Teens

As far back as I can remember I’ve always been opposed to the way society functions – its unspoken rules – stubbornly refusing to conform to them. It really began in my early teens, when I began questioning things that everyone else took for granted. I would wear different clothes from everyone else, not carrying much for their notions of fashion; I would listen to different music, mostly heavy metal and rock; by the time I was sixteen I thought the very notion of modern life to be completely meaningless. My peers at the time were very enthusiastic about going to parties, going out with girls, getting drunk and competing for being the leading male in the herd. I always found this to be so shallow. An orgasm, after all, only lasts for a couple of seconds, and after that you’re back where you started. ’Time is moving’, I thought, ‘the days are going by – before they know it these people will find themselves married, looking for a job, having children, and living a possibly even more meaningless 9 – 5 life, each day being a replica of the previous one’. I read Sartre and, understanding that ‘life is absurd’, became a nihilist.

Although Sartre was the starting point for me (in case Sartre makes my readers frown, I say in my defense that I didn’t know about his communist association at the time) I quickly gained an interest in other philosophers. Plato, in particular, but also Kant and others influenced my thinking at the time. Still unsure of what it all meant, and gazing at the stars like a child, wondering what is out there and how it all came about, I started searching for answers. I thought there must be something here to make life meaningful and worthwhile.

I was into black metal and related genres in my nihilist days and so naturally took an interest in Varg Vikernes. This is where my ideological journey started. I read Vikernes’ own ‘Vargsmål’ and ’Lords of Chaos’ by Michael Moynihan. I was quite impressed at the time, but then – not being from a Scandinavian background – didn’t really feel I could relate to Varg’s notions of religion, nor did I really feel that interested in it, even as a subject. Varg did influence me to look into National Socialism, though, as well as my own, Slavonic pagan pre-history.

My Slavonic phase was short-lived as there is very little information on Slavonic mythology. The Christians destroyed most of the documents associated with it, and so all we know is what was passed down by Christian chroniclers and folk customs, none of which is particularly reliable, or, for that matter, complete. My interest in National Socialism (and related ideologies) did stick for awhile, however, and led me to join the National Alliance, then led by Dr William Pierce.

I was 18 at the time – very idealistic, and hopeful that I had found my purpose in life: to save the white race from extinction. ‘How could there be anything more important that this?’, I thought. But it was not just about race. It was also about the moral decay of the West, the ignorance of my peers of what was going on in the world, and a vision of a greater, more ideal society based on higher values. Science, of course, helps establish that whites have higher IQs than blacks and all that, but what really inspired me to join and begin developing a Danish National Alliance chapter was a speech by Pierce called ‘Our Cause’, where Piece talks about getting back to the essentially religious path of conscious evolution of the race, the gradual realisation of ‘the Creator’. With time however, I got disillusioned with the movement. I felt something was lacking, and Pierce’s ‘Creator’ didn’t really satisfy my existential search. When Pierce died I left the movement.

Integral Tradition

At about this time a close friend of mine began reading authors like René Guenon and Julius Evola. When I read Evola’s ‘Revolt Against the Modern World’ my worldview completely changed. As I read each page I felt that this was something I had always known to be true. At the same time the Guenonian notion that one has to follow a spiritual path to gradually increase one’s understanding of the ultimate Truth really resonated with me. When my interest in philosophy first started I felt helpless: I could see how philosophy couldn’t bring one to realise anything – if one could read two equally persuasive philosophers with opposite conclusions then how could one know which one is actually correct? But Guenon and Evola were saying that one could come to ’realise’ what the truth was.

I felt drawn to spirituality for the first time in many years. But which spirituality? I had come from a Catholic background, but had a lot of reservations about Catholicism and especially about Jesus. At the same time I still felt it was a Semitic religion – and I wanted something Aryan. I did give Christianity a half-hearted chance but in the end came to the conclusion that it just wasn’t for me. I was about 21 at this time.

The Aryan Tradition

In the mean time, a friend – the same one as above – had given me some books on Vedic philosophy, which he was now practicing. I read the books, liked them and thought: ‘the Vedic tradition is the only bona fide living tradition among the Aryan ones which still exists – I have to give it try’. I did – in 2004 – when I went to a temple in London (of all places). It was a bit exotic – they had deities of Radha and Krishna, the divine couple, I had come late in the evening, and the deities were being worshipped with ghee lamps – but at the same time I was very moved by the experience and decided to begin following this path shortly thereafter.

Modern Society

My views on morality, society, politics, and so on, developed in parallel to my philosophical search – although the different ideologies I followed are not as different from each other as their  epistemologies. I always had a vision of a better society, based on something deeper, and I always felt disgusted about modern society, with its petty mass politics, mass production and mass consumerism.

This is the realm of ‘becoming’, as Evola says – or, as the Vedas put it, the realm of the ‘chewing the chewed’. Modern life is a constant repetition growing up, finding a partner, having sex, having children, who in turn grow up and propagate while you grow old, get sick and die. Surely there is a way of organising society so that both it, and the individual, can ‘tap into’ that higher consciousness – the realm of ‘being’ – which gives meaning to life, frees one from the circle of samsara (or becoming) and leads one to know the Absolute Truth.

In this blog I will be considering how such a society is organised, and how it is different from the present one, which I will be analysing ‘with a hammer’.

Dharma