måndag 17 september 2018

War as Being -- the Warrior Way of Truth

The warrior's life is willpower-driven. The warrior has to acquaint himself with death. In other words, the life of a warrior is rather actionist. -- Indeed, actionist it is... and even more so, the text below is now included in a new book called Astral War -- Your Soul Is the Battlefield.




I have previously told you about the astral war – the invisible war, the propaganda war being fought right now. Hereby some Actionist musings on the role of the warrior in this context – how to “be a warrior” in the glorified moral sense. How to be a paragon of responsibility and awareness, a spiritually apt operator in the flurry of existence and beyond.

Actionism (2017) and even Borderline (2015) touched upon this subject -- of war as spiritual elevation, of the study of soldiering as moral inspiration. Hereby some repetition and further deliberations on the subject.

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The main Actionist interest in war is the personal-moral aspect. How to live like a warrior and raise yourself in the process.

One inspiration for this comes from the Castaneda books. The guru Don Juan always speaks about becoming a warrior. When once asked by the pupil, if a warrior really can be a role-model for a man of knowledge, Don Juan says that he doesn’t speak about war in the sense of destruction and violence. He speaks about it as a mental elevator.

In other words, the nagualist disciple needs the warrior simile to have as “a moral equivalent of war”.

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War can take out the best (and worst) in man. Here we focus on the best: qualities like heroism, living a willpower-driven life, ability to rise to the occasion, “being all that you can be”.

Primarily, a spirit warrior knows about death. Castaneda told of this, bushido tells of this. And Actionism. The Actionist knows that his physical body has a limited lifespan. This MMM – Memento Mori Mindset – makes him calm. His spirit will live on after death.

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Actionism told you of this German army concept: Verantwortungsfreude = the joy of responsibility. That is, to assume responsibility gladly – as a soldier on the battlefield, within the framework of the mission at hand, doing everything to assure victory.

To thrive while being responsible is the core of Actionism since the very subtitle of the 2017 Actionism book is “how to become a Responsible Man”.

In the same context Actionism spoke about another German concept: Innere Führung = Inner Leadership. In the German Bundeswehr, this means that every solider must be his own chief. Like, when there’s nothing to do the ranker must nonetheless ask himself what tasks he can occupy himself with, like taking care of his equipment, chopping wood, tidying up the cantonment. He shouldn’t always wait for orders, like a robot. Within the framework of the mission a lot can be done by the ranker’s own initiative.

And Inner Leadership is, like Verantwortungsfreude, an otherwise established concept capturing the gist of Actionism. Like this: Inner = thought; leadership = will. And Will-Thought is the basis of man, the strongest force in the universe as Actionism intimated.

Vernichtungsschlacht is yet another German concept of war that Actionism has embraced. This kind of battle is the encirclement, the Kesselschlacht, where one of the contestants is totally surrounded and eradicated as a fighting force. The historical battles of Cannae, Fraustadt and Tannenberg are of this kind, as are the WWII battles of Suomussalmi and the German eastern front victories of 1941: Minsk, Smolensk and Kiev. Details aside, they can be seen as examples of the ultimate artwork. And Actionism has a strain of artistry over it. As in lauding the saying, "the spirit of song is war," see below.

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So, whereto, spirit soldier...? Attack of course. Always attack! If you want yet another German proverb for this it would be: Über Gräber vorwärts. The Hans von Seeckt ideal.

Don’t get bogged down in trench warfare, no, get up and go!

Attack, always attack. And trenches or not trenches, this embracing of the attack, of attack as a lifestyle, is what separates the spiritual soldier from the IRL soldier. An IRL soldier must practice both the attack and the defense. For his part, the spiritual soldier, the Actionist warrior, is only about attack. Like Serrano says:
[The spirit warrior must take] ... a path untraveled even by the Gods in all the Ages of this closed Universe. And because the Way does not exist, the hero “makes it on the run,” invents it, opens it with the blows of his Sword.

[The Ultimate Avatar, 2014 p 376]
Serrano, in imagining his spirit warrior, had the Grail knights in mind: Parsifal, king Arthur and the rest. There, a fine symbol for the Actionist warrior: a noble, spiritual fighter, using the business of fighting as a way to spiritual elevation and moral perfection. Having the Grail knight as an ideal along with Castaneda’s “Indian Warrior” archetype will illustrate what “fighting as being” in the Actionist sense is about.

