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Chapter 15- The Other Side

We are now ready to move onto traditionally sacred ground. Sacred ground, the other side for indigenous peoples, contained the mystery of who they were as a people. It was the place where the source of their wisdom resided. It also contained every man's answer to the mystery of who he was as a man.

This was the place where their creator still dwelt, including the creator of their manhood. It was a timeless place. It was a dangerous place. Death was all around. So was new life.

As I speak about this place, and the modern wilderness within, I will be talking more and more with the words of monks and mystics and shamans, philosophers and poets and priests. These are the people who have been exploring this realm for thousands of years. Psychology is in its infancy compared to masters and priests of all the religions of the worlds and countless mystics who have chosen to journey unaccompanied within.

As we move forward, I will stay grounded in the science of psychology, as psychology is what I know. Yet the closer we come to the ordeal, the closer we come to the traditions of spirituality, even in terms of answers to the question of manhood. Scott Peck realized this mysterious conjunction in his book, The Road Less Traveled. He saw "no distinction between the process of achieving spiritual growth and achieving mental growth." I cannot go that far in this book; however, I realize that achieving both psychological and spiritual manhood requires the same leaps of faith into the death experience, the same renunciations of former attitude and lifestyles, and the same humility toward a wisdom and energy source greater than one's own. This is why I call this journey toward manhood a psychospiritual journey.

The similarity between great spiritual traditions and the journey of psychological manhood is close enough that the tools and descriptions and insights of the great religious traditions can also be used here very fruitfully. So I can use the terms wilderness and other side, wilderness within and inner life, psyche and soul interchangeably. For they refer to the same place. And this place is where the ordeal takes place. This place is where the transformation from boy to man happens. Indigenous peoples knew that, mystics have known that, humanistic psychologists like Scott Peck now know that.

For modern man , the other side is more clearly inside. The ordeal happens within. Sacred ground is deep within a man's psyche. The mystery is that the deeper a man goes inside, the more he feels a power as from from the outside. It is this power that he will need to complete his ordeal. It is this power that sustains him in facing his ordeal, and will sustain him throughout his manhood. It is for each man to answer for himself the mystery of whether this power is wholly inside or comes from the other side. In many respects it doesn't matter. The important thing is for every man to move to this sacred ground, and to stand his ground.

Men's Church

It always interests me that when men get to this time of ordeal, as part of their therapy, they often feel like they have to get away into nature. Sometimes they need to take long walks alone in woods or into mountains or on beaches. Sometime they need to camp and think. Sometimes they go fishing for long periods of time. Most, though fearful, feel the need to be alone to do this. I know one man in therapy who started walking a nature trail loop every Sunday morning to gain insight and peace. A friend called it his "8 mile church".

To many men, nature feels more spiritual than church, as they move into their initiatory search. I believe that men are showing their hardwired need for wilderness ordeal through these actions. Walking reflects the journey into the unknown. Nature reflects the wilderness. Aloneness is the necessity of the middle stages of ordeal. The search for their own manhood, in this emerging sacred ground, often feels like the most spiritual thing they have ever done, as it was for our ancestors.

I believe sportsmen who fish and hunt are responding unconsciously to this same hardwired need. Hunting and fishing may reflect the sense of primitive survival of the ordeal. Men have told me they feel most themselves and most at peace lying in wait in the hunt or quietly watching their line. These men usually don't know that they are experiencing the effects of feeding their souls. They don't realize they are unconsciously trying to find the peace of the psychospiritual ordeal and the serenity of ancestrally sacred space. They don't realize the spiritual aspects of what they are doing.

In a real sense this longing for the experience of nature and the learning that comes in that context is also the yearning of men to connect with their feminine side. As we will see, initiation can also be seen as a return to the deeper feminine inside a man. This feminine part of himself has lain hidden in his psyche since a child. This is the Great Mother who is never dark, controlling or manipulative. This is a nurturing source of life, especially spiritual life. Connecting with Mother nature is a way for a man to connect directly with the life force rather than trying to get it through a flesh and blood mother object.

And nature is the gateway to the deep feminine understanding of the world. Nature is Gaia, the goddess of the earth. Mother Nature is a very wise spiritual teacher. A man cannot reach full manhood without the wisdom of the deep feminine and a respect for all that the feminine stands for. As we will see the deep feminine residing within is part of the identity of every mature man.

