King Warrior Magician Lover was where I took notes like crazy. Such a fascinating read! Here is my full unedited notes:
“In the late twentieth century, we face a crisis in masculine identity of great proportions“
It’s increasingly difficult to point out masculine and feminine essence.
One could look at the disintegration of the modern family systems as the main culprit, but important as that is, it’s not the whole story.
Two other factors:
⁃ Ritual process –
Traditional societies had standard definitions of what makes up boy psychology and man psychology.
Rituals to manhood has been abandoned or turned into pseudo-initiations. The mere ceremonial versions of these rituals don’t have the power to transform ones consciousness.
Lack of initiation into manhood leaves modern society to a dominance of boy psychology.
⁃ Patriarchy –
The other factor is patriarchy: patriarchy are the expression of the immature masculine. An expression of boy psychology and shadow (crazy) side of masculinity. The stunted masculine. The authors see patriarchy as an attack on both masculinity and femininity in its fullest. Boys fear women and boys fear teal men.
The Patriarchal male does not welcome full masculine and feminine development.
The more beauty, maturity, creativity and generativity we display the more envy, and hate we generate in superiors and peers.
Psychologists often assume it’s connection with the inner feminine that is missing. But the author believes it’s actually the connection with deep and instinctive masculine energies.
The little masculine one can hold on to is criticized by feminists.
We dont need less masculine power, but more mature masculine power.
In lack of rituals we have to each find our own way to man psychology and that’s the purpose of the book. To help us on our way.
Pseudo-initiations:
Two reasons they are pseudo initiations;
- they are stunted and skewed and false. It’s patriartical manhood. There needs to be a death. The ego must die. Effective, transformative initiation slays the ego.
- absence of sacred space and ritual elder.
Jungians refer to masculine potentials as archetypes, or “primordial images”.
Jung and his successors have found that on the level of deep unconscious the psyche of every person is grounded in what Jung called the “collective unconscious” made up of instinctual patterns and energy configurations probably inherited genetically throughout the generation of our species. P9.
These archetypes are foundational.
– Boy psychology –
We are continually mistaking the controlling, threatening, and hostile behavior for strength.
The divine child
- story of young Jesus, Moses , Orpheus
- Superiority complex.
- All powerful, center of the universe yet weak and helpless
- Young at heart, well-being and enthusiasm for life.
The High Chair Tyrant
- hurts himself with limitless demands and grandiosity and reject the very thing he need for life.
- Arrogance
- Irresponsibly
- Childishness (in negative sense)
- Stalin, Hitler, Caligula.
⁃
The Weakling Prince
- Convincing his parents he is a helpless victim
- Few friends
- Little personality
⁃
In therapy, men, rarely identify with the Divine child, rather they need to get in touch with it.
When we are extremely tired or frightened we tend to regress into our Child, high chair tyrant or weakling prince.
The Precocious Child:
Precocious: unusually advanced or mature in development, especially mental development:
- eager to learn
- He causes us to wonder about the world around us and inside us.
- Wants to know what makes people tick, as well as himself.
- Introvert and reflective
- Also extrovert and reach out to people
- Can achieve cognitive detachment from people around him earlier than others.
- Urge to help others with his knowledge.
The know-it-all Trickster
His energy comes from envy. The less a man is in touch with his true talents and abilities, the more he will envy others. Envy blocks creativity.
The trickster have no heroes. We can only admire others if we have a sense of our own worthiness.
⁃ The Oedipal child –
Shadow: mothers boy and dreamer
⁃ The hero –
The grandstander bully
- impress others
- Takes risk
- Not a team player
- Inflated sense of importance and his own abilities.
The coward
- can’t stand up for himself in physical confrontation.
- Acquiesce to pressure from others
- Doormat
⁃ Man psychology –
Four major forms of mature masculinity: king, warrior, magician and lover.
We have all archetypes within us. Like board members we need to make all of the heard.
⁃ King –
Kings in the ancient world was often ritually killed when their ability to live out the king archetype began to fail
⁃ The central archetype, around which the rest of the psyche is organized.
⁃
Two functions of the king when transitioning from boy to man psychology: ordering and blessing.
”The mortal King’s first responsibility is to live according to ma’at, Darma, or the Tao. If he does, the mythology goes, everything in the kingdom – that is, the creation, the world – will also go in the Right Order.”
The king gives his men and blesses the most competent and loyal ones with opportunity, and recognition. E bestows his blessing.
Being praised has enormous psychology consequences for us. Studies show that our body changes chemically when we feel values, praised and blessed.
Young men today crave blessings from older men, starving for king energy. They need to be blessed for their legitimate talents and abilities.
The king guides and nurtures others towards their own fullness of being. It rewards and encourages creativity in others.
The shadow king: tyrant and the weakling
The Tyrant exploits and abuses others. Merciless. Hates all beauty, creativity innocence, strength talent and life energy
Verbal and psychological abuse. But also physical and sexual abuse.
