The supreme nobility of a Roman emperor does not consist in being a master of slaves, but in being a lord of free men, who loves freedom even in those who serve him.
The overall Hindu view concerning the practice of authentic yoga may be summarized with these words: “Very few are qualified for yoga, and even fewer are those who succeed in it.
That the divinities can do little for men, that man is fundamentally the artificer of his own destiny, even of his development beyond this world – this characteristic view held by original Buddhism demonstrates its difference from some later forms, especially the Mahayana schools, into which infiltrated the idea of a power on high busying itself with mankind in order to lead each individual to salvation.
In the idea we recognize our true homeland.
This is not a matter of compromises or adaptations. The power of a new Middle Ages is needed. A change, interior as well as exterior, of barbaric purity is required. Philosophy, “culture”, everyday politics: no more of all that. It is not a matter of shifting to the other side of this bed of agony. It is a matter of finally waking up, and standing on one’s feet.
Be, make yourself God, and in bringing about, save the world.
No idea is as absurd as the idea of progress.
Let us repeat this: inner action must precede all other action.
The hands of the latest aristocrats seem better fit to hold tennis rackets or shakers for cocktail mixes than swords or scepter.
Those who harbour illusions about the possibility of a purely political struggle and the power of this or that formula or system, with no new human quality as its exact counterpart, have learned no lessons from the past.
Against psychoanalysis we should oppose the ideal of an ego which does not abdicate, and which intends to remain conscious, autonomous, and sovereign in the face of the nocturnal and subterranean part of his soul and the demonic character of sexuality. This ego does not feel either ‘repressed’ or psychotically torn apart, but achieves an equilibrium of all his faculties ordered in accordance with a higher significance of living and acting.
With no significant political forces opposing the conversion of our world into a universal marketplace, the conflict of our time is the struggle to retain one’s humanity in an increasingly artificial world. That is the only battle that retains any genuine significance from a traditional perspective.
We cannot ask ourselves whether ‘woman’ is superior or inferior to ‘man’ any more than we can ask ourselves whether water is superior or inferior to fire. There can be no doubt that a woman who is perfectly woman is superior to a man who is imperfectly man, just as a farmer who is faithful to his land and performs his work perfectly is superior to a king who cannot do his own work.
According to the modern man, both causes and effects are relegated to the physical plane, framed within time and space. According to the traditional man the physical plane merely contains effects; nothing takes place in this world that did not originate first in the next world or in the invisible dimension.
Let people of our time talk about these things with condescension as if they were anachronistic and antihistorical; we know that this is an alibi for their defeat. Let us leave modern men to their “truths” and let us only be concerned about one thing: to keep standing amid a world of ruins.
Knighthood, instead, appeared as a superterritorial and supernational community in which its members, who were consecrated to military priesthood, no longer had a homeland and thus were bound by faithfulness not to people but, on the one hand, to an ethics that had as its fundamental values honor, truth, courage, and loyalty and, on the other hand, to a spiritual authority of a universal type, which was essentially that of the Empire.
A political, economic, and social order created merely for the sake of temporal life is exclusively characteristic of the modern world, that is, of the antitraditional world.
The people guilty of crossing the “caste line” were considered the only “impure” beings in the entire hierarchy... In India only the people “without a caste” were considered outcasts, and they were shunned even by the lowest caste, even if they had previously belonged to the highest caste; on the contrary, nobody felt humiliated by his own caste and even a sudra was as proud of and as committed to his own caste as a brahmana of the highest station was to his.
The “enemy” who resists us and the “infidel” within ourselves must be subdued and put in chains. This enemy is the animalistic yearning and instinct, the disorganized multiplicity of impulses, the limitations imposed on us by a fictitious self, and thus also fear, weakness, and uncertainty; this subduing of the enemy is the only way to achieve inner liberation or the rebirth in a state of a deeper inner unity and “peace” in the esoteric and triumphal sense of the word.
Let us leave modern men to their “truths” and let us only be concerned about one thing: to keep standing amid a world of ruins.
The essential thing is not to let oneself be impressed by the omnipotence and apparent triumph of the forces of the epoch. These forces, devoid of connection with any higher principle, are in fact on a short chain.