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Freedom is a word that gets tossed around pretty loosely in western culture the past several years. It’s the theme of cutesy songs, on the lips of empty-headed political pundits who use it as a “brand” for whatever other ideas they are selling to the masses, and like words such as success, happiness, and love, it ends up losing its crucial importance in our lives.

We’d rather watch a news item about Paris Hilton than think deeply on what freedom means to us.

I’m not talking about political freedom or prison systems. I’m talking about something uniquely biologically programmed into the animal instincts of men here.

Believe it or not, out of nowhere I found myself in front of an audience of bright, motivated men quoting Patrick Henry:

“Give me Liberty, or give me death.”

And I’ll tell you why in a moment.

This may be one of those things that is so hidden in your life, you don’t even know the degree of pain you suffer over it.

You might be a man who has a lot of material wealth, or a guy who has a great deal of friends, good connections to women, and a great career you get up for every morning.

You might otherwise be a man who has had his share of problems developing satisfying connections to women, might be in a job that isn’t right for you, or find that you have both a woman in your life and a job, but getting up in the morning to deal with both doesn’t have much pleasure for you.

Either way, there’s something you might not know about yourself or the culture you live in right now, and it’s eating your life without you even knowing it.

This information is the only place I’ve found that completely explains what’s going on.

You see, I recently checked out the film, Reign Over Me again. Maybe you took my suggestion a number of months ago and saw it in the theatre.  It depicts two men - both dentists who were college roommates - each of which feel entirely alone in the world as far as being known at a deep, masculine identity level by anyone else in their lives.

Adam Sandler plays a man who had it all and lost it all in 9-11 - the love of his life, his three daughters, and nearly his sanity. He is a shell of a man now.

Don Cheadle plays a successful dentist who has a great job, but one that is pretty meaningless at times, especially given that his perfect wife doesn’t really “get” him, or knows him on a deep level. She sees him as a teammate and clone of herself, that he should open up to her, but when he does, she bashes him for “adolescent needs” such as making other guy friends, playing sports, or doing nearly anything by himself outside her watch.

You might notice that one or the other of these two men are actually on the ends of the spectrum of where you now are in your life. You might have it better than both of them, but you’ll notice at least a little of yourself in one or the other of them. It doesn’t matter who you are as long as you are a man.

There’s a reason.  It’s about FREEDOM.

One of the things that came up frequently in the seminar - and it will be available to you eventually for listening or watching - was the concept of feeling shame over things that men need in order to feel good about themselves. To feel masculine.

Things like watching sports, competing with other males, bonding with them, getting wild and crazy, trying dangerous things like mountain-climbing, cliff diving, doing stupid things like setting things on fire in your back yard just to see what happens, playing practical jokes on people, going out somewhere just to be alone for awhile, or just “because” are some things that get bashed at times as being “adolescent.”

Guess what they all have at the core?

The masculine principle of FREEDOM.

What if men all spoke only Norwegian, and part of their culture was that they really loved to eat cheese pudding by themselves, in small groups? It was just built into them. A craving that left them feeling empty if they didn’t build it into their diet.

And what if women all spoke only Italian, and part of their culture was that they really felt better at the end of their day by getting together for a big feast of pasta with each other. Just part of their culture.  Without it, they felt kind of anxious and incomplete.

When they try to connect with each other for dinner and conversation, they get all uptight. The Norwegians don’t really share their feelings with each other. They associate in small groups and just appreciate the cheese pudding, not talking all that much. The Italians love a get together and are really emotional with each other, sharing everything, and passing the plates while chatting wildly.

The Italians get kind of off-put by the relative quiet and cliquishness of the Norwegians. What’s more - they start to rip on the choice of wanting Cheese Pudding as part of the dinner. They find it disgusting, lowbrow, and simply won’t allow it at the table. They tell the Norwegians that they need to go eat that stuff on their own time and it won’t be happening here - not in THEIR house.

This offends the Norwegians deeply, but they don’t say anything, because they aren’t used to expressing themselves. They simply absorb the insult and agree that they will sort of sample the pasta a little just to appease the Italians, but will sneak off later to find some Cheese Pudding.

The Italians of course find out that after the dinner, the Norwegians went off to eat Cheese Pudding by themselves and feel excluded and angry about this insult.

