Ten thousand years ago, when a man woke up in the morning, he grabbed his spear and walked out into the forests and prairies. There he listened to the bird calls, smelled the air, touched animal tracks. He sat in itchy bushes waiting for game, scanning the treetops hoping to spot bees returning to their hives full of honey...And he prayed.

He prayed to the Deer God to sacrifice one of its own to feed the human tribe. He prayed to the Monarch of Pheasants and the Father of Fish. And most of all he prayed to the Great Mystery, the Great Spirit, that secreted all these forms because even then men knew that God is not nature, God MAKES nature.

This man was humble and vulnerable and dependent on the awesome power of nature, and he prayed to be in harmony with these incomprehensible forces. He was not in the business of sitting at a desk counting beans, naming feelings, labeling or sorting things. He couldn't even talk out loud to the other guys he was with for fear of scaring off wary prey. He was operating from a deep intuitive well, trying to seduce nature, trying to coax a livelihood from it. This wasn't about killing. It was about praying. Praying to the Deer God -- preying on deer. Does this sound at all rational to you?

Meanwhile, back at the tent, his wife was five months pregnant. She was manufacturing garments out of animal and/or vegetable fibers to be ready when the baby arrived in four months. She had solidified her position in the hierarchy, the pecking order, the bureaucracy, the de facto government of the tribe, and was organizing other wives and older children into work gangs outfitted with seed kernels and sharpened digging sticks and sending them out into the bottomland to plant corn so there would be flatbread to eat in six months. She was dominating and controlling everything she possibly could within her restricted domain. That was her nature, her approach to life. And that is precisely what women and government try to do today.

The highly touted Great Earth Mother of recent popular rediscovery and adulation was a control freak -- the prototype of modern government, especially modern European government -- an anal retentive, female, control mindscape.

It is known that on the 21st of June and the 21st of December virgin boys were castrated and bled to death for her edification and honor. They were fed to the Mother, sacrificed to her, their blood poured onto the dirt of the fields to enrich the anticipated harvest. This was the cult of the Great Earth Mother that pushed out the Deer God and accompanied the emergence of agriculture. She was brutal. She was an odious witch.

And that's why men took religion back. That's how the so-called Patriarchy began. Men were sick and tired of having their balls cut off. Literally! Abraham had to be willing to sacrifice his son Isaac before God could be satisfied of his loyalty. That was the mindscape of that era -- the feminist, Astartian mindscape. Then Jesus came along and said, "I am the sacrifice. You don't have to sacrifice flesh -- the boy or the ram who represents the boy -- anymore." And through his crucifixion he both fulfilled and put an end to the cult of Astarte, the Great Earth Mother...

...To the Native American of the Pacific Northwest the man accorded the greatest prestige was the one who, at the annual Potlatch ceremony, gave the most away! He gave away the most salmon, the most honey, the most furs, and he gave away the most prayers; for everyone understood a real man could always get more of what people needed and therefore he had no need to hoard any of it! This is masculine thinking. Sharing is the essential part of masculine nature. This is what MAN is all about: the faith that his rapport with nature and with his God will continue to provide what is best for him. This is not rugged individualism. This is rugged spiritualism. Here is a belief, a choice, made in favor of the notion that the universe is essentially a good place. This is the Male Choice.

Do you ever listen to women talk? Do you get the idea that the foundation of their belief system is that the world is essentially a good place? Or do you get the feeling from them that life is a constant battle of things to be manipulated and arranged? The king was the first manhole. The corporate male is the latest incarnation of men who have bought into women's values. Have you ever heard of anyone pray for a rise in the Dow Jones? Have you ever heard of anyone pray for a BMW? Not likely. People instinctively know what the Deer God is listening for. You can pretty much cut the cake separating male from female aspirations according to whether the item in question is something people would pray for or not. The king -- the feudal corporation -- is a product of feminine/agrarian/manufacturing type of thinking. The king embodies a belief in scarcity and the hoarding of wealth. People who devote their lives to making money should be ashamed of themselves.

