Women’s versus Men’s experience: Rites, history and heroics.

The original assignment is to separately evaluate a man’s and then a woman’s experience. I thought it more exciting to bring these two perspectives in relation in one essay.

I will examine the different themes and compare Sam Keen’s (K) observations in his book “Fire in the belly” with what Joan Borysenko (B) writes in her book “A Women’s book of Life”. In which ways does gender determine how we experience life? Is separate-self indeed a man’s model and self-in-relation per definition a woman’s way?

Rites and Passages.

Both writers agree that “manhood” and “womanhood” are cultural constructs, behavioral patterns we live by, more or less dictated by our environment and the need to survive as a race.

Especially in earlier life, initiation to manhood/womanhood naturally occurs through the day-to-day contact between a child and the significant persons in their lives. The authors agree that, in general, boys/men are coached and encouraged towards autonomy and independence where girls/women are praised for relational qualities and their responsiveness to the emotions and needs of others.

Socialization makes that we come to see ourselves as others see us.

To rebalance this experience with our inner voice, we need to discover our own definitions of being a man or a woman on a personal level. We do this throughout the different phases of our lives to find our own unique sense of self and gain personal authority (male) and authenticity (female).

According to Sam Keen a man should go “the way of the pilgrim” to do this; essentially to distinguish between his own story and the official myth, focusing on the need of a modern man to authorize his own life. Although this in itself is a separate-self stance, the pilgrimage is seen as a soulful quest into the depth of self to enhance the relationship of a man with himself in order to return to the world with a new sense of self. The whole idea behind it is that a man needs separation to explore who he is, but does this to be in relation with others and earth in general.

Joan Borysenko calls the female equivalent the bio-psycho-spiritual (bps) feedback loop. Just like men women tend to periodically step back from the world to tune in and reflect in a process of coming to terms with events and experiences, their story, in the expanded frame of reference of psychological and spiritual meaning. The focus however is more on restoring homeostasis, balance and relational harmony. Instead of authority women search for greater wisdom, so they can live lives that are more authentic.

“We urgently need new visions of manhood and womanhood”, Sam Keen exclaims.

He points out that our modern rites of passage (war, work and sex) impoverish and alienate men. In the army, the primary virtue of a man is not to think for himself or listen to his conscience, but to obey orders and be ready to fight. The degrading of the feminine is a natural consequence of this. About work he says: “Work has always been our womb, the fertile void out of which we give birth to our visions”.

Now work, tailoring personalities to what the market requires, does not match this need for vocation (meaning) and creativity anymore, at least not for most.

Neither does sex. Being of a gender that has been trained for generations to be warriors and workers and thus not to feel, sex is the only place where a man has cultural permission to feel close to another human being. Sex however, according to Keen, may bring pleasure or joy, but not identity (a new identity being the goal of the rite). “In fact, we are able to lose ourselves in loving sexuality only to the degree that we have found the self elsewhere. It takes a very secure person to surrender to another in love”.

This point of view is again typical separate self. Borysenko describes the self-in-relation, female component; she sees the cyclic bps-feedback loops/passages as instrumental to preserve clarity and restore emotional balance: “balancing the logic of the mind and the wisdom of the heart with the intuition that keeps us tuned in to the relational world”.

Both authors give descriptions of mayor rites in our lives.

Sam Keen pictures boyhood initiation as an internalizing of answers to perennial and mythic questions before the actual experience of life. Afterwards he proposes a commitment to a life of questions (dubito ergo sum!). The willingness to doubt and question itself should in his view be acknowledged as sacred ground: in recognizing our lostness, we have found the seed of a new identity.

It is important to note here is that being lost is meant in the sense of not knowing, or not having to know, the answers. Being lost in the sense of not belonging, of isolation, of meaninglessness is on the other side of this polarity, and in Keen’s opinion that “which so devastates the heart of modern men”. The sense of relationship that came natural to our bushman ancestors who lived intimate with nature, is lost and “we are trapped within the illusion that has been woven around us since birth – the illusion that we are separate selves. The truth is that we are single selves who exist only within the community of interdependent beings” (K). Paradoxically recognizing our lostness and accepting our confusion and insecurity is the way to bring order into the chaos of life.

