Chapter 15
Other Side of the Heart
We
are now ready to move onto traditionally sacred ground. Sacred
ground,the other side for indigenous peoples, contained the mystery
of who they were as a people. It also contained every man's mystery
of who he was as a man.
This was
the place where their creator still dwelt, including the creator of
their manhood. It was a timeless place. It was a dangerous place.
Death was all around. So was life.
As I
speak about this place, and the wilderness within, I will be talking
more and more with the words of monks and mystics and shamans,
philosophers and poets and priests. These are the people who have
been exploring this realm for thousands of years. Psychology is in
its infancy compared to priests of all the religions of the worlds
and countless mystics who have chosen to journey unaccompanied
within.
As we
move forward, I will stay grounded in the science of psychology, as
psychology is what I know. Yet the closer we come to the ordeal, the
closer we come to the traditions of spirituality, even in terms of
answers to the question of manhood. Scott Peck realized this
mysterious conjunction in his book, The Road Less Traveled.
He saw "no distinction between the process of achieving spiritual
growth and achieving mental growth." I cannot go that far in this
book; however, I realize that achieving both psychological and
spiritual manhood requires the same leaps of faith into the death
experience, the same renunciations of former attitude and
lifestyles, and the same humility toward an energy source greater
than one's own.
The
similarity between great spiritual traditions and the journey of
psychological manhood is close enough that the tools and
descriptions and insights of the great religious traditions can also
be used here very fruitfully. So I can use the terms wilderness and
other side, wilderness within and inner life, psyche and unconscious
and soul interchangeably. For they refer to the same place. And this
place is where the ordeal takes place. This place is where the
transformation from boy to man happens. Indigenous peoples knew
that, mystics have known that, psychologists, like Scott Peck, now
know that.
For
modern man , the other side is more clearly inside. The ordeal
happens within. Sacred ground is deep within a man's psyche. The
mystery is that the deeper a man goes inside, the more he feels a
power as from from the outside. It is this power that he will need
to complete his ordeal. It is this power that sustains him in facing
his ordeal, and will sustain him throughout his manhood. It is for
each man to answer for himself the mystery of whether this power is
wholly inside or comes from the other side. In many respects it
doesn't matter. The important thing is for every man to move to this
sacred ground, and to stand his ground.
Men's Church
It
always interests me that when men get to this time of ordeal, as
part of their therapy, they often feel like they have to get away
into nature. Sometimes they need to take long walks alone in woods
or into mountains or on beaches. Sometime they need to camp and
think. Sometimes they go fishing for long periods of time. Most,
though fearful, feel the need to be alone to do this. I know one man
in therapy who started walking a nature trail loop every Sunday
morning to gain insight and peace. A friend called it his "8 mile
church".
To many
men, nature feels more spiritual than church, as they move into
their initiatory search. I believe that men are showing their
hardwired need for wilderness ordeal through these actions. Walking
reflects the journey into the unknown. Nature reflects the
wilderness. Aloneness is the necessity of the middle stages of
ordeal. The search for their own manhood, in this emerging sacred
ground, often feels like the most spiritual thing they have ever
done, as it was for our ancestors.
I
believe sportsmen who fish and hunt are responding unconsciously to
this same hardwired need. Hunting and fishing may reflect the sense
of primitive survival of the ordeal. Men have told me they feel most
themselves and most at peace lying in wait in the hunt or quietly
watching their line. These men usually don't know that they are
experiencing the effects of feeding their souls. They don't realize
they are unconsciously trying to find the peace of the
psychospiritual ordeal and the serenity of ancestrally sacred space.
They don't realize the spiritual aspects of what they are doing.
Sometimes a spouse will bemoan a man's lack of interest in religion.
