SOVEREIGN AWAKENING

The modern hero isn’t a warrior or a demi god, but the person who refuses to sleep walk through life like the masses. He’s the person who retains his childlike sense of wonder for life, who refuses to stay in the box that society wants him to reside in, and who refuses to sell his soul or live a lie. He’s heroic because he dares to question convention and confront what most are too coward to face. He stands by his principles and attacks his purpose unapologetically. But above all he’s heroic because he’s his own master, unlike the majority who surrender to conformity and fear rather than that which is truly their own. In essence, the modern hero is the Sovereign Man.

The modern world is structured such that your body naturally becomes weak, tired and incapable of facing the demands of life. Work is sedentary, food is ultraprocessed, and comfort is made easily available to all. It’s therefore easy to see how the average man has withered into a physically and emotionally incompetent boy. The system has no incentive to make you strong because a mentally and physically capable man is more likely to disregard authority and work by his own laws. From this perspective it’s clear to see that building your body, mind and spirit isn’t vain or performative, but is in fact radically political, life affirming and conducive to a sovereign existence. Because sovereignty demands a life lived in truth, which is impossible to bare without the strength to carry it.

Every civilisation has its myth about man facing the serpent, or the dragon. St George slays the dragon; Zeus defeats Typhon; Thor overcomes the world serpent. It’s a task so daunting that it requires a heroic figure to overcome. Order is created from pure chaos and the world is preserved because of it. But the dragon was never external. It was always a physical manifestation of your inner shadow, and its chaos is that which you refuse to face about yourself. To slay the dragon is to integrate the discordant parts of yourself into the whole and to begin a more sovereign and authentic existence. What you’re avoiding is where the treasure lays. Fear often guards the most joyous of experiences that life has to offer. You must slay the dragon continuously, in spite of your fear, and only then do you earn the right to reap the rewards of a life fully lived.

"I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.” - Jack London

You don’t need to quit your job early on. Freedom is something you eventually earn through your agency. Your job is the training ground which allows you to practice this sense of agency, and to test your courage and initiative. It’s not a cage until you accept it as such, but in fact it’s an opportunity to learn valuable skills with little risk to yourself and your bank account. Once you’re insanely competent, you need only apply this competence to your own vision and your own systems. Then, you’re only steps away from a sovereign existence.

Every day and with every action, you subconsciously choose either courage or cowardice. Each time you speak with confidence or hesitation, each time you act decisively or avoid entirely, each time you confront discomfort or retreat from it, you’re casting a vote for the type of man you’re becoming. Each small choice you make, for the sake of comfort, or boredom, or glory, cements your character into place. This is why it’s so important to choose courage even in the smallest of actions, because you’re continually teaching your mind how to view itself. Choose cowardice and avoidance enough and you’ll quickly morph into a worm who resorts to comfort at the first sign of difficulty.

The Spartans produced some of the most fearsome warriors that have ever existed. Physically weak babies would be abandoned, and those boys who reached 7 were taken from their families and entered the Agoge. Here they would live in military barracks, eat little food and train intensively daily, including running, wrestling, boxing and javelin throwing. With age, training and competition would intensify and the harshness of their living conditions would increase, often sleeping on a bed of reeds every night. Only by age 30 was a man able to call himself a Spartan citizen, so long as he’d sufficiently fulfilled his obligations. And he would often serve militarily until he was 60. The process was extremely difficult because the Spartan phalanx needed disciplined, obedient and resilient men to hold formation. Everything in Spartan society revolved around war, and it’s this that allowed it to dominate surrounding states including Athens. But Sparta eventually collapsed, mainly due to its declining population. Athens became the dominant force in Greece because they were more adaptable. Spartans specialised in one thing only: war. This meant they were brittle outside it - no merchant class, no philosophy, no capacity to innovate or absorb new citizens when their numbers thinned. Athens diversified, trading, building, thinking, adapting to whatever the moment demanded, and outlasted the very warriors who once beat them on the field. Total mastery of one form only will spell your doom. The Sovereign Man trains like a Spartan but thinks like an Athenian. He adapts to circumstance because he realises that if he trains like a Spartan but neglects the interior life of an Athenian, he’s destined to dwindle.

