Way of the Spiritual Warrior
At the heart of all our great spiritual teachings lies a darkly seductive message:
Just do nothing at all.
You have everything you need. Don’t go looking. It’s all right within you.
Stay in one place. Be here now. Be happy. Think positive. Just accept it as it is. Don’t make waves. Don’t ask questions. Don’t go looking for answers.
Sound familiar?
And it’s not just our spiritual teachings either. The message bombards us from everywhere.
Everyone from our bosses, to our leaders, to our parents all have some variation of the same message. Don’t do anything crazy. Be happy with what you have and if you’re not then buy this thing to fill the gap or meditate on it to kill the desire. But don’t step out of line. Don’t talk back. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.
Whether it’s the voice of your guru, or a self help book, or your grade school teachers, or your parents, or the mass media it’s all the same.
And it’s all a lie.
It’s a prison. It’s a way of keeping order and grinding us all down to the same size so we fit in a nice and easy to control box.
The truth is the exact opposite.
The path to greatness, to mastery, to a life of freedom and wild possibility is to take action.
The spiritual journey is a great war, a great adventure. It’s setting out on the open waves, taking big risks, battling monsters real and imagined, slaying dragons and finding buried treasure in far off lands. It requires incredible courage and discipline and immense personal power.
You venture out on the wine dark sea, with nothing but your sword at your side and your wits, full of fear and joy and life, terrified that your worst fears will happen.
And they do.
You get smashed on the rocks and lose everything. Everything terrible you ever worried about is out there waiting for you and more. There are monsters you can’t possibly imagine ready to tear you to shreds. They’re monsters built just for you, monsters that know your worst Achilles heel, who can hit it with pinpoint precision.
But that’s not the end of the story. It’s only the beginning.
It’s only the beginning because you get the hell up and keep fighting and keep putting one foot in front of the other. And with each step you get stronger and stronger.
Somehow, some way, you get through it and rebuild into something better than you were before, something stronger, more focused and clear.
Each scar you get and each scalp you take adds to your power and to a deep seated sense of self worth that can never be taken away from you ever again.
This is the true path of mastery, the way of the spiritual warrior.
There is no other path.
The rest are an illusion.
A Golden Land of Opportunity and Adventure
The life you really want for yourself takes work. It takes effort. It takes you getting out there on the road and taking chances.
The life you want has real stakes. Out there on the open road you’ll have to face your worst fears. People might laugh at you and point at you and call you names. You can fail. And you will fail multiple times before you ever succeed. The life you want has the highest stakes possible: mortal stakes. You can die.
And that’s terrifying.
It’s why the spiritual teachings are so seductive. They play to your fear. Death is our greatest fear. It’s our only true companion, the only traveler who walks with us on our journey from the day we’re born to the day we pass on. As the book Anam Cara tells us, “death is the great wound in the universe, the root of all fear and negativity.”
And it paralyzes so many of us in place.
We’re so afraid that we never take any chances at all. We just stay in our little swim lanes and keep our heads down, working jobs we hate, staying with lovers who don’t fulfill us, accepting people into our lives who don’t value us or take care of us.
But the ancient books and the holy spiritual teachers seem to offer a way out of the pain and the fear. They tell you, you don’t really have to take any chances or risk anything. You can just stay right where you are and meditate all day and rake stones and you’ll find the true meaning of the universe.
But you won’t.
Instead you’ll wake up ten years later and realize you’ve been running in place the whole time.
You got fed spiritual Soma and you didn’t even know it.
Ask yourself a little question. What do all the great spiritual disciplines of the world have in common?
You probably think it’s great wisdom, or powerful unity consciousness, or an amazing community of wonderful people.
Maybe.
But they have something else in common too: None of them have produced a single enlightened person.
Nobody has ever come out of those schools and said “I’m enlightened.” When you evaluate a school you look at success rate. If you wanted to go to law school and they had a zero percent graduation rate, would you go to that school? If they had even a 50% success rate would you go? 75%? No.
But that is exactly what people do with the great spiritual schools of life. They sit at the feet of gurus, read the great books over and over again, experience mystical states and trances, visualize, pray, sway, chant and sing.
And at the end of it not a single person comes out of that beautiful and mystical experience and says I’ve figured it all out.
Think about that for a second.
A zero percent success rate.
Oh they produce a lot of people on the path and a lot of altered states of consciousness but how come nobody ever comes out and says, that’s it! I’ve got it! I’m enlightened. I’m done with the path forever.