Then there are bad relations between the two nations.

This is men and women. And the Cheese Pudding is the masculine instincts that include competition, the need for adventure, risk-taking to test their mettle and rank among other men, as well as the need for aloneness and FREEDOM.

It is built into the male animal nature to need the freedom to explore, to emote in ways that further their rise in status among other men, and not to emote just for the sake of doing so. The freedom to have self-determination in how one’s time and energy and resources are used for building a life that is uniquely geared toward  kind of “masculine mission” in life.

That mission might be about starting a business, or reaching the board room, or winning at a sport, or even exploring a hobby that seems silly to women. The way to get there may seem to others to be filled with irresponsible behavior (the need to take risks and find one’s masculine limits of skill), the need to train or practice ALONE or against other men in order to get the unique kind of testing of mettle, measured against other men, and making us better men, and filled with the need to find out from time to time that if we needed to, we could in fact stand on our own two feet in life, even if we did not have a woman on our arm.

Not doing the latter can have a way of sapping out the core of your masculinity over time. If you are always around one woman, or even many women to the exclusion of bonding with other men, you just start to lose a frame of reference on what you are worth as a man among men. You can ONLY use other men as a measure of that.

And it’s all built into our masculine biology.

If you were to imagine being in a primitive tribe, you would be among the men who go out hunting and facing the wild. If you were always exclusively around women, you wouldn’t know if the time came that the village were under attack or low on food, that you could actually survive and help others survive.

And that is not to say that men and women don’t have wonderful intellectual and emotional skills, or character, sophistication, diplomacy or accomplishment in the civic, professional, academic, arts, sciences, or business life.

I am ONLY talking about the animal part of us here. The things that make us men and women, not clones of each other.

Well the film, 300, came up this weekend, and the story of the Battle of Thermopylae between 300 Spartans, and half a million Persians. Some of the guys asked about courage in the context of impossible odds such as in that story.

When I thought about it, I recalled one of the dramatic statements in the movie, similar to that in Gladiator:

“What we do in life echoes in eternity.”

In other words, men and women are quite equal but DIFFERENT, and the race wouldn’t have survived without either.

Women give their bodies to pregnancy and birth at the beginning of life. They are biologically hard-wired to desire sex of course, but sex ONLY with the promise of commitment, or at the very least that sex is “special,” and they are respected and unique among all women in a man’s life if there is a sexual connection going on.

It might make sense to you that men give their biological contribution to society and the next generation near the END of life, even in death. They produce a fruit of their labors near the end of life, in their CAREER, their life’s work and ambition. In the sustenance they have hunted for their children, “out there,” on sales calls and through promotions up the ranks, and ultimately through the masculine mission that will give their children and society some sort of LEGACY from their lives.

Women want to be remembered during life for the sacrifices they made for you at its beginning.

And men want to never be forgotten after death for the accomplishments they had achieved by the time of its END.

Our accomplishments as men cannot be gotten and heroically given to others without an ample balance of FREEDOM in our lives - to create, to lead, to build, to explore and adventure, to test ourselves, and to be alone to know that we know that we know we can stand on our own even in the midst of chaos and challenge.

This is why women, like the Italians in the story above, are left confused as to why in the world at the very time of challenge, the opportunity for teamwork and togetherness, men opt for aloneness rather than sharing.

We need to tap into our FREEDOM if we are feel fully masculine.

The warriors in 300 were quite aware they were going to die. We all do someday.  But theirs was in their words, going to be a “good death.”

And that can only come after finishing the mission that you were put here to accomplish.

If a man has been properly initiated into manhood, he has come face to face with death and learned that he can do battle with it for a time, and win. He learns to not fear it, but rather simply know it is there sooner or later.

If you defeat the fear of death, then what else is there to fear in life?

Nothing.

And you are truly a man who can be effective in the word.

So in this rich conversation, most of which we got on tape, the realization dawns that there is something uniquely MORE important, more passionately desired than even “survival” and staying alive for a little while longer.

It is the mission. It is what you are going to LEAVE BEHIND - that gift to others, your children, and society that ONLY YOU could have created.

“Give me Liberty or give me death!”

