Herein lies informative manly insight for women and men. Though we are reluctant to embrace and eager to avoid our greater potential and power as intelligent builders and artists, it is in the reflection of woman's eyes that our proper manly destinies are made apparent and inescapable. By attaining greater understanding of the evolved optimal interplay between man and woman, we can make enormous positive changes in our personal lives and ultimately reshape outdated worldwide cultural doctrines which dictate how men and women ought to act.
The following is derived from a fair knowledge of human evolutionary pair-bonding and sociological development, and careful attention to personal and second-hand experience in the affairs of men and their interactions with women. It is, like all hypothesis and theories, subject to error and newly inconsistent observation; it is my plan in time and through further education and improved skill as a linguist and writer to refine these concepts into a truly concise, practical, semantically precise, and completely scientifically corroborative guide.
This experiential knowledge has been run through the artistic and romanticizing filter of my zealous, grandeur-prone, and idealistic mind and made reference to cultural mythologies ancient and modern (Jesus Christ and Superman!) to form a more flowery piece of poetic prose and homage to the fairer sex.
Seriously, we love you girls.
Man as Self-Consuming Purpose
A man's mind is a machine, deriving pleasure and a sense of fulfillment through guiding his body toward efficient productive change. His mind's sole purpose is to work in conjunction with the greater machinery that is the physical universe and its clockwork perfection of constantly transferring states of energy.
He then becomes something unique unto the universe, something special above and lacking from the rocks and shrubs and millipedes. A volitional instigator, he gives purpose and preference to an otherwise predetermined entropic flow of all things. Soaring higher and higher from one success to the next, man can never be content with what is, only with what is becoming through his actions. To cease is to die, and our hero will churn his engines at full capacity until total burnout and exhaustion overtake him, like a brilliantly burning white hot sun gone supernova. In every man lies a tragically magnificent destiny of martyrdom for his chosen cause.
Enter woman: man's savior and liberation. She is the catalyst to an anomalous exit clause built inside of every man's design, and the only hope he has of escaping his self-consuming doom. Heaven and Earth may pass away and man would still seek to build up from hopeless nothingness, if not for the tender influence of a woman.
The Never-Ending Pitfalls of Man
While man's natural inclination is to burn so bright that he burns himself out, his insatiable attraction to woman will counteract and circumvent this forceful pursuit. His desire to be near her is the only thing which can be stronger than the urge to make progress and which can stop the rampaging bull in his tracks. She is an amazing creature; with the power of Gods at her fingertips, she can hijack the simultaneously creative and destructive force that is man and bend it toward her every momentary whim.
Men everywhere are at risk to two opposite dangers perpetually overshadowing their lives. The first is the burden of importance, meaning that a man may become so self-absorbed in his quests and visions that he loses sight of everything else in his life as it falls to the wayside. Tunnel vision overtakes him; he crashes and burns.
The second is the danger of feminine comfort: overindulgence in the sublime and simple ecstasy of a woman who has rescued him from the burden of importance. Seeking rest, a man will retire from his destiny as builder and wish to sleep forever in the gentle and inviting bosom of a woman. He needs her warmth, for it is the one thing he could never construct through his own strength and intellect. His previous importance is cold and empty without her, and once he has known the treasure of the glow she carries he may very well forever forsake his seemingly obsolete duties as man to be with her.
In this manner, we see billionaire business tycoons create vast successful empires from the ground up who still feel perpetually unfulfilled without the one thing that money cannot buy them. The struggle we as men face between a life of importance and a life of happiness is often embodied in modern culture by conceptions of career success vs. family life. This is of course a gross oversimplification of the principles at play.
Kazantzakis' Christ as an Extinguished Star
A emotionally powerful and engaging depiction of this balancing act performed by men everywhere is seen in the film"The Last Temptation of Christ", starring Willam Dafoe and directed by Martin Scorsese, based on the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. In this artistically expanded variation of the story of Jesus Christ, Jesus is faced with a final and ultimate temptation by Satan, masquerading as an angel, to come down off the cross and forsake his ultimate importance as messiah in exchange for a life of simple earthly pleasure with the woman he loves, Mary Magdalene.
The dialogue between Satan and Christ occurs as follows:
"(God) has tested you and he's happy with you. He doesn't want your blood. He said, 'Let him die in a dream. But let him live his life.'"
