On the surface of our everyday experience, we basically perceive two different kinds of states, pleasant and unpleasant. And for most people in the background of the mind, there is always a struggle of trying to reach the pleasant and to escape the unpleasant.
This struggle can be very active, to the degree that it violently occupies our every moment, but it can also be very subtle and persistent at the same time.
Most daily endeavors come down to this struggle. From the standard human mindset, it seems to make sense to follow these ideas. We all want to feel good and not feel bad.
But. The more we enter this mindset and magnify these ideas of needing to feel good and not accepting feeling bad, the more we struggle, the more we lock ourselves into this duality. The more we feel bad and suffer.
There is another way. Underneath the everyday mindset of duality, there is a deeper and more real part of us. A deeper space that underlies all the states we might feel on the surface. And we cannot really feel good, full, complete until we uncover this space. All else is just an endless play of the two polarities. This uncovering happens with accepting both sides, the pleasant and the unpleasant equally.
And if you look carefully and you let yourself drift into the unpleasant, you will see the structure of the process. It’s sort of like a feeling of sickness that came from within and it becomes more and more unpleasant and intense until you so to say, puke it out. At this moment the thing turns around and just like after a good puke, you feel relief, lightness, and all-around well-being.
Through this process, again and again, bit by bit, your subconsciousness cleanses itself of layers of mud. You become more and more true, more and more yourself.
Now, how all this relates to being a man? We can all see clearly that masculinity and femininity are very distorted concepts in modern society by all kinds of false ideas of what is what and what something should be.
In that way, there is a huge pile of beliefs of what a man should be and how he should look, react, behave… These ideas create a mental image men then try to follow. And of course, whichever the mind image is, it takes us further away from the truth, natural, spontaneous, intuitive behavior.
We often stay in the surface mindset of duality and then we get to think that there are two basic states – being a real man and not being a real man. And of course, from this mindset, we try to reach one and escape the other.
But actually, being a real, complete man is not something on the surface, it’s not a set of ideas that have their opposite. It is a form manifestation of our true selves, of the space of no opposites, the deeper space that encompasses both surface forms – being a real man and not being a real man. That means that the real man inside of us doesn’t care about acting manly or not manly, about feeling our weaknesses, insecurities, sensitivities, he is perfectly ok with all of those.
