I wanted to recommend this book, it has been very helpful to say the least. It's a short reading, but it takes some time to process.
I found this book after wondering for a long time about the positive aspects of the male role or archetype after some confusion on how to integrate rejected or overlooked aspects of my own psyche. I found the book after an interesting dream that made me realize this and pointed me in the right direction, so to speak. This was the fist book that I found after searching about this topic.
Due to our default cultural programming in the West, related to postmodernism and radical liberal views, we could have a wrong conception about certain aspects of masculinity, we have movements as radical feminism, that focus on the negative aspects of the "patriarchy" or the masculine archetype, that can mess with finding and developing a true trascendental gender identity that lead us to a balanced and intimate relationship with ourselves, others and life itself; and of course, to the "face of god/archetype" that we represent in this life. At the same time, some of us have not have the chance to have a male role at all or had a weak and/or unbalanced one that leave some voids in our personality. Sometimes the mother alone actually plays a dual role to help the child develop the duality within, but still there are some aspect that the mother figure cannot impact, so we start absorbing a lot of information about "how to be a man" in automatic from our environment, and some of those behavioral patterns, personality traits and habits turn out to be detrimental in our adult life because they tend to be incomplete, skewed or immature. This has been and still is a great adventure of self discovery, and at the same time it has helped me to understanding this "force" out there too. It helps to lay out a clear and understandable map of the masculine psyche.
The exercises at the end are very helpful, specially the meditation that can be practiced as the meditation with a seed suggested by Laura and the Cs in the 29/08/15 session.
Book: https://www.amazon.com/King-Warrior-Magician-Lover-Rediscovering/dp/0062506064
I found a couple of summaries that are attached to this message, and the audio here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1523brduw4
I found this book after wondering for a long time about the positive aspects of the male role or archetype after some confusion on how to integrate rejected or overlooked aspects of my own psyche. I found the book after an interesting dream that made me realize this and pointed me in the right direction, so to speak. This was the fist book that I found after searching about this topic.
Due to our default cultural programming in the West, related to postmodernism and radical liberal views, we could have a wrong conception about certain aspects of masculinity, we have movements as radical feminism, that focus on the negative aspects of the "patriarchy" or the masculine archetype, that can mess with finding and developing a true trascendental gender identity that lead us to a balanced and intimate relationship with ourselves, others and life itself; and of course, to the "face of god/archetype" that we represent in this life. At the same time, some of us have not have the chance to have a male role at all or had a weak and/or unbalanced one that leave some voids in our personality. Sometimes the mother alone actually plays a dual role to help the child develop the duality within, but still there are some aspect that the mother figure cannot impact, so we start absorbing a lot of information about "how to be a man" in automatic from our environment, and some of those behavioral patterns, personality traits and habits turn out to be detrimental in our adult life because they tend to be incomplete, skewed or immature. This has been and still is a great adventure of self discovery, and at the same time it has helped me to understanding this "force" out there too. It helps to lay out a clear and understandable map of the masculine psyche.
Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine: King, Warrior, Magician and Lover
"Man must overcome losing father and find the "king" within."
This book explores how internal psychic structures of masculinity can lead to healthy or destructive behaviors. Authors Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, through personal and anecdotal experience, discuss the vast manifestations of these primal and prevalent archetypes in the lives of boys and men today. In the book the concepts of each archetype are explained thoroughly. They are illustrated with examples ranging across many cultures, religions, and philosophies throughout history.
This decoding of what Jung called the “double quaternio” builds on Jung’s understanding of the archetypal Self, but extends our grasp of inner geography beyond Jung’s work by clearly delineating not only the psychological contents and potentials imaged in the “four quarters,” but also the two fundamental dialectical oppositions built into the dynamics of the deep self: King, Magician, Lover and Warrior.
Topics:
• The dysfunction of main-stream patriarchy
• Boy Vs Man psychology
• Immature archetypal structures; The Precocious Child, Oedipal Child, Divine Child, and Hero
• Mature archetypal structures; The King, Warrior, Magician, and Lover
• The cultural, religious, and philosophical background of each archetype
• How to access the archetypes
• Do you know what sacred masculinity in its fullness is about?
• Can you identify your behaviors and actions that are immature, and why you act them out?
• Are you able to access each archetype when the situation calls for it?
