Men Going Their Own Way?
A Purpose for a Man.
Is it enough that a man and a woman be the comfort and purpose to one another? That is what many seem to want and what out modern civil world was supposed to be about before feminism.
Wasn’t it?
I continue looking at men and continue to update my podcast. We need to take a good look at ourselves if we are to survive, let alone prevail in the modern matriarchy that has been thrust upon us like 21C orphans. Revisions and deeper thought are needed. I hope these essays help.
For a while it was Percy’s father’s path and we saw what happened there. His first comfort and purpose was Belcane, the foreign Princess, his Queen. He was a Man who adventured out, found his woman and married her. He had a Kingdom and treasure. But he was drawn away by Hertzeloyde, ultimately to her own sorrow.
Draw what modern conclusions you may from that.
Certainly some of the feedback from women has been that Gamhuret was a philanderer. He certainly was not a perfect man but neither was she, taking some other woman’s husband. We get a lot of that these days.
Are we meant to be perfect or is ‘Perfect Fool’ the best we can achieve?
That is what ‘Parzival’ means in the sub-text of his name. Only the fool who lacks sophistication (falseness) can access the Hoy Grail.
Pure. Authentic. It wasn’t Gamhuret’s destiny. It was his son, Parzival’s.
Young Percy, now a Knight, is sent out on the Quest to find the Holy Grail. It is at the Command of the King and so he goes, along with all the other Knights, of course. They, like him, travel alone, independent, to all the corners of the world. Men, Going Their Own Way, but with a common Duty. They are United in a Brotherhood. It is the beginning of a Philosophy for him. A purpose in life.
It is Divinely ordered. Not much like today.
Maybe we are going backwards. We do not even give honour to the father let alone to the Father of us all.
The Grail he is searching for is the same one we search for; the Meaning and Power and Purpose of Life. It is the Light of the Spirit. It affords us Full Consciousness. It can cure all the ills of the world and restore the Kingdom. That is to be the Task of Men. Their task is to find it.
It is our task. But we become diverted by comfort. It is a journey into ourselves. A discovery of who we are as men. We have to seek out that treasure that lies deep within us. It is a bigger task than defeating Feminism or even Marxism, and defeating those can only be done by fully conscious men.
Finding and Losing.
Now here is where I come in.
On the first evening out on the Quest he meets his Uncle Amfortas, who he has never met before, and who is the Keeper of the Grail. He is the Old Man inside all of us who has the key to how to be a man. But he is not a particularly good example. He had ‘failed’ in a life shaping task. A moral challenge.
Parzival had not a clue about this or anything else about Amfortas.
Amfortas is an old man, wise now, slow, careful, dignified, after a long career as a Knight and King, and he is severely wounded.
He has the Male Wound; the same wound all men have. Few men even recognise that they are wounded.
He is ambulatory, with difficulty, and rarely leaves his rooms except to go fishing. He had been ‘morallychallenged’ in mid-life, at the height of his pwers and had made an unwise choice. Interestingly, it has not held him back from greatness.
Many of us are not destined to be the Keeper of the Grail. It actually adds to his torment. He cannot partake of it.
At dinner that evening Percy sees the Grail paraded through the Hall. It can cure all ills. It is not for the throng in the great Hall and is taken past Amfortas to the room behind the old King’s throne.
It is for one Greater than him.
He also sees and takes benefit from the Cornucopia that can feed and sustain the World. Everyone feasts on it’s inexhaustible gifts; Percy too. He almost forgets about the Grail.
All we have is the ‘gift’ that Men provide from their own meager resources. But were we to discover our real manhood, our deep humanity, we could restore the world.
But young Percy fails to ask two fundamental questions.
The first was about his Uncle’s obvious distress (remembering his mothers ‘politeness’ rules) and this is the first ‘fault’ that prevents the Grail passing into his possession. “What ails the Uncle” was all he needed to say. He didn’t though.
Men still do not ask other men the decent question, the compassionate question.
The second, which is what the vast majority of men and particularly for us, what MRAs fail to ask was “Who does the Grail serve”. It was vital.
Next day everything is gone.
As he leaves the empty Castle the drawbridge snaps shut, clipping his foot. How many young men shoot themselves in the foot with their own angry certainties and ignorance. So many young men have their attention captured by the ‘goods’ of the world and lose that brief sight of the real purpose of a man.
Our society is obsessed with ‘goods’; material goods which we consider as essential to our wel-being as food and drink. The young, particularly are seduced by them, away from a sound path of developing their own Authentic and far more vauable ‘Good’.
