“The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”
“The world will change, because it has to change.”
― James Baldwin
James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1 1987) was an American writer and civil rights activist who garnered acclaim for his essays, novels, plays, and poems. His 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain has been ranked by Time magazine as one of the top 100 English-language novels. Wikipedia
The most assuring thing about life is that we can change, that things can change, that they are always changing. The most maddening is that despite living in a universe that is one constant transmutation of energy and matter, despite living in bodies and minds whose cells and ideas are constantly being replaced, we so vehemently resist change, too afraid to unsettle the structure of our lives — even when it doesn’t serve us. “People wish to be settled,” Emerson wrote, “[but] only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” In another epoch, another prophet consecrated the elemental: “All that you touch you change,” wrote Octavia Butler. “All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”
If suffering is the magnitude of our resistance to reality, and if change is the fundamental constant of reality, then our resistance to change is our self-directed instrument of suffering.
Speaking to a part that lives in all of us — the “self-cancelling, centerpoised personality” that leads us “to look at things defensively” — one character urges another:
Why are you so afraid of yourself… of changing things? Try to detach yourself from yourself and try to see your own viewpoint from the outside, objectively. You are afraid of losing your balance. But change need not unbalance you; life’s not a static object, after all. It’s a process. There’s no holding still. Intellectually you know that, but emotionally you refuse it. Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice. Life — evolution — the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy — existence itself — is essentially change… When things don’t change any longer, that’s the end result of entropy, the heat-death of the universe. The more things go on moving, interrelating, conflicting, changing, the less balance there is — and the more life.
Observing that life itself, like love, is “a huge gamble against the odds,” he insists that, just as we must love anyway, we must live anyway:
You can’t try to live safely, there’s no such thing as safety. Stick your neck out of your shell, then, and live fully.
“Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” wrote Rachel Carson. “Our world, and the worlds around and within it,” wrote Sy Montgomery a generation later, “is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom… far more vibrant, far more holy, than we could ever imagine.”
There are people whose eye is more sharply focused on those brilliances, whose ear is more finely tuned to the murmurations of the mountains and the oceans and the trees, whose orientation to the world is more tenderly in touch with our creaturely origins. Some of them become artists, some scientists, and some boundary-spanners who refuse the divide, who know that to partition our ways of seeing is to keep ourselves from apprehending the magnificent whole.
Growing up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a child so shy as to dream of being able to communicate via bioluminescence, Ash Eliza Williams came to realize that, lacking the luciferin necessary for the language of light, the human animal has evolved its own alchemical means of silent communication: art.
Animated by “a fascination with alternative languages and methods of connection,” Williams draws on medieval bestiaries and geophysics, on 19th-century zoological illustrations and graphic novels, to conjure up the wonder Rachel Carson insisted is our inheritance and our best protection from ourselves. Emanating from the paintings and sculptures are the “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” that enchanted Darwin — from bioluminescent moths to the bat (that living triumph of the possible over the probable), from chlorophyl (that ongoing mystery of chemistry and chance) to clouds (those abiding spells against indifference) — arranged in series whose very titles are miniature poems, titles like Urgent Beings and The History of Weather.
One began as a book about Rachel Carson and instead became a series of durational paintings about the lives of different creatures — a starling, a violet-eared waxbill, an orange fruit-dove, a hickory tree — using the graphic novel format to explore their experience of time, “to think,” Williams writes, “about the expansiveness or endlessness of a creature’s Umwelt.”
Radiating from it all is what may be the most fruitful orientation a person can have to a world — an obsessive yet spacious curiosity that, through the pinhole of the minutest details, reveals the grandeur of the big picture. “The whole is simpler than its parts,” observed the visionary physicist Willard Gibbs in what remains the finest koan of science, but it is only by attending closely and with a great kindness to the parts, discrete yet intertwined by threads of ceaseless silent communication, that we can contact the majesty and mystery of the whole.
Relationships are the great creative work of our lives. They are, like every creative endeavor, a process demanding both systematic intentionality and surrender. If we show up for that process with courage and consistency, it will surprise us, shatter our complacency, take us places we never thought we could go if we followed the vector of our preconceived plans.
