In other words: develop yourself from the inside out.

Man is microcosm to macrocosm.
Be as ice on the inside and let nothing can harm you on the outside.

"Modern Western man, for the most part a regressive human type, can be compared, in various respects, to a crustacean: he is all the “harder” in his external behaviour as man of action, as unscrupulous entrepreneur, as organizer and so on, as he is “soft” and inconsistent on the plane of interiority." - Julius C. Evola

"Through the “unquestionable/undoubting Consciousness of their own Spiritual-Power ”, the Waves are tamed/subdued [gebändigt] – “made frozen” – they freeze like Ice." - Guido von List, The Mystery of the Runes.

Some of you have asked how a Sophoclean tragedy fits into our Studies in Reaction series:

https://www.imperiumpress.org/product-page/sophocles-ajax

So far, the series has been all non-fiction works, but some of the most based material you'll find is aesthetic—drama, fiction, poetry. Our series encompasses all that, and much more is planned.

As for Sophocles' Ajax specifically, it sketches out Homeric man better than anyone but Homer—in some ways better, because it contrasts Homeric man to the later, classical Greek. We tend to think of Socrates and Achilles as being cultural expressions of the same ethos, but Achilles is a rough-hewn barbarian and Socrates is a sophisticated urbanite. It would be like equating Hegel and a Norse berseker.

Sophocles shows us the barbarian in the shape of Ajax and what he values most in life. And what he values above all else is honour. Honour sounds abstract to us today but it means something very definite: honour is what other people think of you. And when they think little of you, what you feel is shame. Shame is an inherently social phenomenon, is the result of a collective and corporative culture, where the locus of moral authority is outside the individual—sociologists call this shame culture. Think feudal Japan. When the locus of moral authority is within the individual, he feels guilt, and the guilt culture is one where each man judges himself. He may judge according to a standard, but he decides whether the standard has been met. Think the modern West.

Shame culture is what traditional societies look like, and Sophocles gives us a dilemma. Ajax has been dishonoured and has an impossible choice: face his comrades who don't respect him, or do the unthinkable. In the end what is unthinkable to us is not what is unthinkable to him, which shows you just how far we are from our honour-obsessed barbarian roots. Hence, a study in reaction.

This connects with what I wrote before regarding the multiple aspects of the Solar which Evola made use of. First there is the 'Uranic' element, that primordial force of order, authority, and virility. This element corresponds with the 'archaic' ideals of Ajax in Sophocles and Homer, and the transition away from old Uranic worship is evident in that it was mostly gone by Homeric times. It was superceded, or built atop of, by the developed 'Apollonian' element that came with the later Olympian gods. The Olympian ideal of classical Greece is what is most familiar to us as height of Greek culture. It was a grand age full of the greatest philosophy and art; at least until one looks at its origins—the trunk from which it sprouted—and beyond all its aesthetic expression and moralizing one finds it has deviated from its founding principle.

This is perhaps what Nietzsche meant to say in Birth of Tragedy when he haphazardly declared that the 'Apollonian' needed to re-unite with the 'Dionysian;' the Solar symbol developed in the golden age of Olympian victory but began to lose the concepts of honor and shame, and with it its primordial essence. It is not a telluric or naturalistic element missing, but a 'primordial' and essential one which precedes the still Olympian Dionysian frenzy. Interesting that Nietzsche when expounding this concept saw Sophocles as the last great Greek artist and Socrates as the birth of the new Classical man. He was very close to being right.

"I see nothing but a world of ruins, where a kind of front line is possible only in the catacombs." - Julius Evola / Painting: Roman Ruins by Giovanni Ghisolfi

A bit rough around the edges, but I'm still learning. And lo-res because I have slow internet.

https://youtu.be/PzlmJJ1WiUA

"It is in the war between the titans and gods that order and destruction, dominion and nihilism, find their highest expression."

The Vedas in some places say that the deities gained their status, or even created the entire universe, through the power of their inner, ascetic heat (tapas), acquired through the rigorous practice of physical and spiritual self-discipline and mortification of the body. The term tapas derives from a Sanskrit root meaning to heat up or burn, and refers to any one of a variety of ascetic methods for achieving religious power. In the Rig Veda, Indra is said to have achieved his divine place through the practice of asceticism and the generation of this powerful "heat," while elsewhere in that ancient work are encountered cosmogonic hymns that attribute the origins of the universe to the Primal One who creates by "heating up ascetic heat." The metaphysical qualities of both truth and order are said to have derived from ascetic heat, and the ancient Indian seers (rishi s) also were supposed to have achieved their powers through ascetic heat.

Me justifying taking 2 months to only read 30% of Revolt

There is a huge difference between reading a book (so you can put an X on a list, saying you've read it) and digesting it. Most people read carelessly.

In late neoplatonism, the spiritual universe is regarded as a series of emanations from the One. From the One emanated the Divine Mind (Nous) and in turn from the Divine Mind emanated the World Soul (Psyche). Neoplatonists insisted that the One is absolutely transcendent and in the emanations nothing of the higher was lost or transmitted to the lower, which remained unchanged by the lower emanations.

For Plotinus and Porphyry the emanations are as follows:

To Hen (τό ἕν), The One: Deity without quality, sometimes called The Good.

Nous (Νοῦς), Mind: The Universal consciousness, from which proceeds

Psychē (Ψυχή), Soul: Including both individual and world soul, leading finally to

Physis (Φύσις), Nature.
Plotinus urged contemplations for those who wished to perform theurgy, the goal of which was to reunite with the Divine (called henosis). Therefore, his school resembles a school of meditation or contemplation.

Link to the rest of the article
http://opsopaus.com/OM/BA/ETP/V.html

"The Roots of Platonism and Vedānta: Comments on Thomas McEvilley on JSTOR" https://www.jstor.org/stable/20106908