Outer Form, Inner Form

Introduction

One of the many discoveries that I have enjoyed realizing is that of the concept of Outer Form, Inner Form.  As I am re-discovering my Celtic & Druid heritage, besides pursuing the tradition I currently follow, I am come to find that there is a presentation of one side, one mask.  You can see what is there to see, but you cannot look beyond the simplest form of it.  In the sense of understanding ONA, all its MSS, generally starting out, you do not see the depth of it.  With the Druids they had a system where everyone can learn it’s Outer Form, but the Inner Form was reserved for Initiates.

Outer Form

Most people present a certain Outer Form to the world.  It can be a mask, it can be armor, a weapon.  Or the Outer Form can also be who are you, but not the depth of who you are.  It’s generally easy to just glance over someone’s Outer Form and think that is who they are.  Even with the mysteries of certain paths is only perceived as an Outer Form.  Though often mundanes let others choose for them what they think of a path’s Outer Form.  I can look at my mother for example, my sister is interested in an alternative path that is not Christianity and my mother was freaked out.  I decided to mess with my mother and got her a book of Buddhism, this will hopefully plant more seeds of acceptance in her.  My mother was disturbed about Buddhism at first too.

However, many people today present an outer form. It can be described as a mark, or even armor.  There is someone who I know, whose mask is that of a funny crazy guy.  It is just the way he presents himself.  My friend does not like the guy, but he does not see past this guy’s Outer Form like I can.  My friend just see’s this crazy outer appearance and so dropped this guy of the radar.  What my friend failed to see, is the sinister nature behind this guy.  This guy is someone who has followed the Dark Path for many years and now is trying to assume part of a numinous nature with following The Numinous Way, or at least similar to it.  Appearances deceive and clearly people forget this.  There are people who make themselves appear homeless, to gain donations from people though they are not.  That smile may hide sinister intent or a deep sorrow.  That’s the nature of Outer Forms.

Paths, or religions, have Outer Forms per se.  The Outer Forms are the basic you generally get to know.  They may provide free material for you, feed your mind, see if your are curious.  With traditional covens, one is supposed to wait a year and a day before being “initiated.”  This gives the person a time to learn the basic knowledge, as well as convenient preview if the person to be initiated can working within the group.  This is the stage of the Neophyte.  They are generally not the receiving end of the inner most teachings of the mythos and mysteries of a path.  Books cannot teach you what following a path means to follow.  Recently I picked up an old book on Wicca, one I read forever ago and as I was re-reading it, it really opened my eyes.  This is generally why the Neophyte does not need the inner most teachings of a path.

Titles and names are Outer Forms.  We often let ourselves be dictated by certain parts of our lives.  When you are customer service you do not swear.  If you are someone who is a salesman you do not curse away.  You dress a certain way, behave a certain way.  Clothes are an Outer Form too.  That person who is dressed as a homeless may not be really homeless.  Just because they are homeless does not mean you understand the circumstances that brought them there.  Think what you will, but Outer Forms are just a glance, a surface of the ocean.  In the middle of the Atlantic, we see only the vary top of the layer, we do not see the abyss all the way below.  That person in vanilla clothes could be a goth, that Nurse?

The Outer Form of any path is a lure as well as an armor/weapon.  It is a lure for those who it should resonate with.  It is an armor and a weapon for those who should not be part of that path.  No path is perfect for everyone.  The path one follows should resonate within oneself.  There are those who are not meant to follow such paths.  Therefore, like ONA, there is a form like a snake waiting to bite those who are unworthy.  Or maybe it should be the other way around, where the snake is tricksey and you cannot catch it, but it is smart and infect only those of it’s kind who can handle such sweet poison.

Inner Form

The discovery of an Inner Form is stripping away all pretenses.  This does not mean we can ever fully understand each other as we are constantly evolving, well some of us are.  When you push past the mask, all that armor, you discover a Truth about the person.  In an Outer Form they may be all bluster, but their Inner Form will reveal if they are weak, strong, if they walk the walk, or they are just talk, if they are fake, or real.  Strip their clothes off and they are naked, they cannot hide their scars.

