Read the First Two Pages
Women have asked me how I, as a man, can write about women? First of all, please know that men are not from another planet, even if you have entertained this thought. Nor are we all heartless animals, though some may appear to be. Men and women are actually mirror images of each other – opposite sides of the same coin. We each contain elements of the other. Yet, we still regard each other as mysteries because we remain unaware of our common elements within. In fact, we have all been taught to disconnect from, deny and even reject these shared elements by our male-as-dominant, patriarchal society. Therefore, our inner rejected parts become outer mysteries, keeping us separate from our outer opposites – men or women.
These mysteries are nothing more than our conditioned blindness. They are not truly known by anyone. Some people know how to manipulate and move within the present system, thinking of themselves as the “keepers of the mysteries.” But they are still a part of this system; their perceptions, too, are colored by the very system they move within. As for the rest of us, most are clueless, just trying to get by day-to-day.
Our heritages are therefore beyond our reaches. There is something almost supernatural about these mysteries that causes us not to question, learn, or rock the boat. We get comfortable, acquiesce, rollover, and play dead. This is unfulfilling, naturally. In my life, this way of existing became unworkable, and I dared break the taboo to ask the question, “What the hell is really going on here?”
I decided to stop accepting the “truths” about my opposite’s inscrutability – truths that I had been taught were reality. Not all women are crazy, as I had at one time thought, and I can learn to live with them. My accepting this required that I also accept responsibility for my own blindness and unaware actions. This was uncomfortable at first, to say the least. I was facing the unknown. Men, myself included, don’t like the unknown. Truth be told, I was afraid of it. But as a man, I couldn’t acknowledge this because men are not supposed to be afraid or uncertain, are they? So continuing my questioning became even more unattractive. However, I had already arrived at the place of having no other choice; I had to explore this unknown. I needed to learn what was truth and what was illusion. Pandora’s box was being opened consciously.
The first thing I learned was that we, as men and women, are not the acts we put on, the roles we play, nor the beliefs we hold. However, most of us do believe that we are indeed these things, and we believe the same of others as well.
So now what? The old adage, “know thyself,” was never more pertinent. Every man has an inner feminine energy that he needs to be aware of and come to know. My first book, Men – The Gods of Love, explores and explains this. I talk about the necessity of men to accept and balance their inner feminine feeling energy, and in doing so, men will gain the insight needed to understand those mysterious creatures – women. Men can then reclaim their own inner selves, demonstrated by their opposites, their mirror images. Because women are seen as the embodiment of emotions, and men in our society are taught that emotions are wrong and cannot be trusted in themselves, women have become inscrutable mysteries, not to be trusted. Men are taught to blind themselves from their own feelings, or what I refer to as their “inner feminine.”
As a man, I no longer reject my inner feminine; in fact, I celebrate her. Her wisdom, expansiveness and intuitiveness are priceless. This doesn’t mean I feel like a women, only that I feel. This has allowed me to see the reality of women and beyond the illusions that I was taught and that some women promote and hide behind.
Women – The Goddesses of Wisdom unveils the masculine energy inside all women. This veil, created and promoted by our patriarchal society, hides a woman’s inner masculine from herself, as well as from others. I believe it is time to really get naked – as in the naked truth. Discovering one’s truth is the only way to find out who we really are on the inside. Don’t worry; you won’t have to run around naked. But you will need to remove the veil of illusions in order to gain self-knowledge.