I’ve been dabbling into different types of books lately. I no longer only read business books or marketing books, which is a good step for me because I read so many of them over the past 2 years that I really needed to expand my consciousness beyond just business.
I’ve been studying a lot of David DeAngelo’s information which originally was so that I could learn more about girls and improve my dating life. I first heard about David DeAngelo when I was 16 and bought the Double Your Dating eBook. Since then, I’ve bought quite a few other products from him and have learned a ton about everything from How To Approach Women in Bars and Clubs to How To Become a Man.
Some people might think it’s weird or different, but it’s something that I wanted to learn so of course I start to study to learn. What originally started as me just trying to learn how to attract women has actually evolved into something that’s led me to learn how to improve myself to the point where I’m happy with who I am whether I am single or in a relationship. This is a bonus because the women I have been dating enhance my life in one way or another. I’m actually not ashamed to share that anymore either, because it truly has led me to become a better person.
After initially learning how attraction worked, I became intrigued with different aspects of how human interactions take place. If you’ve ever sat in a mall and “people watched”, you know where I’m coming from. After going through one of David’s programs, he had mentioned a bunch of books that would be good to read in order to learn more about what he was speaking about. I became interested in a few of the titles of these books so bought them.
One of these books was “King, Warrior, Magician, Lover” by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette. The subtitle for this book was “Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine”.
Boy and Man Psychology
This really piqued my curiosity. It was all about how there are the different cycles in a man’s life that he must go through to evolve. In our society, we typically don’t have a ceremonial celebration that signifies the man being born and the boy dying. When you think about older society’s and how a man truly had a celebration when he became an adult, whether through a fighting ritual or being tortured by your tribe as in The Emerald Forest there was an initiation into becoming a man. We currently don’t have that in our society, for various reasons and laws. However, this has ultimately affected the evolution of men because many of us don’t truly evolve into our adult form. (I’m guilty of this and still have a lot of boy psychology).
An excerpt from the book:
“The drug dealer, the ducking and diving political leader, the wife beater, the chronically “crabby” boss, the “hot shot” junior executive, the unfaithful husband, the company “yes man”, the indifferent graduate school adviser, the “holier than thou” minister, the gang member, the father who can never find the time to attend his daughter’s school programs, the coach who ridicules his star athletes, the therapist who unconsciously attacks his clients’ “shining” and seeks a kind of gray normalcy for them, the yuppie- all these men have something in common. They are boys pretending to be men. They got that way honestly, because nobody showed them what a mature man is like.”
Reading this really made me think about people who I’ve met and how they have gotten to where they are at. Many people have gotten to this point because no one has been there to guide them. I’ve always been lucky enough to have positive influences in my life who have helped show me right from wrong and have led me to where I’m currently at. I understand that I’m not perfect and that I still have a lot to learn, but I’m truly proud of where I’m at right now. I’m also learning how to become a more mature masculine man in the process thanks to books like this.
The Four Archetypes
I can’t possibly dig into all of the archetypes in this post so I’m just going to share a little of what I’ve learned. In the end, we all hold each of these archetypes in ourselves at all points in our life. We make decisions based on what the dominant archetype currently is in our life. We have these different archetypes and they truly do control all decisions in our lives, whether consciously or unconsciously.
The King
The King archetype is based on two functions: ordering and providing fertility and blessing. The king archetype is actually “the central archetype” around which the rest of the psyche is organized. There are two sides of the king, the active pole of the tyrant and the passive pole of the weakling. This forms the basis to everything we do and we need to be aware of balancing out the tyrant and weakling to hold our true potential.
The Warrior
The Warrior archetype consists of the aggressiveness and competitiveness we feel as men. Our aggressiveness is what truly drives us, energizes us and motivates us to do things. It pushes us into the offensive and is one of the things we must always keep in our mind. This works for pushing us forward in our business as well as meaning that men must typically make the first move in a relationship with females. This makes sense, the masculine is supposed to initiate and a woman expects this of us.
The Magician
The Magician archetype helps us with our awareness and with our insights, primarily as knowledge of anything that is not immediately apparent or commonsensical. It is the part of us that has our “bullshit detector” and is often right, I’ve experienced this with certain people and you probably have experienced it as well. The magician part of us is also responsible for separating our ego from our emotions, without repressing our true emotions.
The Lover
The Lover archetype is our deeply sensual side. The part of us that is the lover doesn’t just see the world in a grain of sand, but he feels it. The man that is under the influence of the lover wants to touch and be touched. He wants to live out the connectedness he feels with the world and all the feelings he has and wants to experience the world as a sensual experience in its totality. All of us, when we actually stop just doing things and just let ourselves be and feel without the pressure to perform, when we actually “stop and smell the roses”, we are feeling the lover inside of us.
I’d love to keep writing about this but I have a feeling that’s enough to let you know a little bit about this book and if it’s something that might be of interest to you or not. If it is something of interest to you, you can buy it from Amazon by clicking the image here:
Otherwise, i’m curious about what you think of the different archetypes of a man. Do you feel it’s important for us to learn about these things in order to grow? Do you think it will benefit our business relationships, sexual relationships or friendships by learning how to control and access each of these archetypes?
Or if you just want to talk about becoming a mature masculine man I’m interested in learning what you think.