The Warrior Ethos

by Steven Pressfield

Alexander operated by the same principle. Let us conduct ourselves so that all men wish to be our friends and all fear to be our enemies.

In other words, our warrior Arjuna is being instructed to slay the enemies inside himself.

Human history, anthropologists say, can be divided into three stages—savagery, barbarism and civilization.

In the Gita, the warrior Arjuna is commanded to slay the “foes” that constitute his own baser being. That is, to eradicate those vices and inner demons that would sabotage his path to becoming his best and highest self.

Arjuna’s divine instructor (one of whose titles in Sanskrit is “Lord of Discipline”) charges his disciple to: Fix your mind upon its object. Hold to this, unswerving, Disowning fear and hope, Advance only upon this goal.

In their book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, authors Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette tell us that the human individual matures from archetype to archetype. A boy, for instance, evolves sequentially through the youth, the wanderer, the lover, the warrior, through husband and father to teacher, king, sage and mystic.

Something inside us makes us want to jump out of airplanes and blow stuff up. Something makes us seek out mentors—tough old sergeants to put us through hell, to push us past our limits, to find out what we’re capable of. And we seek out comrades in arms. Brothers who will get our backs and we’ll get theirs, lifelong friends who are just as crazy as we are.

“This man has conquered the world! What have you accomplished?” The yogi looked up calmly and replied, “I have conquered the need to conquer the world.”

Let us be, then, warriors of the heart, and enlist in our inner cause the virtues we have acquired through blood and sweat in the sphere of conflict—courage, patience, selflessness, loyalty, fidelity, self-command, respect for elders, love of our comrades (and of the enemy), perseverance, cheerfulness in adversity and a sense of humor, however terse or dark.