I speak, naturally, of my 2005 Brazilian Volkswagen: Antônio Carlos GTI.

Tôm when I first brought him home

I’d never had a new car before, and I was working a job where I could afford the payments. So I pretty much bought him right off the lot, at first sight. And he’s been a hell of a car: solid, runs like a champ, fast as hell, easy on gas. I drove him across the continent, and it was great.

But now, I live in a city with decent public trans that’s compact enough that I can walk or bike everywhere… which is a big reason why I moved here. But I find myself clinging to Tôm, in a way that I’m not altogether convinced is healthy.

Part of it is practical, yes: I took out a six-year loan that’ll be paid off in 2012, and the way the amortization is structured means I’ve been mostly paying interest until recently. I’m gaining more and more ground each month, but I wouldn’t get much, if anything, if I sold him now. And I just paid a huge amount in repairs after a hit and run accident, so it’s really hard to justify just cutting him loose. But that’s all pretty much sunk costs… I’m not really making an economic decision here.

Most of the reason why I continue to shell out money for Tôm – loan payments and insurance alone are greater than my rent – is emotional. I finally have a car that’s not rattling itself to pieces as I drive. It’s shiny and fast and I love driving like a maniac on narrow city streets and crowded Traffichusetts highways. And even a trip across town is enough to lift my mood… unless, of course, there’s a Sox game in town. Then I become a Masshole. But even that’s cathartic.

The problem is, I genuinely believe that car culture is destroying the environment, disfiguring the human scale of community and transforming us into atomized scraps of humanity who view the world through a windshield as if it were television. In California, where Happy Motoring has reached its apotheosis, many – maybe most – people don’t know their neighbors. They never walk their own streets… they go from house to car to office to mall to house. And it’s no wonder we have no coherent political culture… it’s all mediated by television and the Internet.

Older cities like Boston at least allow the mingling of different cultures as you walk from neighborhood to neghborhood. It’s so tightly packed that driving is actually slower than biking, often requiring twice or three times as long to drive where you could ride.

Anyway, I’m locked into my sunk cost fallacy. I’ll continue to throw money at Tôm… but I am thinking more and more of selling him when I finish paying off the loan, and buying a nice bike and a Zipcar membership.

Tôm’s probably gonna be pissed, though.

I found an interview with Dennis “Genpo Roshi” Merzel that Bill Harris did as a part of his series on Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. Pop-cultural enlightenment gurus like Tolle and Deepak Chopra always trigger my gag reflex.. especially when, as in this case, they’re heavily promoted by both Harris and, Buddha help us, Oprah. At the same time, these people are often learned and experienced: it’s just that they’ve chosen to make a grab at the incredibly lucrative self-help market. Hard to blame them, with all that money lying around.

Merzel himself is in Maezumi Roshi‘s dharma lineage (as is one of my favorite teachers, Charlotte Beck) and has been studying and teaching for many years. He’s put a fair amount of energy of late into promoting his Big Mind practice, which purportedly allows you to achieve enlightenment in a day. Which, I should note, reeks heavily of bullshit, and the $150 fee doesn’t help with its credibility as an authentic spiritual practice. But, I take what wisdom I can find wherever I can get it. You can make up your own mind.

What I found useful in Merzel’s talk was his approach to balancing out ego and non-dualistic awareness. Ego, in a lot of spiritual traditions, is something to be eliminated, cut out like a tumor. While I think that egoic thought is at the root of most or not all of our problems – as people and as a species – I don’t see a solution in forcing people to somehow eliminate their ego.

First off, getting rid of the ego is an enormously difficult task that even enlightened masters struggle with. But secondly – and more significantly in my opinion – ego is a part of who we are as human beings. And I can’t see the value in denying part of our humanness in pursuit of an abstract goal. The task, it seems to me, is to put the ego and the Buddhamind in harmony. Merzel has a way of presenting this which I found valuable.

He presents a triangle, with egoic thought or “everyday mind” on the left and non-dual awareness or (retching a little) “the power of now” on the right. Ego mind he calls, with some validity, “human.” We need our egos to move through the day, to make decisions about what’s better or worse, and to provide that striving for excellence that’s needed to develop on a spiritual path. Nondual awareness is referred to as “being,” and it’s the consciousness of the Eternal that guides the ego mind in making its choices.