"All the pain... That was real."
"Yes, but there won't be any more. You've done enough."
"I don't have to be sacrificed?"
"No, you don't."
In this moment, a wave of relief and euphoria washes over Jesus, as though the weight of the world has been lifted off this super-man's shoulders, now realizing that for the first time in his life no more is demanded of him; at long last he is given permission to rest after a life of supreme struggle. He is then taken away from the angry murderous crowds by Satan to be reunited with Mary, who was devastated earlier in the movie by his abandonment of her so that he could pursue his divine purpose.
Jesus, the ultimate super-man and ideal notion of masculine purpose and self-sacrifice, forsakes his prime importance as messiah so that he can settle down and dive into the one temptation capable of superseding his masculine prerogative to always be making progress: the warmth of woman. The only thing strong enough to break down the Son of God was the much needed rest and bliss that comes exclusively from the love of a woman. Rather than be extinguished by his tragically magnificent destiny on the cross, he forgoes the ultimate sacrifice to indulge in his deserved leisure with her.
Years later, Satan inquires of Jesus and his new secluded family life with Mary. It is clear that he suffers no remorse for his choice and considers that his entire life and crusade as the most important man who ever lived were worthless without the divine happiness a woman has brought him. He is ashamed of all the mistakes he has made and the wrong ways he sought to do God's will. Happy, but now useless, he retires from the world.
Kazantzakis writes in the preface to the novel:
"My principle anguish and source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh... and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met."
Caught in a Constant Clash Between Spirit and Flesh
The so-called pleasures of the flesh are numerous and varied: intoxicants, thrills, sensory hyper-stimuli, lustful excitements, and more. Any one of these can serve to usurp a man's chosen direction in life, if only momentarily. These problems represent momentary bumps in the road, and are overcome easily by a man truly dedicated to his cause.
However, even the most directed of men will in the end be tempted from his path permanently by the love, not the lust, of a good woman. Once having achieved this, he will lose a great deal of his drive to progress at all in most any other regard. Save the world? Why? When one has already achieved the highest level of personal fulfillment possible and can spend all the moments of his life in making glorious love to his divine queen, what else is there worth living and building for? The drive of his spirit may become permanently abandoned for the fleshy ecstasy of his new found partner or partners.
A man's chosen path of purpose leaves him obsessed with shaping the course of the future and reviewing over the mistakes of the past, but his embrace in a woman's arms acts as a gravitational pull attaching him with great force entirely to his present contentedness. Beginning and end cease to be relevant in such a state, only the wondrous beauty he sees in her that for the moment overflows onto him. She is the world to him, she is existence itself. More than that even, she becomes a mirror for him, reflecting and exposing all the parts of his own being that he would never allow himself to observe or express. What else could he ever possibly hope to accomplish or acquire through his previous folly of a fallacious concept of "purpose"?
Clark Kent, Kal-El, and Superman: the Three States of Man
Further expounding upon Siegel and Shuster's Superman mythos, we see a composite of these two extreme masculine pitfalls in our hero. It is easy for one to ponder why Superman, the worlds most powerful and beloved superhero, should even bother to continue his pseudo-human charade as a feeble reporter. But upon further examination we see that the godly and universally esteemed character of Superman is in fact the product of two lower identities, called Clark Kent and Kal-El respectively. Clark Kent represents his need for simple human comfort, the part that seeks rest from his duty and to be close to his earthly love, Lois Lane. Kal-El is the identity from which Superman derives his ultimate physical power, his Kryptonian ancestry which gives him the ability to be an unstoppable machine crusading for truth, justice, and the American Way.
Capable as Kal-El is, he is no more hero than any other super empowered Kryptonian; nor is mild-mannered Clark Kent anything more than a mundane love-sick puppy. A hero is more than the suit he wears and the weapons he wields, and it is only by the fusion of these two sides of the coin that Superman can focus Kal-El's powers through Clark Kent's earthly motivation to become the champion the world knows him as, invincible in both flesh and spirit now, forever maintained by the love of a good woman. His biological design gives him his unparalleled physical strength, but the influence of his feminine counterpart makes him a champion.
