basic reflections

The True Nature Of A Warrior

 The following is an extract from the series of "Warrior Texts" written by Samuel Widmer. What does it mean to be a warrior? What does a warrior have to learn? What is his actual mission? Read on:

The financial crisis has changed our world. Nobody seems to have quite noticed as yet: the most difficult 25 years of human history have begun. The financial crisis is just the beginning. And even that is not yet over. Other breakdowns will follow, especially ecological ones. How to survive such difficult times?

 

How to escape the insanity of humans and their leaders?  Once more there is only the path of the warrior, who starts out alone and unperturbed, to prepare for the only challenge worthy of humanity, the inescapable encounter with vastness itself. It would be really easy, if humans wanted to know what justice demands of them, how we would have to reconstruct the world to care for the wellbeing of all, to have everything fall back into balance and no derailments have us lose the right path any more. They would just have to pose the question. That is exactly what they don’t do. They don’t really want to know. As soon as they want to know and seriously pose the question, the answers will be obvious in each situation.

 

My experience as a psychotherapist is that we can solve any problem if we speak together with an open heart and an open mind. But we do have to speak with each other and have to have the heart open and the mind too. Otherwise nothing happens. That is the way of the warrior, a way dedicated to an immaculate life and his joy about it. This joy is the only thing that creates balance in the midst of the downfall of a mad world.

***

 I don’t know where the concept of warrior comes from. There seems to be something universal about it. I encountered it though the writings of Carlos Castaneda and the transmission of the teachings through the Yaqui Indian Don Juan Matus.

 

This way of looking at the world convinced me right from the start and since then it has  accompanied me in my life. It proved to be of invaluable support, especially during experiences of being misunderstood and excluded, which he describes in this book, of how not to go under or get entangled in senseless quarrels. It concisely sums up the path of self-awareness and discipline in daily life.

 

The warrior is not a soldier. The soldier’s dependency on authority and his absolute obedience are totally alien to him. His battle is not the war with enmity or allegiance; his battle is a battle with himself, with the Self that he is attempting to conquer to find total freedom. His battle is a struggle for unity. In this he stands totally alone.

 

The warrior knows that he cannot change himself; yet, he attempts to do so tenaciously. His final reward is not the change, but the flux which results from the creation of his tenacity; an energy that changes everything.

 

Unlike the average person, the warrior is never disappointed when he does not succeed in changing himself. That exactly is the distinction. No reaction. The path of the warrior is the path of joyful failure. This is the path of being immaculate. And the flux that he finally experiences, after having developed enough strength, is the loss of human form, the retrieval of the very primary, the unconditioned spirit, the free energy, not caught in habitual patters. Freedom.

And freedom does not consist of being able to decide or choose freely, but in being able to perceive freely, to have the freedom to see everything.

 

The warrior is always an outsider. He wants to stand alone. The common people fear him, despise him, yet also admire him, but they don’t understand him; and ultimately he stays unknowable and unreachable for them. The warrior is not responsible for what happens with someone who has come into contact with him.

 

The warrior has understood that it is his own responsibility to decide. The power of his decisions is all he has. And yet, he knows that he has no choice and that his decision has to do with following the voice that calls him. Meditation for him is to understand that separation is caused by the choice and decision of a will, which is not free. His way of meditation is to understand desire and longing and not to overcome one longing through another.

 

What the warrior seeks is inner stillness, because it is the source of everything inexplicable. It builds upon itself and works in an accumulative way. If the warrior is able to keep this inner stillness for long enough, the interpretation of sensory data that is bombarding him collapses and he returns to his true nature and the true nature of all. This is where he finds freedom. In the context of infinity, to be free is the only worthwhile endeavor. For the warrior, everything but the pursuit of freedom amounts to deceit.

 

 

The Deeper Rebellion

 One of the things that often saddens me is the fact that few so-called rebels put their energy into really solving the root cause of what they see as the problems. As a result  most  drop outs with the potential to change things remain trapped in exactly what they are trying to escape. My years spent in various organisations working ostensibly for a better world have more or less shown me that the desire for a better world is not enough in itself. It has to be accompanied by the strength and intelligence to go beyond the stultifying norms one is trying to overcome, by sheer tenacity and perseverance and the ability to see the true obstacles. To see for example, that the monster is not “the system”. Nor is it other people. It is nothing other than our inability to perceive the world as it is, things as they are, ourselves for that matter, that lands us in a narrow little corner from where we then fight our narrow minded battles.

 

It is not just people working in organisations for social development that I feel close to. I have secretly also sympathised with drug addicts and alcoholics. In some weird way, even these so-called dregs of society, have inadvertently landed where they are, as a result of not playing according to society’s rules. Most unfortunately, none of these so-called rebels have been able to really put their energy into any kind of lasting transformation. As usual for a good reason one supposes.

 

Social reformers, people and others working outside the establishment, all kinds of drop outs, have presumably chosen the route they have, on account mainly of one thing. (I am now referring to genuine individuals and not those who have chosen this kind of work to simply carve out an empire for themselves in the field of conservation or rural work or whatever). They have come into contact with the world in a deeper way than most and it has caused them pain.

