"The Way of the Superior Man" by David Deida

• 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 “mission” or the search for freedom is the priority of the masculine, whereas the search for love is the priority of the feminine.
• The feminine wants to be filled with love, and if the bliss of real love is not forthcoming, chocolate and ice cream -- or a good romantic drama -- will do. The masculine wants to feel the bliss of a life lived at the edge, and if he doesn’t have the balls to do it himself, he’ll watch it on TV, in sporting events and cop shows.
• Spend a minimum of one hour a day doing whatever you are waiting to do until your finances are more secure, or until the children have grown and left home, or until you have finished your obligations and you feel free to do what you really want to do .
• Don’t believe in the myth of “one day when everything will be different”
• Spend at least one hour a day doing whatever you simply love to do.
• Most postponements are excuses for a lack of creative discipline.
• In addition to the myth that one day your life will be fundamentally different, you may believe, and hope, that one day your woman will be fundamentally different. 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.
• Embrace her, or wrestle with her, or scream and yell for the heck of it, but make no effort to bring an end to that which pisses you off. Practice love instead of trying to bring an end to the quality that bothers you. You can’t escape the tussle with the feminine.
• Men who have lived significant lives are men who never waited: not for money, security, ease, or women.
• Every moment waited is a moment wasted, and each wasted moment degrades your clarity of purpose.
• A superior man is free in feeling and action, even amidst great pain and hurt.
• A man must love his father and yet be free of his father’s expectations and criticisms in order to be a free man.
• All men are afraid, unless they are perfectly free. If you cannot admit this, you are pretending to yourself, and to others.
• A free man is free to acknowledge his fears, without hiding them, or himself from them.
• 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.
• You should always listen to your women, and then make your own decision.
• 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.
• Your mission is your priority. Unless you know your mission and have aligned your life with it, your core will feel empty.
• Time you spend with your woman should be time you really want to be with her more than anything else.
• Once you are honest with yourself about your real edge, it is best to lean just beyond it.
• Fear needs to become your friend, so that you are no longer uncomfortable with it. Rather, primary fear shows you that you are at your edge.
• Neither women nor world are predictable.
• About once a week, you should sit down with your closest men friends and discuss what you are doing in your life and what you are afraid of doing.
• Good friends should not tolerate mediocrity in one another.
• Without a conscious life-purpose a man is totally lost, drifting, adapting to events rather than creating events.
• The core of your life is your purpose. 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.
• Success is never as fulfilling as you think it is going to be.
• Among the signs of fulfilling or completing a layer of purpose are these:
• You suddenly have no interest whatsoever in a project or mission that, just previously, motivated you highly.
• You feel surprisingly free of any regrets whatsoever, for starting the project or for ending it.
• Even though you may not have the slightest idea of what you are going to do next, you feel clear, unconfused, and, especially, unburdened.
• You feel an increase in energy at the prospect of ceasing your involvement with the project.
• The project seems almost silly, like collecting shoelaces or wallpapering your house with gas station receipts. Sure, you could do it, but why would you want to?
• If you experience these signs, it is probably time to stop working on this project.
• Learn by trial and error what it is you are to do.
• Children learn most from their parents by osmosis.
• It is not the amount of time but the quality of the interaction that most influences a child’s growth.
• Don’t use your family as an excuse to be less than you can be.
• If you forget your larger purpose while pursuing the small endless tasks of daily life, then you have reduced yourself to a machine of picayune.
• Tasks are important, but no amount of duties adds up to love, freedom, or full consciousness.
• 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 masculine means what is says. A man’s word is his honor. The feminine says what it feels. A woman’s word is her true expression in the moment.
• In an emotional moment, what she says she is going to do is actually an expression of what she feels like doing in the moment.
• What your woman says is like a cloud passing in the sky: well-formed, coherent, and unrecognizable moments later.
• The basic rule is this: Don’t believe the literal content of what your woman says unless love is flowing deeply and fully in the moment when she says it. And even then, know that she is probably talking about her current feelings, not necessarily about the subject of whatever she is talking about.
• The masculine grows by challenge, but the feminine grows by praise.
• Praise always magnifies the quality of your woman that you praise.
• When speaking to your woman, it is always better to call the glass half full than half empty.
• It is a difficult practice for most men to learn, but you must learn to praise the very qualities you feel are not yet praiseworthy in order for them to become so.
• One of the largest gifts you can give your woman is your capacity to open her heart when it is closed.
• 90% of a woman’s emotional problems stem from feeling unloved.
• It is a very rare occasion when your analysis of her mood relieves her of it. Most often, your analysis and attempts to fix her will just piss her off more.
• The next time your woman is in a bad mood, try this: Assume she is not feeling loved.
• If you ever find yourself asking your woman questions about her mood while she is still in it, you are already on the wrong road.
• Basically, most men are afraid of, or disgusted by, feminine emotions. That’s why you try to fix them or escape from them.
• No matter what your woman says or does, give her love.
• One of your most valuable gifts is the ability to see all the options and make a decisions based on this view of all the potential outcomes.
• Even on the most trivial decisions, never say, “Do whatever you want.”
• Your desire for other women is not a reflection of any lack in your intimacy, it is a reflection of your nature as a masculine sexual being.
• Just remember that self-discipline is not self-suppression. Suppression is when you resist and fight against your desires, keeping them as buried and unexpressed as possible. Self-discipline is when your highest desires rule your lesser desires, not through resistance, but through loving action grounded in understanding and compassion.
• The thing your woman is complaining about is rarely the thing she is complaining about. It is a mistake to believe the content of what she is saying, and then respond to her complaints, point by point.
• A man’s past behavior is irrelevant to his woman’’s feeling in the moment.
• Restore love and happiness in the present moment, don’t justify your little mistake by referring to your long line of successes.
• Your basic motivation is to be released from constraint and experience the freedom on the other side.
• The masculine is always seeking this release in one way or another.
• The feminine, on the other hand, is not seeking freedom, but love. A woman’s bliss is not in emptiness, but in fullness. Her means is not release, but surrender.
• Although your woman doesn’t want you to be a killer, she is turned on by your capacity to kill.
• The dark masculine energy of the warrior, the one who could face death and kill when necessary, is an essential part of you.
• Women can attract you, heal you, and inspire your gifts, but they will never satisfy you absolutely.
• Your belly and lower abdomen are special places of power. If your breath does not reach these areas, you can’t recharge your batteries.
• Nobody can live your life for you. You must create your own health, success, and happiness.
• It is extremely difficult for most women to get out of their mood once they are in it.
• The two ways to bring you right to your masculine edge of power are austerity and challenge.
• Austerity means to eliminate the comforts and cushions in your life that you have learned to snuggle into and lose wakefulness. Take away anything that dulls your edge.
• The other means, besides austerity, for rediscovering your masculine core is through challenge.
• The most potent forms of masculine realignment involve both austerity and challenge.