The Essence of Man
Sacred Men's Business
The Masculine Quest
“All forms of quest and masculine spirituality make it clear that a man’s journey into his center is a necessary passage to initiate him into the power that he will need for living in the world. Power he needs to triumph over his life’s challenges, power that his family needs to be safe and secure, power his community needs for mentoring and leadership, and power that the world needs for peace. For a man to be made whole there has to be something that rips him wide open, a wound that allows his soul to enter”. ..Robert Moore
Masculine Quest
The masculine quest arises out of a deep yearning within the masculine psyche (Latin word for soul) for conscious contact with deep inner structures of self hood that awaken a man’s capacity to live his life with authenticity, depth, integrity and freedom. Ancient maps for this journey are primarily stewarded by elders of earth based cultures. Their preparation for the masculine’s quest requires a loving, nurturing and wise mother, leadership from a strong, purposeful and disciplined father and sacred time with a male tribe/community that offers challenge, accountability, role modeling, brotherhood, spiritual teachings and rites of passage that will initiate and guide the masculine spirit into wholeness/holiness and its full potential – which is full embodiment of the sacred masculine. These initiations are not concerned with the socialising role of collective initiations such as birthday parties and deeds performed as entrance into peer groups but rather with the psychological development and spiritual evolution of the individual.
The masculine quest arises out of a deep yearning within the masculine psyche (Latin word for soul) for conscious contact with deep inner structures of self hood that awaken a man’s capacity to live his life with authenticity, depth, integrity and freedom. Ancient maps for this journey are primarily stewarded by elders of earth based cultures. Their preparation for the masculine’s quest requires a loving, nurturing and wise mother, leadership from a strong, purposeful and disciplined father and sacred time with a male tribe/community that offers challenge, accountability, role modeling, brotherhood, spiritual teachings and rites of passage that will initiate and guide the masculine spirit into wholeness/holiness and its full potential – which is full embodiment of the sacred masculine. These initiations are not concerned with the socialising role of collective initiations such as birthday parties and deeds performed as entrance into peer groups but rather with the psychological development and spiritual evolution of the individual.
Shamanic initiation requires an internal recognition from the initiate of his calling and the process is informed in considerable part by the initiate's own experiences including dreams and visions. The separation that takes place in such a process is not merely from his mother and family but from the very ground of his being, with the very real danger of becoming psychotic. Relatively few individuals have ever experienced this form of initiation and the guidance given was individual and spiritual rather than collective and political
…. Paul Wolf-Light.
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Keepers of these initiations still exist today and their teachings provide essential maps that contain the sacred geography and inner pathways of how to be authentically masculine. These current stewards of this wisdom keep the archetypal patterns of masculine quest and initiation alive within the collective psyche and because of this the alchemical process of transforming the lead of young boys into the gold of Kings and Warrior Sages is not completely lost. These ancient pathways are hardwired into the masculine psyche and whether a man consciously chooses to seek initiation or not his masculine core will yearn for it because it is a vital part of his evolution. However without eldership, good fathering or wise mentoring to prepare a man’s inner world for this quest, the journey to the masculine centre is tainted by emptiness, disorientation, failure, feeling lost within the vast wilderness of the undefined and unexamined self and cries that go unheard in the warrior’s dark night.
Journey to the Centre, An exert by Robert Moore
“Throughout history all forms of spirituality have understood "the Center" as the source of power for living in the world. The first task of masculine spirituality is locating the Center, connecting with it, plugging into the sources of regeneration and creativity that are needed for life. When human beings cannot find the Center, they fall into chaos. That chaos has different forms. It can be a cold chaos. You have all been depressed. You have all been without energy, a cold chaos of the wasteland. Or, if you don't know where the Center is, you can have a hot chaos, a compulsive chaos, an addictive chaos, where you have got lots of energy banging off the walls and lighting you up like a Christmas tree, but it is making your life crazy, it is destroying your world. Before you find that Center, you either have cold or hot chaos in some way, and there is no space in the world that is habitable.
Our planet presently has a new form of chaos, a type that has never been seen before. It is a form of chaos that comes, not when the culture has the wrong leaders in its places of eldership, not when leaders need to be changed, but where the whole system of elders has collapsed, and the culture is falling apart and dissolving into chaos. You see it in many places on the earth.
Think of the emerging chaos in our cities, especially the enormous increase in violent crime and murder, particularly among our young males. We are seeing all over the planet a new thing that is more destructive than the Nazi and Japanese war machines. What we are seeing now is systems and structures dissolving in front of our eyes, systems and structures that are needed if we are to hold anything together in order to preserve a humane habitat. Our uninitiated Warriors, our monster-boy Warriors - the men running the gun trade in the world - are making it easy for boys of twelve years old, even of ten years old, to have AK-47's and M-16's all over the planet. Monster-boy gangs are increasingly dominating community after community, city after city, all over the world. It is not just America. Uneldered and uninitiated boys, abandoned by their uninitiated fathers and uncles, are terrorizing people world-wide.
