Cultivating High Thumos: A Path to Heroism and Liberation

To achieve victory and transformation, one must embrace thumos, channeling its light and dark sides towards becoming the strongest version of oneself.

### Cultivating High Thumos: The Key to Transformation and Progress
* 🏛 "Thumos" in ancient Greece referred to **spiritedness, the energy of the heart, passions, and will**, which was the driving force behind heroes, warriors, and philosophers.
* ♂ To become a man of high thumos, one must channel both the **light side (courage, heroism, self-overcoming)** and the **dark side (passions of rage, frustration, will to glory and vengeance)** towards becoming the **strongest version of oneself**.
* 💪 Physical training through activities like martial arts, intense weightlifting, and running is crucial for cultivating **high thumos**, as it not only trains the mind but also builds **health and virility in the blood**.
* 😡 Embracing the dark thumos involves consciously harnessing feelings of **great grief, rage, sorrow, and horror** towards **transformation and overcoming challenges**.
* ♂ The light thumos is associated with **courage, heroism, aspiration, and ambition**, and one way to cultivate it is by "**LARPing in life**," choosing a character or ideal to emulate and immersing oneself in stories that inspire.
* 🌟 "Thumos is the Creed for **transformation**, it is the Creed for **progress**, and it is the Creed of **Heroes**."
* 📈 "Happiness comes from **self-overcoming**, from **progressing in some way**, and joy is in **progress**."
* 🤝 Joining a men's group or community can provide **support and accountability** in the quest to live with **high thumos**.

you want to be glowing. You want to be thriving like a Greek hero. But what do you do when the dark thoughts assail you, when the temptations are swirling, or maybe you're feeling down, you're feeling depressed, you're feeling empty. What do you need? You need thumos. Thumos means spiritedness in ancient Greece. Thumos was associated with the energy of the heart, with the passions, and with the will. It was the virtue and the chief driving force behind heroes, warriors, and philosophers alike. And this idea is changing my life, and I hope to share some insights with you about becoming a man of high thumos. Now, thumos has a light and a dark side. The light side of thumos is courage, is loving heroism, is self-overcoming. But the dark side of thumos is the passions of rage, of frustration, of the will to glory and vengeance. And one thing I've been realizing along my path is that it is important to channel all aspects of the

heart energy of thumos towards becoming your strongest version. If you really want to achieve Victory, most men in the west today are repressed. We've lived in confined houses. We've grown up on excessive safety and comfort, and in an anti-heroic culture. Hence, a lot of the wild passions and strong masculinity have gone underground in our psyche. Yeah, this makes us more docile and peaceful in society, but it also takes away the spiritual element and virility that is there to help man towards His Highest aim, His Highest Destiny, and Liberation. To make a bold claim, no transformation or true development can occur without thumos. In this video, we're talking about Plato's Republic and a three-fold nature of Soul, how to harness your thumos, and we're going to get into physical thumos, the Dark Side of thumos, and channeling it, which is probably the most important, and then the light side of thumos, AKA LARPing in life. Welcome back to Wisdom Warriors. I'm Christian.

let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Part one: Plato. In Plato's Republic, Plato describes the tripartite soul, this three-fold nature of soul. And in that, there is the logos, which is the reason and the mind. There's the thumos, which is the heart and the spiritedness or the passions. And then there's the Aeros, which is associated with the belly and with the appetites, desires, and material needs. And the thumos is kind of the mediator between the two. It's kind of like a wild stallion, right? And this wild stallion, for most people, is broken. It doesn't go anywhere very quickly or with much spirit anymore. And for other people, it's just going crazy this way and that, and they're ruled by that stallion. Plato's idea of justice is when that which is inferior serves that which is superior, when the appetites and the material needs and comfort serve the heart, serve the thumos, and the thumos serves the reason and the virtue.

man is aligned correctly, he will live a good life, and life will be good and beautiful. But most people are misaligned in their internal hierarchy, and to Plato, that would is injust is when that which is inferior rules when the appetites Rule. And all of a sudden, the spiritedness, the passions serve the Quest for satiation of the appetites, instead of the pursuit of virtue and the good life. And this is what creates decadence. Plato believed that thumos was the key because thumos could be made to fight for what is perceived to be just. If you set something as an ideal or an ideal of Justice virtue in your mind, the key to reaching that is through spiritedness, is through directing your courage, your heroic quest for Glory towards that ideal, and also through channeling the darker passions of Rage, of frustration, even grief, and horror towards transformation, towards transforming towards that ideal. The Greek saw this force in the soul as essential for making moral decisions. Cuz here's the thing thing. The moral choice is the hard Choice. Medicine tastes

bitter. It's like, you know, you're scrolling on your phone at night, and you know you should read the book. How do you actually reach for the book and start reading? Spiritedness, you know, if an addiction and a temptation is assailing you, like the urge to smoke your Vape, how do you break that cycle? How do you break that pattern? Thumos. Most people, and most of us here even, have been neutered from our thumos. We have been cut off from that source of Liberation, and because of this, we kind of swirl in self-pity, in Melancholy, in self-sabotage, and we just can't seem to quit. So if you really want to make lasting change in your life, it's not about getting more ideas, it's about becoming a man of high thumos. How do you do that? Part two: physical thumos. Before we get into the psychological aspects of channeling the light and dark of thumos, we need to talk about physiology. The thing is, thumos in Greece was