Sometimes the problem with Outer Forms we lose touch with the Inner Form.  Being out of touch with the Inner Form creates imbalance and strike.  There is a general symptom of feeling unhappy.  The Outer Form though can be so well on that we forget and the only feeling we’ll get from it too, is that something is out of place.  We don’t feel the depth of our being.  We think that what is on the surface is all there is to us.  Often we disguise our Inner Form with our jobs, our social groups, our clothes…They are still part of us, but they are not necessarily part of the Inner Form that we all have.  Inner Forms do change but they are the sum of us, our experiences, thought, words, emotions, actions, and ethics.  They reflect our Character, which is what we should be judged on, not the silly Outer Forms that we front.  Our Character changes over a casual time of accumulation. As we add in experience, of knowledge, actions, and emotions, it builds the Character (Inner Form) of someone.  Just like a house is not made up of one brick, one piece of wood, so it is for our Character.

Religions, or “paths” as I like to call them, is a tool to build the Character, an Inner Form.  They provide us tools (MSS, meditation, tasks, community, etc) to begin an inner alchemy to achieve a change within ourselves.  The inner teachings of such pathways are important, but not necessary for someone who is a neophyte.   Do you teach calculus to a 5 year old?  Not unless they are a very brilliant 5 year old and those are rather rare.  I remember reading this one book, I did not understand it when I was 13 years old.  I went back recently to read it, as I am using it to help teach my sister, and I am picking up little tidbits of information I never realized about it.  It’s easy when one is just an initiate to mistake certain teachings, wisdom, as foolishness, or to pass over and not think of it.  The beginner cannot grasp often the “advanced” teachings especially when they have not facilitated an inner alchemy.  We begin with the basics and build up upon it, that is the nature of how we all learn.  All the science and knowledge we hold dearly in our society, is built upon discovery by discovery.  I am sure to such Ancients, or even people from 100 years ago could not imagine the life and wealth of knowledge hold in the palm of our hands.  The internet is such an abused example of knowledge at our fingertips.

Some Synthesis

However, an Inner Form and Outer Form can be interesting enough inter-changeable, because they are both us.  I am an unfriendly person, but I am also a friendly person.  I am nice, I am cruel, and I can be cruel with my kindness.  Just because we may put a constant mask of one appearance, does not mean the inner form changes.  I am generally a quiet person, but do not let my quietness deceive you.  I can be incredibly loud when I desire to, I can be the life of the party if I so desire.  This is interchangeable for me, but generally I like to be quiet, over-looked. Outer Forms is like a many-sided dice that gamers use, you know those with 20 some sides? People are rather complex and often we only see a couple sides of them.  That whole dice though is the entirey of themselves, with a “core” in the middle.

Outer Forms can serve a purpose, as a mask.  They can be insight roles that are informative.  Pretend to be a Christian.  Pretend to be a Homeless person.  You have to really apply the mask to believe it. The lessons you learn from these Outer Forms are interesting, one’s in which is necessary and only learned by those who do such insight roles.   Outer Forms are important like this, especially when you can deceive so easily.  I often think of the Outer Forms I use as various “selves” that I have.  I have spent a lot of time destroying and ripping them down in a matter, of trying to understand who I am and what I am capable of.  I find another “Self” I destroy it.  It is a brutal process but has been much rewarding and eventually I will arise like a pheonix from all the ashes.  So I keep my Outer Forms, keep a smile on my face, but people don’t understand how amoral I am.

Be not too wise, be not too foolish

Wisdom

This is a bit of Druidism wisdom that I have been exposed to.  I have a feeling most mundanes would understand be not to foolish but why not be to wise?  When one is supposedly to wise it can mean a variety of feelings or situations.  Being to wise and thinking you are such means you have placed yourself at the status of Buddha, or at least, some great enlightened figure.  There is a saying that I adore and it goes, “If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.”  Why kill the Buddha when people want to personify Buddha?  It means you have stopped learning, stopped growing.  Life is ever changing, constant in that form.  As we grow older we gain experience and we know what works and what does not work.  Within a spiritual practice this means you develop a certain tradition and way of what you do, because it works.

