The battles we have evolved to fight have been exchanged in the modern context for conflict not so much against existential threats as against the effects of circumstance on the inner person. Our primary battles are within; no more hunting mammoths, no more raids on neighboring tribes, no more need to train with bow and sword. Yet, the instinct to fight and wage war lives on, if fashioned in no other form than the drive to search for–or even create–a foe in the absence of a menace.
Perhaps that is the great twist of suffering, that our unspoken thirst for violence as an adaptive carry-over from harsher times colors our perception, makes us feel defeated now, crushed by an invisible enemy ultimately of our own subconscious creation just so we can exercise the reflex to fight and wage war. To conquer is a necessity and we must achieve dominance in the small frame of our individual worlds no matter what the cost–even if it means generating our own hardship out of inner psychic reserves. The effect is to produce a constellation of inflection points which stimulate action on multiple fronts–action which vivifies an otherwise dormant spirit of potential aching for actualization.
Ironically, the creation of hardship out of the primal instinct to struggle and fight for something vindicating–if not validating of our very humanity–could mean our own demise. We suffocate under our own desire to conquer frontiers where none physically exist. Yet, that instinct offers us a sufficient modus vivendi to draw out our full potential and thereby inspire deep satisfaction in the heart.
No conflict, then, is truly mediocre. No struggle, then, is truly lame. There is an intentional double meaning there. The smallest psychological differential between actuality and potentiality in personal growth reflects a microcosm of the great drama of human being–survival in a hostile world full of invisible enemies brooding in the unknown, imaginable only by the likeness of visible monsters which have clawed at our bodies over eons. The instinct for violent struggle exists as psychological muscle memory penetrating the layers of both body and spirit.
Stand up, then, against the so-called devils and their wiles. The only object of their brood is to consume us in conquest against the human way of being. The nest of devils within would gladly occupy, possess, and conquer our spirits, rendering us inept and docile, better ground for cultivating useless thorns than trees of seeding fruit. But they must be driven back, slain again and again, lorded over as slaves to the power of the will to struggle for the creation of cultivated paradise, a place of rest for the soul and a wellspring of life for partakers thereof.
