The masculine is always on the move. Biologically to provide for survival. Historically to explore the world and build it. Ultimately, to seek for freedom and find out our true and deepest selves. As men, at our core, we are on a mission. We need a mission. A mission aligned with the expression of our main archetypes, so the actions we take in the world to live up to it are meaningful to us. As individuals, and also beyond ourselves, at service of the collective, and also I believe, in order to connect, spiritually, with something greater than ourselves.
When I started to think about what could finally be my mission a couple of years ago, I had actually no real clue. And I realized that it couldn’t merely come from an intellectual process. Yes, it helped out to know and analyse what I was good at, what I wanted to do more, or do less in my life. But I felt I had to find it out from within, from my deepest longings. But since I didn’t really know who I was deep inside either, how would I find out? So, instead of thinking about it, I started to contemplate. Contemplation is a soft and compassionate process. It requires time, patience, and practise.
And I actually now believe that finding clarity about my mission came with some level of deeper self-realization I achieved recently within my journey. More of a bottom-up process. Maybe I didn’t find my mission actually, but my mission did find me.
Establishing a mission merely from an intellectual perspective without a deeper and embodied understanding of it comes with a risk. The risk that it might end up be driven by unconscious motives, which turn out to be unfulfilling at a deeper level. And on the long run, spread even more unconsciousness in the world beyond ourselves.
So, if I would capture the most important aspects of my mission in a single statement, it would be as follows:
I create a world contributing to the evolution of human consciousness by inspiring people to be free and experience crazy shit with integrity.
And let’s elaborate on why I chose these words then.
Consciousness
Yes.
Consciousness, consciousness, consciousness.
Consciousness is all around us.
Consciousness is in us. Consciousness is us.
I know it, because I witness it, I feel it, in myself. In my body. And I need more, I want to go deeper.
I believe it is time for us to be more awaken. Both at individual level, and collectively.
Mankind as we know it today on Earth is facing challenges that we don’t know how to solve. Physically, the container of our planet will reach soon its full capacity for hosting our species which has deep longings for creation, exploration, and expansion. Leveraging on space colonization is far away from being an option.
We need to be more creative. We need to take new perspectives. Collect, co-create, and internalise new knowledge.
More, and deeper consciousness, in ourselves and in our actions, individually and collectively, is the way.
Evolution / Expansion
We are pure beings. And our Beingness is to be embraced and embodied fully. Absolute Consciousness (or if you prefer, God) is pure Being. The enlightened acceptance of all that Is.
But being all the time in a stillness state of Being, as blissful as it can be turns out to be boring. Eventually, Absolute Consciousness had to create new meanings anchored to its Existence. It’s like a game. God playing games. That’s maybe why Absolute Consciousness had to come up with Creation, and at its cornerstone, the idea of Evolution.
Evolution is fun. It means exploration, based on the basic principle of trial and error. Creation of new knowledge is initiated by taking risks, by pushing boundaries a bit further, and thanks to the feedback provided in return by the external environment, new knowledge can be internalised, and things move forward.
This process has to be efficient, i.e., it has to be implemented with some level of order, otherwise, expansion goes in all directions, and too much energy is wasted on the way. Wasted energy is unfulfilled potential.
Look at children. They explore the world in a very chaotic way, like dogs, there is a lot of entropy and dynamicity spent in their process of discovering the world. They run in all directions, with a lot of playful curiosity and eagerness to see what’s behind the curtains. And that’s not only perfectly fine, it is also absolutely necessary, until a certain point. Until the point from which the child has to become a mature adult, and eventually reach higher level of self-realisation. And the implementation of this process has to be directed. Otherwise, the child stays stuck at the same level of consciousness than the dog, and this is unfulfilled potential, considering all the tools evolution brought at our disposal as modern humans to keep things moving forward.
Indeed, our neo-cortex, encompassing the most modern parts of our brain, is a fantastic tool brought by evolution to modern humans for creating more order in the world. And also to drastically speed up, and optimize its expansion. And it turns out to be a fucking efficient machine for streamlining the process of implementing new abstract ideas into our physical reality. The neo-cortex is also the stronghold of our advanced human ego (or our “default mode network”, which is the kind of ego equivalent from a neuroscience perspective, a term that I use sometimes here when I want to show off with my nerdy scientific side), which came up with the great concept of duality (i.e., me, “I”, versus the rest of the universe). We ended up perceiving ourselves, i.e., our mind and body, as a container with clear boundaries, separated from our environment, and therefore functioning as a unit for storing and internalising new knowledge.