Discipline is impossible when your nervous system is dysregulated, because then even a mild inconvenience feels like a mortal threat. You won’t do the painful or boring work because your spirit feels at war with itself. The answer is to reconnect to the root of your spirit, and this is achieved through silence, stillness and prayer. Feel the frequencies of love and gratitude and you’ll start to intuitively know what to do with your life. From here, discipline is easy because it becomes fused with both your mission and your identity.

Most people who think they have a stressful lifestyle are actually just trying to control too many things that they’re supposed to let run free.

"Do not seek to have events happen as you wish, but wish them to happen as they do happen, and all will be well with you." - Epictetus

Most people think they’re scared to fail and look stupid. The reality is that they’re actually scared to take on the full burden of their fulfilled potential, and their subconscious is fooling them into a life of comfortable mediocrity. Failure is familiar and it confirms your current identity, but if you truly want to live to your heroic potential, you must shed your current identity and assume a more powerful one. There’s nothing the ego hates more than the prospect of its own destruction, so it keeps you mediocre and safe. Your potential demands that you lose your old excuses and become someone who reliably gets things done. It demands that you literally become a new person. Growth, in essence, is a form of continual death, and most people are terrified of it. But you must become acquainted with it, and let it forge you into the man you were meant to be.

The most powerful of forces aren’t guns or tanks, but in fact ideas. The state understands this and it invests heavily on propaganda to impregnate the minds of the populace with certain beliefs, which keep them confused, fearful and small. And they do this with a most professional subtlety, weaving their desired ideas into mass entertainment, “expert” advice and state broadcasts, such that the repetition and emotionality forces your subconscious to accept them as truth. The truth is that the individual is infinitely more powerful than he realises, and a radical shift in his ideological underpinning to a more heroic stance would constitute an existential risk to world controllers. Because those in power thrive off of the fear, uncertainty and disorganisation of the masses. Modern man might yet still glimpse his inner power, but his spiritual and economic poverty gravely impede him. This is why the building of personal sovereignty is so crucial in the modern world.

On the eve of the fall of Constantinople, the Byzantine emperor Constantine XI spoke to his subjects, saying there are four great causes a man should consider worth dying for: his faith, his family, his country and his sovereign. Maybe the reason that people are so spiritually lost in the modern world is because all of these have been stripped from modern man - a fate so dire considering even a doomed Byzantium still possessed them all. Religion is largely non existent in much of the modern West and people prefer instead to worship consumerist ideals and state doctrine. The nuclear family has been disempowered and discouraged through economic policy that forces both parents into wage labor just to survive, with the father removed as the natural provider, and a culture that treats marriage and children as lifestyle options rather than sacred duty. Country has dissolved into bureaucratic union; men no longer want to die for England or France, because those identities no longer exist. And sovereigns have vanished entirely, replaced by the faceless managerial and bureaucratic class of elites, of which no one feels strong ties of loyalty to. Byzantium collapsed with all four intact, yet modern man, comfortable and safe, has none of them, and he wonders why he feels so hollow.

Humans have been around for 200 thousand years, soaking up the sun’s rays and all of a sudden people are terrified of it. Think of the level of propaganda needed to convince society that the provider of life on planet Earth is in fact its destroyer. Now realise that the population has been fooled in countless other ways, all with the aim of keeping people fearful, unhealthy and leached of their economic sovereignty.

