Preparing for Spiritual Warfare (Part 2)

Part 2 of this insight into techniques to practice in spiritual warfare, a forgotten aspect of spiritual life and vitally important in the modern world

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As we explored in Part 1, spiritual warfare is a dimension of life that modern men are often completely unaware of, meaning all manner of inner demons can plague the souls of men who have little to no defence against such attack.

Part 1 covered the first three of seven ‘weapons’ of spiritual warfare: contemplation, unlearning and confession—the core theme running through them all being the skill to disentangle yourself from the world to break free of egocentric possession. Part 2 builds on the initial three, which focused more on the ‘inner’ dimension, by exploring more practical ‘outer’ practices.

Do make sure to read Part 1 below if you haven’t already:

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Preparing for Spiritual Warfare (Part 1)

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4: Connection

The devil thrives when you’re in isolation. Left alone, all manner of dark thoughts and desires can warp your mind, and without recourse to trusted friends and mentors, you will be corrupted.

I’ve had to learn this lesson in my own spiritual life. Being more of an introvert than extrovert, my instincts are to spend time alone, to read, to think about the world and so on. There’s nothing wrong with this by nature, of course, such things can be positives in our spiritual and personal lives. Yet problems arise when we avoid showing our true selves to our fellow men and carry burdens alone.

Early on in my spiritual journey, an elder gave me some sage advice—I must always be honest with myself, with another man and with God. This doesn’t mean I could lie to other people, it meant the real me, no airs and graces, warts and all, must be seen totally by at least someone. This can be quite confronting for many men. To bear your soul as you truly are. To be open about your deepest fears, desires, humiliations, resentments and sins. This isn’t for the faint-hearted, yet its healing potentialities are profound.

Many years ago, I was embarking on some spiritual initiation work and was challenged to reveal my true self beneath the social facade. It was a challenging and scary experience, yet after sharing deeply with a trusted brother, and him with me, not only did I feel a sense of inner peace, but I felt a kinship and peace towards other men on the whole.

This was fascinating for me, as due to growing up around violence and suffering my fair share of physical abuse from elder male figures, deep down, I didn’t trust other men on a root level. I always saw them as competition. I felt an undercurrent of danger when interacting with them. Such traumas can be (and are) easily manipulated in this day and age to manipulate men into the ‘toxic masculinity’ ideology. Yet after my experience of connection, I found a great sense of peace around masculinity, which allowed me to understand myself and other men all the more.

It’s always been a theme in my spiritual life that God wants me to connect with others, I often find He’ll use others to speak through. Not so much in a literal sense, more through a shared journey or a lesson learnt. He resides in us all, after all.

It goes without saying here that we must be careful what sort of man we choose to welcome into our spiritual lives. It should be taken as read that you don’t blurt about your personal life down at the local pub or with someone unwilling or unwise. Such people will only mock you, or worse, damage you. The key is, as Christ put it succinctly, not to ‘cast pearls before swine’.

It could be a spiritual elder, a peer in a personal development or religious context that you trust, you could connect with me or the other men on this platform. The point is you must sense a peace and wisdom in the man you’re connecting with.

The latter point also raises another key dimension. While we may have one or two close folks in our spiritual lives, community is another powerful weapon. I’ve been part of many spiritual and personal development groups over the years, and there are few things more powerful than a group of spiritually dedicated men willing to share about their inner demons.

I’ve heard stories of men who’ve sinned against others and been sinned against, great bruisers share about childhood trauma, violence, anger and fear, playboys talk about lust, infidelities and insecurity, and competent businessmen talk about all manner of addictions to various chemical substances. These men aren’t sitting around complaining, they’re revealing their soul in a sacred space that allows them to expunge the inner darkness and commit to a healing path of spiritual growth.

These sorts of meetings can be so powerful because the physical appearance of a man becomes secondary to his true self, which is represented by the state of his soul. I intend to make this community a place for such growth, with meetings and retreats on the agenda down the line. But for now, remember the importance of connection.

5: Righteous Discernment

Christianity is a very deep and beautiful religion. I often think we need spiritual masters to relay some of the teachings, as they can become easily corrupted in the wrong hands, both in and outside of the church. A good example here is the issue of judgment.

Modern pop culture has an image of Jesus as a desert-wandering hippy who, if around today, would read the Guardian, fight for ‘trans rights’ and support Jeremy Corbyn. Following on from this comes the assumption that judgment is sinful for any Christian due to the famous passage ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged’. More often than not, this is used to shut Christians up, but there is merit in the notion that judgment is ‘un-Christian’ or unspiritual; it’s just not the merit that many today might think it is.

In life we have to make judgments of things, even judgments of people—you couldn’t get too far in this world if you didn’t—you must make the judgment to bring a coat with you or whether to cross the road with your kids because a crack-addled maniac is yelling and screaming down the way. Such judgments aren’t sinful, but rational, so why is judgment bad?

To understand this, let’s revert to Part 1 when we explored how the key to spiritual growth is in letting go, in not responding to the drama of the world or the pull of the inner demons. This is so essential because by remaining still and poised, we’re not making an identity out of dark energies, we’re out of egoic consciousness. From here, we can make clean and clear judgments, better known as ‘discernments’, that aren’t rooted in emotions or thought patterns that are unjust.