Sometimes a spouse will bemoan a man's lack of interest in religion. She will feel he is not spiritual because he doesn't go to church. I try to convey to her that he may very well be meeting his soul's needs in the cathedral of the wilderness. He may be finding his spiritual meaning in the bible of nature, as the Taoists have for thousands of years. He may be finding answers to his deepest questions in the wordless silence of his forbears. He may be searching for spiritual answers deep in the solitude of the wilderness within and without. He may be contacting his feminine side which will enrich their relationship.

It often happens that men in the middle of their ordeal, while in therapy, will come in to a session with poetry. Poetry seems to have the form and words that most express their feelings. Poetry seems to be the nonlinear, non-rational expression of the soul, beset by intense feelings. As one of my clients in the middle of his ordeal wrote to me: "I honestly on one level do not want to exhaust myself with these projects but find I have no choice. Nothing will happen for weeks. Then when riding in the car, lines of poetry will 'pop' into my head out of nowhere and I feel compelled to go home and finish the poem. I know this is not what I should be doing from a conventional sense and I am sure my wife is upset that it interrupts my job search."

Some men just need to be alone for awhile, whether in nature or not. I find it a very healthy sign when a man finds the need to be alone. This need for aloneness, as long as it isn't a code word for not facing engulfment fears, shows a man has dealt with many of his separation issues and is already approaching sacred ground. Wanting 'space' can be very healthy if a man is not running from or toward a mother object. Wanting distance can show that a man is not afraid of looking at his life as a whole and separate individual, instead of as an extension of other's dreams. Spouses and partners need to understand this need as healthy and as a challenge to their own initiatory needs. I will talk about this extensively in a following chapter.

I once asked the men in my men's group when they felt most themselves and the most at peace. One man, John, said he felt most himself when he was alone, especially walking in the twilight on the golf course near his house. Most of the other men agreed that they felt most themselves when alone, especially in nature. John asked quietly if I felt there was anything wrong with this. I felt a sense of shame in the room. Aloneness is surely countercultural in our society and even a mark of oddity. I assured John that to a maturing man this centered sense of aloneness is good and normal. Being in nature, even on a golf course, can show a hunger for sacred ground. It is a sign that the ordeal is working.

I also find that men at this stage of initiation and therapy start talking about God. (I use capital G because in our monotheistic society men see God as singular and unique.) Men spontaneously talk about needing God, or some higher power, to complete their journey. Some men have been introduced to the idea of a higher power through a 12-step process. Others have returned to a possibility of God's help from their earlier, forgotten religious training. Others have lived with their God as companion all along, without connecting God to their inner search.

Carl Jung felt all people were formed through the collective unconscious to believe in and seek God for an answer to adult problems. He felt we all had the archetypal urge to relate to a higher power. He called man homo religiosus. He never claimed that he could prove there was a God. He did say that men routinely act as if there were a God. He also felt that most people over 35 could not heal without recourse to some 'religious answer.' The God most men talk about, and the religious deity Jung talks about, is not necessarily the God men meet in church or in studying religion. This is a God they feel could be anywhere. He is more the God of the wilderness, not the God of the civilized edifice. He is the God met face to face, not the God heard about. He is the God of paradox, not the God of logic. He is the God met beyond the mores of the village.

This is a God who is also male to most men. Like a good father a man can borrow strength and wisdom from this God, finding him more where he is least expected. Most maturing men need the benefit of a power that will push them toward the wilderness, not protect them from it. They often need more a father God who will not protect them from the confusion and loss of the ordeal, instead of a mother church that already gives them the rules and the answers. They need a different, more personal, more deeply masculine God who pushes them toward the inner pain of leaving the safety of religious patriarchy to find the personally sacred.

All men are hardwired to move toward ordeal and maturity. All men are hardwired for the mission leading toward the wilderness. That is a solace I often dwell on. We are made for the wilderness without and within. In a sense we crave ordeal. We are also looking for the holy and sacred. The sacred is another word for the most important inner values in a man's life, the values that make him a man from the inside out. The sacred just lies in different places than is normally thought.

Standing Ground

At the time of ordeal, men sometimes need outside elders, different kinds of priests, to explain some things and point us in the direction of the sacred wilderness. As a counselor, I feel the need to take up an eldering role with men because most of male society has defaulted on this obligation. I feel the obligation to be the one to explain and help any man who comes to me through his ordeal. This should be the job of priests and patriarchs. Unfortunately, it rarely is. As in myth, elders come from the unlikeliest places. One of the unlikeliest is the counselor's office. As one of my clients put it, "I was looking for a great, wise guru someplace; instead I found an ordinary man in a Sears polyester suit." (Actually, I rarely wear suits.)

