Oh dearest Life
may I be clay in your hands
responsible for only this:
To come back to rest in the Heart.
Trillions of times I reached out
trying to hold myself at any of your gifts
but you are moving Shakti!
Constantly moving…
Sand between my fingers.
You take away all hopes my mind can invent
shatter them with Love
and mind trembles before these uncertainties
begging for the land of the dead
where nothing moves
and calcified statues tell lies
about being rocks to hold onto.
But you know better Ma you know…
That there is only this one way:
To freefall
Into the vastness of the Heart
Where peaceful knowing lays
The one unmovable safe harbor
of resting in Shivas arms.
“When the Sacred Masculine is combined with the sacred feminine inside each of us, we create the ‘sacred marriage’ of compassion and passion in ourselves.” – Matthew Fox
The age of armored masculinity is dead and dying at our feet. It’s a bloody tangle of weaponry and bloated egos glued together by myopic one-upmanship and congealed rage.
Celtic deity – from the Gundestrup Cauldron, Denmark, 100BC.
But buried in the rot and decay are the seeds of a new way of being a man in this world, a reawakening of our awareness of the sacred brought on by the reemergence of the divine feminine. No amount of armor can suppress it. No amount of weaponry can keep it at bay. The New Shiva is growing robust and powerful alongside the New Shakti.
The world may not be ready for this New Man to emerge, but emerge he must, if we are to continue living on a planet which is demanding that a healthier more sustainable man appear.
In the same way that both men and women have a feminine aspect, so too do both genders have a masculine aspect. According to analytical psychologist Carl Jung, the feminine aspect of a man is called the anima and the masculine aspect of a woman is called the animus. The New Man, this Shiva incarnate, has the ability to tap into his anima, thereby awakening the divine energy of Shakti from its unconscious state into a state of conscious awareness.
He uses this energy to create rather than destroy, to catalyze rather than militarize, to heal instead of injure. He understands, as Andrea Gibson wrote, “We have to create. It is the only thing louder than destruction.” And so he continually creates ever-changing arenas for further creation.
For thousands of years mankind has been afraid of the light. Even Plato recognized it in his day, saying, “We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” No more.
The redefining of the sacred male principle is the dawn of a new vibrant light, a mature masculinity that is not abusive, domineering or grandiose, but generative, creative, and empowering. He is vulnerable without shame, revealing that his now discarded armor of invulnerability was nothing more than an illusion that hid his true power. He is now free and open to rediscover and reconnect with the power of nature and the cosmos. Tanks be damned. War mongers be damned.
He is ready to establish true relationships with authenticity and integrity. The Great Mystery moves through him, reminding him constantly that he is it and it is him. He is a force of nature first, a man second, the spear of Gaia herself. And no amount of perceived invulnerability can guard against it.
Without the parochial armor of old weighing him down, he frees himself to honor the path of descent, where he engages with the unconscious underworld and is initiated by the Great Mystery itself. Through this initiation he discovers his anima. He discovers his shadow. He discovers a plethora of sub-selves all in contention for his subconscious.
He learns how to make them all conscious. He learns how to wrestle with them, engage with them, play with them, ushering in the beginning of his individuation. After his initiation he takes the first steps toward self-actualization, leaving behind the codependence of his youth and the independence of his courage, and engaging soulfully with the interdependence of his divine masculinity. He has gone from New Man to New God in a mighty feat of self-overcoming that he realizes will require many more feats of the same.
Together with the Sacred feminine, this New God is prepared to engage with the world in a way never before seen. He is Whitman’s multitudes, Goethe’s Faust, Shelly’s Prometheus, Camus’ Sisyphus, and Nietzsche’s Übermensch.
He is Robert Moore’s King, Warrior, Magician, and Lover all wrapped up into one overtly evolving creature. Animal happy, he is Iron John, Wild Man, Father Sky, and Green Man. He is eco-systemic, soul-centric, the prolific planter of the seeds of healthy sustainable change.
