He is dedicated to incarnating love on this earth, through his work and his sexuality, and he does so as a free man, bound neither by outer convention nor inner cowardice.

my book Intimate Communion.*

If you want real passion, you need a ravisher and a ravishee; otherwise, you just have two buddies who decide to rub genitals in bed.

If men and women are clinging to a politically correct sameness even in moments of intimacy, then sexual attraction disappears.

It is up to you: You can have a loving friendship between two similars, but you need a more masculine and a more feminine partner in the moments when you want strong sexual polarity.

If you have a more masculine sexual essence, you would, of course, enjoy staying home and playing with the kids, but deep down, you are driven by a sense of mission. You may not know your mission, but unless you discover this deep purpose and live it fully, your life will feel empty at its core, even if your intimate relationship and family life are full of love. If you have a more feminine sexual essence, your professional life may be incredibly successful, but your core won’t be fulfilled unless love is flowing fully in your family or intimate life.

It’s never going to be over, so stop waiting for the good stuff. As of now, spend a minimum of one hour a day doing whatever you are waiting to do until your finances are more secure,

Practice love instead of trying to bring an end to the quality that bothers you.

The world and your woman will always present you with unforeseen challenges. You are either living fully, giving your gift in the midst of those challenges, even today, or you are waiting for an imaginary future which will never come. Men who have lived significant lives are men who never waited: not for money, security, ease, or women. Feel what you want to give most as a gift, to your woman and to the world, and do what you can to give it today.

Notice if there are times when you find it difficult to look into someone’s eyes, or times your chest and solar plexus become tense and contracted. These are signs of an unskillful reaction to hurt. Contracted and closed in on yourself, you are unable to act. You are trapped in your own self-protective tension, no longer a free man.

The superior man practices opening during these times of automatic closure. Open the front of your body so your chest and solar plexus are not tense. Sit or stand up straight and full, opening the front of your body, softening your chest and belly, wide and free. Breathe down through your chest and solar plexus, deep into your belly. Look directly into the eyes of whomever you are with, feeling your own pain as well as feeling the other person. Only when the front of your body is relaxed and opened, your breath full and deep, and your gaze unguarded and directly connected with another person’s eyes, can your fullest intelligence manifest spontaneously in the situation.

LIVE AS IF YOUR FATHER WERE DEAD A man must love his father and yet be free of his father’s expectations and criticisms in order to be a free man.

How would you have lived your life differently if you had never tried to please your father? If you never tried to show your father that you were worthy? If you never felt burdened by your father’s critical eye?

For the next three days, do at least one activity a day that you have avoided or suppressed because of the influence of your father.

Your edge is where you stop short, or where you compromise your fullest gift, and, instead, cater to your fears.

All men are afraid, unless they are perfectly free. If you cannot admit this, you are pretending to yourself, and to others. Your friends will feel your fear, even if you do not. Thus, they will lose trust in you, knowing you are deluding yourself, lying to yourself, and are therefore likely to lie to them, consciously or unconsciously.

I know that I could give more of my true gift, but I am afraid that I may not succeed, and then I will be a penniless failure. I’ve spent fifteen years developing my career, and I’m afraid to let go of it and start fresh, even though I know that I spend most of my life doing things I have no real interest in doing.

Live with your lips pressed against your fears, kissing your fears, neither pulling back nor aggressively violating them. 

Use aids to support your relaxation into, and creation from, this source. Read books that remind you of who you are, in truth. Spend time with people who inspire and reflect the source to you. Meditate, contemplate, or pray daily so that you steep yourself in the source.

If a woman suggests something that changes a man’s perspective, then he should make a new decision based on his new perspective. But he should never betray his own deepest knowledge and intuition in order to please his woman or “go along” with her. Both she and he will be weakened by such an action. They will grow to resent each other, and the crust of accumulated inauthenticity will burden their love, as well as their capacity for free action.

