Know Your Enemy

To Know Your Enemy, Know Yourself.

To know the plans that could potentially enslave you and your children/grandchildren is your duty as a parent imho.  Seeing what is coming IS taking responsibility.  However, it should never limit your abilities to alter not only your own life toward fulfillment of your soul's desire, but also make safe that gift to your progeny and so on.  Why can't we do both?  When a country, state, city, community or family unit lets down its guard, the predators always come.  It is wise to be vigilant.  I've never met a vigilant man who regretted being vigilant.  Only ones who were not.  Practical spirituality is a daily practice.  Like anything else, it keeps those things you love safe by keeping your mind sharp.

Knowing is Power.  To defend against the tiger in the long grass, you must first learn to hunt like the tiger in the long grass.  The more you learn, the less you will be hunted.  They are directly proportional.

It has been said a million times over, that each man is his own worst enemy.  Unless you know yourself, you cannot know your enemy.

Herein is where the self meets the world and the world meets the self.

Again, touching on the unification of opposites, the theme extends inward and out.  As within, so without.
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“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

A proof for the union of opposites, and WHY IT MATTERS.  These two pictures are saying the EXACT same thing.  Why?

In short, the canon with which I 'd like to leave you all today is meant to conjure up in your mind, the undeniableness of the self as other—as one and the same being—only the order of the archetypes/attributes/characteristics vary in polarized extremes of one single nonjective entity—which all of us embody and are embodied in. 

On one extreme, you have the solipsist who thinks himself to be ALL THAT THERE IS, only his mind matters, and all other beings are actually inside of him and there is no other but he to himself, his self existing for himself alone.  And then, the materialistic externalist who desires to control all other selves outside of himself with absolute and total submission through a technocratic "state as God" dictatorship where his completeness comes from the devouring of all other selves.  Both are bitter enemies, and neither knows 'the other'—condemning themselves to endless turmoil and eternal suffering due to an unreachable syncretism.

It is my assertion, that the solution to this conundrum lies in the middle (the narrow path), where the demarcation line of balance is to be found.  Recognition of both and worship of neither.  In terms of freewill, good and evil are but a matter of degrees, or variables between opposites.  Thus, the marriage of opposites in alchemy, Hermeticism, and spiritual practices remains as important today as ever.  Who truly knows that both heaven and hell exist within simultaneously?

When doing right for the sake of right itself, balance is the sum of that equation in harmony with Nature.  There is no residue left over despite the objections of the opposites.  Nature will quickly confirm whether or not you chose wisely.  And neither good nor evil, life nor death shall rule your temple.  For only your soul may rule and command both.

Matt Presti

Balancer | Leveler | Syncretist