Finding the Center
The old people of the earth always knew that they had to find the Center of the World. Why? Because they knew that if you did not find it, you would either fail to have the energy you needed to live, or any energy you had would be demonic. It would lead to craziness. So find that Center, and in that Center when you find it, the power of Being flows in through that Center. It is there that creation forms out of the chaos. It is there that the great "I AM" is said. It is there that you return for regeneration when things begin to deteriorate. It is there that the creative, regenerative energies of the world flow in. In spirituality, and especially in masculine spirituality, the journey to the Center and to the fruits of that Center are imaged as an ascent. The transformative dynamics of that ascent, your experience and the experience you wish for other men, is a walking of this journey, of this ascent. It moves from the wasteland that is seen at the edge of the circle up to the Center where the cosmos, world, shalom, the sacred order of justice and peace is found. What is that energy for? What is the community stewarded for? It is stewarded for the polis, they used to say in Greece, the city and the cosmos, so that there can be a safe vessel for one's friends, for one's family, and for the rest of humanity”……
For a majority of men today the first-stage of finding their centre involves a process that medicine people call soul retrieval. Parts of our spirit are held in places/and with people in which our original wounding occurred. The old people of the earth knew that a person cannot live in this world without their spirit and they had different ceremonies and practices to call back a persons spirit from places of darkness. Healing the emptiness and deep longing within their un-fathered souls is one of these places. The father wound, which is a wound of absence, is a painful inner dragon to slay because it means coming to terms with feelings of anger, loss, emptiness, betrayal and the pain of rejection. It is a key piece of inner dragon work a man can do because until this wound can be filled with something truthful, loving, compassionate and authentic, men will continue to destroy themselves, their children, their women and the earth.
Our planet presently has a new form of chaos, a type that has never been seen before. It is a form of chaos that comes, not when the culture has the wrong leaders in its places of eldership, not when leaders need to be changed, but where the whole system of elders has collapsed, and the culture is falling apart and dissolving into chaos. You see it in many places on the earth.
Think of the emerging chaos in our cities, especially the enormous increase in violent crime and murder, particularly among our young males. We are seeing all over the planet a new thing that is more destructive than the Nazi and Japanese war machines. What we are seeing now is systems and structures dissolving in front of our eyes, systems and structures that are needed if we are to hold anything together in order to preserve a humane habitat. Our uninitiated Warriors, our monster-boy Warriors - the men running the gun trade in the world - are making it easy for boys of twelve years old, even of ten years old, to have AK-47's and M-16's all over the planet. Monster-boy gangs are increasingly dominating community after community, city after city, all over the world. It is not just America. Uneldered and uninitiated boys, abandoned by their uninitiated fathers and uncles, are terrorizing people world-wide.
Finding the Center
The old people of the earth always knew that they had to find the Center of the World. Why? Because they knew that if you did not find it, you would either fail to have the energy you needed to live, or any energy you had would be demonic. It would lead to craziness. So find that Center, and in that Center when you find it, the power of Being flows in through that Center. It is there that creation forms out of the chaos. It is there that the great "I AM" is said. It is there that you return for regeneration when things begin to deteriorate. It is there that the creative, regenerative energies of the world flow in. In spirituality, and especially in masculine spirituality, the journey to the Center and to the fruits of that Center are imaged as an ascent. The transformative dynamics of that ascent, your experience and the experience you wish for other men, is a walking of this journey, of this ascent. It moves from the wasteland that is seen at the edge of the circle up to the Center where the cosmos, world, shalom, the sacred order of justice and peace is found. What is that energy for? What is the community stewarded for? It is stewarded for the polis, they used to say in Greece, the city and the cosmos, so that there can be a safe vessel for one's friends, for one's family, and for the rest of humanity”……
For a majority of men today the first-stage of finding their centre involves a process that medicine people call soul retrieval. Parts of our spirit are held in places/and with people in which our original wounding occurred. The old people of the earth knew that a person cannot live in this world without their spirit and they had different ceremonies and practices to call back a persons spirit from places of darkness. Healing the emptiness and deep longing within their un-fathered souls is one of these places. The father wound, which is a wound of absence, is a painful inner dragon to slay because it means coming to terms with feelings of anger, loss, emptiness, betrayal and the pain of rejection. It is a key piece of inner dragon work a man can do because until this wound can be filled with something truthful, loving, compassionate and authentic, men will continue to destroy themselves, their children, their women and the earth.
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