Philosophy: Controlling Your Emotions

[MorGrendel]

Controlling Your Emotions

When you are new to combat, you are filled with so much emotion. Often it is difficult to determine which emotions are helpful and which ones are hinderances. I can only speak for two, Hate and Fear. Everything else is useless.

Your Hate is directed towards the enemy. They must be driven from your field quickly, as their very presence defiles its beauty. Let your mercy be that you dispatch them with alacrity.

Your Fear is directed towards those you call your brothers. You fear for their lives before your own. You fear letting them down and you fear disgracing yourself through inaction.

Never Anger
Never Doubt
Never Glory
Never Awe
Never Avarice
Never Joy
Never Apathy
Never Complacence

Once you master these two emotions and your role on the battlefield, you will find a blissful nothing, and a complete lack of distraction when fighting.

* * *
Hate vs Anger, Fear vs Love

There is always the collective grumbling from the old fighters when I tell the new fighters the above. The old fighters know to clear their minds, a skill the young ones have yet to learn. However, the words hate and fear scare them, as it should be. For what is the end result, if the new fighter never learns to compartmentalize his emotions? What do you create if all the fighter learns is how to hate or how to fear? It by no means is a perfect teaching, but I believe it better to work with emotions that can be controlled rather than to ignore the whole spectrum.

People avoid speaking of these emotions; these natural forces. I feel it is like avoiding gravity or not believing in buoyancy. Gravity, like Hate, is a driving force. One sends you to the earth, the other into harms way. Buoyancy and Fear both consist of a succinct duality. A beautiful binary expression: float or sink, fight or flight, never both. Ignore these forces at your own peril, they will catch up to you, and usually at the worst possible moment.

Hate is not anger. Hate is not vengeful, nor is it explosive like a volcano. Hate is the force that drives your legs you feel like you are stuck in the sand, the comfort of your armor’s draining weight, and that satisfying feeling you experience when you regrip your weapon. Hate has a long-view and a smile.

Anger is a loss of one’s senses. It is visceral, a blood lust, and it grows rapidly. Unchecked it spills out everywhere causing havoc and chaos. Anger is reactionary, and unusable when determining targets. Anger is instantaneous and cruel.

Much like when you strike your thumb with a hammer: You are not angry at the hammer, but at your self for your inability to properly use the hammer; you do not hate the thumb for causing you pain, rather you develop a hatred of the situation and catalog how it should be avoided in the future. Anger is like cutting off a toe because it has an ingrown nail, a brute reaction; hate is realizing that the shoe is the culprit and fixing the situation before it happens again. In the end, anger is directed at people, where as hate is directed at situations. When we compartmentalize our hate, fighting in never personal, it is simply a tool to affect a positive result. As soon as the fight is over, there is no more need for hate so it returns to your toolbox for next time.

Some would tell you that fear is crippling, and that it sucks away motivation and aggressiveness. However, it need not be. Fear is the hardwired basis of fight or flight, two clear, honest responses. Fear need not be self-imposed either; it can be personified to others.

So then why not just love those you fight beside? Is not love more powerful? It can be, but love is also very opportunistic. Love chooses favorites. It moves at its own speed, with its own goals, and it can be both passionate and fickle. Love exists before and after the battlefield, and hence it is not specialized enough to be of use.

It is also worth noting that the most destructive of all forces in a unit is to have a part of it that is fearless. Fearless fighters are fire-and-forget weapons. Now, it would be folly to say they can not be useful, but they are not battlefield multipliers to the unit itself. Fearless fighters are ultimately self-centrically minded, and will leave voids in the line. They do not work in tandem, they will float away when the unit sinks (or vise-versa), they will drift off while the unit makes ready.

And so to the crux, how do we create a strong momentary response to a conflict situation. We will use hate to find us a combat and aggressively commit us to it, and we will use fear to keep us and our teammates alive.

* * *
Fighting Without Hate and Fear

Combat without emotion is Zen.
Zen is the only true path of a warrior.
How is Zen reached?

Fight with confidence. Replace all wants and needs with confidence in your own abilities. Fight for the privilege to gain experience and to live in the moment of the experience.

Confidence means that walking and fighting are synergistically copasetic.

One does not feel the frying pan or the fire. One is unaware of the passage of time or the disintegration of well laid plans.

Behavior is controlled by localized spatial awareness, and not preconceived, hope-for-the best battle plans or momentary reactionary responses.

Be Natural
In time the Warrior ethos will overtake you, let it.
You'll find your greatest armor is confidence.
"Walk like your Fight, Fight like Walk"