WILL AND RULERSHIP: WAY OF THE
WARRIOR (Seekers’ Lesson 6)
Erle Frayne D. Argonza
In this article, I will stress the need for
filling up another important ‘glass’ in one’s Path: the ‘glass of Will’. As I
have repeatedly echoed in previous articles, faith alone does not suffice to
make one ascend the Path towards liberation or salvation. One must fill up
other ‘glasses’ of life as well, one of which is the ‘glass of will’.
If life were likened to war, then one must
have both lance & sword to be able to gain mileage in many battles to
fight. This kill weaponry tandem is equivalent to the Will, a trait that one
can’t do without in life. It is Will that keeps one moving in life, and so is
it Will that will propel one to climb the Heights of inner transformation. For
it is truly a matter of climbing mountains, this task of moving ahead in the
Path.
The need for Will-bearers in society led
the Hierarchs to evolve a particular class of humans to perform this role: the
Warrior or ksattriya class. From among the warriors came a special class, the
King, who wasn’t only endowed with Will but was also with extraordinary occult
powers like unto the shamans’ or magicians’. The Warrior class, being the
embodiment of Will, became the models for developing the traits that were
subsidiary to a strong Will.
Weak will leads to stagnation and death,
while strong will leads to greater life and liberation. Subsidiary to Will are
the following traits: Courage, Audacity, Decisiveness, Self-Determination, and
Organizational Ability. Without these traits, human society will flounder and
self-destruct. Mutual faith/devotion is as good a pasting material as we can
ever imagine, but without Will to enforce the norms of mutual devotion, human
associations will self-destruct and society fragment altogether.
Gone may be the Warrior as a class, but in
its stead had evolved the ‘Leader Class’. In all sectors of society, there is
that high expectation to exercise leadership. Necessarily, the exercise of
leadership would require leaders. In political society, we have the Political
Class as a subclass of the Leader Class. In the military/police organizations,
there is the Officers’ Corps. Among the various professions, we have the
Executive Class. Among civil society groups, there is the Mass Leader. Within
the Priesthood, there are the Bishops, Patriarchs, and Imams.
There simply isn’t any sector today that
doesn’t manifest a need for leaders. And no one sector will ever enforce a
lesson of “be weak, remain lowly and weakly in esteem, for thou art of the
weakest types.” No Sir, the lesson is for one to follow the leaders and, in due
time, for one to emerge among the leadership of the organization, group, or
sector. And various discourses have emerged to articulate the need for
leadership, the traits of a leader, the concomitant need for organization, and
determination as a core ingredient in achieving success in business,
professional life, and financial life.
Warriorship—and the Kingly class that it
spawned—was originally a response to the need for Rulership. The Rulership
principle, being a universal/cosmic principle, must be forged in all the
dimensions of human life. Rulership begins first of all with one’s individual
life: one must be Ruler unto one’s Self. The philosophers Plato and Aristotle were
so adroit at their observation of this principle, that both contended for the
need to be King unto one’s Self without reserve. Without the capability to be
King unto one’s self, it will be futile to be King or leader unto others.
Rulership then moves on to the lifeworld,
where the need for leadership and role models among diverse “In-groups” must be
exhibited. Sociologists have done enormous studies on the lifeworld, using the
scientific tools of sociometrics to examine the elements of social distance and
leadership. Max Weber theorized about the ideal types of authority to explicate
leadership types in various contexts: traditional, charismatic, rational-legal.
The principles and elements discovered and articulated by sociologists
eventually overflowed into the new science of management.
Within the context of formal organizations,
the principles and practice of management have already developed to a very
highly complex, sophisticated level today. In the evolving context of
Information Society, new principles are being innovated on which were largely
absent during the time of Weber, Taylor and Fayol, the fathers of the science
of bureaucracy. Ouichi’s Theory Z, for instance, elaborates on the trend
towards more decentralized, autonomous, participative leaderships. The
excitement in the sciences of organization and management is a never ending
story, and I myself wish to continuously get updated about them as a
sociologist and practitioner of organizations and institution-building.
Onwards to the highest levels of expression
of social organization, the need for Rulership remains invariable although the
forms for those at the national, regional and global/international ones do
manifest their own peculiarity. At this juncture, we have reached the point
where the need for a global state has become irreversible, and sooner or later
we will have such a polity at hand. ‘Political Will’ shall then be exercised
with greater resolve, and international fiats executed with more teeth than
before. Otherwise, in this continuing situation of ‘anarchy of nation-states’,
we might end up blowing each other apart and destroying the planet through
weapons of mass destruction due to our stubborn intolerance towards
differences.
