My friend Jeremy recently did the Trusting the Masculine course I did last year with Sydney teacher Trevor Grey. We caught up on Sunday night to chat about his experience, and over the last few days I’ve been reflecting on how different he seemed, how different we seemed and, mostly, how different I am, both since I did the course, and simply “these days”.
I’ve been thinking today about David Deida’s ‘three stages of masculine’ distinction, and the ways that conceptual framework speaks to my experience over the years*.
For the uninitiated, it seems to me that Deida’s stages chart his observations of the genealogical unfolding of affect and spirit in the (possibly western) human male. I consider Deida’s first stage (traditional) Man to be a cultural role defined by stoicism, denial/suppression of affect and the maintenance an illusory omniscience in the I-Thou relationship designed to intimate power, protection, performance and perfectibility (think John Wayne/Clint Eastwood). I’d describe his second stage as the post-modern fella where the socio-cultural expectations of gender are loosened and gender roles are toyed with, men opening themselves to emotion, affect, authentic relationship and other domains traditionally protected by Woman (think a pony-tailed me circa first year uni, with a goateed mouth singing protest songs on my acoustic guitar). Deida’s third stage is where it gets interesting. My exposure to his work suggests that in response to the limitations of the pluralistic second stage, we enter a space where authenticity of heart and mind become one’s predominant experience through a complex process involving a loosening of the ego, the emergence of aperspectival cognition and a deepening of present self-perception as an emergent open-system, among other things. In that new consciousness, gender needs not be narrowly defined, denied nor politicised, but rather, the complexity of its many faces is experienced as another aspect of the arising of forms. In response to that perception, we openly experience the various aspects of gender which arise in our first person experience, we surrender in devotion to the limitless gender relationships inside our sub-personalities and between those of others, and hold lightly, yet still hold, the evident faces of gender observable in our nature (from gross through all subtle realms available).
In this space, a sexual wonderland has emerged for me. I’ve been able to inhabit the fullness more completely, feeling self-preserving sexuality, self-adapting sexuality, transcendent sexuality, compassion, force, passion, commitment, care, fire, intimacy, sensuality, frivolity, heterosexuality, homosexuality, fantasy, longing, denial, trust, dismay, lust… in a ceaseless tangle of legs, sweat, breath, hearts, souls and God.
Given the transcendent opening I’ve been experiencing through sexuality, I’ve been unsteady with Deida’s notion that we have a pre-given ‘essence’ which we can locate and use as the grounding for a permanent polarisation. That hasn’t been my experience. My experience of life discloses a kosmos far more enacted than pre-given. For one, I’ve never been able to locate a stable, permanent and divinely granted basis for my existence that hasn’t been utterly ineffable. Despite all the illusory promises my perceptions provide from moment to moment, the shifting sands of the groundless ground of existence is the only promise, and a promise which can never be grasped… such is the torment of incarnation. Given the depth of realisation evidenced in his prose, I wonder if pressed, Deida would yield on this position? Given my perception of enacted realities, my experience has been deeply diverse (and correspondingly deeply confusing to a sense of self that seems to require the absence of dissonance in a naively congruent self-sense). I’ve simultaneously felt sensual and powerful, compassionate and directed, certain and submissive, dominant and emotionally intimate. I’ve felt hetero, homo and trans attraction and curiosity. I’ve felt identified as a man, and often identified much happier as one of the girls. I’ve sensed assertion and denial of my male sex…
… and yet, I’ve made a choice to enact a polarised self sense in sexual congress to dig a karma that feels trusting, rewarding and beautiful. That self sense identifies as a trustable heterosexual male interested in a deep, committed relationship. It’s limited to my sexuality, and not to the way I show up in the relationship (I’m not keen on any relationship that requires me to express the fullness of masculine tosspottery in every given moment). The basis of this choice hasn’t been pre-ordained. No ontological given. Not even close. I’ve searched high and low for the holy grail in regards to my gender/sex/sexual identity… fuck me, in regards to everything in my life… and the only thing that remained at the end of the painful journey was an exhausted self laying bare in the reality that I Am Agency in the choices about my identity and the mental/emotional/spiritual criteria for those choices. Karma is made.
I’m very different “these days”.
* Of course, as with all conceptions, there’s gradations between, around, and within these ‘stages’, but for conversational purposes around type distinctions, I find it a handy metric.
"The crisis in mature masculinity is very much upon us. Lacking adequate models of mature men, and lacking the societal cohesion and institutional structures for actualising ritual process, its "every man for himself". And most of us fall by the wayside, with no idea what it was that was the goal of our gender-drive or what went wrong in our strivings. We just know we are anxious, on the verge of feeling impotent, helpless, frustrated, put down, unloved and unappreciated, often ashamed of being masculine. We just know that our creativity was attacked, that our initiative was met with hostility, that we were ignored, belittled, and left holing the empty bag of our lost self-esteem. We cave in to a dog-eat-dog world, trying to keep our work and out relationships afloat, losing energy, or missing the mark. Many of us seek the generative, affirming, and empowering father (though most of us don't know it), the father who, for most of us, never existed in our actual lives and won't appear, no matter how hard we try to make him appear".
