In reading Jung’s work on archetypes this morning, I am reminded of how much I love being exposed to the ideas of great minds.
Getting through two pages took me half an hour, and sent me into the realms of Immanuel Kant, Aristotle, Plato, a critique of reason and the nature of knowing itself.
My willingness to become a true student in the act of reading was so enjoyable, it got me thinking about my work with men.
Of all the archetypes, I have noticed that we men tend to be most comfortable with the Magician. Not the entirety of the archetype, however, but the part of it that deals with reason and knowledge. We feel safe in our ivory towers, distant from the messiness of the world and the feminine.
Magicians locked up in their ivory towers never become powerful, however. Because from that place up in the clouds, the learning can not be grounded in the realm of matter and lived experience.
For that to happen, the budding Magician must also integrate the shamanic aspect of the Magician archetype, which most men never do. Being a true student, like being a shaman, has a strong element of descendance, of moving down from reason into matter. And since so many men don’t honor this movement, they end up as nutty professors (A Beautiful Mind) rather than powerful Magicians.
Studying is best done for the love of learning, not for the desire to consume books. It’s best done for the potentially blissful process of expanding and revising our map of reality, not simply for taking on fascinating ideas in order to dominate a quiz down the pub.
When we fail to honor the real challenge of being a true student, we may accumulate knowledge, but we become disembodied, ungrounded and sans real wisdom. In effect, we become less powerful and more miserable.
So give your Magician the opportunity of becoming powerful by celebrating the process of true study. Spend an unreasonable amount of time with one book, rather than skimming through 10*.
When you do so, you’ll slowly start to discover that wisdom is holographic in nature, that delving deeply into one excellent book of powerful ideas will open up a cosmos of universal principles far greater than what is merely between those covers.
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*When I first read David Deida’s the Way of the Superior Man, I liked it so much I decided to translate it. I spent countless late evenings/nights with that project.
Similarly, when reading Robert Moore’s and Douglas Gillette’s book on KWML, I changed my focus for this website, dedicated vast amounts of time to learning and living the wisdom, and eventually became an international authority on the topic.