Kal-El is his identity by default, it is the very body and nature he was born into. He takes on the superimposed human role of Clark Kent so that he can simultaneously become the hero Superman. The same rings true for every real life human male, minus the extreme magnitude of power. We are capable producers by default, but without adopting a softer human side we lose focus, becoming misguided and destructive. It is the marriage of these two aspects of our psyche, the rough and soft, yin and yang, masculine and feminine, etc. that unleashes our greatest potential.
The Folly in Attempting to Circumnavigate our Genetic Design
There is no alternative to the battle of primordial drives we men painstakingly face. Our actions and propensities have been shaped by billions of years of evolved psychology. This physical environment has dictated that for our species to survive and our genes to flourish that we must carry this cross and act in accordance; it is a fundamental part of being a man. Women will always have this hold upon us, and we will always feel uneasy without her and as well without a sense of importance. It is these burdens that have made our species come together into family and tribal units, and granted us intelligence and creativity enough to innovate the tools of a highly advanced civilization.
Whether a man succumbs to the danger of blind self-sacrifice through unhampered purpose or to the motivation-killing indulgence of ultimate ecstasy in women, both are preferable alternatives to a life of absolute waste or destruction. The crook, the liar, the fighter, the pervert, the abuser, the asshole, the taker, the waster, the politician, the censor, the cheater... anyone who gains at the expensive of others is the worst example of retrogressive masculine waste and evil. It is these men who have given up in the struggle of masculinity and sunk to the lowest rung of existence that give men everywhere a bad name. While the potential lies in every man to become such an immoral abomination, it is the job of the virtuous man to remain ever vigilant against these laws of psychological entropy and propensities for retrogression.
The human condition is a merciless master, but it is the only condition we can ever know. It is the greatest show on Earth and the only game in town. Our only option for easing the suffering that comes as an inherent part of our being is to turn the two opposing drives in our lives into complimentary forces. We must realize that though a woman can serve as that wonderful escape and release we so desperately need from our all-important missions, she can also be the biggest inspiration worth striving for. Drive for the sake of drive is blind; communion with the fairer sex without progress is stagnant; but a man driven to progress by woman is unstoppable. He becomes a well-balanced being, and both his simple happiness and productive output are optimized. He becomes a true super-man.
A Woman's Place in the Grand Scheme
This realization calls for the self-aware women of our species to take on the grandest of roles in the earthly scheme of human endeavors. You are the focal points in our lives, the greatest blessing to be bestowed on us, the inspiration to strive and the one thing that all our strivings can never attain on their own. Forgive a man when he loses sight of the ultimate importance you play in his life, and he in turn will forgive you for the emotionally erratic and heartless witch that sporadically emerges from the deepest recesses of your being. We need each other, and any notions of separation and independence among the sexes are illusory and temporary.
Woman is truly the liberator of man, for it is through her that he breaks free from the eternal chain of endless frantic pursuits of higher and higher material successes. If we are to achieve freedom as individuals and still live prosperous lives, we cannot do this on an internal level without the aid of our feminine counterparts. This fallacious battle of the sexes we are confronted with nowadays must come to an end, as only through our cooperation and combination of attributes can we become who we must be.
The quality of our species and the world we create in large part depends upon our ability to coexist and intertwine with each other as mature men and women, our respective strengths optimized through sexual synergy. We complete each other and more, the whole we create being far greater than the sum of its parts.
In knowing this, seeking out a partner becomes far more than a social custom and routine for defending against loneliness or diffusing sexual frustrations. Seeking out that member of the opposite sex who compliments us the greatest and with us forms the most integral unified being becomes the most important mission in our lives, to one day possibly be culminated in the creation of a brand new human being literally consisting of half of each partner. How well we raise this freshly birthed wondrous work of nature and man will also largely depend on how well we function as a unit, thus making the entirety of the character and integrity of the human race rest very significantly on how well we pair-bond and copulate. The magnificent importance of this quest cannot be overstated.
Life is a simply grand sometimes.
I am a teacher of many subjects and a student of many more from San Diego, CA. I have observed that the world humans have created for themselves on this planet is largely irrational, inefficient, unethical, inhospitable, unproductive, insane, and entirely unsustainable. This observation led to conclusions in favor of freeing man from servitude and self-destruction through optimized individual choice. My focus now lies in the liberation of man through educational inspiration and the creation of new institutions which cater to rational beings capable of running their own lives and forfeiting mastery over others.
Email me at livefreeretiree@gmail.com
View more of my writings at http://vahramsvalley.blogspot.com/