The most rewarding relationships come the way creative breakthroughs do — not as a reasoned conclusion but as a revelation, breaking the momentum of our assumptions about what is possible and what we deserve, rising like a mountain from the fault line of our expectations to change the landscape of our lives.
Just as the most compelling creative work tends to blur the boundaries between disciplines, between materials, between genres, the most revelatory relationships tend to blur the boundaries between the common categories of connection, with all the disorientation and overwhelm that entails — nowhere more disorienting than when a friend becomes a lover.
H.G. Wells (September 21, 1866–August 13, 1946) explores the price and the reward of this blessing discomposure in his 1911 novel The New Machiavelli (public domain) — a story largely autobiographical, for which Wells paid a high price, but which he must have felt would offer a compass through the confusions of a complex yet mutely common human experience. (All writers write about their own experience, however many degrees of abstraction it may be refracted through. The great writers make of the personal a handle for the door of the universal so that others may enter the secret rooms of their own experience, those regions of our lives we are too afraid or confused or alienated from ourselves to visit, those places where ultimately we discover who we are and what we want.)
Along the way of his well-planned life, the protagonist meets a young Oxford graduate named Isabel. The two are immediately magnetized into a rare intellectual connection. But as they magnify each other’s minds in sweeping, soaring conversations, beneath the surface of their conscious awareness the body is silently begging for participation:
At that time I think we neither of us suspected the possibility of passion that lay like a coiled snake in the path before us. It seemed to us that we had the quaintest, most delightful friendship in the world… Such friendships are not uncommon nowadays — among easy-going, liberal-minded people. For the most part, there’s no sort of harm, as people say, in them. The two persons concerned are never supposed to think of the passionate love that hovers so close to the friendship, or if they do, then they banish the thought. I think we kept the thought as permanently in exile as any one could do. If it did in odd moments come into our heads we pretended elaborately it wasn’t there.
One day, in one of those small, unpredictable moments that change everything, something shifts in the middle of one of their intoxicating conversations:
I turned to Isabel’s voice, and saw her face uplifted, and her dear cheeks and nose and forehead all splashed and barred with sunlight and the shadows of the twigs of the trees behind me. And something — an infinite tenderness, stabbed me. It was a keen physical feeling, like nothing I had ever felt before. It had a quality of tears in it. For the first time in my narrow and concentrated life another human being had really thrust into my being and gripped my very heart… Our eyes met perplexed for an extraordinary moment… From that time forth I knew I loved Isabel beyond measure. Yet it is curious that it never occurred to me for a year or so that this was likely to be a matter of passion between us.
Suddenly, the “long and frank an intimacy” between the two friends turns into “an extraordinary accession of friendship and tenderness” that comes to include passion as naturally as it had included poetry and philosophy:
The change came so entirely without warning or intention that I find it impossible now to tell the order of its phases. What disturbed pebble started the avalanche I cannot trace. Perhaps it was simply that the barriers between us and this masked aspect of life had been wearing down unperceived… It was as if we had taken off something that had hindered our view of each other, like people who unvizored to talk more easily at a masked ball.
This exquisite mutual recognition is why Tom Stoppard would come to define love as “the mask slipped from the face,” but there is a reason we move through the world masked — there is nothing more vulnerable than the naked face of the soul. Emerson knew this: “There is no terror like that of being known,” he wrote as he was falling in love with his friend Margaret Fuller and resisting it.
And so, as Wells’s characters both feel the energy between them, they resist it, wielding the combined power of their formidable minds at bridling it from involving the body:
The quick leap of her mind evoked a flash of joy in mine like the response of an induction wire; her way of thinking was like watching sunlight reflected from little waves upon the side of a boat, it was so bright, so mobile, so variously and easily true to its law. In the back of our minds we both had a very definite belief that making love is full of joyous, splendid, tender, and exciting possibilities, and we had to discuss why we shouldn’t be to the last degree lovers.
