Card #371 – Quest Courage

Incarnation is not for sissies, not if you want to do it right.

Perhaps, with the typical naive overconfidence of the disincarnate, you chose this particular incarnation with all its hardships and challenges (see Friends don’t let Friends incarnate in the Babylon Matrix). Now that you are incarnate, you may feel some buyer’s remorse. Nevertheless, you need to summon the courage to see this incarnation through, and that requires Warrior skills and resolve.

The occurrence of this card means rising to the challenge and persisting through rainstorms, deserts, political upheavals, interpersonal conflicts, financial difficulties, health problems, threshold guardians, and dark nights of the soul.

This card calls you to discover, recognize, or double down on your quest, your life mission — what you came here to do and will remember well on your deathbed. It means accessing what Aleister Crowley calls “True will” and using it to engage effectively with life, to do your highest value work and nurture your key relationships and work through all the mechanically-resistant mundane details needed to keep your mission going. It means staying true to a quest that serves the world and leads to your soul’s fulfillment.

Are you willing to be on a life mission? Certainly, there are other valid life stances — some prefer unstructured being time, some a mostly interpersonal or social fate, and many prefer the easygoing, take-it-as-it-comes approach to life. There are light and dark aspects of all the stances. For example, the quest can easily become a hyped-up form of heroic adolescent energy that refuses to grow up, or it could be the path of a Warrior with heart.

The most crucial and core form of courage is the will for ruthless and compassionate self-examination. If you lack the courage to face your inner demons, then you will fight them in the outer world as phantoms. The mixed case is when the phantom gets projected onto an actual outer-world demon you must confront. This situation requires subtle discernment to distinguish the phantom (projective) aspects of such a confrontation from the actions necessary to fight the bully.

The pathologized version of Quest Courage could manifest as a tendency toward grandiose and inflated proclamations of what you will eventually do while neglecting to work on your mission today. It could also manifest as inflating an unworthy,
minor or mercenary endeavor into a quest.

A Warrior with a capital “W” is committed to life-affirming, transpersonal aims. Lower-case warriors are either mercenaries or the brainwashed dupes of a military-industrial complex, fundamentalism, unthinking nationalism, or some combo thereof. To be a Warrior with a capital “W,” we need ruthless self-examination to see our layers of conditioning to work toward that rare quality called “free will.”

A lower-case warrior can be quite fearsome, their titanium-alloy exoskeleton can bristle with weapons systems, but they live their inner life on the outside only, and this is merely the life of an automaton. An upper-case Warrior, however, can have a thought like Stephen Daedalus, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.” A Warrior can be a cognitive rebel working in isolation or a self-aware person called to physical action in the world.

The transpersonal cause served by Warriors must have a moral dimension. A moral relativist will insist that the moral aspect is entirely context-specific and fails to recognize universal ethics. But a person with access to global intuition can distinguish between, for example, the intense physical courage of a Panzer Tank commander who serves the pseudo-transpersonal aim of expanding the fatherland with great determination and efficiency and the moral courage of a self-aware person doing valuable work for the greater good. That work could involve physically fighting tyranny on whatever scale (from backyard bully to rogue nation-state) and also (whether we agree with the stance or not) in the physical/moral courage of a pacifist staying true to their values in a dangerous situation.

To be a Warrior means locating your True Will and the transpersonal aims you are willing to serve on your life mission and then summoning your quest courage to take impeccable action despite resistance, stress, and danger.

See:
Friends don’t let Friends Incarnate in the Babylon Matrix
A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler
The Way of the Warrior and other documents in the Warrior Stance section