Over-masculinization has harmed pride; we can only send out but cannot genuinely receive. Because we cannot genuinely receive, we cannot take in the glory of our work, our creation. We cannot draw in the deep nourishment of thoroughly basking in our participation in the Erotic endeavor that is a co-creation with life.
The primary reason the masculine parts of ourselves get stuck in pride isn't that we think it is us; it's that we think it's us only. We do not acknowledge the relationship that produces all—the invisible forces such as what the feminine as muse or raison d'être draws from us as well as the creative forces moving through us.
Spirituality guides us to live without pride, but then we end up collapsed, with no backbone, and no reason to create. We become overly skewed toward masculinity—absent, resentful workhorses, priding ourselves on our ability to eschew pride. Or we do not have the fortification of receiving genuine nourishment from real creation and become teacup people with an overinflated sense of self and no real self to withstand the difficulties of life.
We live feeling as if everything relies on us, crushed beneath the responsibility and isolation of greatness, while failing to acknowledge when someone shows up and makes us connectable and usable. Eros asks that we acknowledge the other and the relief that comes from being usable with the ability to savor the beauty of what occurs as a result.
Without a balance of these factors that fill and nourish the self, the duty-based mind will perform humility with sanctimony and resentment filling the gap. This kind of pride can only exist where experience does not. There is no way to not be prideful. There is only filling oneself with so much experience and becoming so concentrated with it, that there is no room for arrogance—the unwillingness or superiority associated with pride—to grow.
In the duty-based system, we must pretend to know what we are doing at all times. More importantly, the duty-based system is based on the rational notion that performing or saying something is as valuable as being immersed in, lost in, and risking being possessed by it. The rational mind says simply dipping ourselves into an experience is enough.
We can check it off the list and get to the important work of duty-based pride and claiming expertise. We are not required to be fluent in an experience to say we are familiar with it; we need only know enough to describe it.
Duty-based pride does everything in its power to disguise its basic insecurity, which is rooted in the fact that it truly does not know and will not give itself enough to Eros to know. In place of actual knowing, we will talk about experiences as if we know. We are only talking to ourselves and others who engage in that meaningless paradigm, because Eros actually knows.
Duty-based pride has no idea Eros can feel and knows us to the depth of who we are, the truth or lack thereof of our experience—beyond what we can say. There is no pretending where there is true feeling. Where there is no pretending, there is no need for inflation, or for inflation pretending like there is no inflation. There is just actual experience. We don't need to talk about it or prop ourselves up with false humility because that just takes time and effort away from the only thing Eros wants to do: have more experience.
When pride is not worked out through experience, it just mutates into a hundred different forms to conceal itself. But there is no way to deal with pride other than to wring it out. Eros wants to wring us out. It doesn't care at all about expertise. It wants to take us into an experience and squeeze all the hot air out the way we would wring out a wet shirt.
In Eros, this is the reward; not the claiming of experience, but getting worked hard by experience so there is no room for anything other than the experience itself.
This is an affront to the masculine mind, which wants to be owned by nothing. In Eros's eyes, to never be owned is to be undesirable and unclaimed. If we are not owned, possessed, and taken by our life, we might ask ourselves what we have done to make ourselves so unattractive that nothing wants to truly claim us.
If we can hold ourselves out and maintain control, it may be that nothing considers us attractive enough to call our attention. And while we pridefully tell ourselves we were able to hold out, maybe life simply determined that we were not worth the work to call in. That is a different take on pride.
In Eros, we must make ourselves attractive. It isn't a charity and it isn't desperate. It does not have a quota that makes it keep its doors open to welcome everyone. We are only welcome as much as we prove beneficial.
And yet, if we truly want to grow a fortified sense of self—that knows its worth and value and recognizes it is nothing without the grace of Eros, that is neither overly inflated and underqualified nor feigning humility, wondering if everyone knows what an egomaniac we are inside—then we might want to drop the idea that we are doing Eros a favor and make ourselves available to be wrung out.
