[Thoughts on] The Way of the Superior Man

I have been hearing and reading about Davide Deida, the author of The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire for some time. And I must admit to a good portion of skepticism before ordering and then reading this book. I first read something substantial about him in a spiritual magazine article, in EnlightenNext (previously What is Enlightenment?). The description did not really make me want to read the book but he just kept popping up time and again in different places - with some strongly for and others passionately against - and I decided that I needed to make up my own mind on the subject.

One of the ways I personally decide the value of a book is how much I underline (or not) the chapters I have read. Looking back through the book now I see that many passages are underlined and many others have achieved 'star status' (which means that I put an exclamation point or an asterisk next to a passage to symbolize that it is worth re-reading).

I could see how a book like this could piss of many women, feminists or egalitarians of either sex and just about everyone. But, he actually has a lot of very interesting things to say. And one of the most important things he says actually deflects most of the flak he receives as a macho pig - which is that while he talks about him and her he means whoever is playing a typically masculine or feminine role in a relationship (the masculine role can be played by the woman and vice versa).

His opinions are very clear and very 'piss or get off the pot' but many of them hit home with me. Much deeper and concentrated in terms of insights than what I considered the fluff of the Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars series. I found myself rethinking many situations with past girlfriends and understanding where I and we screwed up (mostly me though), what the source of many past frustrations actually were and how to, quite easily actually, change my behavior in the future.

His book delves into a lot more than the him-her relationship decoding/coaching and includes chapters on parenting, on the value of friends and friendships, on being true to your journey, on how not to compromise for the wrong reasons, and many other subjects which, at the end of the day I could summarize as treating the much larger subject of how to live life without regretting the life lived. A subject that is truly one that we can all relate too and that resonated with me quite a bit. Like someone tapping you on the shoulder and - sometimes gently, sometimes more aggressively - saying, "hey you, be careful, make sure you are on course, otherwise the list of regrets may be long and painful to look at..."

An example, well if you ask so kindly here it is:

When you do your tasks the right way, they liberate your life energy so that you can attend to what really matters - the investigation, realization, and embodiment of true freedom. Do you even know what that means? Have you devoted yourself to finding out the deepest truth of your own existence? If, in this very moment, your tasks are not supporting your life in this way, you must drop them or change them so that they do. Otherwise, you are wasting your life.

The above is excerpted from a chapter entitled "Don't Get Lost in Tasks and Duties" which like many of the chapter titles are a quite clear summary of what is within the chapter. Other chapters are entitled, "Praise Her" (with a byline, I like, that begins 'The masculine grows by challenge, but the feminine grows by praise), "Don't Use your Family and your Life as an Excuse", "Live with an Open Heart Even if it Hurts", ...

I still haven't finished reading the book, and some of the later chapters are the more controversial, but I will probably relate my impressions on the rest of the book when I dig into the rest. Good stuff, but to be digested bit by small bit, like many the spiritual book.

Have a wonderful weekend,

Alon

On George Carlin and the future of nostalgia

I recently received an e-mail from a friend entitled "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but the moments that take our breath away..." with some words attributed (properly?) to George Carlin.

I am not sure that it is really from him but allow me to reproduce the main gist of the message and then react to it. Here is my excerpt from the message:

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider freeways,but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness.

We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom.

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often.

We've learned how to make a living, but not a life. We've added years to life not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space. We've done larger things, but not better things.

We've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We've conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We've learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less.

These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill.

So, well, overall it is cute and makes some valid points, but in a nutshell I don't buy into it!

It seems every generation has nostalgia for the good old days, and we are just another generation with another case of 'where-did-the-good-times-go' blues... when things were better, simpler, more wholesome, cheaper, of better quality, realer, whatever, etc. etc. etc.

Come on! We have it soooo good but we don't want to admit it. Now I realize that anyone who is reading this is part of the estimated (but not by me) 1% of the world's population who has it good but even if there are lots of things we all would change about the way things are going, we also have a lot more to be thankful for today than ever before. Or at least that is the way I would like to see it, my illusion so to speak.

For anyone growing up in the States, we were enticed regularly to finish our plates because "think of all the starving kids in China"... I don't think any parents are using that line anymore. Moreover, the rising tide of China's economy is now also lifting Vietnam and starting to spillover to the economies of countries like Laos and Cambodia (along the lines of Kennedy's aphorism "a rising tide lifts all boats").

Progress in health means added years of living, even for people who are diagnosed with diseases that used to mean short-term death sentences. Those extra years, in those situations, are priceless. Personally, chemotherapy and other modern developments allowed my dad to add 10 months to his life after having been told that he only had one to live.  Those extra months, while difficult, allowed him to be present at his daughter's wedding, spend quality time with the family, etc. And thanks to progress in modern medicine, and pain management, the dying process was a lot less painful than it would otherwise have been - for him and for us.