YOUR PURPOSE MUST COME BEFORE YOUR RELATIONSHIP

Your woman will be more fulfilled with thirty minutes a day of undivided attention and ravishing love than she will with a few hours of your weak and divided presence when your heart really isn’t into it. Time you spend with your woman should be time you really want to be with her more than anything else. If you’d rather be doing something else, she’ll feel it. Both of you will be dissatisfied.

LEAN JUST BEYOND YOUR EDGE In any given moment, a man’s growth is optimized if he leans just beyond his edge, his capacity, his fear. He should not be too lazy, happily stagnating in the zone of security and comfort. Nor should he push far beyond his edge, stressing himself unnecessarily, unable to metabolize his experience. He should lean just slightly beyond the edge of fear and discomfort. Constantly. In everything he does.

Your fear is the sharpest definition of your self. You should know it. You should feel it virtually constantly. Fear needs to become your friend, so that you are no longer uncomfortable with it. Rather, primary fear shows you that you are at your edge. Staying with the fear, staying at your edge, allows real transformation to occur.

Many men are willing to poke their woman and bloom her in a mediocre way, sharing a few orgasms and a few emotional moments of bonding before going over tomorrow’s schedule. Many men are willing to poke the world and bloom it in a mediocre way, making a few bucks and contributing enough betterment so they don’t feel like their life is a total waste. But very few men are willing to do the deed for real, to use everything they’ve got to liberate their woman and the world into the deepest possible truth, love, and openness. Few men are willing to give their deepest genius, their true endowment, the poetry of their very being, with every thrust of sex and life. Most men are limpened with doubts and uncertainties. Or they hold back their true drive because of fear. So they diddle their woman and the world just enough to extract the pleasure and comfort they need to assuage their nagging sense of falsity and incompleteness.

You can ravish your woman so deeply that her surrender breaks your heart into light. You can press yourself into the world with such enduring love that the world opens and receives your deepest gifts.

But if you choose a life of sexual and worldly intercourse, you will feel trapped by woman and world unless you are free in the midst of “true fuck,” yielding yourself into the giving, holding nothing back, dissolving all time in the open of love. Through thick and thin, this is the way of the superior man. 

Choose men friends who themselves are living at their edge, facing their fears and living just beyond them. Men of this kind can love you without protecting you from the necessary confrontation with reality that your life involves. You should be able to trust that these friends will tell you about your life as they see it, offer you a specific action which will shed light on your own position, and give you the support necessary to live in the freedom just beyond your edge, which is not always, or even usually, comfortable.

IF YOU DON’T KNOW YOUR PURPOSE, DISCOVER IT, NOW Without a conscious life-purpose a man is totally lost, drifting, adapting to events rather than creating events. Without knowing his life-purpose a man lives a weakened, impotent existence, perhaps eventually becoming even sexually impotent, or prone to mechanical and disinterested sex.

BE WILLING TO CHANGE EVERYTHING IN YOUR LIFE A man must be prepared to give 100 percent to his purpose,

He must be capable of not knowing what to do with his life, entering a period of unknowingness and waiting for a vision or a new form of purpose to emerge.

It’s easy to feel disappointed by life; success is never as fulfilling as you think it is going to be. But there is a reason for this. Successfully completing a lesser purpose doesn’t feel very good for very long, because it is simply preparation for advancing toward a greater embodiment of your deeper purpose. Each purpose, each mission, is meant to be fully lived to the point where it becomes empty, boring, and useless. Then it should be discarded. This is a sign of growth, but you may mistake it for a sign of failure.

Among the signs of fulfilling or completing a layer of purpose are these: 1. You suddenly have no interest whatsoever in a project or mission that, just previously, motivated you highly. 2. You feel surprisingly free of any regrets whatsoever, for starting the project or for ending it. 3. Even though you may not have the slightest idea of what you are going to do next, you feel clear, unconfused, and, especially, unburdened. 4. You feel an increase in energy at the prospect of ceasing your involvement with the project. 5. The project seems almost silly, like collecting shoelaces or wallpapering your house with gas station receipts. Sure, you could do it, but why would you want to?

At this point, you must wait for a vision.

