If you wish your children and your wife and your friends to live forever, you’re a fool because you wish things that aren’t up to you to be up to you and alien things to be your own. Likewise, if you wish your slave not to go wrong, you’re an idiot because you wish vice not to be vice but something else. But if you wish not to fail to attain what you desire, this you can do. So practice what you can do.

Epictetus, The Handbook 14

Asceticism often brings to mind very extreme images, but we can get an accurate sense of the real meaning of asceticism by looking at the etymology of the word.

The word “ascetic” ultimately derives from the ancient Greek word “askein,” which means “to train for athletic competition.”

Therefore, genuine asceticism is spiritual exercise, with the aim of gaining mastery over your impulses and appetites. Just as you lift weights to become stronger and healthier, you should practice asceticism to strengthen your soul.

Asceticism does not need to be (and shouldn’t be) extreme. It can be as simple as abstaining from pornography, eating only enough food to be healthy and no more, and the like. Of course, you know your own vices best and should find ascetic practices that aid you in your most problematic areas.

Just as with physical exercise, the heavier the weight, the greater the benefit. But asceticism should never be taken to the point of serious bodily harm, and it certainly should not have masochistic undertones. Remember, Plato instructs us (in the Timaeus) to be balanced physically and mentally!

Another common misconception is that asceticism means that enjoying things is bad. No, it is exercise for the soul, nothing more. It is perfectly fine to enjoy pleasant things, but you should never be a slave to pleasant things. Asceticism helps you break free of any chains you might have that are keeping you enslaved.

In the next couple essays in Metaphysics of War, Evola digs deeper into both what it is to be heroic and how this relates to spiritual societies. First, a look into the two types of battles fought by warriors. One is the battle he fights against his foes and the other, more important battle is the one he fights within himself.

"The lesser war here corresponds to the exoteric war, the bloody battle which is fought with material arms against the enemy, against the ‘barbarian’, against an inferior race over whom a superior right is claimed, or, finally, when the event is motivated by a religious justification, against the ‘infidel’. ... The ‘greater’ or ‘holy war’ is, contrarily, of the interior and intangible order – it is the war which is fought against the enemy, the ‘barbarian’, the ‘infidel’, whom everyone bears in himself, or whom everyone can see arising in himself on every occasion that he tries to subject his whole being to a spiritual law. ... Appearing in the forms of craving, partiality, passion, instinctuality, weakness and inward cowardice, the enemy within the natural man must be vanquished, its resistance broken, chained and subjected to the spiritual man, this being the condition of reaching inner liberation, the ‘triumphant peace’ which allows one to participate in what is beyond both life and death. The greater, holy war is the ascesis which has always been a philosophical goal. It could be tempting to add as well: it is the path of those who wish to escape from the world and who, using the excuse of inner liberation, become a herd of pacifist cowards. This is not at all the way things are. ... It is a feature of heroic traditions that they prescribe the ‘lesser war’, that is to say the real, bloody war, as an instrument in the realisation of the ‘greater’ or ‘holy war’; so much so that, finally, both become one and the same thing."

Second, this triumphant peace of inner liberation corresponds also to the pax triumphalis of the great civilizations that cultivate such heroic souls. He invokes the Vedic tradition here to give exemplary examples of spiritual warrior culture.

" ‘Do thou fight for the sake of fighting, without considering happiness or distress, loss or gain, victory or defeat – and by so doing you shall never incur sin’ (2:38). We find therefore that the only fault or sin is the state of an incomplete will, of an action which, inwardly, is still far from the height from which one’s own life matters as little as those of others and no human measure has value any longer. ... We thus arrive at this general vision of life: like electrical bulbs too brightly lit, like circuits invested with too high a potential, human beings fall and die only because a power burns within them which transcends their finitude, which goes beyond everything they can do and want. This is why they develop, reach a peak, and then, as if overwhelmed by the wave which up to a given point had carried them forward, sink, dissolve, die and return to the unmanifest. But the one who does not fear death, the one who is able, so to speak, to assume the powers of death by becoming everything which it destroys, overwhelms and shatters – this one finally passes beyond limitation, he continues to remain upon the crest of the wave, he does not fall, and what is beyond life manifests itself within him. ... But we now have all the elements needed to specify, from all the varied ways of understanding, the heroic experience, which may be considered the supreme one, and which can make the identification of war with the ‘path of God’ really true, and can make one recognise, in the hero, a form of divine manifestation. Another previous consideration must be recalled, namely, that as the warrior’s vocation really approaches this metaphysical peak and reflects the impulse to what is universal, it cannot help but tend towards an equally universal manifestation and end for his race; that is to say, it cannot but predestine that race for empire. For only the empire as a superior order in which a pax triumphalis is in force,

almost as the earthly reflection of the sovereignty of the ‘supra-world,’ is adapted to forces in the field of spirit which reflect the great and free energies of nature, and are able to manifest the character of purity, power, irresistibility and transcendence over all pathos, passion and human limitation."

