Things have obviously changed since this book was written, and one of the most important changes was in the power that each of us possess in this current world. In ancient times your choices were very limited, whereas today they are so vast that it is crippling. You can find this addressed in the paradox of choice. Nevertheless what has become far more important in this time that we live is the faculty of will power and our ability to make decisions. Due to the constant bombardment of information what you will find is that your willpower decreases drastically, this makes up one aspect of the prevalent problem of anxiety that the western society faces. 

On top of this the changes that occur happen so rapidly that if you want to succeed your peers, and reach to the heights of your potential, it is a requirement that you involve yourself in continuous learning so that you can adapt to the changing circumstances. This opens your awareness to the first theatre of war, the one that is at the center of your being and where the victory is determined by the relationship you have with yourself. How do you look past the transient parts of yourself and ascertain that which is permanent, and reliable?

When considering these questions, I have the sense that resolve is the answer, but not any kind of resolve. It is the Resolute Acceptance of Death that is the cornerstone of this kind of victory. It is only where the intensity hits a fever pitch where you will be able to improve leaps and bounds past your old self. Where you will either suffer a physical death or sacrifice yourself in a psychic death, by giving up the weaknesses that hold you back. In alchemy this process is called calcination, and in the form of being a soldier it means a fanatical and reckless abandon in the pursuit of glory and power ( at the lower levels) and as a selfless sacrifice to the service of the master ( at the higher levels) - as described in the Hagakure. This is the ideal that is embodied in the Hagakure, and the question then is are you capable of igniting that flame deep within yourself in order to have the intensity of it's heat shine through your eyes and have it guide you through the warpath within?

If you are, then where does this path begin begin and what does it entail? This is the territory I am exploring today, as it is part of the reading in the Book of Five Rings. It is mentioned at an important juncture in the book, and what that means is that before I can continue I have to explore the meaning of the Resolute Acceptance of Death, and the 4 Oaths set forth in the Hagakure. Now before I carry on, I want to mention a conversation I was listening to about Miyamoto Musashi. They covered a few topics in this podcast, and the parts I want to focus on are important to my efforts here. 

The first was Hero worship, this happens through a couple of mechanisms, in the immediate it is expressed as the halo effect, where  the good or bad attributes of a person is allowed to bleed into the rest of the opinion we have of that person. Like when a boss cannot trust you simply because you do not work eight hours a day, where it could be that you are more efficient that everybody else and that you can get the work done in two hours instead of eight. Or where students put their master high up on a pedestal. As time passes by and the facts are stretched into fantastic stories what eventually happens is that the subject of these legends becomes more archetypal in his role, and reaches the level of  Demigod. Much like Miyamoto Musashi who was  canonised as the sword saint. This brings up another interesting topic, which I will dive into  at sometime. But what I am trying to emphasise here that when learning from someone do not buy into the hype, see for yourself, and when the dude is dead test what he is saying so that you can validate what he is saying or disprove it. 

The next last thing I want to mention about this, as it flows right into it. What kind of guy was this ronin we are discussing, well he had six major battles under his belt and that made up the whole of his military career, and the rest of what made him famous was the fact that he went wondering the country side starting fights with people. where he ended up killing 60 people, with a couple of near death experiences. He also was an unkept mess, that did not bath. He was a fanatic, and his story is a testament to the fruits of obsession. He participated in one thing to the exclusion of all else, and when taking up this path it is important for you to know that in the beginning at least you are going to be driving yourself nearly insane,  and the effort and attention required are both going to be so intense that they take priority over nearly everything else. Relationships will suffer, and appearances will fade away, maybe even your reputation will be marred and suffer irreversible damage.

Thankfully I have not done anything of note besides this, and up until now I have been working away in silence, remaining obscure and irrelevant. This makes the costs of listening to a guy like this considerably lower, even though is is decidedly a very solitary one. Who are the men that have the audacity to go against the current, blatantly ignoring the conventions that have brought so many constraints to their peers? How many men do you know like this ? I have not yet sought any of them out, except those in the annals of time.  Now taking a look what I have discussed today I suspect I can just cover the Resolute Acceptance of Death before I bore you to death. 

The Resolute Acceptance of Death

I have already covered a few aspects of this idea in passing, and the effects of embracing it. It describes the attitude that should be taken when embarking on this path, and that is throwing caution to the wind. In any path of change what you will find is that in the beginning that this fanatical attitude is required, where you have to be increasingly unreasonable to obtain the early victories which set the stage for the chain reactions that will bring a lasting change about. In normal day to day life it is nearly impossible to muster this kind of power to your side. But if you are able to do it you will stand as a god among human beings. Your will power is the rarest and most valuable energy that you possess, and if we were incline to take the world really seriously we would place it up above there with life force and our time. 

The manner in which to do this is to consider your mortality, and become increasingly aware of the fact that every second you are in this existence you are dying. what is more important is that you deliberately choose what part of you dies every day that passes. It may seem extremely morbid that you make your own death play such a role in your own life, but there is nothing as liberating than knowing that this is all going to come to an end someday. It acts like deadline pressure, just at an existential level. In this way I find the idea of immortality and reincarnation absurd, because it eliminates the most powerful motivational force in existence. 

I cannot actually translate the impact of this practice to you in words, and instead of that I would rather propose a challenge for you. The meaning of the Resolute Acceptance of Death is as follows. It is to give yourself with no holds barred to the service of that which you have devoted yourself to past the point of death.  More than a mere ideal, it goes much further than that, I need you to experience the fear of your own mortality fading away and how this affects what you occupy yourself with. This state of being is cultivated through practicing meditations that are focused on your mortality. You can imagine how you are hung as a criminal, or how you are slaughtered on the battlefield, or how you starve to death due to your poverty. Elaborate on this kind of thing and notice the fears and anxieties that present themselves. Over time this the impact of these emotions will fade, until you are able to detach yourself from the implications of each scenario. Until you come to the core of it all, and you are faced with the abyss where you simply just fade away into the nothingness. Combining the meditations with the pursuit of the ideal you will necessarily become clearer and more determined in your efforts. 

This is how you survive the periods of time where you are honestly considering suicide. So more than just being a method gaining clarity and arousing awareness, it is also a path through which one can still the storms of despair and break the insidious hold that depression has on the spirit.   More importantly this path allows you to gain control of your willpower and sets the stage for the victory in the battle within. Here you are able to nourish either of the wolves within you with certainty. I hope that you are able to turn this into a Yin and Yang rather than two wolves mauling each other, and this is because each of us has a light and a dark side. starving one side and feeding the other side creates the imbalance that keeps men enslaved. By allowing yourself to see what is evil and good within you, allows you to pass through the middle way without being swayed by either side. Both sides lead being enslaved, walking the middle way is the only way to be a freeman. This does not mean that you are not decided on what is right and wrong, this is not a discussion of moral relativity, both good and evil are distinct and this requires you to be intimately familiar with these essences within yourself. 

The morality I advocate at this juncture is one of the truth. Each one of us has to come to terms of what lies within and clearly set the boundaries that govern how these aspects of us are expressed. In conventional training fear will be attached to allowing men to entertain their evil sides, and that fear will be attached to the idea that some may give into the evil that is brewing within. This is not conventional training, and it calls to you to refine your judgement to the point where you know how to transmute what is evil in you to something that is beneficent to all men.