He rides alongside the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, protecting her when need be, but mostly empowering her and helping her to see that she is the most powerful thing to ever have existed on the planet.
He is the tip of the spear, self-overcoming and constantly adapting to the constantly changing “air” he flies through. He understands, as Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen said, “The real struggle of the heroic individual is not solely to liberate himself from conflict with society, but rather to use the conflict within himself as a source for self-regeneration.”
He is a lover par excellence. But he understands – balls to bones – that love does not imply pacifism. His love is his honor, his honesty, his sincerity in an otherwise dishonorable, dishonest, and insincere world. He has learned how to swallow his pride. He has learned how to forgive.
Indeed, he has learned to forgive all things, not because all things are worthy of forgiveness, but because he is worthy of peace. And through such vulnerable forgiveness his love shines like a mighty beacon of hope for others. He understands that love is a double-edged sword, with which he chooses to stab himself, over and over again, in order to discover the harsh pain of Truth. He accepts that true love is a beautiful annihilation. Like Ken Wilber said, “Real love will take you far beyond yourself; and therefore real love will devastate you.”
Shiva In the end, the sacred masculine exists precisely because of such devastation, rising up from the ashes like his sister the Phoenix. The outdated modes of power that came before him, militaristic and uncouth, are the ashes from which he gathers himself into a force to be reckoned with, a new power that will turn the tables on mankind’s notions of power hitherto.
A power that will co-create a new breed of Hero who has the capacity to expiate his power in order to become a prestigious game changer as opposed to merely a powerful game controller; a truly robust infinite player with the ability to play multiple finite games while respecting the overall infinite game of life.
Militaristic men beware; the time for congratulating yourselves on being conquerors of the world will soon be at an end. Your unsustainable ideals and parochial idols are fast disintegrating all around you. Soon there will be nothing left of your so-called invulnerable constructs of power. It’s time to make way for the healthy New Man, the vulnerable New God, and the truer power of the sacred masculine.
I sit cross-legged in deep reverence I feel a slight loosening of the bands that tie me to my ego’s trivial reality, as my heart begins to open to you, my beloved. Waves of emotion begin to flow through me. Mere ripples at first, like the surface of a lake ruffled in the breeze or the murmuring of the wind in pine trees.
In this way I begin to sense you and offer myself for surrender to you whose love my heart longs for, whose reality is the deep ocean, the vast sky, the infinity of space – and yet so intimate, so close.
I sense a fluttering in my chest and then deeper sighs of grief rise from my belly; from the tomb of those lost years in the lonely desert. And underlying the emerging light in my heart, a sadness for the many years of seeking in vain in relationship – my human experience of fear and blocked emotions, my self-made prison of numbness, my avoidance of deep connection for the sake of my wounded ego’s safety. A safety that only prolongued the pain of what my soul knew lay beyond its reach.
Lower down in my second chakra I begin feeling the stirrings of a new aliveness, as you touch me, my inner beloved, as you come to me at last bringing the simple knowing of that deeper connection, filling my loins with the longing of divine attraction – body and spirit meeting in sacred union, as you come home to me or I come home to you. I visualize you letting me in, coupling in divine ecstasy.
My heart is a golden cave made of light where you sit, my beloved – you who knows and adores me completely in all my glory and all my woundedness. You have always been there, my inner companion, guide and lover. My soul has longed for you always, yet you remained unreachable, blocked by the smaller me.
Now I imagine resting my head on your soft motherly chest, relaxing into the total acceptance you offer me, the immense safety of your physical presence that holds me in your protective loving arms. My breath quivers as old grief shivers through me, melting the ice of those wilderness years of aloneness and separation from you.
Be fully with me now, my beloved. Enter me, infuse me with your healing Shakti energy. Liberate me, as we meld together as one, inseparable in a timeless union of passion.
I hover in brief moments of bliss as all becomes still, silent, barely a breath and only the subtlest presence of your love that bathes me, as it pervades everything that exists. Shakti and Shiva in divine embrace.
