Masculinity in the Modern Age

Masculinity in the Modern Age

[00:45] Terribly Modern

Jai Guru Deva. Thank you for listening to my podcast, The Vedic Worldview. I’m Thom Knoles.

In today’s episode, I’d like to respond to an inquiry from so many of my listeners to talk about the relevance of masculinity, what it means, and so on in the modern age. And really, the modern age itself is a very interesting concept because everyone, in all of history, has thought that they were in the modern age.

The Paleolithic people, who are your ancestors, when we talk about those cave people, you’re talking about your great, great, great, great, great, great times many, perhaps a thousand greats, grandparents. Your DNA came from those people, Paleolithic Stone Age.

The Neolithic, the new (neo means new) -lithic people, who were the ones who let go of hunting and gathering, as a primary activity,and began to figure out that if they stayed put and weathered the winter, that they could actually use the seeds that they’d hunted and gathered to create crops. They could keep the animals that they once had to hunt in one place in an enclosure.

So agriculture and husbandry, those two disciplines were first embraced and discovered, and people began to stay put and get a sense of place that wasn’t one of constant wandering.

So, big difference between Paleolithic and Neolithic, and they all thought it was terribly modern. Terribly modern. Paleolithic, “What did we ever do before we discovered the bow and arrow? We had to chase animals around with rocks. Now, we’re in the modern era.”

Neolithic, “What did we ever do before we figured out how to plant things and let them grow up out of the ground, and then get a sense of ownership of the land and stay put and lay claim to the land rather than wandering across it? What did we ever do before we had this? We’re modern.”

Now, we are in this headspace where it’s a continuous thing. What’s modern? Here I am, modern.

[03:16] What Does It Means to Be a Human?

What’s masculinity in the modern age? Masculinity. What is femininity in the modern age? Femininity. What is gender neutral in the modern age? Gender neutral. Forget about all this masculine-feminine business.

Where we really need to be, my dear listeners, is humanity. Humanity. What does it mean to be a human? Rather than dividing off, you know, that there are people with certain kinds of genitalia, or who identify with those who have that kind of genitalia, and the culture that relatively recently has been created around having that genitalia, which we refer to as masculine, and we attribute certain kinds of traits and behaviors to that, and I want to be one of those, or I am one of those. And so then, what does it mean to be one of those?

I think that this compartmentalization of humanity is troublesome, and it is very troublesome and this is very palpable to someone like me who is an innocent witness of social trends and trends that emerge from desperation to make oneself relevant to evolution.

What we really want is relevance to evolution. Relevance to evolution requires us to address our humanity. So, let’s look at what happens in the creation of the human that you are right now.

[05:31] Journey from Zygote to Human

Everyone who’s listening, I hope you agree, is a human. Although there are some people who, these days, say they don’t identify with being human anymore; they identify with being another animal species.

Alright, that’s fine. If you understand my human language, then let’s at least acknowledge that you started off being a human, even if you have transitioned into being an animal by now. It’s all okay with me. I’ll go with anything. But now we’re talking about our humanity in its inception, and, in fact, let’s go right back to its conception.

When the sperm meets the egg then, wherever that happens, in a test tube, or as it happens in 98 percent of cases, within the uterus, there is the formation of a thing called a zygote. And the zygote is the precursor of the embryo, and the embryo is the precursor of the fetus. And the fetus is the precursor of the neonate. Neonate means freshly born, newborn. And the neonate is the precursor of the toddler, and the toddler is the precursor of… and so on and so on and so on.

And everyone who’s listening to this has, in fact, physiologically gone through all of these stages.

In the zygote stage, where sperm and egg first have met and turned into a single cell before it begins to divide, before it has become embryonic, everything is there. Total masculinity, total femininity. There’s no, yet, appearance of a difference between these two. In most of the embryonic stage, this is also the case.

[07:27] Omnisexuality: Our True Nature

And so, what is it that is our source? If we want to go back to our source, we have to go back to humanity, which, as I’ve stated in many other places at great length for hours, is omnisexual. Omnisexual.

It is not hetero, it is not homo, it is not this or that. It hasn’t decided that genders mean certain things that have happened since the advent of the 1900s and into the 2000s: ways of dressing, ways of behaving, language, and all of that. None of that is there.

If we go back to our source, we are omnisexual humans. Omnisexual humans. And then we begin to decide, once we evolve into more interactive humans, coming out of the childlike nature and into making decisions about how we would wish to interact, we begin to compartmentalize. We compartmentalize on the basis of so many things.

Much of what we use in order to compartmentalize our sense of what we are is our response to the hypnosis of social conditioning. The hypnosis of social conditioning requires of us, in order for it to work, in order for it to breathe into us, these relatively modern cultural orientations, we have to have a degree of suggestibility, and suggestibility is something that comes from loss of contact with source. 

When we have an internalized locus of control (locus here is spelled L-O-C-U-S) an internalized locus of control, that means we have a status that is field-independent.

What’s the field? The field is everything out there. We are field-independent when we have an internalized locus of control. We have a sense of Self and Beingness that is not dependent upon outside causes, outside suggestions as to what the nature of the Self is. Then, we have foundational happiness.

Foundational happiness, foundational sense of Beingness, and it has at its disposal the entire range of gender expressions, and sexual expressions, and so on. The entire range is there.

So Beingness, humanity, omnisexuality, is, in fact, our source. This is non-controversial, by the way. We can take matters about gender, and sexuality, and masculinity, and femininity, and non-binary gender mentality, and ideologues and ideologies, and everything starts getting very fiery and controversial.