I noticed that some of the attendees who had an IMPOSSIBLE time at first with approaching women in the field work section out on the town changed when they saw it: myself and the coaches BEING OURSELVES with people we met in public. If we were to just sit back and send you into interactions, there’s no mentoring going on. We had to DEMONSTRATE what it is to be a FREE MAN.

Free to be yourself. That’s what mindOS is all about!

To free yourself from the JAIL that is your past bad experiences, the negativity that has LOCKED you into pessimism, the belief that you CAN’T BE WHAT YOU WANT TO BE, the prison of your doubt, your fear, and your worry about what others will think of you.

Stop it.

Be FREE.

Do you realize that ANY ACTION you take that frees you in ANY WAY actually RAISES YOUR INNER SENSE OF MASCULINE POWER?

You literally can FEEL it, just as Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler do in their growth as men in Reign Over Me.

I think there must even be a way to MEASURE it.

Do you know what this does for you?

It literally can be COUNTED on - no doubts, no uncertainty, no regrets - to bolster your success with BOTH women and career.

Guys, FREEDOM = the very energy of passion for life as a man. When you tap into this, you have the secret key for building something that no one has ever laid out for you before so clearly. Not anywhere.

You have the very tool to power a life mission that leads to all you ever wanted BOTH with women AND career. And you don’t need to have to choose BETWEEN one or the other as your focus.  They work TOGETHER.

Suddenly, a man asked me what seemed to be out of the blue:

“What is your opinion of prenuptuals?”

In the first few seconds I didn’t see how it could relate.

But suddenly I realized that in today’s crazy dating market of hookups and divorce, and confusion about who is meant for us, there is a fairness possible, a win/win among men and women, a way of respecting each other and what we give to each other.

It blurted out as something sounding almost like a joke, and the room erupted in laughter.

I said, “A pre-nup is a condom.”

When the laughter died down, I explained.

When women give up sex and get broken up with or divorced sometime later, they have given up an opportunity to create a new life - their unique and core gift to humanity in a pregnancy, the suffering and sacrifice, and changes in their body. The pain, and uncertainty, and need for support and safety as they deliver a new life to the world.

Condoms protect against so much for a woman. Disease, unplanned pregnancy, and the risk that they will be abandoned after the man has enjoyed the pleasure with her. If a man refuses this then it ought to make a woman wonder about his intentions, his character, and his respect for her as they connect in the early stages of romance.

But…what about the Norwegians? What about men?

They work for a lifetime building this masculine mission, this gift to the world in their deeds, their careers, their work and labor. The pain of it, the uncertainty, and need for safety and teamwork that perhaps, because they’re men, they don’t often complain about or tell others about - least of all women. It might diminish our masculinity in their eyes to admit weakness.

So they don’t know how very much passion we put into our work - our “other child.”

If women have so very much risk, and so much to lose from their identity in giving in to sex, then men are in the very same situation when called upon to risk their resources and their work at great risk and potential loss of identity.

There is nothing I can thing of that a pre-nup more resembles than a condom then. One which protects against disease and risk of loss of the sometimes decades or lifelong effort emerging from one’s masculine instinct.

Fair, is FAIR.

Pass the Cheese Pudding, but no need to talk too much as you do so, thanks.

If you are interested in this kind of insight in relating to women, while learning specific, targeted, and exact things you can do to “fill the void” as a man, to bolster your masculinity through the roof in a way that woman can deeply understand and get on board with, get Mature Masculine Power.

This is the ONLY place I have found, on the internet, literature, academia, or in person coaching, that you can find this level of material to directly address the vague experience of uneasiness, misunderstanding, “something not quite right,” or even emptiness in your life. That kind that is STILL there even after you have the ability to get a lot of dates, a “great” woman and a “great” job.

In them, Jon Ibrahim, a sex columnist and firefighter, and I cover ALL the biological aspects of masculine instinct, the strategy and tactics for having this core power in your life, and how it effects not only your relations with women, but your CAREER as well.

My follow up to the course was to turn to Carl, a professional boxer and uber-masculine force of nature. I tapped his brain for street smart wisdom about “being a man” who not only attracts women, but masters his career. In Carl’s case, death is a real risk. He laughs at it, and has been undefeated on his way to a world championship.

Thank you, all of you, for being a part of a cultural change on the horizon.