While some people do watch TV more than read, for many of the people I know this is simple not true, sorry George. Spirituality, depth, caring, giving, volunteering, spontaneous acts of kindness are there every day, at all times, if we just care to notice them more than what the news shows us about conflict and war and expressoins of violence and hatred. We don't need to turn a blind eye to the negative aspects but should learn to see the positive more often.

Any time there is a catastrophe somewhere in the world, people from all over the world send money, food, aid or themselves to help. Spontaneously. When the Tsunami hit, the outpouring of aid from all over the world that the aid agencies and NGOs received more money than they knew what to do with. Not from governments but from people like you and me.

I guess it all goes back to our original decisions about life - is it a positive or negative experience? is man inherently good or evil? is the universe inherently loving or not? If you see a loving universe then its development can only be more loving... which means that if we give it a little thought, optimism about the future should replace our illusory, i.e. the future of nostalgia should not be so bright...

[Thoughts on work] Note to myself

I have always been struggling with what to do "when I grow up" in terms of earning a living. I think I would like to earn a living from writing. I know I can earn a living from teaching. And every now and then I am tempted to stop dabbling and take a serious dive into business - because I am probably pretty good at it but mostly because I think I could earn a lot of (or a lot more) money... Usually, a short time after the latter axis of thinking, I end up shaking myself by the shoulders (not easy to do) and sternly telling the guy in the mirror 'what are you thinking?!' It's a cycle...

A friend of mine gave me a wonderful little book (yes, a recurrent theme) called Simple Truths by Kent Nerburn (Amazon link to book here). The subtitle is 'clear and gentle guidance on the big issues in life', and it is quite apt to what you will find inside. Once again, my skeptical side came out and I judged the book by its cover, expecting to find watered-down, easy, American-style spirituality. I underestimated my friends discerning taste and wisdom (please accept my apology! (and read yesterday's post : ))) and Kent Nerburn's wisdom (sorry Kent).

I picked it up today, flipped through it and landed on a chapter called "On Work" and since I have been thinking about this quite a bit of late (I'm in the cycle), I reread the chapter with interest. Here is some of the original text:

Choose your work carefully.
No matter how much you might believe that your work is nothing more than what you do to make money, your work makes you who you are, because it is where you put your time.
We are what we do, and the more we do it, the more we become it. By giving a job your time, you are giving it your consciousness. Eventually it will fill your life with the reality that it presents.

And

You should think of work as vocation, which comes from the Latin word for calling, which comes from the word for voice. In those meanings it touches on what work should really be-- something that calls to you, that gives voice to who you are and what you want to say in the world.
If you find a vocation, embrace it. You have found a way to contribute to the world with love.


I like how Kent thinks and writes. Soft spoken wisdom and thought-provoking. The whole book is a little gem.

In regards to work, maybe because I work alone in front of a computer often, I have been thinking that maybe work is not about work at all but all about relationships.
As I hear from people around me how great and enriching (rare) or awful and frustrating (common) it is to work in a big, medium, little company, I wonder if all work is, really, just an excuse to force us to work on relationship issues. Not with people we love per se, or choose to work with or spend time with, but the infamous "other" that is thrust upon us.

Maybe the point of work is that it is the soul's way of putting us in situations in which we must depend upon and get along with people who we do not share a natural affinity for, in which we are not comfortable, in which we need to realize that a lot of the "what" of work is less important than the "how" of working with people. Maybe it is the devious little soul's way of teaching us the important lessons that we cannot learn with our friends, family and loved ones... Just a thought.

[Thoughts on] MLK's I Have a Dream speech

A friend of mine wrote me as a response to this blog that she is interested in reading about Martin Luther King and reading more of his writings. I have only read his historic I Have A Dream speech (which you can read in its entirety by clicking on the link) which he delivered in Washington in August of 1963.

Because she asked me about it, and also thanks to Obama's references to the man and his words in his inaugural speech, I started to think about the original speech again and what I thought about it the last time I read it (the first time I read it was in elementary school, I believe, but I didn't remember much about it).

There are many incredible passages, inspiring, wise and poetic phrases throughout the speech, but to me there is one phrase that just sticks in my mind and still awes me. Dr. King says this phrase after the fourth of his "I have a dream" statements and it goes:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

If you are a parent, especially the parent of a minority, it is clear that you don't want your children judged by the color of their skin, or their religion, or their sexual orientation, or I don't know what. We could also make the question even more personal and ask what we might want to be judged by? Would it be our actions, intentions, charitable acts, contributions, by how the lives of others would be in your absence (like in Capra's It's a Wonderful Life), by the love we have given or received, by how many friends we have, I don't know actually, probably I would prefer not to be judged.

'by the content of their character'! How brilliant is that?! I am not even sure what it means but at the same time I soooo know what it means and it is incredibly clear. Everything that makes us who we are and how we act - in general and in regards to others; five words to rule them all: the content of our characters.

An admirable man, an admirable legacy...

PS. If you do know of a good book by or on Dr. Martin Luther King please let me know - maybe you could even comment directly to this post and thus share it directly with my intellectually curious friend.