If one is to wise, we do not wish to make mistakes.  We may unconsciously avoid certain situations to create the illusion of our ever impending wisdom and twist of omnipresence.  Many people like to think they know it all, but this is a quality of homo huberis and mundanes a like.  An enlightened individual realizes they do not know it all.  I use the phrase enlightened individual lightly because in the end who is enlightened?  We have moments of enlighten but are we ever enlightened individuals?  This too is wisdom, questioning and skepticism but let it not that we become so wise and so jaded that we become the shadow of ourselves.

Foolishness

Foolishness is a quality that we look down upon in society.  We point out someone who is foolish and ridicule and attempt to humiliate them.  This is the modern day troll culture homo huberis as well as many mundanes.  Sarcasm is one thing, but this modern day troll is a culture that does not understand what it means to be Satan. A mistake is considered weakness and mundanes will jump at a chance to cut each other down.  Do they understand the meaning of being an obstacle of an obtuse that does not fit?

However the ability to act like a comedic fool is a quality that should be desired or least ways, the ability to laugh at yourself for trying something new and look like a fool.  Some people don’t like to dance, others don’t like social situations, so we avoid them because an association of looking foolish.  The people who worry the least about being foolish are usually less stressed over every little thing they do.  To say that “What will they think of me?” should not be a worry is not far from the truth.  Trying something new gives way to a learning experience no matter how foolish, which is why I am always interested in doing an activity I have not done before.  Next year I have a goal to either go skydiving or white water rafting on 4’s and 5’s.  If I worried about what people think of me, I probably would not dance.  I have been to so many raves and while there are some people who do stand on the side, some people dance so strange and yet do they seem to be worried about what I or others think of them?  I do not think so.

Where it should not be valued is where someone continual speaks and make a fool of themselves.  To put it laymen terms, you keep doing the same shit again and again and do not learn from it.  Whether Einstein said it or not, this quote rings true, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.”  While quantum physics is something different in the real casual world, stealing from the work place and it being noticed it going to get you fired.  How can we expect anything different?  They are loosing money from their business and it is going to you.  I have a rule that I apply in my life to relationships, I put in and you give back, this creates a symbiosis within it that neither party is taken advantage of.  I was foolish when I was younger and I would give and taking nothing from relationships because I tried valuing being unselfish, in the casual world, this does not work.  My kindness to those I value is not a weakness and I do not let people take advantage of that.  Through all these experiences of relationships, I have a developed a true kindness and a kindness for selfish manipulative reasons.  These experiences have learned what does and does not work.  I am still experimenting on the manipulation part and sometimes I am fool and make mistakes, but I learn and I never forget.

Synthesis

This is where it all circles around into a subject we all know well, comfort zone and being comfortable.  There are certain situations or actions that make us all uncomfortable.  These situations that push us out of our comfort zone should be valued.  We step into a zone where we are foolish and can make mistakes.  As someone once said on a forum, “The ability to fuck up should be celebrated.”  It really should for many reasons.  I like to think of my mistakes as a humbling learning experience.  They are like a Drill Sargent in an army getting in my face going “You maggot!”

There is something to say about comfort zones in that they allow us to flourish.  With being comfortable allows issues such as being a sloth, or to trusting, thinking you know it all, or a certain pride that shouldn’t be deserved.  I like pride and I certainly have an odd sense of it, but there always seems to be someone better or worse than you.  It is foolish to think one is the best at what they do because you also have peers.  The other coin is that wisdom teaches to take pride in what you do, because you have built the experiences to be where you are at.  This is synthesis, the joining of both.  Flip a coin, heads or tails?

Wyrd

I am going to write a rather personal entry.  You can ignore this if you like.