After World War 2, Europe was ruined and exhausted. Over 40 million Europeans were killed and countless cities completely destroyed. Most economies were bankrupt and national infrastructures devastated. Following the fallout of the world wars, European leaders came to the conclusion that it is nation states who cause wars, and nationalist pride that is itself to blame. The theory is that a Europe that’s politically and economically interdependent is far less likely to be at war, and this has so far proven true. But there are some negative consequences that have turned a once great continent into a shadow of its former self. The European Union has morphed into a type of superstate that controls each nation such that none can ever be great or powerful again. Shared currency means it’s impossible to correct a failing national economy from within, leaving nations tied to the austerity imposed from outside. Nations in Europe have dwindled their defence to the point where they can’t even defend themselves against nations like Russia without US assistance. Nations like the UK are increasingly reliant on imports for energy, food and labour, destroying their sovereignty and exposing them hopelessly to the depredations of globalists. But the tragedy runs much deeper, on the spiritual level. When you diminish the nation and all of its customs, traditions and indigenous peoples, you create a mass of disenfranchised individuals who no longer feel the foundational myths of their own countries. The falling birthrates are a sign that the people no longer feel hope at the direction they’re heading and it’s likely because their national identity has been mercilessly mocked and stolen from them, only to be replaced with a sterile managerial and administrative zone on a map. However, the most catastrophic casualty of the post WWII fallout is in fact the individual. The state has become so all encompassing across Europe that the individual is practically treated both like a data point rather than an intelligent human and like an adolescent rather than a person who’s perfectly capable of making their own decisions. The individual has had his sources of deeper meaning stripped from him while his sources of personal sovereignty and prosperity have been gradually reduced over time. The general population has become so dependent on the state for its decisions and its welfare that they’ve become more like automatons than free individuals with collective and personal identities. That is the great tragedy of post WWII Europe, and much of the world along with it.

"The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are. But most men never claim that privilege. They spend their lives becoming what their parents expected, what their culture demanded, what their fear permitted. And then one day, usually too late, they catch a glimpse of who they might have been - and that glimpse is the most devastating thing a man can experience." - Carl Jung

Modern people are both incapable of sitting quietly with themselves for more than 5 minutes and of appreciating genuine beauty. And the two aren’t mutually exclusive, but deeply connected. Without spending time in your day for silence, you end up in perpetual auto-pilot, constantly consuming, reacting and dissociating without truly seeing. You lose the ability to perceive the depth of wonder in the universe because you’re so caught up in the next distraction and dopamine hit. When you sit in silence regularly, beauty re enters your life, and you’ll begin to glimpse just how much joy there is in the simplest of things. This is true freedom, not a number in your bank account.

For most of history, men spoke only to those in their community and local vicinity. He knew exactly where his food came from, who made his clothes and who built his shelter. His work had intrinsic meaning and he could clearly see the outputs of his labour. His identity was closely tied to his country, his community, his church. The Industrial Revolution severed these critical threads of meaning and replaced them with a cold, materialistic chase towards perpetual growth and production. Now the outputs of work are largely abstract, and the workers themselves no longer benefit from the fruits of their labour, being mere numbers on a spreadsheet. Men have become spiritually fragmented and alienated from one another, in a world that’s too complex and too antithetical to human nature to thrive in. Most mental and societal issues stem from this deep discordance and straying from our nature imposed by the parasites above.

Most spiritual advice teaches you to “let go” or “surrender” and this is good advice to an extent: it’s often your own mind and faulty belief patterns that are holding you back from living your most authentic existence. But if you apply this advice to external problems, you’ll only end up a slave like everyone else. There are innumerable forces that wish to keep you weak, fearful and ignorant and if you simply surrender to this you’ve effectively sold yourself to them. In the face of tyranny, you must act decisively to vanquish that which seeks to control you. Any form of passivity spells certain capitulation to stronger willed egos.

What you refuse to face and emotionally process almost invariably influences your posture, muscle tension, facial expressions and even gut function. It affects your sleep in a way that no blue light blockers or blackout blinds could fix and your jaw, shoulders and chest all tighten. Your nervous system is holding what your conscious mind refuses to look at and address. And many people seem to think that training, nutrition and breath work will save them from their dysregulated nervous system and chronic anxiety and fatigue. But the only thing that will truly help is to live authentically to your nature and to integrate your less favourable parts into a cohesive whole. You’ll know when you’ve achieved this, because your posture, muscles and heart rate will relax naturally, and your chronic health issues will begin to subside of their own accord.

The men of history who truly made a difference rarely waited for perfect conditions to take action. Alexander the Great invaded Persia when he was 20, with only 40,000 men against an empire that spanned from Egypt to India. Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in winter and moved with his army to take Rome, an executable offence if he lost. Churchill chose to resist the Nazis when he became UK prime minister in 1940 at a point when it seemed like Europe was hopelessly lost. Each of these people acted in spite of crushing uncertainty, poor odds and certain pain and suffering. There’s no such time of perfect information and preparation, because by this point you’re likely too late. Either begin your heroic journey now or reconcile yourself to a life of mediocrity.