She will feel he is not spiritual because he doesn't go to church. I
try to convey to her that he may very well be meeting his soul's
needs in the cathedral of the wilderness. He may be finding his
spiritual meaning in the bible of nature, as the Taoists have for
thousands of years. He may be finding answers to his deepest
questions in the wordless silence of his forbears. He may be
searching for spiritual answers deep in the solitude of the
wilderness within and without.
It often
happens that men in the middle of their ordeal, while in therapy,
will come in to a session with poetry. Poetry seems to have the form
and words that most express their feelings. Poetry seems to be the
nonlinear, non-rational expression of the soul, beset by intense
feelings. As one of my clients in the middle of his ordeal wrote to
me: "I honestly on one level do not want to exhaust myself with
these projects but find I have no choice. Nothing will happen for
weeks. Then when riding in the car, lines of poetry will "pop" into
my head out of nowhere and I feel compelled to go home and finish
the poem. I know this is not what I should be doing from a
conventional sense and I am sure my wife is upset that it interrupts
my job search."
Some men
just need to be alone for awhile, whether in nature or not. I find
it a very healthy sign when a man finds the need to be alone. This
need for aloneness, as long as it isn't a code word for not facing
engulfment fears, shows a man has dealt with many of his separation
issues and is already approaching sacred ground. Wanting 'space' can
be very healthy if a man is not running from or toward a mother
object. Wanting distance can show that a man is not afraid of
looking at his life as a whole and separate individual, instead of
as an extension of other's dreams. Spouses and partners need to
understand this need as healthy and as a challenge to their own
initiatory needs. I will talk about this extensively in a following
chapter.
I once
asked the men in my men's group when they felt most themselves and
the most at peace. One man, John, said he felt most himself when he
was alone, especially walking in the twilight on the golf course
near his house. Most of the other men agreed that they felt most
themselves when alone, especially in nature. John asked quietly if I
felt there was anything wrong with this. I felt a sense of shame in
the room. Aloneness is surely countercultural in our society and
even a mark of oddity. I assured John that to a maturing man this
centered sense of aloneness is good and normal. Being in nature,
even on a golf course, can show a hunger for sacred ground. It is a
sign that the ordeal is working.
I also
find that men at this stage of initiation and therapy start talking
about God. (I use capital ÔGÕ because in our monotheistic society
men see God as singular and unique.) Men spontaneously talk about
needing God, or some higher power, to complete their journey. Some
men have been introduced to the idea of a higher power through a
12-step process. Others have returned to a possibility of God's help
from their earlier, forgotten religious training. Others have lived
with their God as companion all along, without connecting God to
their inner search.
Carl
Jung felt all people were formed through the collective unconscious
to believe in and seek God for an answer to adult problems. He felt
we all had the archetypal urge to relate to a higher power. He
called man homo religiosus. He never claimed that he could
prove there was a God. He did say that men routinely act as if there
were a God. He also felt that most people over 35 could not heal
without recourse to some 'religious answer.' The God most men talk
about, and the religious deity Jung talks about, is not necessarily
the God men meet in church or in studying religion. This is a God
they feel could be anywhere. He is more the God of the wilderness,
not the God of the civilized edifice. He is the God met face to
face, not the God heard about. He is the God of paradox, not the God
of logic. He is the God met beyond the mores of the village.
This is
a God who is also male to most men. Like a good father a man can
borrow strength and wisdom from this God, finding him more where he
is least expected. Most maturing men need the benefit of a power
that will push them toward the wilderness, not protect them from it.
They often need more a father God who will not protect them from the
confusion and loss of the ordeal, instead of a mother church that
already gives them the rules and the answers. They need a different,
more personal, more deeply masculine God who pushes them toward the
inner pain of leaving the safety of religious patriarchy to find the
personally sacred.
All men
are hardwired to move toward ordeal and maturity. All men are
hardwired for the mission leading toward the wilderness. That is a
solace I often dwell on. We are made for the wilderness without and
within. In a sense we crave ordeal. We are also looking for the holy
and sacred. The sacred is another word for the most important inner
values in a man's life, the values that make him a man from the
inside out. The sacred just lies in different places than is
normally thought.