In the past year, I have really felt the call to walk the Dark Path.  I have felt this push to go this way.  In a sense there was always an attraction and always a resonance within it.  I have found a home within it that I have never found from other paths.  You know how you find something you want, its everything you want, and you go this?  Or someone who you know you can spend the rest of your life with knowing regardless of how you two change, that this is it?  This.  This.  This.  That is what speaks inside of me.  Though it is more than that, it is synthesis, a gnosis of all that I have learned.  An accumulation of casual and acasual knowledge.

However, I feel an approaching wyrd in my life.  It was like seeing the pattern within the chaos for the first time, following a trail to the end result.  This time period in my life is rather important for my Self and it’s continual development.  I have been on this path for over 10 years now, though not always following the Dark Path.  Lately, it feels like everything I have learned in the past years has come to full circle, that every moment and little gift of knowledge is a seed that is blooming.  All these lessons from wandering about, from spiritual, paganism, focusing on real life, all this, every moment, every dream, every possibility accumulates to this moment, to this stage in my life.  This stage is important for personal gnosis but to also reach the next level.

I recently had a dream about pillars that was organized thus:
: – :
: – :

I was walking, the world seemed so dark, even barren. Starlight above. Emptiness. I come across the pillars from one side and there was light with them. They seemed to radiate sunlight. I followed the bands, ribbons, of energy. Blue and red besides white seems to stick out to me. I discover the pillars on the other side, they radiate a “darkness” or emptiness, void. I discover these two main pillars, they are so incredibly large with height and width. They have a hole in the center. While the pillars connect to the two of the dark and two of the light sides, they connect to each other, but the holes in the middle are the most important part. One pillar had this incredible feeling of strength and power radiating off of it. But I don’t understand the other one. The holes in the middle lead to something “above” that was not there but was. The idea of one comes to mind somewhat. The last pillar.

I think this feeling of wyrd reflect this.  The next stage while is not here, is almost here.  It often feels like I am staring into a great Abyss.  It feels me with a bit of fear and with a bit of anticipation.  I know once I go beyond it, I cannot return.  Yet I want this so I will not turn away.  However, I feel it hangs in balance.  I have to keep pushing forward till I meet this wyrd and either achieve or fail.  There can only be two outcomes.  You just can’t go halfway and be met in the middle with this kind of thing.  If you fall down a hole you do not fall half way down a hole, you fall all the way down.  Unless there is a ledge, but in this matter, there are no ledges.  I could turn back, but I have no desire to.

I will just keep going on.  No matter the fear and anticipation, this is all rather comforting and it feels just right.

The Vehicle of Ideals

I avoid labels often.  You may ask why, but the simplest reasons are the essence of it all that I am not going to constrict myself towards one religion.  I am not going to spend all myself forcing myself onto one path, I make my own path.  I am reminded when I took my pottery class, I had to decide on how much clay to use, what shape it was going to take on, the details of it whether I draw details on it, or what parts are certain colors.  The other example I can think of when I get a blank canvas I have several options I do.  I either draw and work on a white background or I paint it black and work it up that way.  I remember that in painting class I learned that one of the techniques those old painters did would to paint the background a green color and work from there which is where I got fascinated with the black background.  Yet it all takes planning of what I am trying to achieve, how big do I want my canvas?  What is the image going to go on?  The details? Colors?

I love driving cars, there is something about it that is so empowering to me.  It comes from the fact that in my home town, I live in the middle of no where, where the closet store is a forty-five minute walk while by car it is only a five minute drive.  Of course, where does this fit into the vehicle of ideals?  Well for one you certainly do not let your car drive otherwise you would be in constant accidents on the side of the road.  Ignore the advances we are making towards having a car that will drive for us, please, all that does is serve how mindless we are becoming. Do we mindlessly follow our ethics, myths, and scared texts?  Does religion drive us or do we drive it towards some end goal?  When I use my car it is to get to get from one point to another obviously and not the other way.

Earlier this past year I had to go shopping for a new car, due to a stupid decision of an idiot, my car was totaled, it cost more to fix than it was worth.  So I had a lot of choices to consider, just like a spiritual path.  Do I buy a new car or a used car?  What company do I want it from?  What model?  What year?  Do I want AC?  There are many options these days for cars and it all revolves around what you want from the car.  It goes with your spiritual path too.  What do you want out of your spiritual path or car?  Do you want something flashy, something fake, something environmentally consciousness?  Small, big, expensive?  What does your ideals and suppositions offer you?  What is it that you want out of it all?  The end result?  Are you looking for god realization or self-discovery?  Gentleness or harshness?