Here we see the correspondence between heroes and their societies layed out. It takes, generally, a spiritually-minded society to create heroes, but also, it takes heroes to inspire an entire culture to spirituality. This dual influence is really the expression of the transcendent principle. The cultures that accept this become the great empires of history and, in their golden ages, live as expressions of the Divine. These empires inspire heroism in their people just as their founding heroes achieved ascesis within themselves.

Criticism of Evola's comments on the superiority, or more accurately primacy, of the spiritual over the material completely misses the mark. They always come from a materialist viewpoint that doesn't take into account the teleological pre-eminence of the spiritual nature of reality. They carry baggage of a basic view of reality as merely matter and electro-magnetism and cannot comprehend something greater.

When Evola says race is not the most important thing, he is not saying that biology and family are worthless but in fact the opposite; the potential greatness of ancestry and kinship has the ability to bring us towards transcendence, and this is because their inherent value comes from the spiritual realm as aspects of Tradition itself. The greatness of war doesn't stem from the physical battle fought between men but from its forging and sharpening of those men into heroes. The inner war is 'greater' because it is the connection to the Divine; the 'lesser' war in the material world is only capable of being great insofar as it is also a 'greater' war that cultivates spirit within its warriors.

This misunderstanding cannot be over-stated. Blonde hair/blue eye 'Nordicism' clings to materialistic ideas and inevitably keeps the rest of one's thinking on that level. If you wish to revere your ancestors, whose legacy as 'Aryans' still mean 'the wise' to the Vedics and 'the noble' to the Persians, then take that wise and noble path. Yes of course light features are still seen universally across the human species as more beautiful, and beauty and virtue being closely related, it is not wrong to draw a connection. However one must not forget the source of all beauty and virtue and with it the nature of this connection between the physical and transcendent; the characteristic physical traits of our greatest ancestors are not the source of their greatness but rather a consequence of their capacity for appreciating beauty and practicing virtue.

The battle isn't genetic, it's spiritual. Modernity has brought us a dysgenic age far removed from Tradition, but it is our calling to transcend its degenerate depths. One can not simply 'be' biologically white/Aryan/European and win; by reducing your conflict to this level is to already lose. To be strong and fertile is to win, to be disciplined and virtuous is to win, to be noble and wise is to win. Blonde hair didn't tame the wolf or auroch or horse, and blue eyes didn't build or subjugate any empires. Light skin didn't keep pastoralist warrior societies from degenerating into cities surrounded by agricultural serfs, and red hair didn't keep these ancient traditions alive for so many generations. It is the spiritual alignment of their people that allowed our ancestors to develop this superior lifestyle in the first place - they were superior in mind and body because they were first superior in soul.

Outer beauty is a reflection of inner beauty. Even your hair will lighten with all the hours you spend in sunlight if you are laborious (and have some 'West Eurasian' genetics). Your body, just the same, will grow strong and virile if you keep it working outdoors and eat meat. It is no accident that light hair can be earned by being in the light of the Sun, nor that the vitamin D necessary for hormone production comes from it also. Healthy bodies with enough testosterone inevitably think healthier thoughts and thus will be more receptive towards Solar wisdom and nobility. This is only scratching the surface of manners in which characteristics of physical beauty are expressions of transcendent principles.

Eternity as its atemporal horizon then opens itself both in its philosophy which is rooted in the ontological, in the eternal present of the human being and the powers that transcends him. While the liberal conservative simply resists to negative tendencies of modernity and the traditionalist longs to return to the golden epochs of his culture, the conservative revolutionary clashes in order to:

Take out from the structure of the world, the roots of evil in order to abolish time itself as a destructive quality of reality and, by doing so, to fulfill like this some kind of parallel secret, the non-evident intention of deity itself.

