"An Aryan mind has too much respect for other people, and its sense of its own dignity is too pronounced to allow it to impose its own ideas upon others, even when it knows that its ideas are correct." - Julius C. Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening.

How?

It goes back to the absolute importance of sacred rites and initiations. Normally such things are required for men to reach such heroic and ascetic states. However in this age we lack the institutions that would give us these functions, so it is up to the strongest and most pious of us to re-discover those paths and lead the way for others.

To put it simply and concretely, you need to sincerely commit to the warrior-mystic path, always working to improve yourself and your connection to the Divine, praying or meditating for insights and inspirations. Without a mortal guide to help you you must train yourself. The 'divine madness' rarely comes to an uninitiated being, but when one prays for insight and inspiration they will come, and with practice these simple insights and inspirations become entire states of mind until you are truly 'possessed.'

“Men are often called intelligent wrongly. Intelligent men are not those who are erudite in the sayings and books of the wise men of old, but those who have an intelligent soul and can discriminate between good and evil. They avoid what is sinful and harms the soul; and with deep gratitude to God they resolutely adhere by dint of practice to what is good and benefits the soul. These men alone should truly be called intelligent.”

+St. Anthony The Great

"To free human beings from the dominion of the totems [telluric, lunar, plebeian religion]; to strengthen them; to address them to the fulfillment of a spiritual form and limit; and to bring them in an invisible way to the line of influences capable of creating a destiny of heroic and liberating immortality - this was the task of the aristocratic cult.⁹ When human beings persevered in this cult, the fate of Hades was averted and the 'way of the Mother' was barred. Once the divine rites were neglected, however, this destiny was reconfirmed and the power of the inferior nature became omnipotent again. In this way, the meaning of the abovementioned Oriental teaching is made manifest, namely, that those who neglect the rites cannot escape 'hell,' this word meaning both a way of being in this life and a destiny in the next. In its deeper sense, the duty to preserve, nourish, and develop the mystical fire (which was considered to be the body of the god of the families, cities, empires, as well as, according to a Vedic expression, the 'custodian of immortality') without any interruption concealed the ritual promise to preserve, nourish, and develop the principle of a higher destiny and contact with the overworld that were created by the ancestor. In this way the fire is most intimately related to the fire, which especially in Hindu and in the Greek view and, more generally speaking, in the Olympian-Aryan ritual of cremation, burns in the funeral pyre; this fire was the symbol of the power that consumes the last remains of the earthly nature of the deceased until it generates beyond it the 'fulgurating form' of an immortal.¹¹"

⁹ In some traditions there is a belief in two demons: a divine and friendly demon and an earthly demon, subjected to body and to passions. The former may represent transformed influences, or the 'triumphal' heredity that the individual can confirm and renew or betray whenever he gives in to his inferior nature, expressed by the other demon.

¹¹ This form is the same superindividual form of the divine ancestor or of the god into whom the limited consciousness of the individual becomes transformed; this is why in Greece the name of the deceased sometimes was substituted with the name of the founding father of the stock. We may also refer to the Zen koan: 'Show me the face you had before you were born.'

- Julius Evola in Revolt Against the Modern World

Let us take a quick break to celebrate both physical fitness and our specific community. Ozymandias is an old community member with a video channel that has plenty of great book reviews and discussions, and actually inspired our channel here in the first place. While his intellectual discipline is solid, he also is not afraid to put out there as an example his strength earned through years of physical discipline too.

Please give his short video a watch and support our community, and perhaps get inspired yourself along the way.

https://youtu.be/HxIUjSKvA1M

He vows to endure to be burned, to be bound, to be beaten, and to be killed by the sword." The gladiator's oath as cited by Petronius

(Satyricon, 117).

Personal opinion: Ride the Tiger is becoming less and less relevant as a doctrine.

Ride the Tiger, as I have exposed elsewhere, was always designed for a lengthy interregnum, a period where the forces of modernity could not be effectively opposed. We are now increasingly nearing the point of this period's termination.

Continuing the theme of men and women and their symbolism: He stands for otherworldly pursuits; she stands for worldly passions. Worldliness is impossible without the presence of women; monasticism demands the absence of women. Man is the soul. Woman is the flesh. He is the cause. She is the manifestation. He is the self, pure awareness, and the true identity of our being. She is the energy, the matrix, in which the self is enmeshed. Since he is the self, he is the subject who experiences life and she is the object who is experienced in life. She owes her existence to him. He owes his identity to her. He creates, sustains, and destroys her. She enables him to preserve, propagate, indulge, and realize himself. Just as man and woman are complementary, so are spiritual and material realities. Hence, when God is represented, Hindus choose not male or female but both male and female. In Hindu temples, therefore, God is always associated with the Goddess. In Vishnu temples one finds Lakshmi. In Krishna temples one finds Radha. In Rama temples one finds Sita. In Shiva temples one finds Shakti. Without either there is neither.