I know what I want in my car and also for my spiritual journey.  If I didn’t I would not have bought my car and be making long term payments.  I am owning this car for a long time.  Just like my spiritual journey, I have proscribed to a certain doctrine out of choice.  I am here for the long run because it will give me the results that I want.  So I make payments in the sense of initiation grades, of staying true to my path.  You put in what you get.  You can buy a cheap car, a used car, or expensive, you can choose your method of payment.  In the end, the choice is yours.

Faith & Acasual

Leap of Faith.

I love driving in the car for around half an hour.  It kind of makes me wish I had a little bit further to drive to work.  I recorded it but I have no place to upload it, haha.  This topic is obviously about faith, but interesting enough what started it off in my head was a discussion I had with a friend of mine of her reincarnations.  I knew a lot more information about certain subjects that I realize.  It’s weird that I recognize it as “truth” let alone reincarnation as fact.  It is amusing to think that I believe so strongly in reincarnation, afterlife, and other worlds, but I struggle with the belief of Gods.

One of the questions that has been pounding in my head since I was young is, Is there a God?  I have so many questions and I haven’t even arrived at an answer.  This is where my strange processes work through my head at certain times, even at the same time, I believe in gods, but there is also a suspension of this belief, with the question of possibilities.  It is really hard to describe other than I have not made a leap of faith believing in Gods.  It just had not been my experience though I have known others pagan and Semitic wise who do.  As I said my position is hard to describe and I have been trying to straighten out this issue.

One thing I brought up in my rant in the audio file is about quantum physics and string theory.  I was watching this show on the science channel and it was about the possibility of other worlds.  The theory that various physicists have surmised is that other worlds exist, possibly parallel to this one, but we cannot interact with them.  They may pull at the fabric of our universe but we can never interact with them.  There was also something about dark matter being locked in another universe too.  So this brought up the questions again, theory, and the lack of validating such theory.  There is no evidence to prove or disapprove.  We can scream and rage at God who doesn’t prove himself to us, but he doesn’t.  Does that mean he/she/it does not exist?

Let me break down arguments I have against belief in Gods, or what I have trouble with.

Suffering is the first problem I had and the one that does not bother me anymore.  A simple point is suffering is very important to life.  Suffering teaches us, it helps us in many ways.  One point I often like to bring up is if you never knew suffering then you can’t appreciate being happy.  I spent a lot of my life miserable due to familial circumstances that was not beneficial but it has made me appreciate being happy.  Without that suffering I wouldn’t be who I am today.  But I remember as a child demanding why?  Why must I suffer? Oh the ego of a child !  Suffering is natural is what we allow it to do and what we do with it that is important.

The second was the issue of omnipresence as I find in Semitic religions.  It seems a question of logistics for me, the world has long had a lot of people within it, but how can some so called deity/being know even 10million people?  It’s also being everywhere at once, that seems odd to me at least at the point of a deity.  I do not find it odd with the theory of a collective consciousness/unconsciousness that humans have.  I easily tap into it late at night which is sometimes where when I did homework, it was most effective.  Yet the potential is in every person to access this database, but some are more easily able to tune into it.  I am a big believer in that we are all one and inter-connected, I am connected to people I have not met yet, or may not me, the actions I choose today affect them too.  If I decide to slip a sugar into a diabetics coffee, that could affect countless people lives, thus I am connected by a choice sense of creating fate.  Though I believe in metaphysical connections where you can know when something is going on with another.  I have a good example of this within my own a life, a personal semantic.  My cousin had a heart problem that he was born with, I can’t remember what, but there was a surgery to fix this.  Well while they were doing this my cousin went into cardiac arrest and almost died, but my grandmother just knew this.  She was insisting to my mother that something was wrong with my cousin and you couldn’t tell her otherwise.  We couldn’t get in contact with my Aunt & Uncle till later that day.  I have this connection with friends, I know what they are feeling without them telling me what is going on.  I can’t always guess the situation what is going on, but sometimes I do.  You could say I am very perceptive and I can be when I am physically with someone (but very dense at times too).  However, that is not the case when I am 1000 miles away and know that one of my friends is in trouble.  But I think these connections exist even with people do not know because of this collective that humans have.