History does not escape from man, but man does not escape man himself. The absolute liberty of the will from which the progressive mockingly displays has a “genetic” seal. The causality of freewill points out an ontological fingerprint in the effect it imprints over reality: it is the character of human nature, the Dasein (being-there) as the being of the authentic man.

But this liberty is falsified when the understanding of man in modernity, in his desire to conquer absolute liberty, abstracts man from himself. It is the kingdom of the inauthentic, of the crippled human essence. Just as it is warned from Heidegger to Dugin, is the inauthenticity of the Dasman (the-they). For Dugin and Gómez Dávila the true liberty is realized when man by opening himself to the eternal is reintegrated in his ontological essentiality recovering what’s contingent in the perennial and the perpetual in the immortal moment: the temporality of myth. And by opening himself to the eternal it is not but an excuse to accommodate for the sacred, understood as the permanent and most truthful, in the core of our being. As this for Gómez Dávila the liberty:

Is not an instance which fails conflicts between instincts, but instead the mountain from which the man contemplates the ascension of nine stars, between the luminous dust of the starred sky (…) the free instant dissipates the vain clarity of the day, in order for it to raise above the horizon of the soul, the immobile universe which slips its passing lights over the tremble of our flesh.

It is not the past which is eternal what gives absolute sense to the stance of the reactionary. Here in his final lines the “Authentic reactionary” unveils his spiritual inclination:

The reactionary does not claim what the next dawn might bring, neither does he grasps the last shadows of the night. His lair rises in that luminous space where the essences interpellate him with their immortal presences.

There are two races of men on Earth. The first - of a stifling number - is content to satisfy the basic needs of existence. Material concerns, family concerns limit its field. Love, sometimes, casts its shadow there, but strictly egoistic and reduced to the scale of the rest.
The other race, although subject to the yoke of hunger, carnal pleasure and tenderness, carries its ambition further and higher. To flourish and simply to breathe, it needs a more beautiful, more pure and spiritual climate. He must untie ordinary limits, exalt the being beyond himself. Subject him to some great unseen force and lift him up to her. The poverty of man hurts her, despairs her. The inaccessible alone attracts it like redemption and the victory of the human condition.

Joseph Kessel

I would still post for nobody but myself, but there is great value in community so I would like to change what I can to foster the most discussion. Let me know what you engage with so I know what posts to make for you.

Since the roots of our natures are established in divinity, from which also we are produced, we should tenaciously adhere to our root; for streams also of water, and other offspring of the earth, when their roots are cut off become rotten and dry.

The Pythagorean Sentences of Demophilus

According to traditional man the physical plane merely contains effects; nothing takes place in this world that did not originate first in the next world or in the invisible dimension.

Julius Evola

According to the traditional view, man as such is not reducible to purely biological, instinctive, hereditary, naturalistic determinisms; if all this has its part, which is wrongly neglected by a spiritualism of dubious value, the fact still remains that man distinguishes himself from the animal insofar as he participates also in a super-natural, super-biological element, solely in accordance with which he can be free and be himself.

Generally, these two aspects of the human being are not necessarily in contradiction with one another. Although it obeys its own laws, which must be respected, that which in man is ‘nature’ allows itself to be the organ and instrument of expression and action of that in him which is more than ‘nature.

Julius Evola

In this conception every victory had a mystical side in the most objective sense of the term: in the victor, the chief, the imperator, applauded on the battlefield, was sensed the momentary manifestation of a divine force, which transfigured and trans-humanised him

Julius Evola

Colonel John Boyd's approach to tactical decision making: the OODA Loop

Colonel Boyd was a fighter pilot, who served in the United States Air Force during World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam. The OODA Loop was originally known as the “Boyd cycle.” OODA loops are denoscriptions of tactical air-to-air engagement, means of adjusting strategies in constant coevolution with one’s strategic environment, and metaphors for life itself. "...without OODA Loops... we will find it impossible to comprehend, shape, adapt to, and in turn be shaped by an unfolding, evolving reality that is uncertain, ever changing, and unpredictable" (Boyd, 1995). The process of observation, orientation, decision, action represents what takes place during the command and control (C&C) process.

1. Observe (Information Gathering)
2. Orientate (Filter & comprehend the information)
3. Decide (Make the best possible decision based on the filtered information)
4. Act (Take action / react)

Boyd, J. (1995). The Essence of Winning and Losing.