You may wish to go on a retreat in a remote area and be by yourself. Whatever it is you decide to do, consciously keep yourself open and available to receiving a vision of what is next. It will come.

The priority of the feminine, in men and women, is the flow of love in relationship. The priority of the masculine, in men and women, is the mission which leads to freedom. Ultimately, true freedom and true love are the same. However, the journey of the masculine and feminine to this unity of love and freedom is very different.

A short period of time with a father who is absolutely present, full in love, undivided inside, and sure of his mission in life, will affect your children much more positively than if they spend lots of time with a father who is ambiguous in his intent and has lost touch with his deepest purpose, no matter how much he loves his children.

With birth control so readily available, children are a choice. If you choose to be a householder and raise children, you are responsible for serving them with as much authentic love as possible, which you can only give if your life is aligned with your deepest purpose.

Tasks don’t get a man anywhere more conscious or free than he is capable of being in this present moment.

To help you remember the triviality of your daily tasks, interrupt your schedule with refreshers. These refreshers should cut to your core and strip the fat off the moment. Consider your own death. Behold an image of the most enlightened being you know. Contemplate the mystery of existence. Relax into the deepest and most profound loving of which you are capable.

STOP HOPING FOR YOUR WOMAN TO GET EASIER A woman often seems to test her man’s capacity to remain unperturbed in his truth and purpose. She tests him to feel his freedom and depth of love, to know that he is trustable. Her tests may come in the form of complaining, challenging him, changing her mind, doubting him, distracting him, or even undermining his purpose in a subtle or not so subtle way. A man should never think his woman’s testing is going to end and his life will get easier. Rather, he should appreciate that she does these things to feel his strength, integrity, and openness. Her desire is for his deepest truth and love. As he grows, so will her testing.

But because she wants to feel Shiva. She wants to feel your strength. She wants to feel that your happiness is not dependent on her response, nor on you making a million dollars. She wants to feel you are a superior man.

It never ends. A woman will always test her man for the pleasure of feeling his strength in loving, his capacity to transcend nuisance, his persistence in his own truth, and his capacity to share that truth in love with her, even when she is complaining—especially when she is complaining. Her complaint is the beginning of her pleasure. It is not true criticism, but a test of your Shiva-hood. The criticism is entirely dissolved in love as soon as she feels your humor and happiness in the midst of the poke.

She wants to feel your truth. She wants to feel your love. And she wants to feel that your truth and love are stronger than the barbs she can throw at you. Then she can relax and surrender into the polarity of man and woman. Then she can trust you.

the masculine means what it says. A man’s word is his honor. The feminine says what it feels. A woman’s word is her true expression in the moment.

So, when she says that she wants to move to Pittsburgh with you, and then, after you have sold the house, she says she doesn’t want to move with you, don’t start yelling, “But you said . . . !” When she first told you she wanted to move, she was feeling good about the relationship. When she then told you she doesn’t want to move, she was feeling bad about the relationship. Instead of arguing about what she said or didn’t say, establish love in the intimacy first.

The basic rule is this: Don’t believe the literal content of what your woman says unless love is flowing deeply and fully in the moment when she says it.

You should hear what your woman has to say and feel her depth carefully. Then, after you have fully considered her input, make your best possible decision from your own deep core.

PRAISE HER The masculine grows by challenge, but the feminine grows by praise. A man must be unabashed and expressed in his appreciation for his woman. Praise her freely.

Praise is literal food for feminine qualities. If you want your woman to grow in her radiance, health, happiness, love, beauty, power, and depth, praise these qualities. Praise them daily, a number of times.

Praise works. Information doesn’t. Praise motivates. Challenge doesn’t. Try it. Praise specific things you love about your woman five to ten times a day. Find out what happens. 