In the questing way - “the way of the pilgrim” - a man dares to explore his inner world and savors the experience to come to an original set of personal values and a sense of inner authority and power.

This is in essence what women do, although Borysenko focuses much more on meaning and spirituality (per definition self-in-relation). She describes the rites as cycles of questioning and periodic reassessments of priorities; a spiral on which we revisit earlier epochs from a higher perspective. Authenticity and Integrity (wholeness) arise from a process of self-examination, much like in Keen’s book, but the focus is mainly on the Values Triad (B) love, serenity (peace of mind) and service to others and not on the authority for one’s own life as Keen sees it from a man’s perspective. I appreciate Borysenko’s picture: instead of seeing the rites as a series of major transformations of the psyche - destructing of the old self before constructing a new identity (K) - she envisions these transitional periods as times with a potential for the adaptation and changing of existing structures. She sees this as a process of growth; the building on earlier layers to arrive at a stage of integrity where one is optimally in tune with core beliefs for the coming period. Biological changes support changes in awareness and awaken deeper levels of self-in-relation consciousness as for instance the archetype of the Guardian and the Visionary (B) as described in the later stages of the feminine lifecycle.

His and her experience of history

“History is man’s effort to give body to his most clairvoyant dreams” (K).

In his book Sam Keen gives an interesting summary of the history of manhood to prove his point that virility has always been measured by a man’s willingness to hear and respond to the calling of his age. He illustrates how each successive myth/model of manhood was a creative response to its time and in that sense a vocation called forth by a contemporary need. Where females evolve through cycles (loops) during a lifetime, transforming in service to the primary spiritual values of interdependence and interrelatedness, male evolution follows some similar cyclical dance through history guided mainly by tribal conscience. Where conditions of a certain age demand certain virtues in a man, adherence to that virtue became in time counterproductive and in the next cycle, it’s opposite or corrective was called forth (paradoxal counterproductivity, a feedback loop!).

It is interesting to see the overall picture and realize that men fundamentally have adapted and changed in response to the changing demands of the community in the environment throughout the ages. The interaction between reality and the way we humans perceive it (our models of it) is apparent in the history of man as Keen describes it. What men do when they “hear and respond” is a self-in-relation thing to do, however separate-self you go about it….

Now man becomes aware that the human growth process “works” this way and is able to make a choice to perceive life in a different way. He is (more) open to the notion of self-in-relation; he can envision reality as a unified network of mutually interdependent entities whose well-being is enhanced by cooperation and compassion rather than by separation as in his separate-self perspective.

Once he abandons his age-long quest for forging a single identity, for a unifying vision, he is left with no guiding principle except to follow the dictates of the moment. Here Keen comes up with his Pilgrim; the questioning, questing man. If you are looking for an identity and find out this identity is based on how you and your culture of that moment perceive reality, your identity is indeed a question rather than an answer.

Where are the women in Keen’s history of men? Doing the work of the world? Surely the woman is already taking care of men and children, home and hearth and tending relationships within the family, tribe or community. Where man has the need to take charge of his own destiny, historically a woman is more concerned about the destiny of her whole group and has not much use for power or control in the male sense.

It could well be that women, aware of the interrelatedness and interdependency of all things, have a peripheral vision of the whole. As a consequence they adapt more fluidly to difficult/changing situations and feel less frightened by dependency or surrender to what is (vs. autonomy or authority/control).

This seems a fundamental difference between male and female; Keen’s pilgrim could well be an archetypal bridge to close the gap. With his new perception of reality, he will have the courage to respond to the vocation of our moment in history and hear with his heart, willing to be enchanted, inspirited, encouraged, and engaged (K). The spirit of relationality can restore balance to a troubled world (B).

Borysenko’s book focuses on the life cycle, her history as a woman’s personal history in one lifetime. Talking about the history of humankind, she is quite clear in suggesting: “it is time now, however, for the pendulum to swing back toward the feminine so that a physically healthy earth and an emotionally healthy world population can be preserved and encourage”. She claims that this demands a real conversion, a change of heart and consciousness (metanoia). We need to recognize that real security lies not in the dominating power and the impossible quest for total invulnerability, but rather in the acceptance of vulnerability, our limits, and interdependency with others; with other humans and with nature/the earth.

This is of course is also what Keen suggests.