The fickleness and human like qualities that God and Gods have.  I think of God beings are super human.  I do not know why but when I think of t hem, I think of them very unattached, almost a sense of apathy. I think of Gods as they should be better than a human being.  They should not be so fickle, so jealous, so full of hatred towards themselves and others.  Story after story I find of this, but then again I wonder, is this because we as humans lack understanding?  Look at one of the topics in Dark Discussion (Isolated Stunted Growth), where it was pointed out how I related humans to wolves, but wolves don’t use humans as a teaching tool for wolves.  Wolves do not teach other wolves the koans of humans.  We are relating to the Gods being like us possibly.  The one problem is trying to understand the arise of various Gods because you can’t trace back the memeplex completely to the beginning.  You can have a dozen variations of various stories of one God, due to rural differences and the fact that it was all oral traditions.  It still bothers me though because as Gods, should they not be more advanced, more intelligent than the normal human having access most likely to the collective unconsciousness and consciousness?  Should they not be more in touch with the universe?  But if we are all capable of that what separates us from the Gods?

So the third issue I have to bring up is what separates us from the so-called Gods?  This is where my little inner satanist comes out and proclaims we are all Gods.  We can manipulate our reality in some fashion with manipulating others, and our perception.  The answer has not come to me about what separates us from mythological Gods.  They are considered to have certain say, aspects, like Athena is often considered a goddess of wisdom (and war), because that is what she is good at.  Artemis was a goddess of the hunt and that is something she was good at.  She was associated with the moon and being a virgin.  The last two are more associations than anything, but don’t we say, oh your eyes are like the stars, and such?  We have this constant association complex where we relate anything and everything we can, even with Gods.

So where does myth (theory) end and the beginnings of faith and logic twist together?  My friend told me he believes in his personal gods because of experience.  I once talked to a Norse Pagan who says that there must be a trickster God or spirit watching over me (due to the odd tricks that happen in life).  I’ve been told I am guarded/watched over by powerful forces and they have a huge play in my life due to psychics and tarot card readers.  I once had a near death experience with a car accident I shouldn’t have a) walked out alive or b) let alone unhurt as I did.  Who is to deny that there isn’t a possibility?  Yet through all of this questioning, this pondering I have come to one conclusion that it is time to jump off that metaphorical cliff and step into living an acasual existence.  I have lacked a confidence to jump off to fully start experiencing it all, but even brief glimpses is not enough.  I need to start trusting my intuition more, having more confidence in it, letting the “heart” guide and not let all my head do the thinking.

So jump.

Tribes & Self-Preservation

No man is an island.  How can the lone wolf survive without his tribe?  The answer is simple not very easily.  Even ancient humans banded together in packs with delegated jobs, if one went out on their own it made it that much harder.  That is the most basic structure of how communities arise and the purpose of packs (tribes).  It is all about survival.  So where does this idea of self-preservation fit in?

When we are attacked, facing near-death or an event that breaks us down, we think within our Ego, our Self, and the continual existence of this Self.  I remember in this near death experience I once had all that went through my head was, “Not yet!  Not yet!”  I did not want to die, of course I was not thinking of anybody else who could get caught and injured in a whirling car of death.  Self-preservation is important, but it is more important of the focus of the group.  I remember this zombie movie I watched called The Dead and this movie got me screaming at which my boyfriend promptly made fun of me.  The movie starts off with people in a plane that ends up crashing.  Well the main character a military man (I’ll call him A) wakes up on the shore, zombies are coming for them and another military guy (called B) from the plane is there to and runs off, while another guy is being eaten.  Well the guy being eaten it is to late for him, but person B did not stick around for person A.  Person A survives and later keeps trying to survive on his own and eventually finds person B a zombie.  Person A eventually meets a Person C and then queues a scene that got me so angry I walked away from the movie in disgust.  These two guys, A & C decide to pass out on the ground, after making some kind of contraption that if a zombie crossed it would bang against a rock.  Well needless to say zombies came and person C ended up being bit and person A had to survive on his own.  This surviving on your own just does not work, who keep watches while you sleep?  You have to feed yourself too.  I mean zombies is such an extreme semantic, but what happens if you end up in a hostile world with just you and another person?  I love the show (and the comic) The Walking Dead because of the dynamics of it.  You see bands and attempts at forming Tribes to help with survival.