Beyond our ego (from our normal waking consciousness) resides our individual (un)consciousness, our collective (un)consciousness, the transpersonal consciousness, and finally the Absolute Consciousness. So, the path here is to allow ourselves to tap into these layers, and bring back knowledge that can be digested and processed by our neo-cortex, with the goal to accelerate and continue to play hard the game of creation and evolution in our dual, physical reality. But what’s the ultimate end game of creation and evolution, what’s its meaning, ultimately? As conscious creatures, to finally crack the secret of our existence? And ultimately, to challenge God with our findings, and bring Absolute Consciousness to a next level? Ahah, how the fuck I know, this is so spooky. And I am not a philosopher.
But what’s sure, creation, exploration, and expansion, is meaningful at the very core of our beings in the physical world. And with meaningful vision, clear direction, conscious orientation of our energy to take the lead and take actions in the physical world, with strong collective momentum, we can accomplish crazy shit.
Don’t call me teacher bitch
No, I am not a teacher, you are your own teacher. My mission is to potentially inspire and show you possible ways based on my own personal first-hand experiences and knowledge I gathered from so many wise and smart external sources. And you have to decide for yourself what are your deepest needs, what works for you, what doesn’t, or what has to be adapted to better fulfil your own mission.
Only you know.
The full responsibility for your self-healing, self-growth, and finally, self-realisation, has to be embodied in yourself.
For me, it all started with my King and my Warrior. My King, by taking full personal responsibility via self-empowerment for my self-healing and my self-growth. My Warrior, by strongly committing on the long run to target the root causes of what has been preventing me to live to my full potential. With these strong archetypal energies, I have been relentlessly and patiently searching for tools, people and mentors that would fit my very needs. And I started to heal. To release my traumas. To challenge my core and deep limiting believes. From there, I started to get more clarity. And it’s been continuing with my Lover. I discovered how aspects of my core self were so valuable, and lovable. My awesomeness started to be brought to my consciousness. And my darkness as well. And with it, the weights of my shadows. They are part of me. Of my core, whole, self. I had to take full responsibility for them as well. It has then been about discovering self-acceptance. And from self-acceptance, self-love can be finally felt, and nurtured. With my Warrior and Lover gearing up for my journey, I have been discovering and acknowledging more of my core archetypes. When I got there, I started to realize where I wanted to go, and my mission started to appear with more clarity. And then, it becomes deeper consciousness at play from within. Consciously choosing how and where to direct my intentions, time, and energy, and take actions in the physical world. Actions aligned to my core archetypes and needs, and implementing my mission, through myself, and finally beyond myself. I am now taking first meaningful actions. This blog is the first outcome of my new journey. This blog is meaningful to me. It could be meaningful to you as well.
Become your own self-empowered Warrior self-teacher, learn how to get the knowledge you need, get inspired on your way by mentors you consciously chose man. Built up solid support networks with your brothers, within communities. Discover love, self-love, and nurture it. Explore deep within yourself. Use your mind, but knowledge has to be implemented, and then internalised, since truth is to be found out via embodiment. That is where consciousness and wisdom reside. That is the way of the integrated man.
Freedom
I really resonate with freedom, deep inside my core. I want for myself and for all beings to be, and feel, free. It is such a critical quality to be expected from our environment, but also, and more importantly, to create and nurture it within ourselves.
Indeed, it takes conscious efforts to decide to be fully who we are without giving a shit of external judgement, without fearing rejection.
It takes conscious efforts to live the lives we need and want, to fully accept and express our sexuality even in its most intriguing corners, to find the gold and embrace the darkness of our shadows, from our individual and collective unconscious.
It takes conscious efforts to heal and release our past traumas, our childhood co-dependency patterns, our nonconstructive social conditioning that we inherited, to free ourselves from our limiting believes and mind-fucks. To free ourselves from our willingness to control all possible outcomes of our actions. To free ourselves from workaholism.
It takes conscious efforts to live free from dogmas, from unfulfilling rules elaborated by communities and nations.
So you get it, freedom cannot be delivered to you on a silver plate. You cannot take it for granted.
With great freedom comes great responsibility.
Experience
We are experiential beings. We need direct experiences.
If you have never been to Burning Man, you can watch hundreds of hours of videos on YouTube, read endless stories online, ask your friends to tell you all about their experiences there. And yes, you will get an idea in your mind of what it is to be at Burning Man for sure. But only a very partial one.
Why? Simply because your body wasn’t there. And your body has so many sensors all over the place, it functions like a big sponge processing in the moment and over time huge flow of external stimuli and information from your direct environment. And it stores it. Not only in your memories, but most importantly in your subconscious as well. By being there, you get tremendous amount of knowledge you are even not aware of. Embodied experiences and embodied knowledge.
The mind only creates a map of reality. It can be extremely detailed. It can be extremely accurate. But the map is not the territory. The body experiences the territory, and stores knowledge about it, knowledge that can’t be fully passed on from one person to another, or from one institution to people.
