The Northern Way is Life. The Northern Way Life involves:
- Affirmation of Life
- Heroic Life
- Healthy Life
- Natural Life
- Tribal Life
- Creative Life
- Noble Life
Affirmation of Life: Experience life with a “Yes!” A focus on the here and now. Not fixated with the afterlife or a world beyond. “Suck the marrow out of life” (Thoreau). No desert god who sits in judgment, and no priestly class to enforce this manufactured god’s morality. No morality given by a desert god. There is just life, with all its ecstasy and all its pain. “Remain faithful to the earth” (Nietzsche).
Heroic Life: Absent a desert god (as judge and savior), we are left to encounter life without the soft landing offered by eternal bliss. We have the world as it is, both beautiful and horrific, with joy and sorrow. Tragic nature of life. The weak will either return to the fairy tale of the desert god, New Agism, Eastern mysticism, or they will choose nihilism. The nihilist resolves that without god there can be no meaning to life, so the nihilist chooses materialism and escapism as coping mechanisms. Both the religionist and the nihilist succumb to various neuroses and pathologies. The strong choose the heroic life. The hero, accepting the world as it is, welcomes the struggle. He embraces an “expand and expire” notion of life. He embraces the agon, thrives in the struggle. He desires to maximize his power and to experience power growing within him. He finds meaning in the experencce of beauty, excellence and overcoming. He finds ultimate meaning, satisfaction and happines in the perpetuation of his hereditary store.
Healthy Life: The practitioner of the Northern Way understands that all life “seeks” (whether consciously or unconsciously) to maximize power. We maximize power when we have the utmost vitality. Optimize physical and mental health. Proper diet, exercise. Agonal spirit as a motivation for health. Desires good health in order the maximize the experience of life and to perpetuate his hereditary store.
Natural Life: Maximization of power and the perpetation of life and hereditary store is the way of Nature. One discovers in the most simple and generalized observation of Nature this ceaseless activity of Nature, where maximization of power is taking place. The desert religionist (and the practicitioners of its ideological spinoffs, such as liberal democracy, humanism, capitalism and communism) hates this natural order of things. He finds nature as repulsive and evil. He deems nature irredeemable, unsalvagable and withdraws into a spiritualized, abstract existence. He has no concerns for his body or his natural environment. When his worldview dominates, as it has for thousands of years, personal and ecological health suffer. The desert religionist destroys nature, because this world is not his home. He lives in his abstract thoughts, in front of screens, in fairy tale worlds beyond, or immersed in “revealed” sacred texts.
He has suppressed his natural instincts and intuitive capabilities. He is a walking cadaver. The practitioner of the Northern Way is guided by natural instinct and intuition, informed by an enlightened mind, which are life-affirming. Our instincts and intuitive awareness, informed by an enlightened mind, protect us, serve us, expand our power and experience of life. We reject the harmful, life-denying worldview of the desert religionist. The preservation of the wild, without and within. We honor our natural instincts and engage in disciplines that reopen channels of intuition.
Tribal Life: A consequence of the modern withdrawal from Nature into a plastic world of abstract thought and fairy-tale worlds is man’s alienation from his family and kinfolk. He has become atomized. If this world does not matter, then nothing matters, even family. Did not Jesus say we must reject our family if we are to follow the desert god? Alienated from one’s kin, one is also severed from his culture, his heritage, his past and his destiny. The alienated man cares not for his past and has no concern for his progeny. The follower of the Northern Way desires that his kinfolk circle thrives. Just as he lives so as to maximize life and power for himself, he desires the same for his kinfolk, the carriers of his hereditary store. He honors his ancestors, in particular his heroic ancestors who, through great deeds and an accumulation of small, heroic deeds, brought life, protection and honor to his kinfolk and secured a future for his children and their children. Your tribe is a gift. Embrace it, build it and celebrate it.
Creative Life: If the Northern Way man’s concern is to affirm life through the feeling of ever expanding power (just as the flower blooms and the eagle soars), he must work to create the conditions for flourishing, for the optimization of his life and that of his kin and progeny. We are at our greatest creativity when we are in tune with the way of Nature, when we are fully in tune with our instincts and intuition. We desire that which is beautiful. We strive for excellence. We reject the modern race downward into mediocrity, ugliness, decadence and the perverse celebration of pathologies and sickness and mental illness. We create personal lives, families and cultures that promote health, beauty, and excellence.
Noble Life: Taken together all of these pursuits of the Northern Way man (affirmative, heroic, healthy, natural, tribal and creative) lead to the noble life. The original concept of nobility referred to beauty and light. Those who are noble are beautiful and full of light. The strong, the beautiful, the excellent, the disciplined. Well-ordered souls.