So, as one can see from above, it is
sacrosanct an expectation to develop Will and its subsidiary traits to be able
to climb the Heights to the ‘mountain of salvation’. To be able to forge a
strong Will requires intense studies on the subject, intense focus on modeling
one’s behavior from the mentors of Strong Will (executives, leaders of
professions, high political leaders, etc), and practicing leadership in real
life contexts when opportunities for such present themselves. One must also
develop the sharpness at recognizing when a context is filled with opportunities
for exercising leadership. In both normal and contingent situations, such
opportunities present themselves.
As to the study of the subject, it pays to
get some formal studies on leadership, organization and management in whatever
form. Even when one had already accomplished a program degree or special course
on leadership, one must go on and continuously update oneself about new
developments in the field. As many leaders (officials, managers, supervisors)
have found out, refresher courses make such strong dent that the practitioner
gets to be reminded of both flaws and appropriateness in one’s supervisory
behavior after a management workshop.
It is also very enlightening to do
self-assessments about one’s own weaknesses and strengths regarding Rulership
or leadership principles and practice. Many of the weaknesses and strengths are
results of one’s own socializations in previous lives which overflow into the
present embodiment. Some others are results of socialization processes in the
present embodiment. The lesson, which the 2nd Ray shares unto us in
our learnings of the 1st Ray, is to sustain our strengths and
overcome our weaknesses.
Overcoming weaknesses, through diverse
methods of learning and unlearning, is no easy process. But it is a possible
undertaking nonetheless. Overcoming the Fear complex is at the core of ironing
out weaknesses, and this begins with identifying one’s various fears. A listing
of fears could result to a long list, and one should better be honest about
them. Honesty about fears will facilitate one’s unlearning of the said traits,
while dishonesty will only lead to possible scorn from observers. No one can
ever fake Will when one lacks them in certain contexts, since other people are
there to observe you. So better be honest, recognize your weaknesses and
gradually work out to deprogram them.
Those fears that are learned complexes from
out of traumas in life, both past and present embodiments, are the hardest to
unlearn. For instance, the habit of obese eating, which could make one mightily
overweight, could be traced to a previous life of starvation and death. And so,
in this present life, the unconscious fear of starvation leads to indulgent
eating habits and obsessive food storage. Therefore, no matter what weight reduction
and slimming programs one goes through, the same obese habits would come back
and weight lose efforts fail. One must then go through a healing process to be
able to solve the problem.
As already mentioned in the previous
articles, self-development tools and applications are exploding today.
Addressing Rulership-related problems can gain much headway from using such
tools. What I wish to emphasize here is for you to add the tool of yoga
meditation (and prayers too) to unlock the causes of fears and related problems
and take out the dense energies from one’s Unconscious Self. If the fear
complex is very deep-seated, schedule at least a week to meditate on a
particular fear trait. If the fear complex borders the abnormal or
dysfunctional, then better consult a psychiatrist in addition to practicing
meditation and prayers.
In my own experience, joining the radical
mass movement, at a time of Martial Law, demolished my wimpy or low risk-taking
attitude. At age 19 I was initiated via the ‘baptism of fire’, by being posted
at the frontline of an Anti-Dictatorship protest rally in Manila Rizal Avenue
Not only that, even my disdain for cops
disappeared, a disdain that developed during the terror times of Marial Law
(1972-86). I was already a yogi and mystic in the mid-90s when I led national
mobilizations by teachers against unjust economic and educational policies. At
that time, when I looked at the cops in front of my mass formation, I could
only see people who were doing their own duties, many of whom feared the mass
in front of them. Yoga had changed the way I look at duty. I hope that both the
activists and cops learn to meditate and face each other as people doing their
own duties respectively.
For a final recommendation, please don’t
miss out on the Bhagavad-Gita among your readings on leadership and
organization. The sublime thoughts of Sri Krishna are compressed in this book.
It is one exquisite piece that integrates High Wisdom into the practice of
warriorship. It begins with being possibly struck by the ailment of
indecisiveness while one is already in the midst of battles, and what wisdom
lessons to practice to overcome the ailment and win the war eventually. The
lesson says: win the war within one’s self first, in order to win the greater
war ahead of you. What discourse can possibly deconstruct such a recondite
principle, if ever?
[Writ 23 October 2007, Quezon City
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