Crazy shit
Yes, I am a bit crazy. A tiny bit eccentric. Sometimes even a tiny bit manic. And that’s the way it is, and the way it will be. Because that’s part of who I am. I embrace my eccentricity, and I need it. Sometimes I even push for it.
Why? Because it is great to feel my awesome crazy self.
And also because craziness creates chaos. And chaos, when accessed and created consciously, is what creates new order. It creates entropy in our brains, in our bodies, in our communities. It shakes things up, fuck them up, and challenge the status quo of the current order of our daily lives, our mindsets, our established rules, our current knowledge. Craziness becomes a catalyser to make things grow and move forward. To explore new directions, new opportunities, solve new problems, create new art forms from scratch.
So, I fucking embrace my crazy side. I love it. It is meaningful. And there is no way I gonna hide nor repress it here on this blog, I can’t afford it. It is part of who I am. And I will continue to explore it, in all directions and corners if I need to. I trust the way craziness needs to be consciously expressed in me, channelled through me. I have to continue to cut through the bullshit, pass through the nonconstructive doubts established by social conditioning or fear of being judged. I can’t lie to myself anymore.
And I can’t lie to you either. I have to speak up my truth here. Unapologetically. And without fearing the consequences. It is not negotiable. Otherwise the whole thing can’t work. It can’t work.
But what’s the price to pay by an integrated man for being fully himself and speaking up his truth?
He creates polarity. And some people will not like him, will get triggered, even maybe offended, turned off by him. These people will not love him.
And that’s not only fine, since an integrated man is more fuelled on self-validation than on external one, and has built up a solid support system around him, it is also necessary.
Diversity is necessary. Living in a world in which everybody agrees is not healthy. In some cases, people who disagree with us might convey a message that we went too far, that we lost track. We might have to listen to them with curiosity and openness. In some cases, they can be our allies, watchdogs providing us constructive and needed feedback, and avoiding us to get drawn in insanity.
At a personal level, as a consequence to show up with my true self, I will also lose some friends on my way. It is unavoidable. I had my first casualty a couple of years ago when a very dear friend of mine told me she couldn’t keep up with me because of this several months experiment during which I avoided gluten in my diet. She said she couldn’t understand me anymore. Oh boy. If she knew what I am up for now.
I am also very aware that on this blog, I gonna lose some of you brothers. These of you who will get turned off.
And that’s perfectly fine. And I want you, just as I do, to follow your own path towards integration, find out what it is, and speak up your truth as well.
But listen up brother.
Listen up.
Before you decide once and for all that this crazy shit is not for you, please dare be a bit curious and open. Dare taking some time to look deeper within yourself. It doesn’t hurt. Ask yourself some questions. It all starts with questions brother. Why does it turn you off? Why do you feel offended? Why are you getting triggered by my words? Maybe there is something there. Maybe something deeper inside to learn about yourself. That’s where exploration starts. That’s how it grows. Give it a chance.
Integrity
I just typed “integrity” in Google, and the first definitions that came up were as follows:
- The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles,
- The state of being whole and undivided.
So, I thought it was pretty cool to add it at the end of my mission statement. It sounds quite serious and wise, so people would take me more seriously I think.
Living up to my mission, how and what?
This blog is a first concrete and visible outcome of meaningful actions I’ve been taking recently. It is fully aligned with my mission. And I have now more ideas on how to proceed. On how to implement things further.
So keep tuned in, more is coming. Don’t worry, it’s gonna be yummy.
And finally, while writing this post, I went through ranges of diverse and strong emotions.
Indeed, I had the feeling that I had finally nailed it, the why, the root of what I need to do in my life. It felt amazing. It felt very touching. It felt so meaningful.
But then, I started to feel some strong fear. Fear of not knowing where I am heading. Fear of the life changes I have to take on. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the commitment I have to take to live up to my mission. Fear of the amount of energy and time I have to put to implement it.
And you know what I am finally feeling right now?
I am feeling like I want to take a shit.
Yes, as simple as that. I need to take a shit. Because taking a shit is part of my mundane life as well. And many aspects of my life are actually mundane, basic, simple. Yes, living up to my mission is important. Yes, taking meaningful and directed actions to implement it is crucial. I need my mission as an integrated man. My mission needs me.
But my mission and the way I am implementing it does not define me either. My mission does not reflect wholly who I am. I am also bigger than my mission. I am also much smaller. It is not about living up to my mission, it is about my growth, my expansion, about finding out out my most authentic self.
So, there is no need to make a too big deal about it. Let’s simply take one step at a time. And breathe. Consciously. No need to let my mind slip and make up stories about the future of my mission. No big fucking deal.
It is always a question of balance.
And now it is really time to take a shit.