Young Percy has set out just the day before to find the Holy Grail. He caught a glimpse of it so quickly and just as quickly lost it. The Teenage Boy is right at that point where his spiritual nature suddenly lights him up, only to be drawn away by the ‘goods’ of the world.
We as MRAs while providing space for ourselves in small internet crevices, rarely ask the fundamental questions. We are only starting to make the space for understanding other men’s pain. It is our own. And we let the chance for a tremendous power to slip by leaving us bereft and confused.
We still have not approached the question of Who does the Grail serve. Is it just YOU?
Young Percy carried his Mother’s lessons with him into the world, discovered a manly purpose but was untutored in manliness. He was under the delusion that wearing armour, an outer shell, made him a man.
What is worn on the outside is very different from the man inside. He needs a quite different sort of clothing in there.
It may be that Hertzeloyde gave him what he really needed. Her silk shift. It was for the inner chap.
BTW. In answer to some feedback comments, very little is said about Amfortas by Wolfram. He is a rather sad figure and does not feature strongly in the tale. He is the current Keeper of the Grail and Parzival is destined to be the next.
Wagner, who was a composer, took a lot of liberties with the character. !!
A New Purpose – Finding the Men we Can Become.
Parzival spends the rest of his life trying to find the Castle again with it’s old man and its Holy Treaure. A long and arduous life, with its ups and downs, successes and failures, material gains and losses.
He discovers the three things that this post is all about and what we men need just as much as he did. Our Emotion; Morality; And Character.
He is given some solace within a short time by another man. A ‘mentor’. This one takes his time with the young fellow, teaching him manly skills and manly attitudes. He is patient and firm.
Many teen boys, even when they have fathers, distance themselves too early. A fortunate boy makes a friend of his dad as he comes of age. Throughout history young men have needed a mentor at this stage. Another man he can look up to; one who will give his time and wisdom.
Again, our society does not treat boys – or girls for that matter – at all well. Our feminised pseudo-empathetic and pseudo-’understanding’ world encourages childishness and drives children from their parents. ‘Mentors’ are far more likely to be precocious other children who have developed ’spiv’ characteristics early on. Our ‘Entertainment’ Industry is a seductive paedophile Whore that holds out sweeties.
As Parents and Adults we must defeat this multi-headed monster and reclaim our children.
But, let us go on. – Parzival meets many other men on his travels – and fights them.
Women’s rules.
Chivalry rules.
He defeats most, but instead of killing them, he sends them to serve his King. He has learned part of the Holy lesson from his Adult mentor, but he has to practice it. An understanding is starting to arise in him. Just as manhood did. He is starting to modify his mother’s rules; going against even the conventional ‘men’s rules’ of the day as should befit his Station. He is starting to question his actions and learn what is the purpose of his manhood gifts.
Now, some people have asked me about this. I have had emails from confused folk. It is about this –what I called ‘intuitive’ idea – of defeating without killing.
Parzival becomes well known and loved, even revered, for not just ‘sparing’ his combat opponents, but restoring their dignity and honour. He has that ‘Moses’ quality that changes all around him as he ushers in a new era, a new ‘Law’.
He respects his ‘enemy du jour’. He ‘converts’. He doesn’t keep them as a private army – which he could – but sends them to serve a King far greater than himself.
As Men’s Rights Activists we often demonise our opponents. We hack them down instead of engaging them, overcoming them and turning them to Good purpose. I would say that there is a lesson for MRAs to learn from this.
I see MRAs such as Glenn Sacks get scorned for being patient and engaging women correspondents who oppose his views. And I see a ‘Triuwe’ Knight in him. He knows that there is much that is good and useful in most people. Even self-described feminist women.
I see David Usher being scorned for trying hard to engage people who object to marriage; even amongst MRAs. He is an educator-knight. A fine mentor.
I see fine, strong women like Wendy MacElroy being dismissed and villified simply for having a mild sort of equality – feminism as a trade-mark. She converts more Feminists than you can sheke a stick at.
But onward.
Parzival meets his half-brother, his Father’s and Belcane’s son – the piebald Fierefiz, the half-cast.; the man who is ‘different’. A man as Good and as Honourable as himself and carrying the same Father’s genes.
He fights him. Of course.
We do that too.
All men are our brothers and we automatically fight them. Women’s rules. “Let’s you and him fight.
It is something we must stop doing. We must VALUE men. Even as we oppose them. Yes, we must overcome them, as reflected in their ideologies and perspectives. Yes we must play the cards that are dealt us and often in circumstances that are bloody and cruel. But we do not need to succumb to the circumstances.