Over decades or hundreds or even thousands of years they should have a whole nation of enlightened folks and yet they’ve got a big, fat goose egg.
What does that tell you?
It tells you that all the great gurus of the world are the last thing in your way, the last thing holding you back from your dreams. Their hypnotic words are the most ingenious trap ever devised. They sit on the pedestal and you sit at their lotus strewn feet and dream away your life instead of living it.
Every single guru imagines he’s helping you when he’s doing the exact opposite. He’s simply keeping you in Plato’s little cave of shadows, lost and not even knowing you’re lost.
I am your anti-guru. I want to free you from me as fast as possible. I want you to get to a place where you refer to no non-you authorities ever.
That’s because you can sit at the foot gurus for years, listening to their pretty words and discovering powerful mystical states, hanging out with tranced out spiritual folks and never make a single inch of progress.
And then one day you stand up, walk out the door and you never look back. Suddenly you’ve made more progress in that single second than you ever did in all those years sitting at his feet chanting and swaying and moaning.
Like Siddhartha you need to take a close look at the great master and realize that he doesn’t know a damn thing you don’t know and walk the hell out of the forest to something else entirely.
But how do you find that courage?
Courage comes from self confidence and confidence comes from self worth.
But where does true self confidence and self worth come from?
The Path to Freedom
The path to courage is to find out what it is you’re really supposed to do in life. It sounds easy but it’s hard.
All of us have a mustard seed deep inside of us that’s waiting to grow, that we imagined when we were still little kids and nobody filled our heads with fake dreams of safety and security.
It’s easy to be deluded into thinking you want money and power and a fabulous yacht and maybe you do if you’re meant to be Jeff Bezos but most people don’t need any of that at all.
There are two versions of the Law of Attraction, the fake pop version and the real one that actually works.
The fake version tells you to sit there and visualize a big house or a Lamborghini and magically it appears in your life. It won’t. That’s not how it works. No amount of sitting and visualizing things will make them come true.
The real law of attraction works much differently. First, you come into alignment with what you’re really meant to be and what you really want to do. When you know what you want then what you need appears. My needs are in natural harmony with I want to do in the world.
I can’t just snap my fingers and have whatever I want. I can’t make a bowl of chicken noodles appear or a private jet pop out of thin air. I can’t do that because I have no authentic desire for those things.
What I do have an authentic desire to do is write, and give talks and travel the world. Those are my real desires, the life I always imagined for myself. And because they’re true desires they have slowly come to be my reality. They manifest a little more and more each day because I’ve done the long hard work of writing every day for decades. I didn’t wait for those things to come to me, I made them come to me through taking direct action in the world.
That is the real law of attraction in action.
Once you decide what you really want and where you’re going then the Universe provides it for you, just as you need it. It gives you no more and no less than what you need and can handle.
When I finally committed to writing, I committed in my heart and my mind and my spirit. I worked at it every day before anyone cared about a single word I wrote.
It only took me a decade to become an overnight success.
And I spent another decade before that dancing around it and never fully committed. That’s how long mastery takes.
Once you align with a greater purpose the world opens up to you.
When you find your authentic desires then you’re truly free. The world goes out of its way to give you what you want and what you need. Things fall into your lap like magic.
But it’s not magic.
It only looks that way to people still crawling around in the muck, filled with fear, afraid to unlock their door and step out into the greater world.
The Path of Fear
Of course, you can always choose the path of fear instead.
You can forget your dreams. They’re too big for you anyway, right? They’re crazy and never work out because you’re not talented or good enough.
Let me tell you a little story.
Jim Carrey’s father was a comedian, even funnier than Jim, but he never took the risk to put himself out there and embrace it. Instead, he had a family and set aside his career for a safe job at an accounting firm. It worked for many years, as the life he really wanted passed him by.
And then one day he lost his job and they were broke and struggling and barely getting by. They lost everything. All their safety and security got ripped away in an instant.
That’s the thing about it. No matter what path you choose you get the pain and suffering of life.
Oh you thought the path of the spiritual warrior meant you walked around with a beatific smile on your face all day and nothing ever bothered you ever again?
Sorry but that’s an illusion too.
“That’s just something out of a sales pitch…It’s offering you a state of consciousness that’s so crazy ass wonderful that anyone would be an idiot not to want it,” says Jed Mckenna says in Spiritual Enlightenment the Damnedest Thing.
