Robert Augustus Masters - Birthing the Man

This month's newsletter from The Masters Center for Transformation features this excellent - incredibly important - article from Robert Augustus Masters. If you are interested in masculinity and personal transformation with a fully integral perspective, Robert Masters is the ONLY person doing this work.

Here are two small section from the larger article - follow the link - two paragraphs from the beginning and a few from the middle section. Be sure to read the whole article - it's crucial that men begin to see their position in relation to themselves, their fathers, and the cultural definitions that imprison them.

Birthing the Man

January 24th, 2011 | By Robert Augustus Masters

Some men, recoiling from hardness, get stuck in softness and hypertolerance, drawing their soft-shelled carapace ever inward, ever tighter, squeezing the power out of their breath and the heat out of their anger and the meat out of their lust, trading in their power for approval and security, chronically caving in to prove their harmlessness, confusing surrender with collapse and emotional flatness with equanimity.

Now and then they lightly potshot raw male power, smudging and scorning its lyrics, fleeing its muscular intensity and no-bullshit solidity, scrambling to please yet another surrogate of their childhood’s dominant parent, reducing themselves to not much more than psychologically sophisticated beggars for his or her multi-headed applause, little men to the end, their tears falling in deserted rooms.

*****

Some men, determined enough to stop playing buddy to their armor, be it hard or soft, and gutsy enough to unpeel and reveal and fully feel without castrating their power, find a young boy crouched in the dark, the long dark, the orphaned dark, a half-sobbing boy, a boy crushed and bleeding, hammering against the inside of their chest, hammering and hammering with tiny stammering fists, a boy bruised and divided, shoulders sagging, throat and truth far apart, a confused boy with not enough father and too much mother, already either enemy or slave to the Feminine, just like Daddy, but still nevertheless hammering and hammering, screaming to be felt, to be touched, to be known, to be held, to be initiated into the truly Masculine, screaming and screaming, squashed by grownup silence, betrayed by negative associations between vulnerability and weakness, the ignoring of his voice a choice pushing us closer to a deadly edge.

And still the boy calls, calling for the jailer’s love, the man’s love, love plain and simple, love uncluttered by mind, love clear and direct and fresh and goddamn the paternal patter, the embarrassed impotence, the slamming doors and useless explanations, the flat eyes, the resignation, the sagging duty, the congealed cries, and goddamn the plastic sky, no more than the ceiling of Daddy’s hungriest thought, and goddamn the lame acceptance of the knot pulled so tight between sternum and spine, shutting out the boy’s calling, muting his message, his eyes clouded with smothered longing, his heart dropping between his ragged knees, his choice seemingly but to fight, flee, or freeze.

Men and men and men, do you not see the loveless shoulds so often framing your name, oozing with deadening collusion, well-dressed confusion, and slaveships of invasive expectations? Do you not sense the secondhand scent, the perfumed rot of romantic delusion, the ads of drive-through titillation, the addiction to making it big? Do you not feel the frozen or jellied jaw, the slitted or mind-fitted glance, the classroom drugging of upstart cries, the got-it-together disguise, the emotional hard-on? Or the haloed wimphood, the limping passion, the glorified sensitivity, the righteous flight from anger and lust, flashing a spiritual smile? Do you not long for more substance and less style, and to cease the denial, and to cut loose the shoulds that keep you on trial?

Men and men and men, do you not feel the unhealed hurt beneath your data-jammed mind, and do you do not feel the fear to openly confess what you’re really doing, and do you not feel the innocence you will not bless, the pain of pretending that father knows best, the price of pretending that you are not pretending, the heartbreak that cries out for more than a superficial mending?

Tags: masculinity, men, psychology, inner child, wounding, personal growth, Birthing the Man, Robert Augustus Masters, Masters Center for Transformation, Integral psychology, fathers, men's work