The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire

by David Deida

Live completely. Know your deepest purpose. Give the gift you were born to give. Enjoy sex as a cosmic portal into love’s wonders. Serve your friends so they may grow. And, through the inevitable cycles of breathtaking success and gut wrenching despair, when you have mastered and outgrown the challenges of women, work, and sexual desire, be willing to forget you were ever born.

So, here’s my summation for a new preface: Stop waiting. Feel everything. Love achingly. Give impeccably. Let go.

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.

If you are a man, you are probably more emotionally expressive and open-minded than your father was.

In my workshops and consultations I hear independent and successful women complaining that many of today’s men have become “wimps,” too weak and ambiguous to really trust. Sensitive and affectionate men are complaining that many of today’s women have become “ballbusters,” too hardened and emotionally guarded to fully embrace.

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.

The love may still be strong, the friendship may still be strong, but the sexual polarity fades, unless in moments of intimacy one partner is willing to play the masculine pole and one partner is willing to play the feminine.

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.

It doesn’t matter if you change every day who plays the masculine pole and who plays the feminine pole. For sexual polarity, you need an energetic polarity, an attractive difference between masculine and feminine.

This book is written specifically for people who have a more masculine sexual essence, and their lovers, who will have a more feminine sexual essence—since you always attract your sexual reciprocal. These people can’t help but be attracted into relationships based on difference, for better or for worse.

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.

The “mission” or the search for freedom is the priority of the masculine, whereas the search for love is the priority of the feminine.

For the masculine, mission, competition, and putting it all on the line (indeed, facing death), are all forms of ecstasy. Witness the masculine popularity of war stories, dangerous heroism, and sports playoffs.

You can’t deny your true sexual essence by covering it with layers of false energy for years, and then expect to know your authentic purpose and be free in the flow of love.

Furthermore, when you deny your true core you deny the possibility of true and real love.

This fear is the texture of their inability to open fully in love. Such a person is spiritually handicapped, obstructed at heart, even though they may have achieved a safe relationship and a successful career.

Most men make the error of thinking that one day it will be done. They think, “If I can work enough, then one day I could rest.” Or, “One day my woman will understand something and then she will stop complaining.” Or, “I’m only doing this now so that one day I can do what I really want with my life.” The masculine error is to think that eventually things will be different in some fundamental way. They won’t. It never ends. As long as life continues, the creative challenge is to tussle, play, and make love with the present moment while giving your unique gift.

However, be forewarned: you may discover that you don’t, or can’t, do it; that in fact, your fantasy of your future life is simply a fantasy.

Limited money and family obligations have never stopped a man who really wanted to do something, although they provide excuses for a man who is not really up to the creative challenge in the first place.

Don’t wait. Assume she’s going to be however she is, forever.

The feminine always seems chaotic and complicated from the perspective of the masculine.

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

Learn to find humor in the unending emotional drama the feminine seems to enjoy so much. The love that you magnify may realign her behavior, but your effort to fix her and your frustration never will.

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 wait...

Men wh...

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. Every moment waited is a moment w...

If necessary, a man should live with a hurting heart rather than a closed one. He should learn to stay in the wound of pain and act with spontaneous skill and love even from that place.

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.

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.

Know Your Real Edge and Don’t Fake It

It is simply true that each man has his limit, his capacity for growth, and his destiny.

He shouldn’t pretend he is more enlightened than he is—nor should he stop short of his actual edge.

All men are afraid, unless they are perfectly free.

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.

your fear of ...

If you are this kind of man who is hanging back, working hard perhaps, but not at your real edge, other men will not be able to trust

that you can and will help them live at their edge and give their fullest gift.

A fearful man who knows he is fearful is far more trustable than a fearful man who isn’t aware of his fear. And a fearful man who still leans into his fear, living at his edge and putting his gift out from there, is more trustworthy and more inspirational than a fearful man who hangs back in the comfort zone, unwilling to even experience his fear on a day to day level.

Eternity must be a man’s home, moment by moment. Without it, he is lost, always striving, grasping at puffs of smoke. A man must do anything necessary to glimpse, and then stabilize, this ever-fresh realization, and organize his life around it.

Your job, your children, your wife, your money, your artistic creations, your pleasures—they are all superficial and empty, if they are not floating in the deep sea of your conscious loving.

But all of it is empty if we do not live our responsibilities as expressions of our depth of being and heart-truth.

But if you postpone the process of submerging yourself in the source for the sake of taking care of business first, your life will be spent in hours and days of business, and then it will be gone. Only if you are well grounded in that which is larger than life will you be

able to play life with humor, knowing that each task is a mirage of necessity.

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.

You are weakening your woman’s trust in you: why should she trust your wisdom if you don’t?

They will sense that your false smile hides an inner division.

“My deepest wisdom is leading me to this decision. If I am wrong, I will learn from it, and my wisdom will have deepened. I’m willing to be wrong, and grow from it. I trust this process of acting from my deepest wisdom.”

However, if you give up your real decision to follow your woman’s, then you will blame her for being wrong if she is wrong, and you will feel disempowered if she is right, having denied yourself the opportunity to act from your core and grow from your mistakes.