In fact it’s so crazy ass wonderful that nobody ever stopped long enough to ask the simple question:
Is it real?
It’s not.
Nobody is super amazingly chill all the time no matter what happens to them. You think a Buddha wouldn’t feel pain at his best friend’s funeral? That’s not a Buddha, that’s a psychopath. Life is ups and downs, fear and pain and emotional storms and great joy and triumph.
No matter what path you choose it’s all the same joy and pain. But some have a lot more pain than others. It’s the path of least resistance that holds the most pain for you. It’s a terrified life that makes you suffer.
Think about an animal in the wild. Maybe it gets eaten by a vicious predator at the end of its life, facing minutes of intense fear. But the rest of its life it spends enjoying the world, doing its job with dedication and care and focus. It frolics in the forest, drinks from the river and hangs out with friends and family. It lives in the present all the time in a way we never can and never will.
But we can approximate that state of mind.
When you choose a life of passion and adventure and dedication to a higher craft you’ll feel real pain and sorrow, real emotions, good and bad, but you’ll really feel. You’ll feel every punch and every moment of glorious ecstasy as you hold you hands high above your head in triumph.
So why not choose the path of your dreams?
You have to let go of security and safety and trust fall into the Universe. Adventure is dangerous. You could fail. You could die.
But so what?
We all die in the end. Sorry to spoil the story but it’s true. Why not go out in a hail of bullets chasing your heart’s desires?
It’s courageous thought and bold action that destroys delusion and gives you the life of your dreams.
Put that Boulder Down
Now once you choose the path of adventure you’ll have to face your inner demons. A whole nightmare of emotional debris lives on inside of you, clogging you up and holding you back from doing what you’re meant to do.
So how do you deal with all the emotional garbage of the past? How do you get it out and get past it for good and take real action and venture out on the waves for a life of fun and fantasy?
You just put it down.
Everything you know about dealing with your personal emotional shit is wrong. Dead wrong.
Reading books about it? Wallowing in it? Engaging it endlessly, as you talk about it over and over and over. No.
Instead the only way past it is to transcend it. You just put the big boulder you’ve been carrying around with you down forever.
Sitting there talking about it constantly and wallowing in it is the worst thing you can do.
In the book Spiritual Warfare, McKenna gives us a simple metaphor. If you’re chased by a monster in the sewers and you’re climbing out as it claws at your legs, what do you do?
You keep climbing.
But what do most people do? The jump back right down into the sewer and they fight the demon endlessly.
Forget it. Just leave it behind.
The real path is not concerned with answers. Just questions. There are no answers as to why all that crap is still stuck in your skull. Who cares who put it there? Who cares why? It’s all a variation on the same fears and weakness and pain. We ask the right questions, get the next step and we venture out into the world.
We put our boulders down and we never look back. With each step we shed more of our past trauma and pain.
It takes great courage to find your inner truth and go after it. Sometimes we wait so long we miss the boat and the opportunity is gone, never to come again.
But for most of us, it’s not too late. We can still strike out on the waves. We can still live the great adventure of life, pick up our swords and go out to strange new lands hunting dragons.
The price of it is simple. Everything.
You have to clear out everything about your current life, leave it all behind, sacrifice everything to do something amazing. The price of truth is everything.
Did you see Avengers Infinity Wars? If not spoilers ahead.
OK, still here?
Remember when the Mad Titan went for the soul stone and had to throw the only thing he ever loved off the cliff? That’s an incredible metaphor for spiritual warfare. Sometimes you have to cut the cords to everything you ever loved in your past and move forward, your heart and mind and spirit crumbling under the weight of it all but still somehow finding the strength to do it.
That’s how it’s done. You kill that past (metaphorically) and move forward.
You don’t need to struggle with all the coagulated emotional clots in your heart and mind. What you do is take another courageous step forward and you leave another piece of the mess behind and you never look back.
Every day you do the work and the next day and the next day and the next day. That is the path of the spiritual warrior.
First comes intent.
Then you make a decision.
Then you commit to the decision in your heart and mind.
Then you keep pushing forward no matter what, every single day for the rest of your life.
And one day you’ll look up and you’ll be the thing that everyone admires and wants. But even that won’t matter because you won’t need their validation or opinion. You’ll already know it’s good and right as soon as you do it.
Now get out there and do something amazing.
The world is waiting for you.
And when you’re done they’ll sing your praises forever in the halls of eternity.
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