For example, imagine if you’d just had a row with someone and they asked you to say something nice about them. You’d probably struggle; you may emphasise their bad points and obfuscate their good ones. However, when you are calm, you would give a more authentic account. This simple example shows the difference between judgment of an egoic/emotional nature and discernment of a still, objective nature.

When it comes to judgment, Christ never asks men to have no opinion—as prior stated, he tells us not to cast pearls before swine, meaning we have to make a call about who is ‘swine’ and who isn’t—the point is the energy from where ‘judgment’ is made. Is it from the spirit or from the ego? If it’s the latter, we will be inviting darkness in, we will be hypocrites.

One final note on this is that we shouldn’t be of the mind that our judgment is righteous and others is not. This is a common trap many religious followers have fallen into. This is just the ego sneaking in through the back door. This should be a personal practice, trusting that you will discern the right energy in you and others.

6: Facing Hell

The comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell is perhaps most famous for his ideas of the monomyth, I explore his work at length here, the guiding narrative that man harks back to no matter the place and time. The central idea is that man must go on a ‘Hero’s Journey’ where he descends into the underworld to overcome his greatest fears, and often himself, to die and be reborn in an evolved energy.

It’s this that inspires one of his more famous teachings: ‘The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.’

The question here is simple, then. What is the cave that you fear to enter? This is different for different men. One of my ultimate fears was public speaking; it still gives me the shivers, but I can enjoy it now. However, in my old job, I was challenged to speak in front of 500 people with very little experience. Another man may do this without a second thought, but to me, it was the ultimate fear.

Yet to overcome it, I had to realise that this wasn’t about public speaking, this was about ‘entering the cave’.

This is the key point. Whatever external thing it seems you fear, the purpose of facing it is to free yourself by facing the inner hell. No challenge is too small or too big. I’ve known men petrified of going on a tube train due to claustrophobia. I knew another man who was a deep-sea diver on oil rigs, yet would get into a state of total terror at the thought of interviewing on camera. Each of these men had located their cave and it’s only they that can face it down.

Understanding our challenges this way can be very helpful psychologically and spiritually. This is because men tend to feel shame over that which they fear, yet everyone has some weird hang-up, be it heights, spiders, claustrophobia, flying on a plane, and so on. Yet we must understand it’s not the external thing we’re frightened of, it’s the cave, it’s darkness, it’s hell.

Once we start to understand this, we can see that such challenges are apertures through which God/Life is presenting us with the potential for massive spiritual growth.

7: Helping Others

Lastly we come to the core tenet of the spiritual life—helping your fellow man. To be clear, helping another should only be done if the person wants helping, if they haven’t indicated so you’ll just drive them mad (and understandably so).

With this in mind, a good place to be of service is spiritual communities, men’s groups, any place where men have come along with an expressed intention to work on themselves. Another important aspect of this is in understanding that in helping someone else, you’re not his teacher or superior, but a fellow traveller on the same journey.

Most of helping others is in what’s referred to these days as ‘holding space’, you can see US comedian Theo Von do this for MMA fighter Sean Strickland here as he gets very raw about his past trauma and the dark, angry desires that has inspired. Note how Von, despite presenting himself as a dumb Bible belt yokel, is emotionally astute in that he doesn’t affirm or deny Strickland’s narractive, but just holds the peace like any good friend would.

Now we’ve got the practicalities out of the way, we can broach the real purpose of helping others. It isn’t to be some goody two shoes, and if you’re doing it through gritted teeth, I wouldn’t bother (you’d be best off rereading Part 1). The purpose is twofold; one, it’s to get you out of your own way, and two, it’s to follow the second great commandment: ‘love your neighbour as yourself’.

Again, this teaching can be misunderstood through the frame of modernity. It doesn’t mean you have to like everybody, it doesn’t mean you always have to be soft and gentle, nor does it mean you try and mother people. What it means is that you recognise what G.K. Chesterton refers to as ‘the million masks of God’, i.e., you see the shared divine nature in the soul of your brother.

This recognition is the great mystical truth in all esotericism. The One God manifesting as infinite versions and forms. The realisation of this in Christian language is the Kingdom of Heaven, the true seeing of all as spiritual unity. All is God. This teaching lies at the heart of the Christian tradition and has been a monumental influence on Western Culture as it implies an inherent worth in each human being.

We don’t appreciate this so much today as we view it as a moral absolute without realising we’re living in a Christian moral universe, yet as secular historian Tom Holland discovered when exploring the roots of Western morality, we can chart our foundations back to Christian spiritual teaching. The notion that man has worth in the eyes of God, no matter his worldly status, has been revolutionary in building the stable, safe and humane societies the West is known for. While a valid criticism may well be that this loving nature of Christianity has been abused and blended with neo-Marxian intersectionality into a ‘toxic empathy’ that’s plaguing the West, its roots are pure and vital.

In essence, we must connect with our brother to find ourselves.