earth.

Balance, strength and courage… and love. =)
Thank you for reading

Namaste