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

by David Deida

Your Purpose Must Come Before Your Relationship

Every man knows that his highest purpose in life cannot be reduced to any particular relationship. If a man prioritizes his relationship over his highest purpose, he weakens himself, disserves the universe, and cheats his woman of an authentic man who can offer her full, undivided presence.

Admit to yourself that if you had to choose one or the other, the perfect intimate relationship or achieving your highest purpose in life, you would choose to succeed at your purpose. Just this self-knowledge often relieves much pressure a man feels to prior...

Your mission is your priority. Unless you know your mission and have aligned your life to it, your core will feel empty. Your presence in the world will be weakened, as ...

Tell your woman that you love her, but you cannot deny your heart’s purpose.

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.

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.

Once you are honest with yourself about your real edge, it is best to lean just beyond it. Very few men have the guts for this practice. Most men either settle for the easy path or self-aggrandize themselves by taking the extreme hard path. Your insecurity may cause you to doubt yourself, and so you take the easy way, not even approaching your real edge or your real gift. Alternatively, your insecurity may lead you to push, push, push, seeking to become victorious over your own sense of lack.

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.

Own your fear, and lean just beyond it. In every aspect of your life. Starting now.

The way a man penetrates the world should be the same way he penetrates his woman: not merely for personal gain or pleasure, but to magnify love, openness, and depth.

The freedom or love they have achieved and the way they have given their gifts often leave a sense of incompleteness. Something is still lacking. There is still a desire to go beyond, to untrap themselves, to enjoy life free of a subtle sense of constraint, loneliness, underlying tension, and fear. And, for many men, try as they might, the sense remains that their fullest gift remains ungiven. Their life feels somewhat false at its core, as does their sexing.

There is no essential difference between entering your woman’s feminine heart and entering fully into the world. Both forms of intercourse, sexual and worldly, require sensitivity, spontaneity, and a strong connection to deep truth in order to penetrate chaos and closure in a way that love prevails.

Neither woman nor world are predictable.

Through thick and thin, this is the way of the superior man.

A man’s capacity to receive another man’s direct criticism is a measure of his capacity to receive masculine energy. If he doesn’t have a good relationship to masculine energy (e.g., his father), then he will act like a woman and be hurt or defensive rather than make use of other men’s criticism.

Good friends should not tolerate mediocrity in one another.

Without this masculine force in your life, your direction becomes unchecked, and you are liable to meander in the mush of your own ambiguity and indecision.

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.

Everything in your life, from your diet to your career, must be aligned with your purpose if you are to act with coherence and integrity in the world.

The superior man is not seeking for fulfillment through work and woman, because he is already full. For him, work and intimacy are opportunities to give his gifts, and be vanished in the bliss of the giving.

A man must be prepared to give 100% to his purpose, fulfill his karma or dissolve it, and then let go of that specific form of living. 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. These cycles of strong specific action followed by periods of not knowing what the hell

is going on are natural for a man who is shedding layers of karma in his relaxation into truth.

known. In the meantime, you will experience layer after layer of purposes, each one getting closer and closer to the fullness of your deepest 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.

If a man never discovers his deepest purpose, or if he permanently compromises it and uses his family as an excuse for doing so, then his core becomes weakened and he loses depth and presence. His woman loses trust and sexual polarity with him, even though he may be putting much energy into parenting their children and doing the housework. A man should, of course, be a

full participant in caring for children and the household. But if he gives up his deepest purpose to do so, ultimately, everyone suffers.

This self-resignation will communicate itself to your woman and your children. They will feel your weakness. Your woman will begin to take charge more than she really wants, since you are clearly not capable of taking charge yourself, and someone has to do it. Your children will challenge your capacity to discipline them, since they can feel your own lack of authentic self-discipline. Try as you might, once you have negated your own deep purpose, your household will become a place where everybody tests your capacity to stand your ground, and you will lose.

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.

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.

It is not the amount of time but the quality of the interaction that most influences a child’s growth.

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.

This “do mode” is one of men’s biggest strengths and weaknesses.

The test of your fullness in every moment is your capacity to die in free and loving surrender, knowing you’ve done everything you could do while alive to give your gift and know the truth of being. Have you loved fully? Or, do you have unexpressed feelings that would taint your last moment with regret? Do you consistently relax into the awe of immense mystery? Or, are you so absorbed in your work and projects that you no longer feel the miracle of existence, each moment emerging from and dissolving into the great unknowable? Has your task addiction built blinders that limit the vastness of your vision, even now?

You are not a drone. You are the unbounded mystery of love.

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.

Every moment of your life is either a test or a celebration. The same is true about every moment with your woman, only doubly so. Not only is her simple existence a test for you, but one of her deepest pleasures in intimacy is testing you, and then feeling you are not moved off course by her challenge.

The most erotic moment for a woman is feeling that you are Shiva, the divine masculine: unperturbable, totally loving,...

She is challenging you because your success doesn’t mean shit to her, unless you are free and loving.

But you don’t want her to settle for some bozo who depends on his woman’s response to be happy.

You don’t need your woman’s strokes to fulfill your mission. It still feels good when she strokes you, but you don’t need mommy anymore, telling you what a good boy you are. And your woman doesn’t want you to need mommy. In fact, it sickens her.

So she will test you. She might not be fully conscious of why she is doing it, but she will poke your weak spots, especially in moments of your superficial success, in order to feel your strength. If you collapse, you’ve flunked the test. You have let your woman deflate you.

If you remain full and strong, humorous and happy, your truth unperturbed by her testing, then you pass the test.

It will last, perhaps, ten minutes. And then she will test you again.

The criticism is entirely dissolved in love as soon as she feels your humor and happiness in the midst of the poke.

It never ends. This is the secret. You can’t get out of it. Finding a different woman won’t get you out of it.

Your woman is testing you because s...

The most loving women are the women who will test you the most.

Yet, if your purpose is to be free, you wouldn’t have it any other way.