Malignant= Elak, ondskefull.
The tyrant king is operating in narcissistic personality disorder. Drug lords, pimps, mafia bosses.
He is sensitive to criticism and puts on a threatening front.
The weakling king: lacks centeredness, calmness and security in himself. Paranoid. (The sect leader in Holy hell?)
Abdication syndrome: hallmark of the Weakling. People turn over their own inner King energy to “the Fürer”. Giving power over our lives to .
The Warrior
Alert and mindful. Knows what he wants and how to get it.
As a function of his clarity of mind he is a strategist and tactician. He has awareness of the shortness of life. Every act counts.
The sense of imminence if death energizes the man accessing the Warrior energy to take decisive action.
His control is first of all over his mind and attitudes.
He does not live like most people, he is a spiritual machine, trained to bear the unbearable in the service of a transpersonal goal.
He is emotionally distant as long as a man is accessing the warrior. “Unavailable” or “inaccessible”.
The warrior in his fullness operating without the other archetypes (king and lover) can be disastrous because of his detachment.
The shadow warrior: the sadist and the masochist.
Detachment in itself is not a bad thing but it opens doors to the “demon” of cruelty.
The masochist
Darth Vader
The sadist:
Stay long hours, workaholics, people don’t live up to their standards (nor themselves). Don’t take care of them selfs physically or mentally. Then it’s probably the shadow warrior in you.
“Any work that puts a great deal of pressure on a person to perform at his best all the time leaves us vulnerable to the shadow system if the warrior”
If we are not secure enough in our inner structure, we will rely on our performance in the outer world to bolster our self confidence. 🔑
The Magician:
The energy of the magician is twofold:
⁃ The knower and master of technology
⁃ “The ritual elder” who guides the process and transformation, both within and without.
Merlin, Obi-wan
Initiator of secret and hidden knowledge off all kinds, in himself and others.
All knowledge that takes special practice to acquire the province of Magician energy
An apprentice electrician or shaman are in exactly the same position.
Gnosticism: movement in Ancient Greece seeking deep psychological knowledge. Gnosis=knowledge
Thoughtfulness and reflection. Introversion.
Manipulator &the “innocent”
The man under the power of the Manipulator not only hurts others, he huts himself.
In the fear of making the wrong decision, he makes none.
The passive pole of the Magicians shadow is what we are calling the Naive, or “Innocent”.
The “innocent” wants status that traditionally come to the man who is a magician, at least in societally sanctioned fields. But he doesn’t want to take the responsibilities the belong to the true magician. He doesn’t want to share and teach.
Hides truth for the sake of achieving and maintaining status.
Motivations come from envy of those who act, who live, who wants to share.
Lover
The lover is the archetype of play and if “display”, of healthy embodiment, of being in the world of sensuous pleasure and in ones own body without shame.
Feeling a oneness with all.
The artist and the psychic.
Connoisseurs
The fans and buffs
When we stop to smell the roses..
Any man living in the shadow form of the masculine energies, is possessed by the very energy that could be a source of life and well-being for him, if accessed appropriately. The shadow side works to his destruction and the destruction of others.
Shadows: the Addicted and the impotent
Question for the Addicted lover: “why should I put limits on my sensual and sexual experience of this vast world, a world that holds unending pleasures for me?”
The addicted lover gets lost in an ocean of the senses. Everything makes strong impressions on him.
Pulled here and there. Not the master of his own fate.
Addiction to cigarettes and addictive behaviors.
Monogamy (though not in a simple yay) can be seen as a mans own deep rootedness and centeredness. He is bounded, not by external rules, but by his own inner structure.
The Impotent
Lack of enthusiasm, lack of vividness, lack of aliveness. We will feel bored and listless. Symptoms psychologists call the “flattening affect”.
Conclusion:
What today is called patriarchy is really “puerarcy” (I.e the rule of boys) like Lord if the flies. Systems of initiation, previously making mature masculine energy accessible, have broken down.
Active imagination: imaginative dialogue with the archetypical energy forms.
Unwanted energies acting up, like children, really just want to be noticed, honored and be taken seriously. Ones validated, the stop acting up.
Invocation: across masculine energies in fullness in their positive form. Focused imaging.
Look at images of the archetypes and read about the gods that represent the archetypes.
The pyramid, a symbol for the masculine self.
A related technique is admiring. Admire other men, dead or alive. Have contact with older men. Read biographies.
Act “as if”: act the king and all of a sudden you feel like a king.
This book is concerned about helping men to take responsibility for the destructiveness of immature forms of masculinity.
Check out my reading lists for more great books!
I have adopted many powerful principles the last couple of years that increased my baseline happiness levels. One of the big ones, second only to learning to stop giving a shit about what people might think of me and what I do (still W.I.P 😉) ,is the Stoic idea of being indifferent to thing that are not under ‘our direct control’.