A man gets resentful and frustrated with his woman when he is too afraid, weak, or unskilled to penetrate her moods and tests into love. He wishes she were easier to deal with. But it is not entirely her fault that she is bitchy and complaining. It is also a reflection of her lack of being penetrated by love. When a man resigns, and simply tolerates his woman’s self-destructive moods, it is a sign of his weakness. His attitude has become one of wanting to escape women and the world, rather than wanting to serve women and the world into love. A man shouldn’t tolerate bitchy and complaining moodiness in his woman, but he should serve her and love her with every ounce of his skill and perseverance. Then, if she cannot or will not open in love, he might decide to end his relationship with her, harboring no anger or resentment, because he knows he has done everything he could.

DON’T ANALYZE YOUR WOMAN The feminine’s moods and opinions are like weather patterns. They are constantly changing, severe and gentle, and they have no single source. No analysis will work. There is no linear chain of cause and effect that can lead to the kernel of the “problem.” There is no problem, only a storm, a breeze, a sudden change in weather. And the bases of these storms are the high and low pressure systems of love. When a woman feels love flowing deeply, her mood can instantly evaporate into joy, regardless of the supposed reason for the mood.

90 percent of a woman’s emotional problems stem from feeling unloved.

“What do you want from me?” You tell her to think about it and let you know. This seems fair to a man, but it is not. It is a no-win situation for your woman. Why? Because what she really wants is a man who can figure it out for himself. She wants a man who loves her, and escorts her with his loving, without having to ask her what she wants all the time.

One of the deepest feminine desires in intimacy (though not in business or simple friendship) is to be able to relax and surrender, knowing that her man is taking care of everything.

Give your gift. Like wrestling a steer or surfing ocean waves, mastery involves blending with your woman’s powerful energy and feeling the rise and fall of the moment, without lapsing in presence for a second. You’re going to get stamped on by the steer, you’re going to get swamped by the ocean, and you’re going to get hurt by your woman. This is how you learn. You get up, dust yourself off, swim to shore, and turn and face your woman again. The only options are fear or mastery. You can quit, you can choose small steer and tiny waves, you can wait for your woman to calm down, or you can even threaten her. Or, you can take the moment as a challenge to your ability to conquer the world, and your woman, with love.

Sexual attraction, however, is very different from having sex. There is a big difference between choosing to be intimate with a woman and simply being attracted to her energy and radiance. Intimacy is a choice between people who want to commit to loving and serving one another. Whereas the zing of attraction is a choiceless natural flow of energy between your masculine core and feminine energy, wherever it is found. When a woman is relaxed in her feminine radiance, she is like beautiful music or a warm ocean breeze. You don’t need to have sex with her to savor inexpressible joy.

a more masculine man can expect that any woman who really turns him on and enlivens him will also be relatively wild, undisciplined, “bonkers,” chaotic, prone to changing her mind and “lying.” Still, from an energetic perspective, this kind of woman will be much more healing and inspiring to him than a more balanced or neutral woman who is steady, reasonable, “trustworthy,” and able to say what she means in a way he can understand.

If you are like most men, you have probably minimized your appreciation of the full spectrum of your woman’s feminine energy by numbing yourself to the aspects that most irritate you. For instance, she doesn’t drive you crazy any more because you’ve learned not to take her too seriously. Perhaps you have learned to seem attentive while not really listening to her endless chat. Or, maybe you have learned to give her a daily dose of affection as a way to quell her ongoing need for more intimate time than you really want to spend with her.

You will only be happy in intimacy if you choose a woman who is your sexual reciprocal as a partner. And you will only be able to survive such an intimacy if her dark and light sides are equally embraceable to you. It takes time to develop such skill and strength, but in doing so you learn to provide your woman, as well as the world, with a man whose gifts are uncompromised by fear of feminine power and chaos. 

The more you seek a woman who gives you everything, the less you get of anything. Business skills are for the most part masculine skills (in both men and women). Friendship, in itself, is a neutral, nonsexual matter. And sexual passion requires a clear polarity between your masculine core and your woman’s feminine energy. When you don’t prioritize the purpose of your relationship, these different energies often cancel each other out, and you are left with a sexually neutralized alliance.

