The New Way Of The Superior Man - David Deida
In a Nutshell
Men reach a phase where old drives for success, validation, and purpose dissolve, leaving a state of pure presence and stillness rather than apathy or depression. This "man of zero" is not a problem to fix but an evolution: one rests as awareness itself, allowing life and action to arise from a deeper force rather than personal striving. True integration requires staying present through emerging discomfort and suppressed material, maintaining discipline in the body-mind while no longer needing external motivation, and learning to hold polarity in relationships from this place of emptiness.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
David Deida is an esoteric figure living in seclusion in a house in the middle of nowhere in Florida. The conversation addresses the concept of a "man of zero" as a phase some men experience.
A man of zero reaches a point where motivation has evaporated. They may remain active with marriage, children, businesses, and creative pursuits, but underneath lies the feeling of "why am I doing this?" and a sense that part of them would rather do nothing. Deida observed this pattern in many men he interacted with over the years.
This represents a kind of sequel to The Way of the Superior Man, though not necessarily a linear stage progression. A person might enter the man of zero phase and later return to being the superior man after a month, year, or decade.
A superior man is motivated by a deep sense of purpose, which might involve discovering their purpose, serving the world, giving their gift, or making things right. When this motivation evaporates, the man of zero phase begins.
The man of zero phase may be temporary. Deida's own book emerged unexpectedly during this phase as a new purpose that arose from nowhere. The phase involves discipline and effort once a new direction appears.
The state is not apathy but rather clarity, pure presence, and pure awareness. It involves being absolutely present with the moment without an urge to push and change things. One feels deeply content with the way things are, without stress, though this does not prevent action.
Most men carry a kernel of stress in their gut, heart, or solar plexus that drives them to act. The man of zero experiences what happens when that stress is absent.
In the superior man phase, motivation comes mostly from personal sense of purpose. In the man of zero phase, one becomes available to be used by something much larger. The question becomes how the universe uses you and how that deeper force moves through you.
When one reaches this restful state of no longer needing to prove oneself, much of one's previous ambition and pushing falls away. This suggests that without drives for validation, recognition, and past patterns, one might not push as hard. This represents an evolution and form of growth rather than a negative development.
Some of the best music was created by artists motivated by getting laid. People create real art and beauty from inherited feelings of lack of self-worth. It is not necessarily negative that people are motivated by these factors. The question is what happens when those motivations are no longer sufficient to move someone.
The world is shaped by people trying to prove themselves to themselves and others. Much motivation comes from running away from something feared rather than moving toward something wanted. When viewed from the individual perspective, reaching this phase represents an internal evolution.
The first indicator is no longer being motivated the way one used to be. Friends may seem motivated with reasons to get up in the morning, but that motivation is absent. There is a sense of peace or lack of stress in the heart or depth. Many men assume this is a problem because their previous motivations no longer move them and feel false.
Temporarily, the deepest self wants to do nothing, which serves as a portal. If men learn to do nothing impeccably—without turning to phones, pornography, or movies—and instead remain present, totally aware, crystal clear, without pulling away or pushing anything, something emerges from that state.
One can simply be, whether sitting or walking. That being then begins to unfold through one's life, body, and mind. Because body and mind are conditioned and trained in certain ways, the expression of being will look different through different individuals.
A core component is becoming comfortable with peace and experiencing a deceleration in striving. The need to do and the need to be busy fall away. The sense of seeking—whether for self-validation, peace on earth, or anything else—dissolves, leaving one with just being.
Most men reaching this place assume something is wrong and try to restore motivation through testosterone, caffeine, or other means. In fact, this state is their mojo, leading them to relax their body and mind to become transparent to their deepest being.
Once living from the place of being, there is a through-and-through sense of authenticity. There is no sense of something lacking to fill or stress to release. It is simply a fullness of being living one's life.
The same force that grows trees and moves blood is at work. Thoughts appear out of nowhere. Nobody knows what they are about to think. Nobody plans thoughts. Thoughts, bodies, and experiences of hearing and seeing simply appear. When one can stay in this state because there is no motive to move, a sense of freedom emerges. Things appear and one may act on them, but the essential feeling is freedom.
Success eventually stops feeling meaningful. Striving no longer rewards in the same way. Men reaching this escape velocity enter the man of zero phase. Because they have taken meaning from progress, difficulty, hard charging, and fulfilling ambition, when that drive disappears they often attempt to change conditions—through caffeine, imagined enemies, higher testosterone, or divorce—to reignite motivation.
