Pussy has destroyed more men than any other calamity on the face of the planet.

With a degree of detachment, it becomes amazing to see the kind of nonsense that men partake in throwing away money, careers, and livelihood for sirens of ever decreasing qualities. Men who have been titans of industry, civic, or military leaders have fallen from grace in the public eye and had their positions in society destroyed over and over by their dalliances. The US military has become such a boiled frog that we simply accept the environment of harassment, complaints, flings with wanton human resource specialists and cooks, jealousy and conflict because of the previous, and the self-censoring that accompanies the social dynamic of having women in a military context. But this is far from something remotely new.

Observing from a purely quantitative standpoint; the technological, financial, and logistic bandwidth that pornography holds in the modern world is staggering. The shape of technology  have been guided and determined solely by pornography on multiple occasions. It has become ubiquitous and taken for granted and is an open and increasingly less sullied secret in popular culture and everyday life.

A warrior monk will have to fight and gain mastery with the struggle with the base desires of lust. I include eros with ritual as the couplet of the spiritual/intellectual component of the Greek training. The reason being that aside from the yearning for God, sexual desire is one of the most fundamental drives for the human person. Ultimately it must be the most subtle that manages the densest parts of us. On the one hand it is not simply a matter of completely eliminating this drive and becoming a eunuch. Rather our lower aspects must be purified and brought to bear in our struggles.

One of the big dogs said that without temptation there is no salvation and without volatility there is no combustion as any alchemist would tell you. Also eros shares at it’s root the same desires that propels an individual’s towards its return to the One. I’m going to be drawing from  the excellent book by Ioan Culianu Eros and Magic in the Renaissance.

“The kind of love that Socrates teaches in Plato’s dialogues represents a gradual elevation in the nature of the human being from the signs of beauty apparent in the physical world to the ideal forms whence those signs derive, the intellectual cosmos which, as unique and indivisible source of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, also represents the ultimate goal to which he aspires. Love is the name of that desire with many manifestations which, even in its most decadent form, admixing sexual attraction, still retains its quality of unconscious aspiration to the transcendental Beauty.“ Ioan Culianu Eros and Magic in the renaissance

A modern Templar must affirm to swear off of pornagrphy and fapping and I’m unceremoniously late this November. There is never a bad time to begin though though but I’ve already mentioned ceremony has an important role. I should not list too many specific techniques or strategies before sounding prosaic and bourgeoisie with the typical admonishments:  work out, play a game, go for a walk. I should first remind you that you are haunted. Our society in banishing the spiritual realm in daily life has left us as bound lambs for evil spirits of our own making.

“This inner sense is something taken for granted and even more so the power present in images and the life they can have of their own is outright denied.” ibid

To the ancients the individual interacts through the world through phantasms. We do not observe the world directly through the senses, but they are translated by the soul into images.

“Called phantasia or inner sense, the sidereal spirit transforms messages from the five senses in phantasms perceptible to the soul.” ibid

Modern science more or less agrees as is evidenced by the existence of optical illusions and other ways in which our senses translate the world for us in an indirect way. The relationship between the conscious and the unconscious has been deeply altered and our ability to control our own processes of imagination reduced to almost nothing. The control of lust means actively managing and becoming acquainted with the images that accost us and cause the agitations in our minds and bodies. Take the time to become aware of phantasy and in what manner they act upon your soul. The habit of fasting and prayer must be a mainstay in your daily life to strengthen your resolve in purifying your neglected imaginative senses. This is the active practice of the three traditional vows of the Templars: poverty, chastity, and obedience. Take heart in knowing that with any resistance of temptation comes an influx of forces from above. When these are purified our inner sense of phantasia become a ladder leading to an elevation of our being. Suddenly an enemy is made into a friend and an ally in holy struggle.

“This said concerning the idealization of feminine beings, it behooves us to return to the believers in love in the West. One of the most striking aspects of courtly love is the “vocation of suffering” on the part of the faithful. The occultation of love represents an essential element of the ritual of eroticism. In this process of voluntary withdrawal from the love object, a withdrawal that causes the indefinite postponement of the consummation of desire, is to be seen one of the secrets of Western tradition.” ibid

In the meantime if you want a concrete spiritual exercise in dealing with the vagaries of eros you can have one. The next time you are charmed by the image of a woman that strikes your fancy bring this truth to mind: at some point in time some man somewhere has been tired of her shit.