A person's prenatal hormonal experience appears to be an especially strong influence on later behavior. From those controversial corridors of animal research comes conclusive evidence that a male rat will act like one only if it has gotten the right amount of androgen, starting at the right time, and for the right duration, in the course of its development. If he hasn't received the proper amounts of hormones at the proper times he will act like a female, even if he looks like a normal male.

Conversely, Robert Goy says the evidence is "indisputable" that excessive prenatal exposure to male androgen can produce male gender-role behavior in females. And, Roger Gorski's UCLA team found that when testosterone is withheld by castrating rat pups their brains look like those of females.

What does it all mean? It means that, all things being equal, we would all come out female. It means that a male baby's Y chromosome induces the mother's undescended testicles to manufacture testosterone and other male androgens that shape a male fetus' gonads and brain and launch him on a life course which is incomparable and literally inconceivable to the female of the species; and this process begins in the first weeks of existence as a zygote.

But most importantly, it means that males are not born, they are made.

They are made by hormones which enlarge and reform the normal model brain creating a greater right-brain capacity, and vastly different perceptual skills. And they are made by the sport and war and government and literature and legends of the older men whose duty it is to initiate the younger men into the formation of those values which beget and sustain human life. Men do not just happen.

Women reach puberty, their breasts enlarge, they bleed between their legs, and life tells them that they are mature females. They can hardly fail to get the point. The female initiation in many tribes is simply for the pubescent girl to sit still and meditate silently on her condition. With men, the transitions, though noticeable, are hardly that distinct. Men must be activated, by hormones and by the society of men. Men must be made, and if they're not what you get are men who act like women.

Mothers, with some fantasy cut-out in their heads of what boys are like, and suffering from the deficiencies of their husbands, set about to make junior a perfect little man. He is such a "good little boy" when he learns to pee pee inside the round white hole and resists smacking the cat with his toy bulldozer. Mothers love their daughters, but they wax with pride over their sons. They immediately set about trying to make them into everything the husband is not...

The mere fact that a man is accustomed from his earliest years to have women around, to find their presence "normal", their absence "abnormal", tends to make him dependent on women later in life. Dad is a character that comes and goes, but mom is the rock in junior's life. He learns from her that taking directions from women who act like they know what they are doing is normal. It is almost impossible to underestimate the psychological power of this early social dynamic. A man's whole notion of security and safety throughout life comes from giving himself to this dependent relationship. Like an imprinted gosling he spends his whole life looking for a certain shape to attach himself to.

We spend our marriages trying to wrest the same affirmation from our wives that we got from our moms, way back when, before we could even "think". Our wives accuse us of trying to get them to mother us and it's true, we are, that's how we were trained. I know a phone-sex vendor in Chicago named Valerie Craft who stated unequivocally that her entire business consists in comforting men in the manner of their mothers. Astounding! But not really.

Says Vilar:

"One of the most useful factors in conditioning a man is praise. Its effect is better and much more long-lasting than say, sex, as it may be started early and continued throughout a man's life. Furthermore, if praise is applied in the correct dosage a woman will never need to scold. Any man who is accustomed to a regular and conditional dosage of praise will interpret its absence as displeasure."

Most jilted male lovers and husbands have an explosive mental melt-down at their beloved's infidelities, which is vastly out of proportion to what they are being deprived of. It feels to them as if they are being torn away from their mother's bodies, and indeed, that's just what is going on down deep in their psyches. They are losing the basic unit of security, the emotional lifeline ingrained in them when they were still peeing in their pants. That's why men rage and want to beat people up when their lovers leave them. That's why most break-ups involve women leaving men rather than men leaving women. Why would a man leave? After years of adolescent drunken degradation and self-abuse he has an hour-glass-shaped praise-giver back in his life again. That's normal. That's how it's supposed to be. That's what mom showed him.