There is a certain strength with numbers in a hostile world.  Do not think for one moment that Mother Nature or let alone the veneer of “modern society” is not hostile because it is.  This life is filled with conflict and struggles and it is never going to go away.  Through suffering we learn, through struggles we gain strength, and through strength we gain victory.  While this is only a small sample of the Sith code from Star Wars, there is a certain validity to it.  Even now in these harsh times, the family (as a tribe), is very important.  It is not “wrong” to live with your parents, it is part of surviving.  It seems like this stupid white USA culture thing we whites got going on that we cannot live with our own parents for survival.  We have broken down these tribes and communities into small family and the individual.  Maybe whites do not see what is wrong with it because they are not exposed to a different reality or just want to avoid these connections.  I spent almost two months in Cambodia and more living with my boyfriend’s Cambodian family that has taught me these family bonds.  My mother used to tell me “family are thicker than friends, because you cannot change your blood.”  It is a blanket statement but has held so much value that I have seen.  I would do anything for my family despite my differences, they are my blood.  I see how my boyfriend is with his family and even when he re-connected with his brothers and mother who he hasn’t seen since his father and him escaped from the Khmer rouge.

The struggle of self-preservation can be seen through the lone wolf too.  During times of scarce game some wolves will go to try and make it on their own in attempt to nourish themselves better.  I feel I could almost relate it to modern society.  You have alphas (leaders), betas (followers), and omegas (bottom runts and outcasts), and then you get your lone wolf disconnected from the pack trying to find his way into his own territory, or start his own pack or find a pack.  We have people who are the icing on the top who can nourish themselves so well off the fat of the land and then the rest of humanity struggling to continue on.  It is like in old times with its kings, nobles, and plebeians.   There is a growing examples of this that so-called Occupy groups want to change, but all they do seems to me at times sit on their asses and not get their hands dirty.  Occupy is a good example of people grouping together to try to nourish themselves, forming a so-called fake tribe.  It is fake because there are no bonds that are binding.

Ah, to break down into an interesting branches of semantics, think of religion.  Pagans versus Christian, right hand path versus left hand path.  These distinct groups are against each other, their beliefs help bind them, for Druids there are Groves and Christians Church.  But this is a weak example of “tribes.”  These are tribes bound by beliefs, but finding a church with such strong tribal identity and self-preservation for the group is difficult.  The Order of Nine Angles is a strong example for me though.  Through its traditions and MSS, it builds Nexions (Temples) as it Tribes.  These tribes help to form bonds of loyalty and emotional ties to each other.  It also builds a certain sinister character that helps provide an identity.  Put it all together and you have an anchor, an allegiance extremely strong towards your Nexion and those who are sinister in character.  While ONA is certainly very different from many groups out there, those who walk the Dark Path recognize each other for what they are, wolves in a world filled with sheep and they respect each other.

To conclude, when there is self-preservation of the tribe and not just for the individual, the tribe works for itself.  We work to protect ourselves within our group.  It is them versus us mindset, like various gang mindsets, or the racism between blacks, white, and all the rest of ethnicity.  These are our ancient instincts creeping into our lives, instincts we do not seem to forget.  These tribes and communities provide identity, emotional ties, anchor (home), and pride.  These all help to form bonds and like a circle it cycles through helping build our allegiance towards our tribe and create the collaboration of self-preservation.