Standing Ground
At the
time of ordeal, men also need elders, different kinds of priests, to
explain some things and point us in the direction of the sacred
wilderness. As a counselor, I feel the need to take up an eldering
role because most of male society has defaulted on this obligation.
I feel the obligation to be the one to explain and help any man who
comes to me through his ordeal. This should be the job of priests
and patriarchs. Unfortunately, it rarely is. As in myth, elders come
from the unlikeliest places. One of the unlikeliest is the
counselorÕs office. As one of my clients put it, "I was looking for
a great, wise guru someplace; instead I found an ordinary man in a
Sears, polyester suit." (Actually, I rarely wear suits.)
The
first thing a modern elder must explain is that an elder is
different from a father. A father gives advice, walking ahead to
guide a boy into the masculine world. He teaches about the
marketplace and social relationship. He also teaches a man the best
stance toward the feminine, especially toward wives and mothers. A
father has answers about the village and the marketplace, the hearth
and the home. He gives a man strength for the coming ordeal by
lending the son his strength.
An elder
has no answers. He can talk of the process of ordeal. He can talk of
how the best men have handled ordeal in the past. But he can't give
answers to the man's deepest questions. What he can do is witness to
the reality of the other side. In the secularized world of the
marketplace he can speak to the sacredness of the wilderness.
There is
an old Zen mystery expression that holds here. It goes, "If you meet
the Buddha on the road, kill him." Part of this expression has to do
with someone holding himself out as having the answers to another's
spiritual quest. If you meet an elder who says he has the answers,
you have gotten the wrong elder. You have gotten an elder who has
not been to sacred ground himself.
The most
important thing a modern elder can do is encourage a man to stay
within his death experience, with its depression, loss, confusion,
humiliation, and emptiness. The middle of the ordeal hurts. The
elder is there not to explain the meaning of the hurt, but to
explain that the hurt is meaningful. The elder explains that pain is
part of the reality of the wilderness, that pain does not mean that
he is in the wrong place. The elder encourages a man to stand his
ground.
An elder
must witness to the necessity of walking the wildness. Sometimes a
seeking man will approach ordeal many times, then return to the
comfort of his addiction time after time. Many times going back
involves a relationship that was unsatisfying but provided relief
from the abandonment pain of the present. An elder is there to tell
him this repetition does not mean that he can't eventually fully
separate and complete his initiation. An elder is there to witness
to the need for the next attempt, for the next foray away from the
village. An elder tries to encourage him to return to that sacred
place of confusing feelings and unanswered questions.
Hurry Up and Wait
A modern
elder has a hard time convincing a man to stay in the ordeal, to
stay on sacred ground. He has a hard time convincing a man that he
must humbly be open and not set an agenda or a timetable. The modern
initiate is feeling very lost, very different. He feels outside
life, even outside time, looking in. He feels sometimes like a dead
soul or ghost returning to earth, yet not being able to communicate.
A number of movies lately, including Ghost and The Sixth Sense, have
this theme. As Luke said on Degaba. "I feel like I'm in a dream."
A man at
this point in ordeal feels in a situation a lot like the old Army
dictum, "hurry up and wait." After all the separation work a man
does, and having stood his ground, he is greeted with the need to
just wait. He is given no trophies or medals. He doesn't make the
newspapers for the substantial, draining work he has already done.
Because he is outside of the patriarchal reality, few people notice
or understand all the work he has done. His ability to be humble is
sorely tried.
Like
being in the Army, a man in the wilderness has no control over his
time. And time then starts to hang heavy as nothing seems to be
happening. He is really in another time, a sacred time. Here there
are no production goals or timetables. A man cannot work his plan
because he cannot create one. He can no longer measure himself by
his accomplishments Marketplace skills are useless.