He brings the two together at the apex of the triangle and calls it (retching again) “Human Being” – placing ego as a tool of non-dual awareness, rather than excluding it altogether:

the triangle described by Merzel

There’s a very interesting story I’ve thought a lot about lately. It was written by a neuroanatomist who suffered a stroke and observed the effect it had on her consciousness, from the point of view of someone who understands how the different parts of the brain work. She had a golf-ball-sized blood clot that put pressure on her brain’s left hemisphere, rendering her unable to walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. She describes this experience in terms that resemble those used by people who have had glimpses of true enlightenment: a sense of oneness with the Universe, freed from any sense of being a separate self. When the blood clot was removed, she resumed being able to use language, study… and communicate her experience to others.

It seems to me that we, as humans, have the incredible gift of being able to experience ourselves as both individuals (left hemisphere) and as part of Oneness (right hemisphere). I have a suspicion that we are Evolution’s way of becoming aware of itself, and that it is this element of our nature that makes so many people drawn to religion and spirituality. However you choose to view it, though, I think it is hard to make the case that either ego or non-dual, Universal consciousness should be allowed to completely eclipse the other half of our natures.

We are all of a piece. We diminish ourselves by denying any part of ourselves. And I believe that the path to reaching our true potential is in accepting the totality of what we are. The story of driving Lucifer out of Heaven is re-enacted constantly in our culture: from faith-healers driving out demons to New Agers doggedly sitting on their meditation cushions trying to eliminate their egos.

Lucifer isn’t bad. Just misunderstood.

This Men’s Monday, I’m going to take a shot at rehabilitating the image of Old Scratch, and see what role he might play in my quest to define Guyness for this post-postmodern day and age. I’m not trying to insult anyone’s religious beliefs, just seeking after some truths through the mythology of our culture.

The name Lucifer comes from the old Latin word for Venus, the Morning Star. In Isaiah 14, Lucifer is referred to as “son of the morning” (Venus), describing one that is “fallen from heaven.” The story, as it’s commonly told, has Lucifer being thrown out of Heaven for the sin of Pride. Some versions have him challenging God directly for control over the Cosmos; in others, it’s his refusal to bow before Jesus Christ, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

Satan/Lucifer also appears in the Islamic tradition as Iblis, who is the one angel that refuses when God orders them to bow before His creation: Adam. Joseph Campbell tells a fascinating version of this tale in Persian culture, depicting “Satan as the most loyal lover of God:”

You will have heard the old legend of how, when God created the angels, he commanded them to pay worship to no one but himself; but then, creating man, he commanded them to bow in reverence to this most noble of his works, and Lucifer refused – because, we are told, of his pride. However, according to this Muslim reading of his case, it was rather because he loved and adored God so deeply and intensely that he could not bring himself to bow before anything else [...] And it was for that that he was flung into Hell, condemned to exist there forever, apart from his love.

A thread that seems to run through all these stories in the image of Lucifer as one who stands apart, conscious of his own place. In Sufi tradition, he represents the nafs, the egoic self, and in modern Kabbalism, the instruction is to fight “the Satan” (pronounced properly in Hebrew with the accent on the second syllable), which is represented as “the desire to receive for the self only.”

Those of use who were born and raised in the heart of 20th century American culture are pretty strongly conditioned to see the world in black and white terms. Even many of us who separated ourselves firmly from the church just kind of internalized that duality: religion became synonymous with evil, darkness, ignorance. Lately, I’ve been wondering about what a more nuanced perspective on the war between God and Satan might look like. The constant battle between the heavenly hosts and Satan’s minions could also be framed as an interplay between faith and reason, between trusting in fate and acting through free will… between the Self and the self.

Christian eschatology holds that Lucifer will be thrown into the lake of fire on Judgment Day, and Islam also tells of the eventual defeat of Iblis. To me, though, the idea that evil will ever be finally defeated seems ludicrous… even in the interpretation where Satan represents the ego. The ego can never be totally eliminated: it’s a part of the human psyche. So, too, is our capacity for reason as much a part of what makes us human as our ability to reflect on things of the Spirit.

It seems a much healthier way to perceive the Universe and our roles within it. Rather than being caught in a constant battle between two adversaries, we as humans can see ourselves as navigating a course between two extremes. Too far to one side, and we lose ourselves in frenzied abandon to the Ultimate, with people who murder abortion doctors and jihadists seeking eternity in Paradise with 72 virgins (which sort of sounds terrible, if you ask me). Too far to the other side, and we have the cold rationality of “the end justifies the means,” the commodification of the natural world, and the comsummation of the Ego in the person of the Dictator, the Commander in Chief.