It is healthy and appropriate for the motivations of body and mind that previously moved one to come to stillness and discover the truth of what remains.
Success only felt full because of thoughts and feelings of lack and the goals one pursued. Anyone who has succeeded at anything discovers that after achieving zillions of dollars, the beautiful partner, or whatever the goal was, they remain the same being they were before.
If motivated to make money, find a partner, or have sex with many people, one can explore that. Human birth exists to explore all possibilities of being human. However, there comes a point, which can occur at any age, where things feel empty. The tone becomes one of emptiness and meaninglessness. One may be in a mansion with external changes, but essentially remains the same one.
A large percentage of men entering this phase have achieved some success and reached meaninglessness. However, more younger men are reaching this point before achieving success, often due to meditative experiences or psychedelics. They can have an unearned glimpse of infinity early in life. Their practice remains the same as outlined in the book.
Psychedelic experiences can create spiritual bypass. People may go to the Amazon, sit with a shaman, touch the divine, and feel the infinite, then return as the same person with no integration. They visited a peak moment like a tourist and returned to normal life.
The key insight is recognizing that one is the same being before, during, and after any experience. Being or awareness of being is what is always there—present at age five, ten, and now. Experiences change, but the sense of I or being is continuous. The practice is to rest as that being.
Psychedelics may afford healing and visions of parallel worlds. Those can be interesting and useful, but the one having the visions is the same one who eats lunch and performs daily functions.
True clinical depression involves biochemical imbalances addressable through pharmacological means, or depression from losing someone loved or failing at something pursued for years. What most people experience when reaching meaninglessness is that their actual life no longer holds meaning, leading to the question of what to do now.
The addition of collapse creates depression. Being one's deepest self without collapse is the man of zero. Collapse involves contracting in the solar plexus, hunching over, and mulling over thoughts. Subtracting the doing—including contraction, slouching, and thought mulling—leaves being without collapse.
When drive and ambition disappear, one may look at friends who remain congruent and aligned, and feel this must be depression. One way to distinguish is to notice that thoughts are moving while one remains. Thoughts have beginnings and endings. One can witness thoughts coming and going while remaining present. The experience changes, but one does not.
One can sink into, rest as, or relax as that being. Buying into thoughts creates contraction. Getting lost in thoughts, sexual relationships, or work creates suffering because one is not one's true self. The check is whether one remains free even as thoughts move—whether one is the awareness or space of awareness in which thoughts move. Resting there is effortless. Feeling effort indicates missing the mark.
When the drive that kept one busy disappears, quiet and fleeting thoughts that were previously avoided through busyness surface. This creates additional material to contend with, incentivizing a return to drive and pursuit.
The situation is more challenging because suppressed material returns. Past lies told for personal gain create contraction and tension. When reaching zero, all tensions from one's entire life surface—including lies to self and others. Memories arise to awareness for release. This is a purification process.
Deeper than personal history, genetic, epigenetic, and ancestral material surfaces. At the mammalian level, urges to kill, mate, and run arise. Moments of hurting others arise. These appear to be released. The process is not vanilla and requires tolerance of the unfolding.
Interest in previous games becomes less, but skills remain. If effectiveness is measured by playing a game one has transcended, one is less moved to play. If the game is imposed, one might be more skilled because less wound up in personal issues.
Many people respond with distaste when told the view from the top is not what they imagined. They view it as a luxurious position unavailable to them, believing that reaching the goal would solve their internal need for validation. If someone feels they need to man up and push through, that is a valid phase to go through.
The recognition is available right now, in this moment. One can feel what is happening, notice what is happening. There is always something happening—auditory and visual perceptions—but none of that changes the one experiencing it. One is the same one listening now as yesterday or ten years ago. In this moment, one can relax or notice that one, and instantly all the doing and thinking becomes empty—not negatively, but as stuff happening, like watching a river or clouds. It flows through one. There is no need to wait for achievement or arrival.
Self-improvement does not block awareness or real freedom. People moved to self-improve should do so. Sooner or later most men feel the emptiness of awareness regardless of how active or improved they are.
A third of the book The Man of Zero addresses sex. As men rest at zero more stably, past motivations for sex (mammalian conditioning, psychological past, first sexual relationships, childhood traumas) lose power. Men often experience less actual desire for sex but more sexual fantasies surfacing from depths previously repressed.
Men may feel they are losing sexual desire and try to regain it. What previously turned them on (lingerie, porn) becomes less compelling. Instead, a partner's actual love, devotion, and surrender to love opens the body to love and generates sexual polarity from zero.
