The Solar Doctrine Page 6

completely burnt. As long as there is life, there is always a light, and in the case of the aspirant to Solar Warrior who has gone through such hellish temperatures of life, such light and hope is manifested in the form of a new quality of the “alloy” of the spirit that can be of great help when applying “The Solar Doctrine”.

  When reading all these postulates of “The Solar Doctrine”, Arthur, experiencing a state of intense inner enlightenment, realized that the situation of disease he was going through during those moments and that drained him into an almost quasi-vegetative state in a hospital bed of Mostoles (Madrid) was precisely the perfect opportunity he required in order to verify if within him actually existed the Noble character that the Doctrine demanded as a foundational base in order to progress towards the Solar Warrior condition. Hence the Doctrine indicated him that what actually had value in regards to the aim of becoming a Solar Warrior was a natural ethics of “When the going gets tough, the tough get going” or “Always look at the bright side of life” and to deeply comprehend that what was going on with him during those days was real; it was real that he was alone; it was real that he was ill; it was real that he was going through a passive and almost vegetative situation… During those moments, and once assisted by the indications pointed out in the Doctrine that he was reading once and again in his Iphone´s screen, Arthur deeply realized that nothing he had previously experienced or thought during the last 20 years of his life had been actually real, and that to cap it all, such evasion from reality later induced in him the logic and irrepressible need to create an image and identity of himself in cyberspace (mostly in Facebook…) which during those days lay bare his own contradictions and reductions to the utmost absurdity. Why?… While in cyberspace the imagery of his life was full of happiness, elegant dinners together with Helena and many friends and coworkers, in his real life, quite contrarily, he was at the verge of chronic depression, disease, and as lonely as the moon.

  Stalked by such thoughts, Arthur was still kind of obsessed with having the battery of his Iphone fully charged in the case things turned out to end up awfully, and he had to kick the bucket in the selfsame hospital, thinking fearfully that in such potential doom scenario his friends wouldn´t receive due notice and could not attend his funeral…

  Yet after a while, and after a careful and detailed reading of “The Solar Doctrine” he became capable of releasing from such pessimist thoughts. Such reading started to lit a little light at the end of the tunnel he was immersed. And yet, such outbursts of pessimism on the part of Arthur were similar to those that dominated “Martin the pessimist”, “Gregorio the victimist”, and “Marcus the Grouchy”… All these individuals were unable to not let go their constant complaining when facing the situation they were living, since their desire of identifying once and again with the highly virtual world they had created in the exterior of the hospital caused them deep unrest as well as a frontal rejection to their actual conditions of life. Arthur, however, by following the premises outlined in “The Solar Doctrine” well understood that the “Arthur of flesh and blood” who was ill and bedridden in the hospital constituted the most honest symbolic expression of the existential background of his life during the last 20 years, since deep down he had always been passive -almost vegetative-, deep down he always required external assistances, deep down he had no friends, deep down he had never faced himself, deep down he had always completely forgot about the heart of his life. And yet now at last he had the chance of arising from his most honest essence in order to build the trunk of an indestructible personality, such as the one described and exposed in “The Solar Doctrine”. In order to achieve such goal, the Solar Warrior apprentice must learn to have an authentic link to death, and thus accept death as the condition of life.

  The razor´s edge

  In “The Solar Doctrine” can be read:

  “The tempering of a Sword demands huge amounts of fire and an alloy made of pure steel, yet these attributes are insufficient in order to configure the structure of the Sword, and in order to provide it with a harmony that can dominate and affirm at the same time all the elements that compose it. The tempering of the steel of a Sword corresponds to a genuine process of creativity and generation of forms in non-linear states far from equilibrium, states of high dissipation where not only do technical demands arise, but also artistic ones, where both the blacksmith and the Sword through resonance obey the same subtle harmonies. This technically sacred process is characterized by the virtue of deeply modifying the “I” of the individual in a way and power that has not been even suspected by modern schools of psychology. And it is precisely this effective process of spiritual tempering is what the Nobleman must experience within, in order to eventually allow his forged steel to shine, and eventually expose his Solar Warrior condition”

  And some words after Arthur could read:

  “The Body is the Temple of the Spirit”

  In the Doctrine is indicated that these statements serve as a support for meditation with regar to a mode of conceiving human experience that goes way back to the times of the Order of the Knights Templar, around the Middle-Ages, an age considered by many historians as the “ages of darkness”… Arthur actually wasn´t too sure if one could consider it to be a privilege or not to enter into contact with this millenary tradition, since the more he read and read once and over again the Doctrine on the screen of his Iphone, the more he deeply acknowledge that the Doctrine demanded of him the taking of responsibility. And whenever the Doctrine makes use of the word responsibility in no case does it refer only to the responsibility to pay the installment agreements of a mortgage or the responsibility of going to the office every morning… There is a higher responsibility that integrates all these other partial responsibilities, and this is basically the responsibility to oneself. It was in this regard how Arthur realized that, despite all first impressions, he had behaved with a complete lack of responsibility during the last 20 years of his life, and this caused the side-effect of the steep degradation of his health in the last years: arterial hypertension, high cholesterol, being overweight, and now even suffering from an ulcer and cirrhosis. Thus, it was already quite obvious that Arthur´s “Temple of the Spirit” demanded profound restorations in order to follow the path that heroically had already been the quest of the Knights Templar, more than seven centuries ago. In point of fact, in the Doctrine was pointed out that the human body, especially during the last century, started to gain more and more value as an image, and that it was by surrendering to this power of the image that mostly all demands of health were thereafter determined, sometimes arriving at very aberrant and distressing cases such as the anorexic or vigorexic individuals. In the Doctrine it is stated that even though the human body as a whole doesn´t actually “think” (since this function is assigned exclusively to the brain…) it does however determine the direction and aim of thoughts and all conceptual structures. But due to the patent irresponsibility of Arthur with himself and with his own body during the last years, this is, because of his incapacity to determine the direction of his own life and acts, his body became more and more redundant and “lazy”. Such “determining the direction” of his life -Arthur thought- could be actually analogous or equivalent to the symbol of powerful verticality of a Sword, and in effect such powerful self-determination of the material and corporal domain was something that actually inspired Arthur to get once again in contact with his own body, with his own Temple.

  So, while he was confined to bed in the hospital, Arthur immediately decided to start with his duty, this is, with the responsibility towards himself. And this meant to start descending towards matter, to descend into his own body, to descend to the “Arthur of flesh and blood” full of drives and emotions that during his life he had disregarded so much, and in this way had avoided identifying himself at each moment with all the other countless highly artificial identities. Of course, the identification with “Arthur the Cyborg” still was necessary for him in order to keep in touch w
ith “The Solar Doctrine” through his Iphone, but in spite of this latter identification, Arthur admirably put a lot of effort into the task of releasing from all other identifications. And yet this task in no way was easy. Day in day out images of his wife Helena and the life he had shared with her emerged in his mind. Such images now corresponded to a form of life that was already torn into pieces, and for him still all the broken pieces became difficult to digest. Deep down, he felt within a tough conflict of love-hatred in all of it, since on one hand he had almost devoted his entire life to the creation and promotion of this lie, but on the other hand this lie had asphyxiated and smashed his true life, and consequently, also his heart, liver and stomach. But it was more than evident for Arthur that what had already occurred was irreversible, and that the divorce process would keep on further developing one way or another. In his insides, in his body, in his Temple, Arthur could feel the fight between his life and the other life, between his body and mind; between reality and