How many men are Manginas, not because they want to support women’s rights, but to Lord it over other men and steal their armour. Their ‘High Moral Ground’ is just a hillock of quicksand they stand on.
Manginas play a main role in the women’s game of ‘Let’s you and him fight’. We can fight them. We have little choice. But how we fight is our choice. The purpose of the fight is in our purview.
But we must defeat them to recruit our fellow men and put them to good use. Serving the King.
How many women are really nice people who want to fulfil their potential but have been sold a pack of AgitProp? They speak in slogans because that is what they have been taught. Defeating them will take a lot of whacks from morn to dusk, but when their mendacities are defeated we must resore their dignity and honour.
We have recruited at least half of the women who come to men’s rights forums to see what we are about. The patient, older men do that work, even against the efforts of young farm-boys who rant in their anger and ignorance. Women and manginas come with challenges and mouth, but we use masculine power of argument and reason and facts, and we CAN overcome.
Many women fight just as well as many men – and on different battle-grounds – and far better than some.
Percy fails to defeat Fierefiz but they part as equals. It is an equality of failure to overcome their own hubris. We must do better. We must change the rules of game in order to win the Manhood prizes. We must play a different game with good men’s rules for different prizes, conscious of what effect we have.
Our consciousness of self is barely better than the old Greeks. We as men, must become more conscious, so that we greet our brother and ride alongside him, despite our mother’s baggage. We must settle our differences by respecting those which are beneficial to us all.
We are a disappointed male generation. Young Parzival suffered profound disappointment all of his life. He travelled widely but he struggled with a ‘native’ immorality largely inherited from women but constantly and deleteriously re-inforced by most of the men he encountered.
He progressively overcomes his own crude nature, refining a spiritual self that one day will change his world.
He tries hard to be a man and serve his King. It is his Duty. His Purpose. But he has to find his true self first.
He had started with ‘expectations’, but no internal moral ‘map’. He lived in a world in turmoil and decline, as we do, that had no maps. The human heart is the landscape he travelled through which was, and still is beset by war. It is the same war that goes on inside us all.
He journeyed painfully. As all men seem to do. And he rarely had another man to trust enough to teach him the right paths to travel.
Or a good woman, who rises above simple gender.
‘Good’, Integrity, Morality, Purpose, aren’t ‘gender-specific’ concepts.
They are transcendent.
I chose the word ‘disappointment’ for Percy deliberately. There is a moral judgement aspect to it but I meant it mostly as a feeling. It is an internal ‘warning’ expression we need to take note of.
That dissatisfaction and disappointment are as easily projected onto others as female guilt is projected onto men. We men MUST be careful to own our own feelings and not cast them onto others.
Simply ‘blaming’ women will not serve us well let alone serve a higher Purpose.
Blaming men happens a lot in our modern psychobabble era. We have broad shoulders but even camels crack with just one more straw. Men too.
It is all very well saying that I have expectations and therefore open myself to disappointment but that smacks too much of a pseudo-guru-speak to me. We all have expectations and most are perfectly reasonable.
If we ‘tweak’ them just a little.
I generally expect no more of others than I expect of myself, and most often a little less. I expect a little more, too, from people I look up to and those who claim a position that impacts upon me. That is a man’s way.
I get disappointed, as Parzival was, because I am an emotional being. All men are. We get angry and we love. It is our anger and our love. Men’s emotions are real, and an integral part of us. Not the ersatz ‘sentimentality’ so often seen in immature women.
Just look at the real sorrow of a firefighter who carries out a dead child from a building. It is genuine tears he sheds. Men’s tears from the heart. Look at the soldier who repels an attack and cuddles a bereft child on his knee. He cries with her.
Men do their job by controlling their emotions, deploying that emotional power usefully.
But we are encouraged, mainly by other, lesser, men to deny our emotions altogether. Be ‘Hard’.
Denying our emotions, a youthful MRA ‘mode’, is to cut off our sword-arm. It takes away a fundamental humanity which we need to gain the Grail.
Who does the Grail serve?
An emotionless man is a psychopath serving a darkness.
I am a man and I have emotions too. I laugh and cry; I can be affected by a sunset and a song. Men cry when their children are stolen by the family Courts. Our tears are not seen because we hide them. We feel the total waste of our life’s efforts when we are dispossessed.
We see men cry but only when we allow them to.
Women are emotional creatures and that we have to adapt to them is also a demand that women try to force us to wear – for their own purpose. It has to have a higher purpose. But for most women, casting that responsibility to adapt onto men only allows women licence.
