Some of the great students of this reservoir in recent centuries have been George Groddeck, Gurdjieff, Carl Jung, Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell, and Georges Dumezil. (Location 133)
The male in the past twenty years has become more thoughtful, more gentle. But by this process he has not become more free. He’s a nice boy who pleases not only his mother but also the young woman he is living with. (Location 175)
I remember a bumper sticker during the sixties that read “WOMEN SAY YES TO MEN WHO SAY NO.” (Location 186)
Young men for various reasons wanted their harder women, and women began to desire softer men. It seemed like a nice arrangement for a while, but we’ve lived with it long enough now to see that it isn’t working out. (Location 191)
But showing a sword doesn’t necessarily mean fighting. It can also suggest a joyful decisiveness. (Location 208)
What I’m suggesting, then, is that every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. (Location 233)
We have to accept the possibility that the true radiant energy in the male does not hide in, reside in, or wait for us in the feminine realm, nor in the macho/John Wayne realm, but in the magnetic field of the deep masculine. It is protected by the instinctive one who’s underwater and who has been there we don’t know how long. (Location 271)
The man has to do it bucket by bucket. (Location 290)
No mother worth her salt would give the key anyway. If a son can’t steal it, he doesn’t deserve it. (Location 341)
The boys in our culture have a continuing need for initiation into male spirit, but old men in general don’t offer it. (Location 387)
It’s becoming clear to us that manhood doesn’t happen by itself; it doesn’t happen just because we eat Wheaties. The active intervention of the older men means that older men welcome the younger man into the ancient, mythologized, instinctive male world. (Location 395)
One could say that many young men in the sixties tried to accept initiation from women. But only men can initiate men, as only women can initiate women. (Location 428)
Many men, however—and I am one of them—have found inside an ability to nurture that didn’t appear until it was called for. (Location 448)
If the old men haven’t done their work to interrupt the mother-son unity, what else can the boys do to extricate themselves but to talk ugly? It’s quite unconscious and there’s no elegance in it at all. (Location 472)
The gist of his idea is that if the son does not actually see what his father does during the day and through all the seasons of the year, a hole will appear in the son’s psyche, and the hole will fill with demons who tell him that his father’s work is evil and that the father is evil. (Location 517)
If the son learns feeling primarily from the mother, then he will probably see his own masculinity from the feminine point of view as well. (Location 583)
Something in the adolescent male wants risk, courts danger, goes out to the edge—even to the edge of death. (Location 646)
“If you’re a young man and you’re not being admired by an older man, you’re being hurt.” (Location 671)
Not seeing your father when you are small, never being with him, having a remote father, an absent father, a workaholic father, is an injury. (Location 673)
Those with no wounds are the unluckiest of all. (Location 885)
Our story gives a teaching diametrically opposite. It says that where a man’s wound is, that is where his genius will be. (Location 888)
We know that shame often keeps us from meeting other people’s eyes—or our own. (Location 1056)
The Wild Man’s job is to teach the young man how abundant, various, and many-sided his manhood is. The boy’s body inherits physical abilities developed by long-dead ancestors, and his mind inherits spiritual and soul powers developed centuries ago. (Location 1171)
Some say that the man’s task in the first half of his life is to become bonded to matter: to learn a craft, become friends with wood, earth, wind, or fire. (Location 1252)
Passivity increases exponentially as the educational system turns out “products.” (Location 1291)
The average American child by eighteen has seen four thousand hours of commercials, yet very few televisions have been smashed by axes, very few presidential debates interrupted (Location 1292)
The passive man may not say what he wants, and the girlfriend or wife has to guess it. As a compensation for passivity at home, he may go into robot production at work, but that isn’t really what he wants either. (Location 1314)
The naïve man will also be proud that he can pick up the pain of others. He particularly picks up women’s pain. (Location 1341)
He is often more in touch with women’s pain than with his own, and he will offer to carry a woman’s pain before he checks with his own heart (Location 1345)
I don’t mean that men shouldn’t listen. But hearing a woman’s pain and carrying it are two different things. (Location 1347)
But, for us, how can we get a look at the cinders side of things when the society is determined to create a world of shopping malls and entertainment complexes in which we are made to believe that there is no death, disfigurement, illness, insanity, poverty, lethargy, or misery? (Location 1685)
When a man possesses empathy, it does not mean that he has developed the feminine feeling only; of course he has, and it is good to develop the feminine. But when he learns to shudder, he is developing a part of the masculine emotional body as well. (Location 1788)
James Hillman remarks: “If you are still being hurt by an event that happened to you at twelve, it is the thought that is hurting you now.” (Location 2329)
We know that each child begins in the womb as a female, and the fetus chosen to be male goes through hundreds of changes before he is born. (Location 2390)
speaks of adolescent wildness and its challenge to our lack of ideas. Their music, their fashions, their words, their codes, he says, announce that the initiatory moment has come. Those extravagances are a request for a response. (Location 3662)
Hundreds of times one man or another has said to me that now, at forty or forty-five, he realizes that his task throughout his life has been to be a substitute husband, lover, and soul companion for his mother. He envisions himself as a white knight for womankind. If I ask such a man, “How do you feel about men?” he is likely to say, “I have never been able to trust them.” (Location 3770)