Let’s stay in the simplest form of awareness. The simplest form of awareness is, what is the best thing to be? The best thing to be is human. From the human perspective, that’s the best thing to be. From the tiger perspective, the best thing to be is a tiger.

[11:22] The Crazy Tiger

I remember once my teacher, Maharishi, and Chris Rock based a joke on this once which I watched. So he must have heard a story of Maharishi saying this, very interesting.

Somebody reported the news to my master, Maharishi, that some magicians who were famous magicians in Las Vegas, Nevada, had a show that involved tigers doing various kinds of acts that were acts that were kind of cutesy-woodsy because normally, there were things that a big tiger wouldn’t be considered to be doing.

And one day, as it was reported to Maharishi, the tiger “went crazy” and stopped riding the little tricycle around with its little vest on and its bowtie and its little bowler hat that had been put on its head, and instead of riding the little bicycle or whatever it was around the ring with the magician, snapping a little whip, the tiger, “went crazy” and attacked the magician and savaged him.

And this was big news all over the place. A man barely survived it. When this news was brought to Maharishi, he said, “That wasn’t the tiger going crazy. That was the tiger going tiger. The crazy tiger was the tiger riding the bicycle with the little vest and the bow tie and the bowler hat. That was crazy tiger. Tiger pouncing on man? That was tiger being tiger.”

So, what is the nature of a given thing? The nature of a human is super broad-spectrum. Our repertoire of potential behaviors relative to, compared with, the repertoire of relevant behaviors of any other species, so far, is vast and enormous.

And so then when I get men saying to me, “I want to be masculine, what have I got to do to be masculine?” I say, “Well, let’s challenge the assumption you’re making. How far back do you want to go? Do you want to go Paleolithic? Or how far deep into your own iterations of your physiology do you want to go? Do you want to go back to being the zygote, or the embryo, or the fetus?”

[13:58] Cultural Inventions

Let’s really examine what it is you’re looking for here, because you can draw upon your humanity and end up accessing things which culturally have come to be known as femininity. That’s a cultural idea that’s come to be known as femininity. Or you can draw upon your humanity and end up behaving in ways that have come to be known as masculine, culturally.

In relatively recent hundreds of years, these are inventions, cultural inventions, what is masculine, what is feminine, these are cultural inventions.

The fact is, as humans, we can draw upon the entire range, the entire range. And what we need to be drawing upon then is our infinite capability, our infinite dynamism, our infinite compassion, our infinite wisdom, our infinite creativity, our infinite ability to bring to an end anything that no longer is relevant to evolution.

Our infinite ability to embrace all that is evolutionary, which has become evolutionary, which may not have even been considered by us as evolutionary in the past. Let’s make use of the full human brain rather than dwelling upon these compartmentalized imaginations of cultural invention about what’s masculine and what’s feminine.

The ultimate unification of all of this is infinite organizing power, which we might consider to be the divine feminine, and the ability to tap into pure knowledge, which is the divine masculine, but really, these two are expressed in one beautiful image, which is called Ardhanarishvara.

[16:14] Ardhanarishvara: The Balance of Masculine and Feminine

In Sanskrit, Ardhanarishvara means, Ardha means half. And Ishvara means Supreme Being. There’s a beautiful image of Lord Shiva in which the left-hand side of Shiva is classically, culturally feminine, both in dressing and in physiology, anatomy.

Whereas the right-hand side of Shiva appears as masculine, and in between, there’s not a sharp line, there is a fuzzy boundary line between the two.

And if you walk around the Shiva Murti, a murti means a three-dimensional sculptural object. Then, if you stand to Shiva’s right-hand side, you’ll notice that the back of Shiva has now become masculine, and the front has become feminine. If you continue clockwise around Shiva, It’s always from every point of view of the observer, of any observer, is always half and half masculine, feminine, all in one body. And this is telling us something. You’re not compartmentalized. Compartmentalization is a mistake. It’s a mistake. And the idea that I’m going to form my entire identity on a cultural invention of what it is that I am is a mistake.

[18:04] Being vs. Doing: What It Means to Be Human

It’s a mistake of the intellect from the Vedic perspective. You’re all of it. You are all of it. Don’t be exclusive. Be inclusive of all of it. Omnisexual. We have our humanity. Our humanity is in full play.

And so then, what does this mean with regard to action? Doings are not being. I’ve emphasized this many times in other places, but to try to form one’s identity on the basis of doings —”I do sexual activity in this particular way.” I’m going to put in brackets here in parentheses for Americans, (so far).

I do my sexual activity in this particular way (so far). What do I mean by so far? Don’t be alarmed. I mean, so far as you know, right now, that’s the way that you seem to find sexual expression. It’s a doing. It’s not Being.

Being is what you are. Doings are what you do. And we are not human doings, we are human beings. And so, a human being has all of it in us. How it expresses itself in any given moment, dependent upon what is relevant behavior in a given setting; those are all doings. Doings can never be a sustained identity. Doings can never be a sustained identity.

What is a sustained identity? Being. Being goes beyond body. Being is pure consciousness. Being is the nature of the Knower. Being is unbounded awareness. And Being is all-inclusive.

So that’s about where I’d like to go on the subject of what does it mean to be masculine in the modern age?

First of all, I don’t think there’s such a thing as either the modern age or of compartmentalized masculinity. I think neither of them actually exist. What exists is one continuum of our sense of what’s modern and one continuum of omnisexuality. Humanity. Humanity. And we need to find in our humanity the entire range, the entire spectrum of human repertoire.

Jai Guru Deva.