The following is an extract from the series of “Warrior Texts” written by Samuel Widmer. What does it mean to be a warrior? What does a warrior have to learn? What is his actual mission? Read on:
The financial crisis has changed our world. Nobody seems to have quite noticed as yet: the most difficult 25 years of human history have begun. The financial crisis is just the beginning. And even that is not yet over. Other breakdowns will follow, especially ecological ones. How to survive such difficult times?
How to escape the insanity of humans and their leaders? Once more there is only the path of the warrior, who starts out alone and unperturbed, to prepare for the only challenge worthy of humanity, the inescapable encounter with vastness itself. It would be really easy, if humans wanted to know what justice demands of them, how we would have to reconstruct the world to care for the wellbeing of all, to have everything fall back into balance and no derailments have us lose the right path any more. They would just have to pose the question. That is exactly what they don’t do. They don’t really want to know. As soon as they want to know and seriously pose the question, the answers will be obvious in each situation.
My experience as a psychotherapist is that we can solve any problem if we speak together with an open heart and an open mind. But we do have to speak with each other and have to have the heart open and the mind too. Otherwise nothing happens. That is the way of the warrior, a way dedicated to an immaculate life and his joy about it. This joy is the only thing that creates balance in the midst of the downfall of a mad world.
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I don’t know where the concept of warrior comes from. There seems to be something universal about it. I encountered it though the writings of Carlos Castaneda and the transmission of the teachings through the Yaqui Indian Don Juan Matus.
This way of looking at the world convinced me right from the start and since then it has accompanied me in my life. It proved to be of invaluable support, especially during experiences of being misunderstood and excluded, which he describes in this book, of how not to go under or get entangled in senseless quarrels. It concisely sums up the path of self-awareness and discipline in daily life.
The warrior is not a soldier. The soldier’s dependency on authority and his absolute obedience are totally alien to him. His battle is not the war with enmity or allegiance; his battle is a battle with himself, with the Self that he is attempting to conquer to find total freedom. His battle is a struggle for unity. In this he stands totally alone.
The warrior knows that he cannot change himself; yet, he attempts to do so tenaciously. His final reward is not the change, but the flux which results from the creation of his tenacity; an energy that changes everything.
Unlike the average person, the warrior is never disappointed when he does not succeed in changing himself. That exactly is the distinction. No reaction. The path of the warrior is the path of joyful failure. This is the path of being immaculate. And the flux that he finally experiences, after having developed enough strength, is the loss of human form, the retrieval of the very primary, the unconditioned spirit, the free energy, not caught in habitual patters. Freedom.
And freedom does not consist of being able to decide or choose freely, but in being able to perceive freely, to have the freedom to see everything.
The warrior is always an outsider. He wants to stand alone. The common people fear him, despise him, yet also admire him, but they don’t understand him; and ultimately he stays unknowable and unreachable for them. The warrior is not responsible for what happens with someone who has come into contact with him.
The warrior has understood that it is his own responsibility to decide. The power of his decisions is all he has. And yet, he knows that he has no choice and that his decision has to do with following the voice that calls him. Meditation for him is to understand that separation is caused by the choice and decision of a will, which is not free. His way of meditation is to understand desire and longing and not to overcome one longing through another.
What the warrior seeks is inner stillness, because it is the source of everything inexplicable. It builds upon itself and works in an accumulative way. If the warrior is able to keep this inner stillness for long enough, the interpretation of sensory data that is bombarding him collapses and he returns to his true nature and the true nature of all. This is where he finds freedom. In the context of infinity, to be free is the only worthwhile endeavor. For the warrior, everything but the pursuit of freedom amounts to deceit.