The cutting of all bonds, the intolerance of all limits, the pure and incoercible impulse to overcome without any determined goal, to always move on beyond any given state, experience, or idea, and naturally and even more beyond any human attachment to a given person, fearing neither contradictions nor destructions, thus pure movement, with all that implies of dissolution -advancing with a devouring fire that leaves nothing behind itself...
This is not the way of the man we have in mind, who has quite another constutition. A clean line of division must be drawn. But first it is useful to see what is to be expected in the case of those who remain on this side of the line, that is, in those who follow the way of immanence unflinchingly, without turning back, without lowering their level, but also without the capacity to reach the turning point that alone can make good their lack from the very start, of the quality I have indicated in the man of Tradition, in the man who is constitutionally not modern. Once they have entered on the way of absolute affirmation, and have mastered all those forms of "ascesis" and the activation of a higher intensity of life that we have mentioned, their only saving solution is in a conscious change of polarity; in the possibility that at a given point, in given situations or environments, by a kind of ontological rupture of level, their life would be turned upside down, as it were, and transformed into a different quality - the mehr leben [living more] would give place to a mehr-als-leben [more than living].
In the positive case, the result might be expressed as a transition from the plane of "Dionysus" to that of a spiritual superiority, known in antiquity under the Apollonian or Olympian symbol. It is of capital importance to recognize that this is the only solution that does not involve a regression, and that it is the antithesis of any solution of the religious or devotional type. The "conversion" of certain contemporaries who found themselves unable to sustain the tension of the nihilistic climate, or who faced the experiences in question superficially, as mere intellectuals, represent cases of surrender that are devoid of any interest for us.
Superior men find themselves in continual inner and outer peril.
-Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger
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