Of course we have to adapt to one another’s emotional states. Of course we have to recognise emotion. But it is neither a one way street (how many times do you hear women talk about men’s emotions or try to adapt to them?) nor is it the sole highway to happiness.
The issue is not the demanded adaptation by men that damages us but the use of emotion – by modern women – to blackmail, manipulate and coerce, instead of enliven one another or comfort another or empathise with another.
Men must not follow these “women’s rules’.
And men must not allow the downgrading of emotion by armoured Knights wielding swords and not wanting to cry at the futility.
Parzival learned the hard way. So many men today not only learn the hard way but get hacked to pieces by emotionally-driven forces unleashed upon them by feminist-controlled Institutions.
Men’s emotion can colour our world lively with exacting brush-strokes, finely discriminating shades of detail and a pallette of hue. But modern women – and quite a few men too – use emotion like Jackson Pollock used buckets of shit. It isn’t adult.
Too many men reject emotion altogether and don armour to hide within. MRAs must harness their emotion; train it, deploy it.
Who does the Grail serve?
We MRAs vent to one another but the public does not see our righteous anger. It does not see it as valid, because we don’t show it; and when we do we do not harness it and use it well.
It is women’s rules are that men’s adult anger is not to be expressed. It HAS to be.
I say ‘adult’. I have a model, fuzzy albeit, in my mind of what an adult is. Parzival only had his mother. Who are your models of ‘Adult’?
I ask a question here. If you were to give a teenage boy 10 men to model himself on, adult men, who would you choose?
What are the qualities you would want to show to a teen boy?
I expect people of a particular age to behave as adults. I expect them to guide children and contribute to society. I do not expect adults to act like children - although some child-like aspects can be endearing – and react strongly (with emotion as well) when adults are childish.
A Major aspect of adulthood which is a significant ‘missing in action’ factor is this issue of Morality.
It was an aspect in Percy’s life that he found only by being beaten near unto death and being cared for in the forest by an old Hermit. Another Old Man. A compassionate old man.
How many of our younger MRAs, raised through Institutionalised Feminism, listen to old men? Old men have healing power.
How many women have rejected their father, their own personal older man?
How many of our young MRAs, while ranting against feminism, accept feminism’s rejection of morality?
Is it wise to ‘Go Your Own Way’ without a moral compass?
Over his life, Percy developed ‘Character’. Is it only through such hardships that we gain Character?
I haven’t found another way. But by crikey, I would like to save so many young men the unecessary pain and anguish.
Today people are lauded for ‘being characters’, like wise-guys and spivs and celebrities. I am making a judgement here. A moral judgment. I am told that I do that.
Feminists and the majority of women tell me that I have no right to judge and morality is just a patriarchal means to oppress women. Cant. Slogan-thinking. AgitProp. More women’s rules to hamper men.
Note how Feminists and Women in General are very, very quick to judge a man.
And far, far too many men say the same thing, but with a variety of other self-serving rationales.
Characterless people. Immoral spivs.
I – and you – have EVERY right to judge. It is a higher-order adult skill and ability and necessity.
You have a DUTY as an MRA to understand what morality is and abide by moral standards upon which Judgment depends. It is a significant part of an adults ‘journey’, a Man’s journey, to explore with morality like a navigator of old and through its substance, understand the world.
And we must judge ourselves if we are to develop ourselves. The total rejection of morality by society in general, led by this ‘adaptation’ to childish non-adult self-centred emotiveness based on pseudo-women’s demands, manipulations and coercions is the ground in which feminism and attendant/other evils grow.
It is laying waste to the souls of men.
By rejecting – even denying the existence of – morality, we give ourselves licence.
Who does the Grail Serve?
It is a ‘free-pass’ to make our own rules and damn the consequences.
MGTOW can only go so far before they run into reality.
We can become ‘characters’ instead of developing Character. Like Britney Spears with or without dicks. Non-ebrities.
It is the rejection of morality that plays men into the hands of feminism.
Good people love freedom. Bad people love licence.
Morals produce Character. License destroys it.
These lessons are not ‘Women’s Rules’.
This is amfortas.
If you have been challenged reading this, good. Think about it. Talk back.
Ask, Who Does the Grail Serve.
* see also
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2009/08/10/the-ascent-of-men/
Amfortas is a Psychologist and Men's Rights Advocate living in Tasmania; the mania inflicted by Feminist-Socialism. He is the Past-Chairman of mensnewsdaily.com Ask, Who Does the Grail Serve. | More from Amfortas
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