Roland Maimonedes views spirituality as empathy, love, uncertainty, and the surrender of power—none of which he had considered particularly manly.
I always wanted to be a manly man. When I was a kid, that meant muscles and toughness, probably because I was getting the crap knocked out of me all the time. When I got a little older, sexual conquest was added to the mix, and I naturally assumed that muscular toughness was the gateway to amorous abundance. You might say that spirituality, for me, is the space in which I’ve been figuring out why this approach hasn’t worked out so well.
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The first thing that undermined my masculinity was empathy. The suffering of others actually caused me to feel pain. I thought it was a special quality that could, if left unchecked, turn me into a sissy. It turns out however, that empathy is a hardwired, biological response. We all have sympathetic reactions to perceived events in which the same neural pattern is triggered as if we were having the experience ourselves. This is not to say that compassion can be reduced to biology. Something in me made a decision to honor that biological response rather than try to overcome it.
Rather than let empathy turn me into a sissy, though, the cause of justice provided a new channel for the flow of testosterone. In the name of love, I became a righteous defender of the oppressed against the greedy, self-serving agents of the military-industrial complex. I was an agent of a new consciousness on earth in which our care for one another and for the earth was our highest value.
Sensing that being right was another source of potency, I immersed myself in the quest for knowledge. This was a little detour since thinking and reading do nothing to increase muscle mass, though in my case I believe it contributed to an increase in cranial bone density. The pen is mightier than the sword, but which would you choose as a phallic emblem?
It didn’t take long to bump into the contradiction of demonizing and blaming those I thought were responsible for injustice while claiming to be an embodiment of love. This spawned a real internal struggle. How could I surrender the self-righteousness upon which I had constructed the edifice of a personality? To paraphrase the immortal words of Walt Kelley, “I have met the enemy, and he is me.”
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My surrender to my empathetic impulses, as well as some carnal ones, had led me down the slippery slope to a quest for an understanding of the nature of love. There is this force that draws people to each other and also draws our individual selves to life itself. Of mysterious origin, known by many names, manifesting in many forms, limitless, ever unfolding, love, it seemed to me, partook of the qualities that many use to describe deity. Its description also seemed to share the language that scientists were beginning to use to describe the unified force that is the source of all creation.
The most striking scientific revelation was the “Uncertainty Principle”. The idea is that we can’t measure both the speed and location of energy at the same time. We have to choose one or the other. If we choose speed, the energy appears to be a wave. If we choose location, the energy appears to be a particle. In a sense our perception of the thing determines its physical manifestation.
Was my decision to honor the feeling of empathy the result of yet another constellation of phenomenological influences burned into my DNA? Is there an end to trying to reduce experience to a set of empirical data points? I reached a point where I had to embrace the mystery of things.
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Why do we want to feel that we know things? We have to make critical decisions all the time that affect our prospects of survival. Being social animals, we have to do things together, and people have to be persuaded to do one thing over another. So being right is a position of power. To be in a state of not knowing is to relinquish that power.
Relinquishing power can feel like impotence, or it can feel like congruence with nature. History is strewn with the wreckage of empires guided by sages in the service of the powerful. I became a man when I learned the difference between humiliation and humility.
—Photo by ntoper / flickr
Congratulations Roland for spreading your hard-won wisdom with us. As a female, I am moved and inspired by men who are courageous enough to put the “sword” down and replace it with true masculinity – empathy, kindness, gentleness, love… Just like a drop of water creates ripples all around it, so too, are you opening up the door for other men (and women) to surrender their deepest fears for going against so many of these strange and artificial societal norms. I celebrate your new paradigm for masculinity!
Men can be spiritual, AND be fierce warriors. Warriors are still needed. The greatest thing the devil ever did was to convince you he didn’t exist. It is possible to be empathetic, and compassionate and still be a warrior, still be fierce, still face death and kiss fear on the mouth. The old masculinity is not dead. It’s perennial, and will always be useful. Nor will it be supplanted by the new masculinity. The new masculinity is weak, impotent, and slack without the old masculinity. The old masculine ethic was, largely, too hard, to sharp, too cutting, to the point… Read more »
That is very well put.
Your point about judgment/self-righteousness being another brand of power gone awry is astute. I’m not a man and I’ve struggled with it myself. It’s almost like an addiction.
Empathy is real manhood in my book (quite literally). The whole point of GMP is to actually listen to other men tell their stories and be moved and inspired by them. I have always said the beauty of this thing is I get to hang out with heroes i life. That started with the 31 guys in the book and the circle just keeps expanding. You are not part of it. Thank you.
Ouch, Tom. Your auto-correct appears to hate Roland. Pretty sure you meant “now”.
Roland, in my view, it takes incredible strength to be empathetic, loving, uncertain and willing to surrender power. Thanks for framing it this way. And like you, I have been moved by the idea that there can be multiple realities that co-exist, and we see what we are looking for.