Stillness is one side of polarity; the other side is fullness or energy. The masculine is the unchanging stillness that can be experienced. The feminine is everything that moves, life force, energy, and fullness to the emptiness.
Resting in emptiness through polarity attracts fullness. In heterosexual relationships, men resting as zero tend to attract women who are very active, like to talk, and like to socialize. It is important to learn to embrace this polarity.
Ultimately the polarity is the fullness of awareness attracting a woman in her fullness of devotion whose heart is open and full of love, who loves but does not need the man, and vice versa. This creates a strong polarity between depth of stillness and her radiance and power.
More women graduate high school than men. More women are in law school and medical school than men. This trend is expected to continue with more women leaders and more successful women than men. Men will need to learn to rest as the man of zero in depth while maintaining polarity.
A woman who is strong and powerful may come home from work and find the man completely present, rooted in the deepest sense of being, absolutely attentive without clinging because his awareness is free. This is felt as the greatest gift. She moves from being attracted to a man who makes money and is socially charismatic to a man whose polarity matches at the level of being and doing, emptiness and fullness.
Awareness is where everything happens. The man is that awareness and is therefore the ultimate frame. This applies sexually: a man of zero may lie in bed not wanting to do anything yet can hold his lover and feel her body, tensions, emotions, and ongoing yearning in her heart. She feels his presence and deep knowing, which can be more penetrating than physical action.
Evolutionarily, male bodies only need to ejaculate to create the next generation while women must survive pregnancy and raise the child. Men are built to be easily sexually aroused and fantasize often, making it easy to talk about sex and what they like physically.
Intimacy often involves emotional sensitivity. Most men during sex remain identified with physical sensations and the evolutionary drive toward erection and ejaculation. At depth the masculine is emptiness or nothingness while emotions fill that emptiness. Men who love nothingness often do not like filling it with emotion.
When asked what they are feeling, men often truthfully say nothing or that they have no feelings about something. This creates a communication gap: the woman feels he is not sharing while the man feels she is creating a problem when none exists.
When in the man of zero phase, awareness is recognized in all beings. Feeling the awareness in the lover creates mutual awareness that is love. Recognition of shared being at depth, despite surface differences in minds and bodies, manifests as love. With polarity present, this connection remains even while playing opposite poles.
One feels love and remains still and silent with no mood while the other flows with feeling and is highly responsive to life. This forms a good pair in terms of polarity: unity of heart alongside reciprocity in body and mind.
Men should not push their stage or phase but live it fully. The best way to grow out of a phase is to grow through it. If motivated toward purely physical sex, continue until it becomes obsolete.
When ready, practices include:
- Taking attention off oneself and onto the partner's body, feeling tensions, relaxations, breath, and emotions in the partner more than one's own sexual sensations.
- Creating resonance through synchronized breathing during sex.
- Going deeper in the body beyond surface physical contact.
The feeling of going deep is the essential masculine urge, expressed as going deep into her, into self, and into being.
Stability of being infiltrates patterns of the body-mind over time. As one rests as being more stably, patterns (traumas, aggression from upbringing or mammalian inheritance) integrate naturally because tension is no longer added to them. They uncoil in the space of awareness.
Some people with tight knots may need somatic therapy, cognitive therapy, or trauma therapy to loosen contractions. The goal is relaxation in the openness of presence.
Integration is slow. The body is the last to change. One may find the body doing things the mind no longer wants. Patience and compassion are required as past contractions stored in the body-mind open in the spaciousness of present being. This process takes years.
Recognition of being does not automatically produce integrated behavior. Some deeply realized people remain unintegrated in patterns (alcoholism, infidelity) while some less deep people are socially skilled and trustworthy. One must use discrimination rather than assuming depth equals integration.
A lack of integration often creates more art than an integrated human because suffering triggers depth and art. Good art comes from depth. People should not rush through phases or assume someone has depth simply because they produce meaningful work.
The body and mind continue to require discipline even after reaching rest at zero. To become stronger requires lifting weights regularly. To think more clearly may require reading books. Learning to golf requires discipline and repetition. The body and mind still require discipline, but the discipline is no longer to be what you are. You recognize you are what you are, so being depth is effortless. If you are trying to be being, you are trying and not being. Effortlessness is the key to knowing that in this moment you are just being. Within that effortless being you might still decide to paint something, pick up your kid from school, or build a business, and those things require repetitive action or discipline.