What he
needs to do is wait, humbly, for a plan beyond his ego. An elder
points this out. Yet waiting seems highly inefficient. If time is
money, as in the marketplace, then this is financially disastrous.
Waiting for the plan seems a great waste of time and money. Not
being 'productive' is at best uncomfortable. At worst it feels
totally deflating.
Sometimes the wait is quite a while. The elder is severely
questioned, even occasionally raged at. At times the biggest pain is
boredom. A man is not used to living in a limbo between past and
future. He feels the need to plan, to strategize, to do something,
if nothing else, to relieve the boredom. To be masculine means to
act. To act at least gives the illusion of some control. Instead the
whole experience starts to feel like he'll be stuck in this place
forever. That thought is frightening.
Malidoma
Some, at his initiation, was told to sit in front of a tree in the
wilderness, to watch and wait. He was given no other instructions.
He waited in front of that tree night and day for three days while
nothing happened. After the first day he impatiently made up a
meaningful story about the message he supposedly got. The elders
unhesitatingly sent him back to wait some more.
The
Buddha decided to make his stand under a Bo Tree. He vowed to either
reach enlightenment or die right there. His facing of initiatory
death was profound. He fasted and waited a long, long time.
In the
great manhood myth of Western civilization Parsifal roams the alien
countryside for 20 years looking for the Grail in the Grail castle.
The Grail represents those sacred answers to identity and manhood.
Robert Johnson, in his book He, talks of this ordeal time as
the dry years.
At this
time, outside of normal time, a man needs an elder. Elders
understand sacred time. Like any true elder, I try to help men by
telling them their feelings are normal for the culturally abnormal
experience of ordeal. I explain that the wilderness has different
rules than the marketplace. It is a different place with a different
kind of time. I try to appeal to their hardwired sense of the
healthy warrior, holding ground sorely won, ground that makes no
present sense. I feel sometimes like Knute Rockne at half-time of a
Notre Dame game, reminding them of the futility of going back,
pushing them to a stubborn sense of mission and endurance.
As it
was for indigenous people, it is today. If a man does not feel he
has a sacred purpose, a purpose beyond his ego needs, he will feel
the same emptiness and loneliness of the ordeal, but with no
meaningful outcome. To find this purpose he must stay and endure on
sacred ground. This inner ground is a place of both intense feeling
and the emptiness of feeling, both pain and numbness. That is a
paradox of the sacred ground within. That is a paradox the elder
encourages a man to face.
An Initiatory Experience
I cannot
emphasize enough how countercultural the ordeal experience is. A man
goes against all he was taught about manliness. Instead of acting,
he is asked to wait. Instead of setting goals, he is asked to let
them find him. Instead of standing up for his beliefs, he is asked
to admit he doesn't know what they are. Instead of being in control,
he is asked to give up control. Instead of making himself feel good,
he is asked to allow himself to feel lousy.
I have
found that giving a man the formal opportunity to have a sense of
initiatory space and time can hasten the maturing process. This
experience can then give a man the understanding and courage to
continue his initiatory process. I call this an initiatory
experience, not initiation. Full initiation takes a much longer
period of time; however, this experience can trigger or hasten the
process.
In
structuring this initiatory experience, I act as elder. As opposed
to indigenous elders I talk to a man about voluntarily trying an
initiatory experience. By this time many men have set significant
boundaries and understand the need for separation. I explain that
this experience incorporates many elements of a traditional ordeal
time. I offer this proposal to a man, as elders do, when I feel he
is ready. I give him the choice of the circumstances. The intensity
of the experience can vary, as can the length.
There is
a Hasidic saying, "There is another world and it is in this one."
The other side is always just around the corner, or just the other
side of our own heart. This is why a man can consciously experience
the other side in ways that indigenous people do. The most important
elements of this other world are voluntary aloneness and being in
unstructured time.