Says Vilar:

"Training by means of praise has the following advantages: it makes the object of praise dependent (in order for praise to be worth something it has to come from a "higher" source, thus the object of praise exalts the praise-giver to a superior level); it creates an addict (without praise he no longer knows whether or not he is worth something -- automatic existential shame -- and he forgets the ability to identify with himself); praise increases his productivity (it is most effectively meted out not for the same achievements but for increasingly higher ones). Only mothers and wives, not other men or women, dispense the hugs and praise that men so crave. A boy, like a monkey, will repeat the actions that called forth endearments and, if at any time recognition is not granted, he will do everything in his power, bar nothing, to regain it."

He will climb mountains or work in coal mines or eat shit, allowing himself, like a junkie, to be totally shamed. And, says Vilar, "the happiness he feels when praise is restored will already have assumed the proportions of an addiction."

Shame, that deep feeling of worthlessness and helplessness, is precisely the result of withheld praise. Regarding my own mother I've always referred to it as "withdrawal of love". Even now, 43 years after the fact, she can set off an awful, depressing, manic, physical grinding in my stomach simply by withdrawing her love. Clearly she trained me to respond that way eons ago, before I had any sense of how anything works. In its way, it is sheer brutality. Dependency training is like teaching a puppy to come on the word "go" and then sending him off on a walk with a total stranger. The entire phenomenon of praise, and shame, and withdrawal of love is a very distorted garbling of signals imprinted in babies' heads. God says surrender your ego. Mom says hang onto your ego so I can continue to use it to shame you into doing what I want. Who do you want to believe? God or mom? Do you wonder why so many more men than women drink and abuse drugs?

Here is the substance of addiction. We were strung out on praise early in life and without regular doses of praise we hurt so bad and feel so useless we have to try to kill the pain somehow. Ah, that first glass of beer, that first joint, how it took the pain away!

Responsible older men used to be available to initiate younger men away from this bondage to women. Without the mental break-down that accompanies initiation men remain enslaved to female praise. It's a fact, and an outrage. We are letting them rent free space in our heads...

Says Esther Vilar:

"No matter what labor saving devices arrive a woman's demands on life will always be material, never intellectual, never spiritual."

On South Pacific islands the old men call their families and friends to worship by beating a large wooden club on a hollow log. The flat thumping sound ricochets off the trunks of coconut palms and reverberates far back into the bush. Though they call themselves Christians these men are performing a ritual that is thousands of years old. They are connecting, across time, with their ancestors -- their grandfathers. So as we ease into this topic of talking about men let's take a few moments to remember our grandfathers.

I'd like you to close your eyes and call up an image of your grandfathers. You are here because they were here, and that is worth honoring. So please close your eyes for a moment and remember your grandfathers....Let us welcome the memory of our grandfathers, our ancestors, those who have gone before us, and on whose shoulders we stand.

(silent moment)

"Grandfather energy is energy that is quiet and secure. It has been tested and it has not been found wanting. It does not need to prove itself any longer, and so it can approve the efforts of others who are not, as yet, sure of themselves. Children can feel secure in the presence of grandparents because, while mom and dad are still rushing to find their way through life's journey, grandpa and grandma can create a space where the journey has found its end and purpose.

Grandfathers can trust life deeply precisely because they have come to terms with death. They know that the enemy is not pain, but fear of pain. They have lived through enough life to understand that, in the long run, life is stronger than death.

The courage of the grandfather is not to fight death but to affirm life. Grandfathers can trust life because they have seen more of it than younger men, and they can trust death because they are closer to it than younger men. Every moment is a gift from God. Death is not good, but it is part of life, and life is good.

The soul of the grandfather is large enough to realize that spiritual growth is not so much learning as unlearning. He understands that he does not so much grasp the truth as let go of personal obstacles to truth. He is aware that people who strongly approve or disapprove of something have too much ego blocking their vision.

Perhaps, more than anything else, one becomes a grandfather in learning to deal with limits graciously. It has something to do with loss of strength and fleetness and balance and the passing of pets and friends. Becoming a grandfather takes skill and luck and perseverance.

Grandfathers largely mistrust the world's definition of freedom. They have seen too many people manipulated, led off to the slaughter, by leaders who appealed to their right to have this or their freedom to do that. The grandfather knows his boundaries and knows his center but does not have to protect either of them."

So says Richard Rohr.

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