There is a difference between bottom-up motivation, which is less conscious and driven by need for recognition and past patterns, versus a more conscious choice where you do not need to paint but you want to paint, or you do not need to go to the gym but you want to go to the gym. The need to go to the gym might be because if the body is better then you will look good to the person you love and they will find you attractive, as opposed to doing it simply because you want to.
Women had a major transitionary period about 50 to 60 years ago. As women take over functions that men once had, men will have to find a deeper reason for being. That deeper reason is to frame everything, hold everything, be presence, and be depth. Whatever somebody is doing, your presence deepens them so their doing becomes steeper. This involves a different form of self-worth, measuring yourself on your stability in being what you are rather than on how much money you have or how much weight you can lift.
The masculine essence is identifying more with the emptiness aspect of being than the fullness aspect of being. The feminine is oriented toward growth, change, flowering, and fullness. The masculine is more oriented toward timelessness, peace, and being. Two different orientations are emptiness and fullness, or presence and radiance.
David Deida has instructed in artificial intelligence, researched neuroscience, developed yoga techniques for intimate relationships, wrote PhDs that received an award from the French government, published academic papers, studied spirituality, and wrote 11 books. He has lived mostly in silence and retreat-like life for the last couple of decades. The through line is a desire to understand reality, who I am, and who we are that started very early in life. He remembers being in the crib and feeling perspective, and crawling on the carpet at his grandparents' house and realizing what size meant. This interest led to mathematics where he developed the inducational calculus, a calculus of distinctions about how distinctions arise in consciousness. Published papers in that became biology and immunology. He worked in labs and in a sleep lab to study sleep and dreams. During all of that his main interest was the nature of being, of reality, of me, of the world, why we are here, and what is the meaning, not in an intellectual sense but to be able to do it.
David Deida went to college at 16 years old in a combined medical school and undergraduate program. He was dissecting brains in labs and suddenly realized he could not do it anymore because he had outgrown it. He let things go in an easy and responsible way. He spent a year living under a tarp on a beach on a deserted part of Hawaii with no money, and from that year came his first book. If you surrender to that process and are not lazy, and really put in the work as things arise, what you create from that place of depth is worth something to people. He learned to make a living doing what he loves. The pain of living an untrue life exceeded the fear of what might happen. It literally hurt. His body hurt. Every being hurt to do those things. Suffering is the root of a lot of exploration, creation, and art. The suffering became so intense that when he ended a phase he had no choice but to allow the new authenticity to find a way to express itself.
After a seven-day deep emotions boot camp retreat involving 12 hours a day working on anger, grief, sadness, upright communication, and apologies, sensitivity to misalignment increased dramatically. The constriction feels like a wet rag being twisted from the back of the mouth to the middle of the stomach. Small lies or inauthentic communications create this tightening. The contraction in the front of the body from the throat down through the solar plexus and deeper is a signal that you are out of line. If the need for self-worth is intense, it can push someone to ignore that for years. You can learn to feel that tension, constriction, and contraction as it is happening. It is like a meter. It is like flying an airplane by instruments. You feel the tightening and recognize you might not be aware of why it is happening, but you are living off the mark. The lagging indicator is ending up in a life you are not supposed to be in. Different people feel the contraction in different places. Some feel it in the emotional body and become emotionally unwell. Some experience it in the mental or intellectual body and start thinking strange thoughts. Different men feel it primarily in different dimensions, and that is the dimension they should focus their work on.
Every man has to discover this for themselves. One intimate relationship and having a partner is highly informative because the partner's contractions reflect when you are off. It is harder to bypass your partner's complaints and contractions. The wisdom of intimate partners in their natural reflection, depth, and love has informed development significantly. Working with a long-term teacher who can reflect areas you cannot see yourself or are not willing to see, and who lovingly continues reflecting until you pick it up, is also highly effective. Feeling the contraction in the front of the body, learning how to open that, and feeling what is forming that are useful techniques. The love of a partner and the love of teachers are the most effective modalities.
David Deida stated that the host seems authentically and genuinely committed to truth, which is pretty rare. The host has this podcast and has been highly motivated to create it, but the heart is in it. David Deida felt moved to connect because he agrees with the heart and resonates with the heart. The host described the podcast as a thinly veiled autobiography masquerading as conversations, cycling through serially monogamous relationships with 1,100 world experts on a variety of topics, trying to find out what is true and understand himself and the world. David Deida advised to trust the heart in the midst of all of it and you will go the right way.
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