Aloneness is the consequence of having faced separation and
abandonment fears. It is the indispensable part of the heart of
ordeal. Initiatory time is a place in time beyond the structure and
schedules of the patriarchal world of work and family
responsibility. This is a place outside of time as we know it. It is
a place outside of plans and expectations. It is a place on the
other side of rules.
The
experience can last from one afternoon to one week or more. It
involves taking oneself outside of one's ordinary lifestyle,
preferably to a place one has not been before. The place must be one
of privacy where a man's boundaries will be respected. Most of the
time I recommend finding a place to stay where a man can be alone
and not know anyone around. This could be anyplace from a hotel room
to a cabin in a State Park to a room at a retreat center, to a tent
in the woods. I usually recommend someplace where there is access to
nature for walks and seclusion, although being in a strange city
does have both the sense of aloneness and the invisibility of the
initiate.
Aloneness involves being in a situation where there is no
interaction with significant people in one's life. Preferably, there
should be no interaction of any significance with any other person.
This ban on interaction also includes any reading or other media: no
books, radio, television, computers. What interaction is allowed is
a writing instrument and paper to record thoughts, feelings,
experiences. The aloneness in a strange place is the doorway to the
experience of the other side.
The
other side has a feeling of timelessness beyond the past and future.
I recommend removing one's watch and putting it away, as a symbol of
entering this timeless place. We contact this world by removing our
schedules, our timebound habits, our planning for the future, the
points we scored in the past.
Most men
start feeling uncomfortable just thinking about this experience.
That feeling alone shows the sacredness of the space. Most men feel
an archetypal fear of going into this experience and entering this
space. This fear is normal. Young men have experienced it for
thousands of years. Traditionally, any experience of the sacred
evokes death and its terror.
There is
a feeling of unreality in the ordeal. Living only in the present,
and in the disconnection of loss, brings a weird feeling of
timelessness, like being lost in space. Myths and fairy tales try to
give this same feeling, telling us we are in a different
psychological time. They often start "once upon a time", speaking of
a time different from our everyday time. The Star Wars story starts
in a time "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away". These are
the code words for talking of the inner life, the other side, and
its timelessness.
The
feelings of timelessness, aloneness, emptiness, disorientation, and
free-floating discomfort are signals that a man is entering an
ordeal experience. He is starting to experience the other side. This
is when the pull to regressive addictions will get much stronger,
even though he has worked hard on separating from them. This kind of
regressive pull invariably happens when anyone takes a growth step.
This is something an elder must explain. The pull to regression, and
sometimes succumbing to that pull, is part of the maturing process.
It never stops, even after ordeal. Maturation depends on how we
handle these inevitable regressive pulls.
Talk of
the regressive pull leads me to explain other elements of this
initiatory experience. Addictions are banned. No sex, drugs, or
rock'n'roll. No sex includes any sexual experience, including
masturbation. No drugs means no mood altering substance of any kind,
especially alcohol and pot. Not essential, but recommended, are
abstention from the drugs nicotine and caffeine. No rock'n'roll
means no music or other taped messages of entertainment.
Work
habits are banned. No work planning or work projects. No work
planning means not thinking about or writing down any work related
ideas. A man in ordeal will inevitably think about his work
accomplishments or work plans as a kind of orienting comfort. There
is nothing wrong with thinking of accomplishments as a way of
feeling confidence in one's ego strength. Holding on to one's
identity as a marketplace worker is regressive.
No work
habits means no scheduling the day or setting goals for the
experience. These schedules will always be counterproductive and
take one back to everyday, timebound reality. Planning is ego work
not the work of the self. Schedules cause us to focus away from very
important realities that will hold a key for us. Often schedules are
the result of work addicted warriors with no kingly direction. The
warrior will have plenty of meaningful work, including schedules, to
do once the king is found.
Fasting
is another part of the ordeal that is not essential but very
helpful. Fasting not only mimics the survival reality of ordeal, but
it also frustrates a possibly addictive and pleasurable side of
ourselves. Fasting intensifies the separation experience from
comfort. It has been a traditional way of contacting the other side
for millennia.