In that way we have of feeling safer in negative certainty than in uncertainty, forestalling the vulnerable possibility of losing what we desire by turning away from it by our own will or convincing ourselves we don’t desire it in the first place, they reason through their list of reservations:
There is a phase in every love affair, a sort of heroic hysteria, when death and ruin are agreeable additions to the prospect. It gives the business a gravity, a solemnity. Timid people may hesitate and draw back with a vague instinctive terror of the immensity of the oppositions they challenge, but neither Isabel nor I are timid people.
Jolted awake from their Cartesian stupor, they discover that what hadn’t seemed possible, that what neither their culture nor their past experience modeled, could actually exist: a love not subtractive of the rest of life but infinitely additive, one not predicated on a tradeoff of devotions between the relationship and their individual work, a fully integrated love in which the passions of the mind and the passions of the body are entwined, annealed, magnified:
It wasn’t as if we could throw everything aside for our love, and have that as we wanted it. Love such as we bore one another isn’t altogether, or even chiefly, a thing in itself — it is for the most part a value set upon things. Our love was interwoven with all our other interests; to go out of the world and live in isolation seemed to us like killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sight of each other engaged finely and characteristically, we knew each other best as activities.
As they become lovers, they enter the magical world all new lovers enter — an island all their own lightyears away from the mainland of their familiar lives:
For a brief time we had been like two people in a magic cell, magically cut off from the world and full of a light of its own, and then we began to realise that we were not in the least cut off, that the world was all about us and pressing in upon us, limiting us, threatening us, resuming possession of us.
Every uncommon love requires constant vigilance and protection from the pressures of the commonplace, a trust that its reality is deeper and larger and more powerful than the so-called real world. Eventually, the protagonist discovers that despite the profound reconfiguration of life his relationship with Isabel demands of both of them, it is worth the toil — because it is worth everything. Wells writes:
There is no describing the reality of love. The shapes of things are nothing, the actual happenings are nothing, except that somehow there falls a light upon them and a wonder… No one can tell love — we can only tell the gross facts of love and its consequences.
With every relationship that reorients life, that remaps the landscape of permission and possibility for both people, the question is always the same: Which is the higher price — the price of the consequences or the price of a life without such love? And the answer is always arrived at by the same path: the courage of living.
“We believe in ordinary acts of bravery, in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.”
~ Veronica Roth
Veronica Anne Roth (born 1988) is a New York Times bestselling American novelist and short story writer. She’s best known for her Divergent trilogy, a dystopian science-fiction series for young adults set in a post-apocalyptic Chicago. The series includes Divergent, Insurgent, and Allegiant, plus two companion books. The Divergent trilogy was adapted into a successful film series from 2014–2016. Wikipedia.org
In Part 1 of the “Evolution of Sex,” I described a few of the major problems facing boys and men said that what boys and men need more than anything else is to reconnect with the community of life on planet Earth. In Part 2 I said that the ancient philosophical dictum to “know thyself” must start with understanding the biological basis of maleness and the importance of evolutionary science. In Part 3, we will delve more deeply into biological importance of our sex chromosomes and how they help us understand and heal ourselves.
Sharon Moalem, M.D., PhD, is an award-winning physician and scientist. His work brings together evolution, genetics, and medicine to revolutionize how we understand and treat disease. In his book, The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women, he says,
“I was always taught males are the strong sex, yet that’s the opposite of what I’ve seen so far, both clinically and in my genetics research.”
He offers some basic facts of life:
“Women live longer than men.
Women have stronger immune systems.
Women are less likely to suffer from a developmental disability.
Women are more likely to see the world in a wider variety of colors.
Women are better at fighting cancer.
Women are simply stronger than men at every stage of life.
But why?”
Clearly, nature and nurture, biology and lifestyle, are all contributing factors, but recent scientific findings point to inherent biological risk-factors as having particular significance.
“We used to think that the mitigating factor explaining the difference in longevity between the sexes was behavioral in nature,” says Dr. Moalem. “More men, for example, have typically perished while serving as soldiers, and while employed in more dangerous occupations. We now know that genetic females’ longevity advantage can be attributed to factors that are biological in nature. Having the use of two X chromosomes makes females more genetically diverse. And the ability to rely on that diverse genetic knowledge is why females always come out on top.”