After truly diving into Evola's work, it is my observation that many in our circles - even in these smaller spiritual and intellectual circles - simply do not grasp what Evola says. They do not understand what he wrote or why he did so. The bigger picture which he paints is invisible before their eyes.

Evola's writings are nothing like a holy book or spiritual guide, which if we are being honest is a characterization they get labeled with all to often. If anything his writings show how one might better read holy books, and how one might possibly write guides on spirituality.

Evola's practically mythic reputation as some master of esotericism is so off-the-mark it is insulting to his legacy, which seems increasingly obvious to me to be the single greatest attempt ever made to exotericize spirituality.

"In those areas in which Tradition retained all of its vitality the dynamic succession of sacred kings represented an axis of light and of eternity within the temporal framework, the victorious presence of the supernatural in the world, and the 'Olympian' component that transfigures the demonic element of chaos and bestows a higher meaning to state, nation, and race. Even in the lower strata of society, the hierarchical bond created by a conscious and virile devotion was considered a means to approach, and to participate in, the supernatural.
In fact, invested with authority from above, the simple law acted as a reference and a support that went beyond mere human individuality for those who could not light the supernatural fire for themselves. In reality, the intimate, free, and effective dedication of one's entire life to traditional norms, even when a full understanding of their inner dimension was not present to justify such an adherence, was enough to acquire objectively a higher meaning; through obedience, faithfulness, and action in conformity with traditional principles and limitations an invisible force shaped such a life and oriented it toward that supernatural axis that in others (in those privileged few at the top of the hierarchy) existed as a state of truth, realization, and light. In this manner, a stable and lively organism was formed that was constantly oriented toward the overworld and sanctified in power and in act according to its hierarchical degrees in the various domains of thinking, feeling, acting, and struggling. Such was the climate of the world of Tradition."

- Julius Evola in Revolt Against the Modern World

As regards procreation, Aristotle wrote, “The male represents the specific form; the female represents the matter, being passive insofar as she is female, whereas the male is active.” This polarity recurs in the concepts of ancient Greek philosophy, having its origin in the mysteries and being applied to various forms that nowadays are no longer understood in their original, living meaning. The male is form, the female is matter. “Form” here means the power that determines and arouses the principle of motion, development, becoming. “Matter” means the material and instrumental cause of all development, the pure indeterminate capability, the substance or power that, being devoid of form in itself, can take up any form, and which in itself is nothing but can become everything when it has been awakened and fecundated. The Greek word for matter does not mean, therefore, either the matter of the organism or that of physical nature in general…In Pythagorean terms this is also the principle of the Dyad (of the binary, of the Two); it is opposed to the One and is presented by Plato as déuteron or that which is always the “other,” being related to the receiving place, khṓa, of being and to the “mother” or “foster-mother” of becoming.

[...]The representations of ascetic and Apollonian manhood must be deemed still higher than Heracles with the symbolism of his labors, which emphasize heroic manhood and, to some extent, resistance to the dominion of women. Here we can consider Shiva as a connecting element, as the god of a cult and not as a metaphysical principle; if, on the one hand, in the Alexandrine period, he was taken to be the same as Dionysus, god of the orgiastic rites, on the other hand, he was also thought of as the great ascetic of the high peaks. He had a wife, Parvati, but was not held in bondage by her, for he was able to strike with lightning the god of love, Kama, when the latter sought to awaken in him desire of need, privation, thirst, and dependence. (In Hindu myth, Kama was revived by Shiva through the intercession of divinities, such as Rati, who personify forms of pure erotic experience, free of conditional qualities.)

Above all the ascetic struggles, manhood, next, has a typical symbol in Heruka, whose severe and imposing heroic beauty is sometimes even frightening. He is the naked divinity and shining scepter-bearer of the Hindu Tibetan pantheon; here nakedness expresses a meaning opposed to that of female ultimate nakedness and represents pure being in itself, the “purity” or dominating uranic simplicity which is dangerous for woman (to see man in such “nakedness” may signify that she will lose him forever, which is another well known theme in the saga). But Shiva often already had the same attribute, namely digambara or “the naked one.