Look at me

Where the appearance of a self stands in for the Self, there is a ceaseless striving for significance.

Yes, sir!

As boys, we were trained from childhood to trust external authority—parents, teachers, priests, doctors, elders, bosses et al. No one said, “Trust yourself.” The price for this is men who lack self-confidence.

Self-image

In the end, all that’s required is for us to surrender our attachments. The stickiest of all of the attachments is the image we hold of ourselves.

The father wound

“You are my son, whom I love. With you I am well pleased.” Few and widely spaced are boys whose fathers tell them that. So they cobble together a sense of themselves from other sources. Now they are men, divorced from the ceremonies of innocence, twisted by compensatory behaviours and lost in their lusts.