Son’s need fathers…
This isn’t a hard and fast rule, I’m sure you know somebody who’s managed really well with a missing parent, but it’s a general rule..
Where I lived in Brixton, South London in the 80’s there were plenty of young men who had no father to guide them. The Dad had either absconded, gone off with another woman, or was doing time in Brixton Prison. These young lads were trying to become men…
It’s difficult for a young boy to become a man, when they only have a woman as a role model – that’s not to say that mums don’t provide amazing support in general, but that it’s just not the right sort of support.
This is why we make such a fuss about our sportsmen’s behaviour. We want people that our children can look up too.
I looked up to my father and tried to do what I could to impress him. It wasn’t until he’d died that I found that I’d missed the point entirely! (I thought he must really approve of my stella career in the City as a broker… apparently he hated it!)
Interestingly, for me, that wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was that my father “seemed” happy with me as a human, as a father, as a worker…
That was all that was needed. If he’d been critical of me, I’d have had to changed things.
It was feeling that I was supported was all that mattered, and knowing that in a tight spot, he would have my back as he had done on several occasions in my teens.
So often the reasons that people become “Spiritual” is because they don’t feel like they fit their own family. This was not the case for me, I was very lucky to have a very supportive family, but more and more often I see that people are making their “own” families these days. They feel that they are the only ones who are moving forward on the “Spiritual” trajectory, and that nobody in their family accepts or understands them. At best they are loved, and seen as being a bit crazy, at worst this becomes total alienation.
In exactly the same way our young guys in Brixton were looking to make a family, find people who “got them” – the only person who was NOT likely to get them, was their mums. Big brothers tend to be role models, but what when they have no role model either – well then other young men fill that role. If you are brought up in a tough Estate in London, there’s only Football, Music or of course Drugs.
Drug dealing is the only business a young boy can get into that’s likely to make lots of cash very quickly and has the benefit of a young person being treated as a juvenile by the legal system. Up to the age of 18, you can get away with “murder” much more easily.
Gangs provide family.
Lost boys get scooped up by gangs.
It’s not for no reason that James Bond’s back story tells us about his parents dying really young. In every spy story, our hero has lost everything, like Jason Bourne, and has found his way into some shady organisation, be it illegal, or government sponsored. There seems to be a very fine line between the two.
Some of us find our political families too. We hear stories of our politicians joining the Party at the age of 16, to help canvas for the Member of Parliament, they study politics at university, they become a researcher and then stand for Parliament themselves.
They have been taken into the ideological family from an early age.
It’s no different from being taken into a gang.
A street gang in Brixton is only a few socio-economic steps below a political party!
It’s just the same desire to be part of something bigger than oneself.
If you have no father, then you tend to grow up with little self-confidence. In life we just need dad to hold the saddle of the bike a few times, until we have the confidence to peddle ourselves. Being brought up without that steady hand makes us vulnerable.
Those vulnerable boys often used to find themselves in the Navy or the Army, they were given a surrogate father in the form of a tough, but ultimately fair, Seargent-Major. Many people left the army better for it… (Many left the army dead too, however…!)
Many young men used to find there way into the Maffia for the same reasons, there’s lots of money to be made here, people will respect you, and you have a daddy to look after you.
I don’t think Trump, Putin or Netanyahu are any different.
They are just lost little boys who wanted respect.
These people rarely if ever make it to the top on their own. They need to be grown by their “fathers.” As we see, their fathers are seldom their own flesh and blood (but can be sometimes, witness the Bush Clan as an example!) but tend to be older men who specialise in empire building. These guys are always wondering how best to keep their legacy alive when they are gone.
In ancient history, the idea was to build a Pyramid that would last 5,000 years, In the Middle ages, we moved onto castles and cathedrals. These days few people care about building massive structures, they dream about owning the media, being preserved as a digital Icon for millennia to come.
Think about leaving this planet, and starting a colony on another planet, that’s the next seismic shift in the human story. The Name attached to that will surely live in the minds of human for many thousands of years!
(Personally, I don’t think so… I’d have gone for monument building – a passing meteor could easily shift the World’s magnetic field, and all digital things would be wiped out. There are many origin stories that suggest that equally advanced civilisations have had this happen to them on Earth repeatedly – up to five times some anthropologist say..!)
So here we are again.
Today we hear that Germany is pumping up its defence budget, that the USA has repeatedly broken its agreements not to militarise the buffer zones agreed in the 1990’s by Gorbachev and Regan, and that Israel has again started hostilities killing four hundred more people
The Russians seem to be using every means possible to delay coming to the negotiating table, allowing the War to run on.
It’s always about power. It’s about young men, becoming old men, making sure that the world remembers their name.
These names are usually written in the blood of other young men. (Who joined the gang, in hope of gaining some respect from their elders.)
If we can only believe that respect is only found “outside” of ourselves. If we only believe that love comes from others, then we’ll continue to make these mistakes over and over again.
Learning to love yourself and learning to have respect for yourself is a difficult enough story for a man, especially when every role model in the world is following the same external path.
Wouldn’t it be nice if young men started pinning posters of Papaji, or Siri Ramana Maharshi, or Joe Despenza, or Mooji on their walls and idolising them…
We could have a Top Trumps game for young boys.. “I’m going to play my Lao Tzu card, he could Meditate straight for 12 hours!” – “I beat you! I’ll play my Bodhidharma card, he can meditate for seven years!”
It’s taken a long time for me to learn self-respect.
I started thirty years ago by trying to Alkalise my body, and giving up Coffee, then the smoking went, then the drinking… bit by bit I respect my body more.
Cleaning up my mind has been on the agenda for the past five years.
Very few things trouble me these days from a psychological perspective – I’ve waded deep in the water, and washed my mind (quite) clean.
It’s always a work in progress.
If we are to survive as a race, we have to stop the lost boys F*cking everything up AGAIN..
I don’t doubt this has happened repeatedly and will do so, unless we intervene
A hunger for Power, and ever bigger and more dangerous technologies, where do YOU think it leads to?
We Fathers need to take responsibilities for our children, be they flesh and blood, or just “lent” to us for our care. (Its sad to say, that sometimes we can try our best, and still not be able to help, but we should never give up trying, and loving..)
This will be how we change our world.
All my love to my sons, and my sons who I’ve not yet met