Neither extreme is human. Nor can we be fully human without making peace between these two extremes. What if the son of the morning could be reconciled with God the Father? In a mature relationship, the Father doesn’t dominate (“my way or the highway”), and the son no longer sees the need to rebel… instead, each allows the other to operate in his own sphere. Less metaphorically, what I’m groping around with is a proper appreciation of the role of the ego and the intellect (Lucifer, the Light-Bringer) in our day to day, and the role of the enlightened Mind (the Holy Ghost) in matters of the Spirit.

What if we, as men, stopped both fearing and giving into our own inner Lucifers… and stopped cowering to and rebelling from our Jehovahs?

Wouldn’t that be the path of integrity?

One of the fundamental problems in my mind is that the word “anger” is often used to describe a range of emotions, running the gamut from mild aggravation to murderous rage. What stands out as significant to me is the aspect of hostility that is often added to anger. While the feeling of anger can include hostility, it seems to me that it doesn’t have to – and that the hostility is what’s toxic.

Anger is always a sign that something’s off. Maybe something “out there” in the world needs to be addressed… or maybe something “in here,” in our internal lives, is unsettled. If we either ignore the “warning light” by blindly expressing our anger, then I think we go as far off the mark as we do when we repress and bury the emotion. The trick, I think, is in paying smart attention to the source of anger so we can deal with what’s really going on.

Now here’s what I think of as the key: the source of angry feelings is different than the object of those feelings. Nobody “makes you” angry. Shit happens and you react to it with anger. If you just let yourself feel the anger – without inhibitions, judgments, or interpretations – you’ve taken an important step towards understanding it and taking care of the real issue.

One way I try to get to the source of my anger is by paying attention to the way it feels – my breathing, my pounding heart, that gnawing sensation in the stomach – rather than getting all dramatic with my thoughts. Remember, the source of the anger is different than the whole story about why you’re angry. Stay with the feelings instead of the drama.

From my own experience trying to get to the source, pissed-off feelings always seem to have their roots either fear or hurt. If I can find the fear or the hurt underlying the anger, then I try to go back to the original trigger and check it out from the perspective of being afraid or hurt, rather than pissed. From that point of view, I can often find a different way of reacting that deals a lot more skillfully with what actually happened.

Anger is a very powerful emotion – if we can, as men, can learn to use it rather than be used by it, then we can show up more authentically in our lives rather than burning up our energy being pissed off at some dick who cut us off on the road. You decide for yourself what seems like a position of more genuine strength.

This all came up for me as i was reading a recent Salon Books review of a new study about 16-26 year old men called Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. Written by Manhood in America author Michael Kimmel, the book (which could be its whole own Men’s Monday post) takes a look at some of the grotesquely distorted “values” of young men coming up today. The author looks at the rise in bullying, porn addiction, binge drinking, gay-bashing, date rape, etc. – and points to the need for a strong, positive charismatic role model in young guys’ lives.

All good stuff, but what got me was not the article itself but the reaction to it in the letters thread. The whining – about how it’s all women’s fault, because they like bad boys and the nice guys never get laid – was so irritating that I had to write a reply (which won Editor’s Choice yeah me!).

There’s no question that women (and men) prefer guys who are confident. As a skinny guy, I learned early that if you don’t project confidence, other guys would walk all over you. And since I was never a good fighter, I had to do it with bluster and humor.

The study referred to a sense of “thwarted entitlement” among today’s misogynistic young men. And in that letters thread, I saw it all over the place – saying “aggressive behavior is rewarded by women” and that “sensitive guys never get any female attention.” But it just seemed like basically whining to me, from guys who either tried to be tough once and got their ass kicked, or tried to be sensitive once and it went down wrong.

Am I kidding myself? Is the charismatic factor confidence itself – even if sometimes expressed as aggression, danger, unpredictability?

Or do chicks really dig psychos?

I want to talk about “stepping up.” I grew up without a strong father figure, and me and my best friend sort of raised each other up. Through osmosis from the men around us we idealized, and (probably most importantly) through movies and books, we developed this ethos that a guy is there for his buddies and the women in his life, does what he says he’s going to do, and treats everybody with respect. It didn’t hurt that we were both raised by tough single moms.

I’m not saying I think we were all that unique. And I’m definitely not saying I always live up to the ideal. But I do see a lot of the new-age soft type and the strong silent psychopath out there, and not a lot in between.

There’s one significant exception to this rule. I see a lot of men with strong character in communities of faith, especially (but of course not exclusively) among young evangelical Christians. Problem is… I’m not religious. Respect it, but I’ve been there, done that, doesn’t work for me.

So here’s my quandary, and my challenge: what is it about religious belief that tends to make guys more accountable and willingness to step up… and what can non-religious guys take from it that might help put some steel in our spines?