An elder has no answers. He can talk of the process of ordeal. He can talk of how the best men have handled ordeal in the past. But he can't give answers to the man's deepest questions. What he can do is witness to the reality of the other side. In the secularized world of the marketplace he can speak to the sacredness of the wilderness.

There is an old Zen mystery expression that holds here. It goes, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." Part of this expression has to do with someone holding himself out as having the answers to another's spiritual quest. If you meet an elder who says he has the answers, you have gotten the wrong elder. You have gotten an elder who has not been to sacred ground himself.

The most important thing a modern outside elder can do is encourage a man to stay within his death experience, with its depression, loss, confusion, humiliation, and emptiness. The middle of the ordeal hurts. The elder is there not to explain the meaning of the hurt, but to explain that the hurt is meaningful. The elder explains that pain is part of the reality of the wilderness, that pain does not mean that he is in the wrong place. The elder encourages a man to stand his ground.

An elder must witness to the necessity of walking the wilderness. Sometimes a seeking man will approach ordeal many times, then return to the comfort of his addiction time after time. Many times going back involves a relationship that was unsatisfying but provided relief from the abandonment pain of the present. An elder is there to tell him this repetition does not mean that he can't eventually fully separate and complete his initiation. An elder is there to witness to the need for the next attempt, for the next foray away from the village. An elder tries to encourage him to return to that sacred place of confusing feelings and unanswered questions.

Hurry Up and Wait

With or without an outside elder a man at this point in ordeal feels in a situation a lot like the old Army dictum, "hurry up and wait." After all the separation work a man does, and having stood his ground, he is greeted with the need to just wait. He is given no trophies or medals. He doesn't make the newspapers for the substantial, draining work he has already done. Because he is outside of the patriarchal reality, few people notice or understand all the work he has done. His ability to be humble is sorely tried.

Like being in the Army, a man in the wilderness has no control over his time. And time then starts to hang heavy as nothing seems to be happening. He is really in another time, a sacred time. Here there are no production goals or timetables. A man cannot work his plan because he cannot create one. He can no longer measure himself by his accomplishments Marketplace skills are useless.

What he needs to do is wait, humbly, for a plan beyond his ego. An outside elder sometimes points this out. At other times the elder within sends through a man's intuition the message to stop and wait. Yet waiting seems highly inefficient. If time is money, as in the marketplace, then this is financially disastrous. Waiting for the plan seems a great waste of time and money. Not being 'productive' is at best uncomfortable. At worst it feels totally deflating. And it is quite uncomfortable

Sometimes the wait is quite a while. At times the biggest pain is boredom. A man is not used to living in a limbo between past and future. He feels the need to plan, to strategize, to do something, if nothing else, to relieve the boredom. To be masculine means to act. To act at least gives the illusion of some control. Instead the whole experience starts to feel like he'll be stuck in this place forever. That thought is frightening. That thought is normal.

Malidoma Some, at his initiation, was told to sit in front of a tree in the wilderness, to watch and wait. He was given no other instructions. He waited in front of that tree night and day for three days while nothing happened. After the first day he impatiently made up a meaningful story about the message he supposedly got. The elders unhesitatingly sent him back to wait some more.

The Buddha decided to make his stand under a Bo Tree. He vowed to either reach enlightenment or die right there. His facing of initiatory death was profound. He fasted and waited a long, long time. He knew he had to.

In the great manhood myth of Western civilization Parsifal roams the alien countryside for 20 years looking for the Grail in the Grail castle. The Grail represents those sacred answers to identity and manhood. Robert Johnson, in his book He, talks of this ordeal time as the dry years.

Here, waiting, a man is in sacred time. With men I see, like any elder, I try to help men by telling them their feelings of discomfort and disorientation are normal for the culturally abnormal experience of ordeal. I explain that the wilderness has different rules than the marketplace. It is a different place with a different kind of time. I try to appeal to their hardwired sense of the healthy warrior, holding ground sorely won, ground that makes no present sense. I feel sometimes like Knute Rockne at half-time of a Notre Dame game, reminding them of the futility of going back, pushing them to a stubborn sense of mission and endurance.

As it was for indigenous people, it is today. If a man does not feel he has a sacred purpose, a purpose beyond his ego needs, he will feel the same emptiness and loneliness of the ordeal regularly in his inevitable depression, but with no meaningful outcome. To find this purpose he must stay and endure on sacred ground. This inner ground is a place of both intense feeling and the emptiness of feeling, both pain and numbness. That is a paradox of the sacred ground within.

