“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”

Janis Joplin

Like other Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), I feel no desire to be ‘in’ the gynocentric, feminist-infested, misandrist, man-belittling world any more than I must. I also do not feel any desire to not be in the world.  I know that everything visible is necessarily transitory and thus not really real in the permanent sense of having a fixed, immutable, unchanging essence.  Whatever comes into material being will go out of being. Only that which is invisible could be eternal and unchanging and thus capable of being really real. I am interested in the eternal and whether going my own way is a way to get there.

            What value is it to become attached by desire to what is visible while knowing that the visible world I perceive is not the really real world but merely appearances of the real, perceptual phenomena?  None. I don’t know how I came to be manifested in this visible world articulated in accordance with my sensing it. Yet I feel certain that I must guard against getting trapped in this ever-changing realm, trapped in the false belief that it is somehow the ‘really real’ realm…which is impossible. As I said, the really real can only be invisible, unchanging and eternal. Thus the really real is necessarily beyond time and temporality, beyond space and spatiality.  The really real is forever. I would like going my own way to go there.

            Here is another approach to the same idea.  What a strangeness I am to myself! How odd that I should be present to myself at all, capable of  knowing myself—the strangest of things! But I lose the sense of how odd and unlikely I am in my everyday life among other human beings, a forgetfulness born of habit and efficiency. I get used to myself. I get lost in everydayness and become familiar to myself, assumed, along with everyone and everything else. I take my being for granted and accept it as normal. Yet, my being is far from normal if normal means immediately making sense or being structured within the comprehensible. I am not comprehensible to myself. I am the oddest of oddities, more odd than odd can be.

            Being is forever estranged from itself and does not know itself and will never catch up with itself and reduce itself to an act of knowing certitude or production of knowledge within the temporal, material plane of some perceiver. To think otherwise is presumptuous, a simpering presumptuousness born of a fear of the unknown and unknowable that drives us to fashion our being into the goes-without-saying until it disappears behind many guises.

            Of all human foolishness, the drive to twist ourselves into the belief that we understand anything, including ourselves, first and foremost ourselves, is the most foolish. We are gripped by being, yet not for a moment do we grasp it. To believe otherwise is to have given yourself over to the need for some felt-security, some being-found sameness that will save you from your essential, ontogenetic lostness. That is precisely the essence of attachment, the place from which you must begin to get free.

            I am here, yet I am passing and thus not really here or there entirely and I do not want to get stuck in the illusion of materiality. This life is merely a passage, a transformation process, a being-born out of what we call death, the final transformation or transmutation of this material plane, the final letting-go we will undertake.

            My work here, the work of a hermit, is to get free of attachments to being here while simultaneously finding unity with it all at the same time.  Unity in detachment.  Not to not be here, but to be here free of being attached to being here. To get free of attachment, you must first see how you are attached. That’s a good place to begin.  Make it your main life pursuit because getting-free of attachment is the way of forever, the way of letting-be and letting-go is the approach to immortality.  It is the space of true freedom and independence.  Men Going Their Own Way will be found there.