This biological advantage not only holds for female humans but is true throughout the animal kingdom adding additional credence to role played by biology. In her article “Sex Differences in Adult Lifespan and Aging Rates of Mortality Across Wild Mammals,” Dr. Jean-François Lemaître says,
“In human populations, women consistently outlive men, which suggests profound biological foundations for sex differences in survival. In our study we compiled demographic data from 134 mammal populations, encompassing 101 species, to show that the female’s median lifespan is on average 18.6% longer than that of conspecific males, whereas in humans the female advantage is on average 7.8%.”
In Part 2 of “The Evolution of Sex,” I quoted the work of David C. Page, M.D., professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who said,
“There are ten trillion cells in the human body and every one of them is sex specific. So, all your cells know on a molecular level whether they are XX or XY.”
Dr. Page goes on to detail the genetic difference between males and females.
“In humans, there are 23 pairs of chromosomes. One pair of the 23 chromosomes, known as sex chromosomes, determines at conception whether a fertilized egg will develop into a male or female. Today, human females have one pair of identical X chromosomes. Human males, instead of a matched pair, have one X and one smaller Y chromosome.”
My friend and colleague Robert Bly used to say that boys need to be in the presence of older men “in order to hear the sound that male cells sing.” This is a wonderful and poetic way of expressing our biological difference.
Evolution helps us understand why females should come out as the biologically stronger sex.
“Although we belong to the same species and are more similar than we are different,” says Dr. Moalem, “there’s an important reason that females are more genetically endowed. Our very existence has depended on it for millions of years. Being the stronger sex, genetically speaking, is what allowed females to survive long enough to ensure the survival of our offspring — which in turn means the survival of us all.”
Like Every Other Part of Us, The Male Brain is Significantly Different from the Female Brain
Louanne Brizendine, M.D. is a neuropsychiatrist, researcher, and clinician and a professor and is on the faculty of U.C. San Francisco Medical Center. She is the author of three books, The Female Brain, The Male Brain, and The Upgrade: How the Female Brain Gets Stronger and Better in Midlife and Beyond.
In her book The Male Brain, she says,
“Simplifying the entire male brain to just the ‘brain below the belt’ is a good setup for jokes, but it hardly represents the totality of a man’s brain.” She goes on to say, “The male brain is a lean, mean, problem-solving machine. Faced with a personal problem, a man will use his analytical brain structures, not his emotional ones, to find a solution.”
Here are some of the significant differences in the brain structure and function Dr. Brizendine describes:
The anterior cingulate cortex weighs options and makes decisions.
It’s the worrywart center, and it’s larger in women and smaller in men.
The medial preoptic area is the area for sexual pursuit.
It’s two-and-a-half times larger in the male.
The temporal parietal junction is the solution seeker.
It’s more active in the male brain, comes online more quickly, and races toward a “fix-it-fast” solution.
The hippocampus is the center for emotional memory.
“It’s the elephant that never forgets a fight, a romantic encounter, or a tender moment — and won’t let you forget it either,” says Dr. Brizendine. She notes that it’s larger and more active in women.
Testosterone: The Holy Grail of Manhood
Larrian Gillespie, M.D. calls testosterone the “Holy Grail of Manhood.” Testosterone is an androgen that is produced both in the adrenals and testes of men. Women produce this same steroid from their ovaries, but as is true in all aspects of life, quantity is important.
“Men have about 20 to 40 times more testosterone than women, which is one reason why our sex drives are so different. This forceful hormone is responsible for the drive associated with sexual appetite and patterns of aggression.”
Dr. Carole Hooven is a human evolutionary biologist and an associate in Harvard’s Department of Psychology, in the lab of Steven Pinker, and an active member of the newly established Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard. In her book, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, she says,
“The consensus of experts is that testosterone’s main job is to support the anatomy, physiology, and behavior that increases a male’s reproductive output — at least in nonhuman animals. And men are no exception — T helps them reproduce and directs energy to be used in ways that support competition, and directs energy to be used in ways that support competition for mates.”
