This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series The Warrior's Stake
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Last Updated on August 5, 2015

In the book Peace, Power, and Presence I explore the archetype of the Warrior, and the Warrior’s approach to Life and Reality. Fundamental to the Warrior’s approach is her impeccability. Ordinary Man has all but lost his/her sense of what it means to be impeccable. The qualities and principles of impeccability are for the most part foreign to the average contemporary human being. This is a great loss and a great challenge for Man as he/she moves through life.

The word Impeccable implies a state of sinlessness; being without error. “Sin”, as explored in Peace, Power, and Presence, refers to “missing the mark” and also to “guilt”. To be without sin is to not “miss the mark” and to be free from guilt. Missing the mark could also be referred to as mis-taking reality.

It should become immediately obvious from the above description of the word impeccable that the Warrior is not concerned with the actual attainment of some lofty ideal of being absolutely impeccable, or living without mistake or error. The Warrior is very aware of his or her fallibility. She is, after all, subject to unconsciousness, and that condition of unconsciousness forces much of her experience of reality into what might be described as the Unknown. What I discover tomorrow may very well bring to light the fact that what (relatively less) I knew yesterday resulted in my making choices that were ultimately in error, if for no other reason than those choices being based on only a partial comprehension of life and the true consequences of my choices within life. Does the Warrior get into a guilt trip over this unavoidable situation? Not in the slightest. To do so would be to sin. To do so would be to cease being impeccable.

Following the logic of the above exploration it must also now be obvious that in essence a Warrior’s impeccability is at a pragmatic level about her doing her best in any given moment. The word “best” is a relative term. The Warrior is very aware of that. What was my best yesterday may not be my best today. Therefore the Warriors take on doing his best is to simply be as fully present as possible to what Is, here and now. In being as fully present as he is able in any given moment the Warrior is going be be fully self-engaged in whatever action he is taking, and fully committed to carrying out that action in such a way that the experience of that and the end result of that is as close a representation of his intent as possible.

I am certain that as you read the above it is becoming clearer and clearer that the Warrior’s Impeccability is not a state of finality. It is not something you arrive at. It is a movement toward. It is an approach to what is. It is an approach that takes into account two apparently contradicting aspects of reality and what it means to be Man. One, that man is unconscious of what he/she is unconscious of. Most of reality is unknown to Man, so his/her choices will inevitably always be based on only a partial summation of all the facts. Secondarily there is the realisation that despite this, even because of this, I can in this moment apply the fullness of my known Self to each moment, to each action I take part in. It is in this that the Warrior can rest in the fact that he/she has done his/her best, for now… and Now is all the Warrior takes into consideration.

This last statement does not imply that the Warrior is frivolous about his actions, paying no regard to the possible outcomes and consequences of each act. Rather what it implies is that the Warrior recognises that he can not directly act upon the so-called future, nor can he change the so-called past. He/she can only act here and now. The Warrior knows that if his action here and now is impeccable, it is completely senseless investing his power into an entanglement with the so-called future. Similarly, the Warrior does not entangle his/her energy into the past. He may project his attention into the past or future as part of participating more fully in that grander aspect of here and now, but this is not even remotely similar to the way in which ordinary Man habitually gets entangled in mental and emotional stories about his/her perceived past and future.

Clarifying the above point further, the Warrior recognises that his/her impeccability is all he/she really has, and it is not something he/she has in the past of future. It is now. The Warrior therefore understands that so long as I act impeccability now, then only the very best that is possible in any given moment will unfold as a consequence of that action. Similarly, whatever has occured in his past, the Warrior knows that he did his very best and for this reason there is no point in getting entangled in regrets and guilt. It is also for this reason the Warrior does not invest himself in feeling sorry or apologetic. She knows that her best is her best, and that if someone else has an issue with this then that is of their own making. The Warrior realises at a deep level that she is essentially not responsible for someone else dreaming her into their world.

As ordinary Man steps into the Warrior’s Approach it is inevitable that he/she will become increasingly aware of just much of his/her life has been lived without impeccability thus far. Deep feelings of regret, sorry, and even guilt may arise. These feelings are nothing new. They would have been there all along. Remember to be impeccable is to be without guilt or sin. It is this state of sin that resulted in this person acting out his folly of unconsciousness in the first place. All that is happening here and now, as this person steps up to the Warrior’s Approach is he/she is becoming conscious of what was hereto unconscious… sin or guilt. The guilt of mis-taking reality and living as those there were no mis-take.

That last statement is important, for the Warrior recognises that even now he/she must surely be mis-taking reality to some degree by virtue of the fact that most of reality is unknown to him, and that an even vaster portion of it is completely Unknowable. The difference, however, between the Warrior and ordinary Man in this regard is that the Warrior is under no illusions about this predicament. He recognises and accepts that this is simply how it is, whereas ordinary Man all to often gets caught up in the arrogance of believing he knows far more than he really does and is not mis-taking reality at all. The prior is a case of honesty and humility, the later is a case of arrogance and pure folly. The word humility stems from the same word humus, which is Latin for earth, ground, or soil. To be humble is to accept and embrace the nature and relative short-comings of being in the earth… in a human body (which is made up of the Earth).