If you decide, however, that the purpose of your intimacy is the passionate transmission of love, the rejuvenative healing of sexual energy, and the cultivation of heart through your mutual commitment to spiritual awakening, then be careful. Don’t force your woman to be your on-call accountant. Don’t expect her to always help you with your financial problems, like a career consultant. Don’t emphasize the daily chores while disregarding the bodily transmission of love for days and days. Don’t squash the fullness of her feminine energy into merely functional roles. Your woman has the capacity to awaken your heart and fill your body with life. You, however, must give her the opportunity—as well as the fullness of your masculine transmission of love.

She can be the mother of your children as well as your business partner, as long as these functions do not cut into the primacy of your purpose: to serve one another’s enlightenment through your unwavering commitment to love, and to enliven one another’s core by the bodily transmission of love via sexual polarity.

If you can’t handle one—if deep communion, rejuvenating passion, and spiritual happiness are not the main features of your present intimacy—then you have not passed the test, and it is best to discipline your desire for other partners, since nobody is likely to be served. 

In general, blonde, light-skinned, Japanese, and Chinese women are cooler. Dark skinned, brunette, red-headed, Korean, and Polynesian women are hotter.

You may begin to doubt your current intimate relationship if you don’t understand how your needs for feminine energy change. When your life seems dreary and boring, a more spicy and hot woman will probably appeal to you. She will provide you with the fire you are missing. However, when your life is extremely challenging and you feel burnt out, a hot woman might be too much. You may be more attracted to the soothing gaze and touch of a cool woman.

Sometimes a woman will make a request of her man in plain English, not to get him to do something, but to see if he is so weak that he will do it. In other words, she is testing his capacity to do what is right, not what she is asking for. In such cases, if the man does what his woman asks, she will be disappointed and angry. The man will have no idea why she is so angry or what could possibly please her. He must remember that her trust is engendered not by him fulfilling her requests, but by him magnifying love, consciousness, and success in their lives, in spite of her requests.

Underneath your woman’s superficial request is her actual desire and need: she wants your passionate fullness to pervade her, she wants to be able to trust the unshakability of your loving, she wants to feel in her bones that your divine masculine presence is stronger than your distractibility.

Your woman is a form of the goddess, taunting you, testing you, seducing you, ready to chop your head off with her wrath if you are weak and ambiguous in your truth, and ready to surrender to the force of your loving if you are steady and brilliant in your loving consciousness.

She won’t be disappointed if she feels you are strong and clear in the true direction of your heart. And if she is disappointed by your deepest truth, you shouldn’t be with her. 

The thing your woman is complaining about is rarely the thing she is complaining about.

When she complains about financial issues, she is usually feeling a lack in your masculine capacity to direct your life with clarity, purpose, integrity, and wisdom. The money itself is secondary. If you were poor but totally conscious, happy, full of integrity, fearless, humorous, loving, and giving your fullest gift to the world and to your woman, she wouldn’t complain about lack of money.

You must listen to your woman more as an oracle than as an advisor. She usually is speaking in a very tangential, but revelatory, style. She is revealing your unconscious habits that prevent your fullest awakening in consciousness. Your unconsciousness causes her pain. She won’t say it that way, but that’s what she is indicating.

If a woman has become the point of your life, you are lost. You have a gift to give, a purpose to fulfill, a deep heart-impulse that moves you. If you have lost touch with this impulse, then you will begin to feel ambiguous in your life. You will make decisions because you have to, but they won’t be guided by a deeper sense of purpose. You may take on your woman’s purposes because they are stronger than yours. You may adapt your need for direction to externally regulated purposes, becoming a cogwheel company man or a dead-ended husband and parent, without leaving yourself open to your own greatest vision.

It’s also easy to give up entirely on living a life of absolute commitment to truth, settling for the common life of absolute commitment to work, family, intimacy, and friends. Yet, you can only be a superior professional, father, husband, and friend when you are living these relationships as gifts given from your core, not as what’s left over because you don’t have the guts to discover your core impulse and live on its basis.

A man could be perfect for ten years, but if he’s an asshole for thirty seconds his woman acts like he’s always been one. The feminine responds to the moment of energy, forgetting her man’s history of past behavior.