Dr. Hooven goes on to say,
“Sex differences are simply differences between males and females — in humans, chimps, or other species — and noting difference says nothing about cause. Men are more likely than women to be sexually attracted to women, and they are far more physically aggressive than women in every pocket of the earth, at every age. For example, they are responsible for around 70 percent of all traffic fatalities and 98 percent of mass shootings in the United States, and worldwide commit over 95 percent of homicides and the overwhelming majority of violent acts of every kind, including sexual assault.”
She concludes saying, “One important point about sex differences, illustrated by these examples, is that almost any feature that differs between the sexes isn’t exclusive to males or to females. Women murder and sexually assault, they enjoy sex with other women.”
We all are aware than males, are on average, taller than females. But is a male who is 5 feet, 5 inches tall if I stretch to my fullest, there are many females who are taller than me (including my wife, Carlin).
Accepting Ourselves For The Vulnerable Males We Are is Our True Superpower
My mother loved Shakespeare and passed on his wisdom to me early. Writing in my Junior High School yearbook she offered this quote from Hamlet.
“This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Over the years, I’ve learned more about what it means to be true to ourselves.
As I approach my 82nd birthday, I believe that accepting our inherent male vulnerability and weakness, is the key to developing our own superpowers. I believe the world needs males and it would be a better place if we let go of our need to dominate others. Men would treat women and other men with more kindness and generosity, if we truly accepted ourselves for the beautiful and vulnerable beings we are. We would also have a better chance of finding our home in the community of life on planet Earth.
As historian and geologian Thomas Berry reminds us,
“We never knew enough. Nor were we sufficiently intimate with all our cousins in the great family of the earth. Nor could we listen to the various creatures of the earth, each telling its own story. The time has now come, however, when we will listen or we will die.”
In Part 4 of “The Evolution of Sex,” we will explore our biology and our evolutionary future.
Best Wishes,
Jed Diamond
Founder and VHS (Visionary Healer Scholar) of MenAlive
The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains,-
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns?
Is not the Vision He, tho’ He be not that which He seems?
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?
Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb,
Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him?
Dark is the world to thee; thyself art the reason why,
For is He not all but thou, that hast power to feel “I am I”?
Glory about thee, without thee; and thou fulfillest thy doom,
Making Him broken gleams and a stifled splendour and gloom.
Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet-
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.
God is law, say the wise; O soul, and let us rejoice,
For if He thunder by law the thunder is yet His voice.
Law is God, say some; no God at all, says the fool,
For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent in a pool;
And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see;
But if we could see and hear, this Vision-were it not He?
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (August 6, 1809 – October 6, 1892) was an English poet. He was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom during much of Queen Victoria’s reign. In 1829 he was awarded the Chancellor’s Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his first pieces, “Timbuktu”. Wikipedia
“For my earthly mother gave me death, but my true mother gave me life.”
–Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas
Amrit Sandhu Dec 28, 2025 Inspired Evolution Podcast Aaron Abke’s deep dive into Christ consciousness whilst challenging conventional religious interpretations and offering a refreshing fresh perspective on awakening Christ within. Is Christ consciousness truly a state of mind, or a divine essence we all possess? How does understanding the metaphysics of Christ’s teachings help us transcend the ego and manifest our divine nature? Aaron unpacks the essence of early Christian mysticism, revealing truths the church has overlooked for centuries. Join Aaron as he guides us through the transformative power of forgiveness, unity with the divine, and the path to realizing our true nature. This is the untold wisdom of Christ’s teachings.
Consciousness, spirituality, biography, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more
Why are you so afraid of yourself… of changing things? Try to detach yourself from yourself and try to see your own viewpoint from the outside, objectively. You are afraid of losing your balance. But change need not unbalance you; life’s not a static object, after all. It’s a process. There’s no holding still. Intellectually you know that, but emotionally you refuse it. Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice. Life — evolution — the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy — existence itself — is essentially change… When things don’t change any longer, that’s the end result of entropy, the heat-death of the universe. The more things go on moving, interrelating, conflicting, changing, the less balance there is — and the more life.