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The gist of the spirit warrior is this: forever living as if in the din of battle, in fierce and hectic action, but not letting this affect you, not getting stressed out by this. No, the mere demand of action makes you calm. Thus, you’re forever living in apatia, sang-froid, samatva and equanimity – living in total concentration and total relaxation, being indifferent to happiness and sorrow: sukha-duhkha-samâ, eternally enjoying the emptiness of the moment, the nothingness now.

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It’s about attack, always attack. Coolness and restraint must of course be remembered but generally, the spirit warrior is about being strong, powerful and inspirational – and fighting bravely in the offensive mode is the prime symbol of this. No immortal hero ever won battles by being locked up in a fortress.

It’s about “triumph of the will to immortality”.

It’s about “fire and movement as spiritual elevation”.

It’s about the central Actionist tenets of “Movement as a State” and “Rest in Action” – to always be on the go but not striving for a climax, no, it’s the very state of being active you strive for. Actionism explained that in discussing Rest in Action.

This elevated state of the warrior is what the poet Karin Boye wrote about. “Rest only awaits you in battle. Only between the shields there is peace.” A similar Swedish Valkyrie poet was Edith Södergran, who meant that “the spirit of song is war”. She lauded war as an aesthetic, elementary action. “War” in her hands became truly mythical in the sense of Serrano. She for instance wrote about the hero being “enraptured in tranquility,” following his path with “amor fati” written on his banner, discarding everything having to do with “slow,” “careful” and “try”. (More about Södergran’s fiery poetry can be found in Borderline.)

This is devotion in the original, Roman sense: to put your life in the hands of the gods, to fight without a thought of tomorrow. Devotio it was called in Latin. The Actionist is devoted in this sense: to affirm the inner, divine light in an active way.

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This is war as being. This is constant attack. This is Odin, god of war, poetry and ecstasy...

This is the Grail. This is Kalki on a white horse:
And I looked, and behold, a white horse. He who sat on it had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer.

[Rev. 6:2]
This is spirit war, astral war, total war in the spiritual sense. Your soul is the battlefield. Go to this war with a song on your lips: “the spirit of song is war”.

So prepare for total war: a total, absolute, all-out war against materialism. As I said in a poem written in 2018:
I am the Holy Flame,
I am the Holy Fire...

I am the flash in the firepan,
fire and movement preaching man.

Burning all materialism to ashes.
I will burn it to ashes, then burn the ashes.
In other words, it will be the ultimate Vernichtungsschlacht.




Related
Astral War (2023)
Actionism (2017)
Borderline (2015)
Castaneda -- Words and Concepts
Illustration by LS.

måndag 10 september 2018

Good Reads Lately, September 2018


Hereby some succinct reading tips. [If you want a rather similar text in Swedish, telling about other books I've just read, check this out.]




Jules Verne, Robur the Conqueror (1886). A credible conceptualization of the principle "heavier than air" (and not "lighter than air" such as balloons); a powerful "preachment in prose" that this heavier stuff would ultimately conquer the skies. "To be stronger than air you must be heavier than it"... Also, this novel has a main character with an adorable superman persona.

Samuel Delany: Babel-17; Empire Star (both 1966). A kind of brainy space adventures. Top notch. Serious literature in popular form. You might say that regarding life-style etc. etc. Delany veered off into uninteresting lands in the 70s. However, he was no mad man, no, in his 60s novels he spun yarns having rightfully become classics of sf. As good as Philip K. Dick, sometimes better, I'd say.

Carl von Clausewitz, On War (1832). A great read for civilians (military minds can read Schlieffen). A book about what war is (and it's an activity hard to formalize, you can only grasp it by a system of axioms, Clausewitz means). -- The book could demand some preparation, some reading up on Clausewits's approach, but it isn't so very hard to understand. Clausewitz comes through as very readable.

Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History (1874). The latter half is the usual diatribe against the author's dislikes. However, in the former part Nietzsche (among other things) advocates the study of history leading to great deeds and heroism. "Monumentalist history" he calls it. To stand in awe as before Plutarch's heroes is the lodestar of history.

Goethe, Faust, Part 1 (1808). The best strain of this classic is the occult. It isn't all histrionics; Goethe had some esoteric knowledge. And Faust and Mefisto sauntering about in this world and the next is the perfect duo: hero and sidekick, sidekick and hero.




Related
Table of Contents for This Blog
Good Reads, November 2017
Timeline of Conservative SF