Man's proper stature is not one of mediocrity, failure, frustration, or defeat, but one of achievement, strength, and nobility. In short, man can and ought to be a hero.

Mike Mentzer

“All battles are first
won or lost, in the mind”.
Joan of Arc

"He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious."

"Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories."

- Sun Tzu

The soldier and sailor should make simplicity their aim. If you do not make simplicity your aim, you will become effeminate and frivolous and acquire fondness for luxurious and extravagant ways; you will finally grow selfish and sordid and sink to the last degree of baseness, so that neither loyalty nor valor will avail to save you from the contempt of the world.

[from the Japanese Imperial Renoscript to Soldiers and Sailors, issued by Emperor Meiji of Japan in 1882]

Thus practicing constant control of the body, mind and activities, the mystic transcendentalist, his mind regulated, attains peace by cessation of material existence.

Bhagavad Gita, 6.15

"Man is the most divine of all beings, for amongst all living things, Atum associates with him only- speaking to him in dreams at night, fortelling the future for him in the flight of birds, the bowels of beasts and the whispering oak. All other living things inhabit only one part of the cosmos- fishes in water, animals on the earth, birds in the air. Man penetrates all of these elements. With his sense of sight, he even grasps the heavens."
-The Hermetica.

The biggest puzzle arising is that comprehension of the One is neither by scientific understanding nor by intellection, as it is in the case of other intelligibles. It corresponds rather to a presence which is better than scientific understanding. But the soul undergoes a departure from its unity and the fact that it is not altogether a unity, whenever it attains scientific understanding. For scientific understanding involves an account, and an account is multiple. The soul, then, passes by the One when it falls into number and multiplicity. So, it should run above scientific understanding, and in no way exit from its unity, and should depart from scientific understanding, and the objects of scientific understanding, indeed all else, even from the vision of Beauty. For everything beautiful is posterior to the One, and comes from it, just as all daylight comes from the sun.

Plotinus, 6.9.4

Meme Friday: Hardcore Edition

“Thou art called to endure and to labour, not to a life of ease and trifling talk. Here therefore are men tried as gold in the furnace.”

~Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

"Sallust described the original Romans as the most religious of mortals: religiossimi mortales (Cat., 13), and Cicero said that ancient Roman civilisation exceeded every other people or nation in its sense of the sacred: omnes gentes nationisque superavimus (Hat: respon., IX, 19). ... The Roman, like ancient and traditional men in general, believed in a meeting and mutual interpenetration of divine and human forces. This led him to develop a special sense of history and time, to which we have drawn attention in another of our articles here, speaking about a book by Franz Altheim. The ancient Roman felt that the manifestation of the divine was to be found in time, in history, in everything which is carried out through human action, rather than in the space of pure contemplation, detached from the world, or in the motionless, silent symbols of a hyperkosmia or ‘super-world’. He thus lived his history, from his very origins onwards, more or less in terms of ‘sacred’, or at the very least ‘prophetic’ history. In his Life of Romulus (1:8) Plutarch says in so many words, ‘Rome could not have acquired so much power if in one way or another it had not had a divine origin, such as to show to the eyes of men something great and inexplicable.’ ... This fact allows us to see the error of those who consider the ancient Romans essentially as a race of semi-barbarians, who prevailed only through brutal force of arms, borrowing from other peoples, such as the Etruscans, Greeks and Syrians, the elements which served them in lieu of true culture. Rather, it is true that ancient Romanity had a particular mystical conception of war and victory, whose importance has oddly escaped the specialists ... Each victory was believed to actualise a new centre of forces, separate from the particular individuality of the mortal man who had realised it; or, if we prefer, by victory the victor had become a force existing in an almost transcendent order: a force not of the victory achieved in a given moment of history, but, as the Roman expression stated exactly, of a ‘perpetual’ or ‘perennial’ victory. The cult of such entities, established by law, was designed to stabilise, so to speak, the presence of this force, so that it added invisibly to those of the race, leading it towards outcomes of ‘fortune’, making of each new victory a means for revelation and reinforcement of the energy of the original victory. ... The cult of victory, which was believed to have prehistoric origins, can be said more generally to be the secret spirit of the greatness of Rome and of Rome’s faith in its prophetic destiny. ... It is however certain that, even today, in this unleashed vicissitude one should not feel alone on the battlefields – one should sense, in spite of everything, relationships with a more than merely human order, and paths which cannot be assessed solely by the values of this visible reality can be the source of a force and an indomitability whose effects on any plane, in our view, should not be underestimated."

- Julius Evola in Roman Conception of Victory

"In the quiet and ordered periods of history, this wisdom is accessible only to a few chosen ones, since there are too many occasions to surrender and to sink, to consider the ephemeral to be the important, or to forget the instability and contingency which is the natural state of things. It is on this basis that what can be called, in the broader sense, the mentality of bourgeois life is organised: it is a life which does not know either heights or depths, and develops interests, affections, desires and passions which, however important they may be from the merely earthly point of view, become petty and relative from the supra-individual and spiritual point of view, which must always be regarded as proper to any human existence worthy of the name. The tragic and disrupted periods of history ensure, by force of circumstances, that a greater number of persons are led towards an awakening, towards liberation. And really and essentially it is by this that the deepest vitality of a stock, its virility and its unshakability, in the superior sense, can be measured. ... We need to remember that, for a complex set of reasons, the superstition which attaches all value to purely individual and earthly human life has spread and rooted itself tenaciously – a superstition which, in other civilisations, was and remains almost unknown. The fact that, nominally, the West professes Christianity has had only a minimal influence in this respect: the whole doctrine of the supernatural existence of the spirit and of its survival beyond this world has not undermined this superstition in any significant way; it has not caused knowledge of what did not begin with birth and cannot end with death to be applied in the daily, sentimental and biological life of a sufficient number of beings. ... A radical destruction of the ‘bourgeois’ who exists in every man is possible in these disrupted times more than in any other. In these times man can find himself again, can really stand in front of himself and get used to watching everything according to the view from the other shore, so as to restore to importance, to essential significance, what should be so in any normal existence: the relationship between life and the ‘more than life’, between the human and the eternal, between the short-lived and the incorruptible. And to find ways over and above mere assertion and gimmickry, for these values to be positively lived, and to find forceful expression in the greatest possible number of persons in these hours of trial is undoubtedly one of the main tasks facing the politico-spiritual elite of our nation."

- Julius Evola in Liberations