Both writers acknowledge the bitterness that women ànd men feel about the way our concept of manhood and womanhood historically developed. Keen suggests wisely that we, men as well as women, really listen to each other. We need to learn to mutually respect each other’s wounds, and realize we do not need to fight this battle between the genders on a personal level. Appreciation of the differences in our experience would be a big step forward. (More on this in the next essay)

Heroes and Heroines.

The most important message of Keen’s book is that modern man has lost his clear-cut idea of what a hero is. He argues that the need for heroes is a fundamental part of the human condition. “Ideals are the polestars that guide us on our journey from the actual to the possible. And heroes are the incarnation of the ideal – the ideals made flesh and story.”

I like Keen’s halls of fame, his primary source of his sense of ideals and heroism. Exemplary men and women for example are not only heroes of the moment but also pathfinders and definers of the human condition, the spiritual elite who reveal some aspect or elemental virtue of the human promise. They are, like true ideals, heralds of things to come.

We saw that, in an evolving world the idea of man’s virtues and heroism has been periodically redefined. The realization that our perception of reality is but a temporary illusion and that modern manhood is a work in process makes it difficult to see what we are becoming. Our picture of a hero becomes a kind of collage made up of fragments of virtues that carry the promise/potential of bringing us where we dream to go.

Keen continues to describe his (personal) list of these virtues. Empathy and a Heartful Mind are on the top of his list. The first part of his experience of the heroic journey is marked by an intense focus on the self (coming alive), the second part by self-forgetting. “A man who has become fully alive is no longer a problem to himself. He has been set free from agonizing self-consciousness and is free to explore and participate in the world beyond self.” The hero is now spiritually available or spiritually ready.

In a man’s experience man needs to separate himself to build a relation to himself (as a separate identity), to return to the word, accepting his place and responsibility as a self-in-relation. Now he can open himself up to empathy and allow himself to have a Heartful Mind, now he can become a cobeing, a true partner to women in a joint effort to make the world a better place. The new heroic man has a willingness to fit in, to live in harmonious intercourse with the surrounding whole he is part of, and seeks to empower others.

Women go through cycles of a process of self-examination too.

In Borysenko’s Life Cycle, every stage of her life triggers a woman to reevaluate her set of values and goals, and give her the opportunity to harmonize her outer life consonant with it.

From this process, her authenticity and integrity arise. Especially in the earlier cycles (when they still can afford to do so?) women also step back from the world, “fall asleep” to it just enough to see, hear and know what is real, rather than to live a constricted, artificial, fairy-tale existence (B). Later in life, this process becomes more like cocooning or hibernating, a natural biological pause required to reassess, restore and renew.

Although both, male and female need a certain distance from others to do their soul-searching, it feels as if men do this to be able to hear their own voice, looking for identity and autonomy. Women on the other hand seem to need the distance to see reality from a meta-perspective (the expanded frame of reference we saw before), reassessing their position in the whole of their/our world.

I find most of the virtues of Keen’s “newest” hero in Joan Borysenko’s women, and although she doesn’t describe her heroine per se, she gives the reader the image of the potential, or even “the best” a woman can develop or transform into in every one of the seven-year periods of her lifecycle. A virtue that is valued as heroic in the later stages of life is for example the spiritual wisdom of interrelatedness, which brings women to support and encourage the growth of others and the preservation of life. Another of the female virtues mentioned is the ability to tell the truth with the relational skills needed in order to be heard, again a highly useful quality when our vision expands from personal or communal relationships, to the realm of humanity at large. What I especially like is the virtue to claim your own happiness rather than to live as a wishfulfiller for others, and linked to that one the willingness to take care of others without disempowering them (or resenting it!). Female growth and heroine-ship seem to have that direction: the encouragement of herself and others to become compassionate, authentic people who realize we are together and responsible in this world.

For me it makes sense to go beyond a clear definition of the ideal man/woman, the hero/heroine, and develop our potential virtues as our tools to become conscious enough to live harmoniously together on this earth as authentic human beings.

Without doubt, male and female experience of life is different and probably always will be as we are biologically different. Instead of being competitive, we could find ways to combine forces, learn from each other and complement and enhance each other’s virtues like yin and yang, together forming a whole.

This is basically what self-in-relationships is about.