Taking a deeper look at the transition of ordinary Man to that of embracing what is means to be the Warrior, and this predicament of having acted unconsciously and foolishly in the past, what does he/she do with this and the accumulated guilt or sin (or Karma, if you prefer that word) of this? Does she simply forget the so-called past and pretend it never happened? Surely such pretending will result in nothing more than being pretentious here in this current moment.

The word pretentious comes from the word pretend. Pretend can be defined as follows:

3. To hold out, or represent, falsely; to put forward, or
offer, as true or real (something untrue or unreal); to
show hypocritically, or for the purpose of deceiving; to
simulate; to feign; as, to pretend friendship.

The Warrior recognises that to whatever degree she has not integrated the folly of her past behaviour and the folly of being in judgement toward that, and thus feeling (consciously or otherwise) guilty about that, is the degree to which she will represent herself falsely here and now. She will put forth into this moment that which is not true or real, and such as act contradicts her impeccability. So what is she to do? What does ordinary Man do as she steps into the Warrior’s Approach with regards to her past of folly and self-deception?

Recapitulation. The Warrior understands that Life is, in it’s most basic and fundamental description, about the Evolution of Awareness. This was revealed to this author as Forever Expanding Awareness in Liberation. This can be put other ways, such as Forever Evolving Awareness in Life; Forever Evolving Awareness of Love; and so on. Whichever way you put it, this is an acronym for the word FEAL. This author sees this as a profound indication of how the Warrior is to best approach reality, and more specifically the fact that Life is forever evolving awareness of love. Put another way, FEAL is indicative of how the Warrior can most directly step into a fully and more conscious participation in what is–in the dance or play of Forever Evolving Awareness of Love. By “fealing”. Which is simply to feel with less e-motion (less fixation on the movement of energy) and greater incorporation of Awareness.

So what does it mean to recapitulate?

In the simplest of terms this is simply and profoundly about the act of the Warrior re-viewing his so-called past, with a degree of feeling (fealing) that was not available to him at that past time. The Warrior recognises that the quality of fealing available to him now was not available to him then, because he now (hopefully!!) embodies a greater degree of awareness now, for he too is in the flow of forever expanding/evolving awareness. Let us look at a moment to this word re-view. A similar word in meaning is to respect. Re-spect. Spect comes from the Latin word specere which means to look or to see. We get words like spectacles (the glasses people wear to help them to see). To re-spect is quite literally to look-again. To take another look. To see a second time. Recapitulation is therefore to see again; to look again. Though in looking again, she will this time see (be aware of) what she was previously unable to see (was unaware of). This act of respecting (re-viewing) the past is all part-in-parcel to the Warrior’s Impeccability here and now.

Recapitulation is, therefore, to take another look at our memory of the past. This is not, however, merely a mental or intellectual exercise. Nothing could be further from it. It was ordinary Man’s fixation on experiencing life through the intellect to the complete disregard for his deep and subtle feelings that has resulted in the past being such the mess that it was in the first place. A mess in the sense of it being murky, unconscious, and entangled in a great deal of misuse of and loss of power. The Warrior recognises that such a loss of power is unsustainable. To the Warrior such a misappropriation of Power is unthinkable, and ironically only occurs through approaching life through excessive thinking, as opposed to deeply fealing.

It is not my intention to explore the topic of recapitulation any further in this article than I now have. So I shall leave this topic at that.

I imagine that for the average person reading these words, one particular thought may come to mind. Namely, “isn’t being so impeccable going to be difficult? Surely it is… and is perhaps beyond what I am capable of”. This is a perfectly valid thought, and it is this level of thinking that in one regard distinguishes ordinary Man from the Warrior. The Warrior recognises that right here and now she has available to her exactly what is required to take the next step, to act impeccably in this moment with whatever is in front of her. My answer, therefore, to this line of thought is this. To the Warrior everything in Life is a challenge. We either face that challenge or we don’t, and in facing it, we either face it wholeheartedly or we don’t. The Warrior’s impeccability dictates that a half-hearted approach is folly, and to be avoided at all cost, which may simply mean staying put and waiting, wholeheartedly. Non-action is also an act in the Warrior’s world, and is no less significant, and thus is always an option if done wholeheartedly–namely, if done with feeling and total abandonment of mental fiction and stories. To sit still and embrace or even grapple with (as one may have to do from time to time) the felt-sense of the unknown whilst it emerges into your conscious awareness (into your Known) may look like inactivity to the casual observer. Yet in reality this can be as engaging as any other action Man might engage it. Of course, this is quite a different state from he who is merely wallowing in self-pity and confusion, grappling with what to do next.

A Warrior’s impeccability is made manifest through action, through speech, through conscious non-action, and through a sense of Presence which he/she will bring of all of these, and more.

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