 

Pain can be a great shaper of destinies. Pain can help people to move mountains. Provided it is dealt with in the right way. Unfortunately most of us have a standard reaction to pain and all that causes us distress. We jump into action. “Action” ranges from thinking fast and furiously about the painful situation, to talk, to action. Earthquakes, the Tsunami, various natural and man-made disasters witness a lot of action and genuine human support from all directions. Human beings seem capable of reacting fast to catastrophes. What we are not good at  is dealing with chronic situations. Chronic unpleasantness, cruelty, bad behaviour. In short all the things which finally lead to man-made crises.

 

Social reformers commonly jump into action by girding their loins and going and forming organisations and getting to work on various issues. The junkies jump for their brand of poison be it crack or illicit hooch. Pain is hard to bear. It is hard to stay with. But it is precisely through staying with it, without immediately reacting to it, that we get the strength we need to go deeper into the poison that is destroying our world so as to be able to dissolve it and free ourselves of the trouble. This does not mean, as so many people might suppose that we drop everything and sit in the lotus posture of contemplation. No. It means we carry on with our work, with our duties, with whatever we are doing. And yet, somehow, what it means, is that through it all, that we make time for the necessary contemplation of life.

 

To be able to deal with the world the way it is, we need a lot of staying power. We need to be able to just watch a problem quietly. We need stillness, not in the sense of being lazy or apathetic but still as in meditation. As in the eye of the storm, as in the heart of true creativity.

 

Again, there is a reason that we have by and large failed to go as deep as we need to go into the problem. It is not something we learned to do – ever. Nobody taught us how to look, how to listen, or how to deal with our feelings without suppressing them, in order that we might get the best out of our energy without losing it in constantly hiding the way we are. For this reason, precisely because most of us find ourselves on foreign terrain when it comes genuine change, the only thing to do is for each of us to depend on our own resources to find our way as individuals.

 

It’s a little bit like being lost in a forest, initially alone, so that one has nothing else to go by besides one’s own senses and intelligence. Perhaps when one has ventured far enough in this fashion, we will meet each other in a new space, where each of us will have learned the value of independent thinking and perception from which point onwards we will be able to work together, to cooperate with each other and give ourselves to a common goal without losing our individual essence.

 

Uma

 

On Sexuality

Lots to reflect on, in this piece  sent in by Radha.

Sexuality is such a taboo subject. Yet we are in it, with it all the
time. It is all pervasive. In our movies, in our advertisements, in
our interactions and actions, in our thoughts and feelings … it is
like an unseen force that swirls around us and inside us all the time.
Yet we pretend it is not there, or at least pretend and play with it
like a little kitten when we actually know it is a tiger waiting to be
discovered. Perhaps we know somewhere that it is the nature of this
tiger we find difficult to engage with.

Sexuality is one of the primordial urges – survival and procreation. A
primordial force generated from the union of the male and female
principles, and thus the best and worst of both. Being the union of
these two principles it is a sum total of all the energies that exist,
a sum much larger than the totality of all.

It also is a container of the collective conscious and unconscious – a
container for all that can lead us to the highest or the lowest within
us. It is a force within us that can take us to transcendence and reveal
the joy of Unity with the Divine and at the same time it is a force
that can take us to the depths of our beings into the dark underbelly
of depravation. We probably ‘remember’ from the collective
un/conscious of what this power has unleashed or the ways in which
this energy has been used and misused. The pain and fear that it has
generated over the millennia within humanity. And the bliss and joy it
has gifted to us too. So we all feel a frisson down
our spine when we engage with these memories. Somewhere we really, really
understand the capacity of this force, and that is why our wariness to
engage with this.

It is taboo, perhaps, because it has been recognized by humanity as
that which cannot be treated lightly or with levity. Perhaps there is
an unspoken recognition that this kitten can turn into a raging,
mauling tiger in an instant. It is like we warn children – ‘don’t play
with fire’. That warning does not mean stay away from fire, but a
reminder to treat it with respect and honor that it deserves. It is
the same with sexuality – society has tabooed it as a warning to us
collectively to be careful with it, to be protective of it and to be
protected from it at the same time. It is a warning from experience of
how this force can become twisted and monstrous if not engaged with in
honour. Neither its divinity nor its depravity can be treated with
levity. It can be treated so, only after we ourselves have gone
through the rigours of understanding its nature within us.

Maybe this distinction of itself, within itself doesn’t exist. But its
manifestation in our evolution has seen two separate, distinct routes
that it can take, its light and its dark sides… perhaps that is the
mistake we make … for we need to engage with it in its totality rather
than its varied manifestations.

It is important to engage with this force. One cannot turn away from
it. One cannot say one will never engage with it. That would be as
foolish as mis-treating it. It needs to be engaged with in complete
awareness, and with complete respect and reverence for it. And once we
mutually understand one another – the force and us, and we have
acknowledged it for what it is, it will allow us to ‘play’ joyfully,
and treat us to its sparkle and awesome splendour.