An Initiatory Experience

I cannot emphasize enough how countercultural the ordeal experience is. A man goes against all he was taught about manliness. Instead of acting, he is asked to wait. Instead of setting goals, he is asked to let them find him. Instead of standing up for his beliefs, he is asked to admit he doesn't know what they are. Instead of being in control, he is asked to give up control. Instead of making himself feel good, he is asked to allow himself to feel lousy.

I have found that giving a man the formal opportunity to have a sense of initiatory space and time can hasten the maturing process. This experience can then give a man the understanding and courage to continue his initiatory process. I call this an initiatory experience, not initiation. Full initiation takes a much longer period of time; however, this experience can trigger or hasten the process.

In structuring this initiatory experience, I act as elder. As opposed to indigenous elders I talk to a man about voluntarily trying an initiatory experience. By this time many men have set significant boundaries and understand the need for separation. I explain that this experience incorporates many elements of a traditional ordeal time. I offer this proposal to a man, as elders do, when I feel he is ready. I give him the choice of the circumstances. The intensity of the experience can vary, as can the length.

There is a Hasidic saying, "There is another world and it is in this one." The other side is always just around the corner, or just the other side of our own heart. This is why a man can consciously experience the other side in ways that indigenous people do. The most important elements of this other world are voluntary aloneness and being in unstructured time.

Aloneness is the consequence of having faced separation and abandonment fears. It is the indispensable part of the heart of ordeal. Initiatory time is a place in time beyond the structure and schedules of the patriarchal world of work and family responsibility. This is a place outside of time as we know it. It is a place outside of plans and expectations. It is a place on the other side of rules.

This structured experience can last from one afternoon to one week or more. It involves taking oneself outside of one's ordinary lifestyle, preferably to a place one has not been before. The place must be one of privacy where a man's boundaries will be respected. Most of the time I recommend finding a place to stay where a man can be alone and not know anyone around. This could be anyplace from a hotel room to a cabin in a State Park to a room at a retreat center, to a tent in the woods. I usually recommend someplace where there is access to nature for walks and seclusion, although being in a strange city does have both the sense of aloneness and the invisibility of the initiate.

Aloneness involves being in a situation where there is no interaction with significant people in one's life. Preferably, there should be no interaction of any significance with any other person. This ban on interaction also includes any reading or other media: no books, radio, television, computers. What interaction is allowed is a writing instrument and paper to record thoughts, feelings, experiences. The aloneness in a strange place is the doorway to the experience of the other side.

The other side has a feeling of timelessness beyond the past and future. I recommend removing one's watch and putting it away, as a symbol of entering this timeless place. We contact this world by removing our schedules, our timebound habits, our planning for the future, the points we scored in the past.

Most men start feeling uncomfortable just thinking about this experience. That feeling alone shows the sacredness of the space. Most men feel an archetypal fear of going into this experience and entering this space. This fear is normal. Young men have experienced it for thousands of years. Traditionally, any experience of the sacred evokes death and its terror.

There is a feeling of unreality in the ordeal. Living only in the present, and in the disconnection of loss, brings a weird feeling of timelessness, like being lost in space. Myths and fairy tales try to give this same feeling, telling us we are in a different psychological time. They often start "once upon a time", speaking of a time different from our everyday time. The Star Wars story starts in a time "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away". These are the code words for talking of the inner life, the other side, and its timelessness.

The feelings of timelessness, aloneness, emptiness, disorientation, and free-floating discomfort are signals that a man is entering an ordeal experience. He is starting to experience the other side. This is when the pull to regressive addictions will get much stronger, even though he has worked hard on separating from them. This kind of regressive pull invariably happens when anyone takes a growth step. This is something an elder must explain. The pull to regression, and sometimes succumbing to that pull, is part of the maturing process. It never stops, even after ordeal. Maturation depends on how we handle these inevitable regressive pulls.

Talk of the regressive pull leads me to explain other elements of this initiatory experience. Addictions are banned. No sex, drugs, or rock'n'roll. No sex includes any sexual experience, including masturbation. No drugs means no mood altering substance of any kind, especially alcohol and pot. Not essential, but recommended, are abstention from the drugs nicotine and caffeine. No rock'n'roll means no music or other taped messages of entertainment.