If you want your woman to be able to relax into her feminine and shine her natural radiance, then you must relieve her of the necessity to be in charge. This doesn’t mean you need to boss her around. It means you need to know where you are heading and how you are going to get there, in every way, including financially and spiritually.

How can you be more responsible? Not necessarily by doing more work. You become more responsible by knowing your deepest purpose, and then arranging your finances and spiritual life from that knowingness.

It doesn’t matter if your woman earns more or less money than you—or even if she earns all the money in the relationship. What matters is if she can feel your loving clarity, wisdom, and certainty of direction.

The essential masculine ecstasy is in the moment of release from constraint. This could occur when facing death and living through it, succeeding in (and thus being released from) your purpose, and in competition (which is ritual threat of death). The masculine is always seeking release from constraint into freedom.

Orgasm is actually called petite mort or “little death” in French.

The attachment to comfort and security is what limits most men in their capacity to make a spiritual touchdown.

To be free is to die to your need to be a separate self. What, then, could be constrained? Ego death, absolute surrender to the point of oneness, is the ultimate freedom.

The feminine seeks fullness and abhors emptiness.

But until you finally relax into the place you always are, your woman will continue to surrender—to you, chocolate, and shopping—in the hope of being filled with love, and you will continue to release yourself—through television, orgasm, and financial success—in the hope of being emptied of stress into unconstrained freedom.

When this masculine desire to ravish becomes dissociated from your heart, then you will settle for breaking through a woman’s resistance without love, through violence or coercion.

The dark masculine energy of the warrior, the one who could face death and kill when necessary, is an essential part of you. Today’s current fashion is to suppress both the dark masculine and the dark feminine, so we have a large population of wimpy men and polite women. But beneath the nice veneer of most women lies the wrathful goddess who would chop the head off of every mediocre “new age” man. And beneath the patient smile of most men lies the warrior of love who would ravish his woman into bliss rather than listen to her chat in pointless emotional circles.

If you are not penetrating her moods, she can’t feel your free consciousness. Instead, she feels you throw up your hands, impotent in the face of her energy.

The secret is to match her energy with consciousness demonstrated through your body. If she is screaming and breaking dishes, your body must meet her energy. Your fearlessness and strength of love must manifest through your body. If you are cringing, if your voice is restrained, and you are telling her that you love her, she won’t believe you. If you walk up to her, hold her in your arms, and laugh affectionately in the humor of the moment, she will feel your freedom, if it is for real. She will feel it because it is communicated through your body.

If you have ever tried to increase your income, or magnify your spiritual clarity, you know that the world will test you. Only through your persistence, fearlessness, and loving service does the world yield to your efforts. And the same is true of your woman. You are not trying to please her. You are learning to pervade the world, including her, with consciousness and love. That is what you are here to do.

If you give up at a certain point with her, you will likewise only go so far in the giving of your gift to the world.

And, she knows your true capacity as a full man, a man of free consciousness and love. Her gift, if she is a good woman, is to test you with her darkest moods, over and over and over, until your consciousness is unperturbed by feminine challenge, and you are able to pervade her with your love, just as you are here to pervade the world.

Men should not degrade older women by demanding or desiring them to be like young women. There should be no such comparison. Each age of woman has its own value, and the transition from superficial shine to deep radiance is inevitable.

As a man, you probably have much more to give the world than your children. Just as beautiful women inspire biological procreation, they also inspire artistic, social, and spiritual creativity. When it comes down to it, most creative men will admit that, one way or another, women are their muse and inspiration.

When you feel sexual lust or desire for any woman, breathe deeply and allow the feeling of desire to magnify. And allow it to magnify more. Don’t let the energy become lodged in your head or genitals, but circulate it throughout your body.

You’ve probably seen the face of your woman when you’ve gotten to the point of “putting up” with her, rather than permeating her. She begins to look haggard and drawn. Her long face bespeaks a heart and body unravished by the clarity and force of your masculine loving. She never seems really happy.