In order for Man psychology to come into being for any particular man, there needs to be a death. Death—symbolic, psychological, or spiritual—is always a vital part of any initiatory ritual. In psychological terms, the boy Ego must “die.” The old ways of being and doing and thinking and feeling must ritually “die,” before the new man can emerge. "Pseudo-initiation", though placing some curbs on the boy Ego, often amplifies the Ego’s striving for power and control in a new form, an adolescent form regulated by other adolescents. Effective, transformative initiation absolutely slays the Ego and its desires in its old form to resurrect it with a new, subordinate relationship to a previously unknown power or center. Submission to the power of the mature masculine energies always brings forth a new masculine personality that is marked by calm, compassion, clarity of vision, and generativity. Truly deep and rooted masculinity is not abusive nor weak.
We can look at family systems and see the breakdown of the traditional family. More and more families display the sorry fact of the disappearing father, which disappearance, through either emotional or physical abandonment, or both, wreaks psychological devastation on the children of both sexes. The weak or absent father cripples both his daughters’ and his sons’ ability to achieve their own gender identity and to relate in an intimate and positive way with themselves and members both of their own sex and the opposite sex.
The drug dealer, the ducking and diving political leader, the wife beater, the chronically “crabby” boss, the “hot shot” junior executive, the unfaithful husband, the company “yes man,” the indifferent graduate school adviser, the “holier than thou” minister, the gang member, the father who can never find the time to attend his daughter’s school programs, the coach who ridicules his star athletes, the therapist who unconsciously attacks his clients’ “shining” and seeks a kind of gray normalcy for them, the yuppie—all these men have something in common. They are all boys pretending to be men. They got that way honestly, because nobody showed them what a mature man is like. Their kind of “manhood” is a pretense to manhood that goes largely undetected as such by most of us. We are continually mistaking this man’s controlling, threatening, and hostile behaviors for strength. In reality, he is showing an underlying extreme vulnerability and weakness, the vulnerability of the wounded boy.
The devastating fact is that most men are fixated at an immature level of development. These early developmental levels are governed by the inner blueprints appropriate to boyhood. When they are allowed to rule what should be adulthood, when the archetypes of boyhood are not built upon and transcended by the Ego’s appropriate accessing of the archetypes of mature masculinity, they cause us to act out of our hidden (to us, but seldom to others) boyishness. We often talk with affection about boyishness in our culture. The truth is that the boy in each of us—when he is in his appropriate place in our lives—is the source of playfulness, of pleasure, of fun, of energy, of a kind of open-mindedness, that is ready for adventure and for the future. But there is another kind of boyishness that remains infantile in our interactions within ourselves and with others when manhood is required.
We found, as these men sought their own experience of masculine structures through meditation, prayer, and what Jungians call active imagination, that as they got more and more in touch with the inner archetypes of mature masculinity, they were increasingly able to let go of their "patriarchal" self and other wounding thought, feeling, and behavior patterns and become more genuinely strong, centered, and generative toward themselves and others - both women and men.
We hear it said of some man that “he just can’t get himself together.” What this means, on a deep level, is that so-and-so is not experiencing, and cannot experience, his deep cohesive structures. He is fragmented; various parts of his personality are split off from each other and leading fairly independent and often chaotic lives. A man who “cannot get it together” is a man who has probably not had the opportunity to undergo ritual initiation into the deep structures of manhood. He remains a boy—not because he wants to, but because no one has shown him the way to transform his boy energies into man energies. No one has led him into direct and healing experiences of the inner world of the masculine potentials.
The King:
• Dis-identify our Egos from The King, keep cognitive distance.
• Recognize and bless others; their talents and beauty.
• Commit and honor a transpersonal devotion.
• Be generative and encourage growth.
The Warrior:
• Be energetic, decisive, courageous, enduring, persevering, and loyal.
• Care for ourselves and others.
• Show warmth, compassion, and appreciation.
• Fight good fights to make the world a better place for everyone
The Magician:
• Seek clarity, deep understanding and reflection of ourselves and others.
• Apply technical skill in our outer work, and in our inner handling of psychological forces.
• Regulate and control the energies of the other archetypes.
The Lover:
• Feel related, connected, alive, enthusiastic, compassionate, empathetic, and energized.
• Have romance about our lives, our goals, our work, and our accomplishments.
• Find the spontaneity and joy of life inside ourselves.
If contemporary men can take the task of their own initiation from Boyhood to Manhood as seriously as did their tribal forebears, then we may witness the end of the beginning of our species, instead of the beginning of the end. - Moore & Gillette
The exercises at the end are very helpful, specially the meditation that can be practiced as the meditation with a seed suggested by Laura and the Cs in the 29/08/15 session.
Book: https://www.amazon.com/King-Warrior-Magician-Lover-Rediscovering/dp/0062506064
I found a couple of summaries that are attached to this message, and the audio here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1523brduw4