Work habits are banned. No work planning or work projects. No work planning means not thinking about or writing down any work related ideas. A man in ordeal will inevitably think about his work accomplishments or work plans as a kind of orienting comfort. There is nothing wrong with thinking of accomplishments as a way of feeling confidence in one's ego strength. Holding on to one's identity as a marketplace worker is regressive.

No work habits means no scheduling the day or setting goals for the experience. These schedules will always be counterproductive and take one back to everyday, timebound reality. Planning is ego work not the work of the self. Schedules cause us to focus away from very important realities that will hold a key for us. Often schedules are the result of work addicted warriors with no kingly direction. The warrior will have plenty of meaningful work, including schedules, to do once the king is found.

Fasting is another part of the ordeal that is not essential but very helpful. Fasting not only mimics the survival reality of ordeal, but it also frustrates a possibly addictive and pleasurable side of ourselves. Fasting intensifies the separation experience from comfort. It has been a traditional way of contacting the other side for millennia.

Fasting also intensifies the feeling of the timelessness of the other side. Many of us use meals as a scheduling technique that orients us to the security of time. When schedules are disrupted in other ways, such as in vacations, retreats or workshops, most people unconsciously start to talk and think about the next meal. Meals become the connection to everyday reality and our familiar schedules. Food is also a primitive comfort when feeling disoriented. Fasting can be for one or two days as long as a man drinks large amounts of water or juices and has no complicating health problems.

The most important part of the initiatory experience is the same as in indigenous initiation, to stay within the wilderness and survive. I act as elder and the only person the initiate can contact. My job is to encourage the man to stay within the experience. Most men will quickly start feeling overwhelmed by the disorientation and separateness. Their discomfort level increases substantially. The purpose seems to get lost. My job is to remind a man of his original purpose, to help him start to understand the meaning of his experience, and to uphold his warrior.

Indigenous people stayed in the wilderness until the sense of meaning and direction arose. The experience described here is less intense and full. Yet, often the elements and structure of this experience jump starts the maturing process. I have found that the experiencing of the other side in this conscious way changes a man today as it has changed men for a long time. The intentionality and particular structure of this experience seems to bring a man toward a different sense of his manhood. He starts to feel differently from the inside out. In the absence of cultural rite of initiation, an initiatory experience, like I have described, tries to get as close as possible to a full and conscious rite of male maturity.

Many other processes have elements of this rite and allow a man to contact the other side. Counseling, spiritual direction, guided meditative practices, 12 step work are some other ways. Denise Linn, in the first half of her excellent book Quest, describes in more detail much of these same initiatory pieces in the context of the Native American vision quest. I have written this book to add some crucial eldering and intentionality pieces that I feel men need in order to put the whole maturing puzzle together.

There are also other opportunities for experiencing a structured initiatory experience. These are sometimes called vision quests, initiations, transformative experiences. The Mankind Project (link on my web site) is a national organization that can be trusted to give a man the opportunity to experience an authentic initiatory situation. I can be contacted for information on other groups that I know can do the same.

Most men have already experienced the other side intensely because of a premature separation experience. They have experienced the aloneness, unreality, disorientation, and inner pain as a tragedy they never want to return to. As I have mentioned they have been traumatized by the experience because of the absence of fathers and elders to prepare, explain and support. Because of this trauma many men are understandably resistant to go there again, especially voluntarily. An initiatory experience can be a crucial part of preparing a man to see his larger initiation through.

Starting to See

When a man perseveres in his ordeal, things start changing inside. There are very subtle changes, at first. Friends often see these changes before the man realizes the shift. After a while a man realizes that he is seeing the world differently. He also notices he is feeling the world differently. He is more comfortable in confusion, comfortable enough to start to notice the village from the viewpoint of the wilderness. He also notices his comfort in the wilderness, itself. He can stay within his feelings and pause to understand them. Instead of acting out, a detour around feelings, he acts in, moving deeper into them. He can stand his ground. The wilderness holds less and less terror and even starts to feel reassuring. He realizes he has given up the familiar for his freedom. Freedom, even with some fear, starts to feel exciting. Feeling starts to feel exciting. Fear and anxiety begin to be memory. He has faced his biggest fears and he is still standing.

He, as they say, is not out of the woods yet. And he moves back and forth between nostalgia and excitement, between anxiety and anticipation. He is in the middle of ordeal, yet he is still alive and feels alive. He is much stronger than he ever felt he could be. He has a quiet, healthy pride in that. He has gotten the confidence to stand his ground and see it through.

All chapters of Toward Manhood are archived.

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