Fasting
also intensifies the feeling of the timelessness of the other side.
Many of us use meals as a scheduling technique that orients us to
the security of time. When schedules are disrupted in other ways,
such as in vacations, retreats or workshops, most people
unconsciously start to talk and think about the next meal. Meals
become the connection to everyday reality and our familiar
schedules. Food is also a primitive comfort when feeling
disoriented. Fasting can be for one or two days as long as a man
drinks large amounts of water or juices and has no complicating
health problems.
The most
important part of the initiatory experience is the same as in
indigenous initiation, to stay within the wilderness and survive. I
act as elder and the only person the initiate can contact. My job is
to encourage the man to stay within the experience. Most men will
quickly start feeling overwhelmed by the disorientation and
separateness. Their discomfort level increases substantially. The
purpose seems to get lost. My job is to remind a man of his original
purpose, to help him start to understand the meaning of his
experience, and to uphold his warrior.
Indigenous people stayed in the wilderness until the sense of
meaning and direction arose. The experience described here is less
intense and full. Yet, often the elements and structure of this
experience jump starts the maturing process. I have found that the
experiencing of the other side in this conscious way changes a man
today as it has changed men for a long time. The intentionality and
particular structure of this experience seems to bring a man toward
a different sense of his manhood. He starts to feel differently from
the inside out. In the absence of cultural rite of initiation, an
initiatory experience, like I have described, tries to get as close
as possible to a full and conscious rite of male maturity.
Many
other processes have elements of this rite and allow a man to
contact the other side. Counseling, spiritual direction, guided
meditative practices, 12 step work are some other ways. Denise Linn,
in the first half of her excellent book Quest, describes in
more detail much of these same initiatory pieces in the context of
the Native American vision quest. I have written this book to add
some crucial eldering and intentionality pieces that I feel men need
in order to put the whole maturing puzzle together.
Any man
can try this experience alone, though I highly recommend he does it
with another trusted, mature man who can be contacted as needed. The
elder is there to be contacted if the experience gets too intense
and a man needs to talk to someone who understands and can give
perspective and support. The elder is also there to help in
reviewing the experience in order to understand its meaning.
Most men
have already experienced the other side intensely because of a
premature separation experience. They have experienced the
aloneness, unreality, disorientation, and inner pain as a tragedy
they never want to return to. As I have mentioned they have been
traumatized by the experience because of the absence of fathers and
elders to prepare, explain and support. Because of this trauma many
men are understandably resistant to go there again, especially
voluntarily. An elder tries to help a man understand his involuntary
experience and prepare him for the inevitable next time he will be
thrown into the other side. An initiatory experience can be a
crucial part of that preparation process.
Starting to See
When a
man perseveres in his ordeal, things start changing inside. There
are very subtle changes, at first. Friends often see these changes
before the man realizes the shift. After a while a man realizes that
he is seeing the world differently. He also notices he is feeling
the world differently. He is more comfortable in confusion,
comfortable enough to start to notice the village from the viewpoint
of the wilderness. He also notices his comfort in the wilderness,
itself. He can stay within his feelings and pause to understand
them. Instead of acting out, a detour around feelings, he acts in,
moving deeper into them. He can stand his ground. The wilderness
holds less and less terror and even starts to feel reassuring. He
realizes he has given up the familiar for his freedom. Freedom, even
with some fear, starts to feel exciting. Feeling starts to feel
exciting. Fear and anxiety begin to be memory. He has faced his
biggest fears and he is still standing.
He, as
they say, is not out of the woods yet. And he moves back and forth
between nostalgia and excitement, between anxiety and anticipation.
He is in the middle of ordeal, yet he is still alive and feels
alive. He is much stronger than he ever felt he could be. He has a
quiet, healthy pride in that. He has gotten the confidence to move
on.
Larry Pesavento ©2005