associated with the breath and with the blood, AKA The Life Force. Physical training is non-negotiable for cultivating High thumos. You see things like martial arts, intense weightlifting, running - all of these things. Not only do you get the practice being spirited in your mind and attitude, you also build up the healthiness and virility in your blood. And no matter how spirited you are in your mind, if your blood is exhausted and empty, it's going to be really hard to overcome yourself. There's an old quote from Nietzsche that says when he's very tired, all of his old demons come back. High thumos training is also just so fun. It's one of the few times I feel Fully Alive in life - like doing a martial arts Kata with the Setting Sun, dancing as hard as I can, doing a combat sport, doing heavy deadlifts, running - these kinds of things really ignite that spirit inside of me, ignite the Daemon the ancient Greeks would call it, and help you have more spiritedness in life. The thing is

is if you start training hard and training well, this spiritedness transfers into how you work, how you play, how you love, you know, other aspects of life, and ultimately, that is the warrior ethos. The warrior path is to do things in excellence and to bring the fullness of your spirit into any given task. Part three: embracing the dark thumos. So, the dark thumos refers to the great grief, rage, sorrow, horror that we all feel when we're faced with insurmountable atrocities or adversities. And also, we can feel this dark thumos in regards to smaller things like relapsing on sugar or losing our dog or the girl not texting us back. And most people react one of two ways to these darker emotions: either they feel them and if they're more neurotic, they feel dark emotions very strongly and they kind of let these angers and passions run wild through their lives. Or if you're more like me, you feel them but then they automatically and almost unconsciously

slide beneath the surface. Yeah, we get frustrated, we get angry for a time, but it kind of gets buried underneath our conscious minds. And both of these solutions that people have are kind of immature. And I've been trying to grow and actually harness that darker energy in a more conscious way. For instance, I went to a men's Circle a few months back, and I didn't know what I was walking into, but it was a sacred combat Circle about rage, about anger. And we got there, and we were asked to feel into where are we angry in our lives and express that vocally and talk about that. And I was feeling into myself. I was like, damn, all I feel is melancholy. I feel fatigue. I feel, you know, a dullness of sadness. And these are feelings that I wrestle with often. And all the other men started sharing their angers and their frustrations. And I started feeling that power coming out of them, that expression. And the mic got passed to me. And all of the sudden, that sadness about fatigue.

that sadness about The Chronic insomnia got turned into rage, and I talked about how angry I was at insomnia, how angry I was at how I've hurt myself, and the weaknesses and Temptations in my past. How angry I was at the disconnection and loneliness of the world. I just let this out of me, and I realized that a lot of that melano and dull sorrow was actually just the tip of the iceberg for a lot of frustration and anger that I wasn't feeling. And by releasing it and then hitting that heavy bag over and over again, I realized that I haven't been channeling my anger. I just kind of let things cross my boundaries, and I accept life instead of having the will to fight, right? And yeah, there is virtues to this. It's more maybe enlightened, you know, not to get so upset and angry all the time, but there's also a curse in that because anger is sacred. It is there to help you fight and overcome that which ails you. It is there to help you.

hold your boundaries, say no to things, and you know EXP your power in life. I think back to times where I've had to kick big addictions, like cigarettes for instance, and it was usually through this feeling of absolute frustration, getting fed up with myself, mad about how I'm hurting myself, and mad that I haven't been able to quit before. And it was that feeling of like righteous anger, of thumos, of passion, that allowed me to kickstart and break the cycle. And that's the thing, is like thumos, when it serves virtue, when it serves the logos, it is what allows you to break out of cycles. But when it serves, you know, the lusts, when it serves the desires and appetites, it brings you deeper into addiction. So it's almost like thumos, in my mind, is this vertical escalator where you're either going down deeper into bondage, or you're going up towards liberation. Thumos is the key to liberation. And one thing I didn't talk about there in terms

of the dark thumos is often periods of great change, of heartbreak, of realization, of like a dark night of the Soul per se. These are periods of initiation. They're going to inspire great feelings of grief, of despair, of Anger, of loss, and I just encourage you not to run from those moments when they come. The Broken Heart, the despair, is literally what inspires the courage for the rise. The most transformative seasons of my life have always come from the darkest moments. So we've established that thumos is the will to fight Injustice, but it's also the will to Glory. It's the will to Liberation. And in that, I've identified two positive aspects of the light thumos, and that is courage and heroism, as well as aspiration and ambition, all within reason, obviously. Now, how do you cultivate these things in abundance in your life? More thumos, more spiritedness in life in general, a more metaphysical approach I've been taking is laring in life. I'm sure you all have.

a character in your mind that you like to emulate. Maybe it's Bruce Lee, maybe it's one of the Spartans of 300, maybe it's Batman. Like, I don't care, be a kid again, right? Have a hero. And the thing is, heroic stories are so important because they are what download this software into our brain, right? So, this is why The Iliad was like the software of the Greek, and because the Greeks had that software, it determined what the boys became. It's the same thing with Thor and the Nordic gods for the Germanic peoples. It's the same thing with the gods of the Japanese Samurai, you know, whatever we put at the center of our culture, whatever myth or story. We Tell ourselves, we start to reflect. So, put good software into your brain. I love reading, you know, inspiring books, watching good movies, and kind of like being immersed in some story almost at all times, right now for me. Laring at life like my quest this week in the men's Academy is to train like a demigod.

and I know it sounds funny, and that sounds like a weirdo, but I got this idea from watching an interview with the golden one. Shout out to the golden one, another high thumos man out there, and he really embraced the idea of laring at life not as a negative thing, but a positive thing because it gives a greater sense of meaning to your actions and to your struggles. So, laring is important because it creates a lived mythology. Mythology was not just like these dreamlike ideas, it was supposed to help people make sense of the struggles and, you know, adversities of their life and inspire them to the heights of liberation, to the heights of their destiny. And the problem is right now, the modern West, we're in a fight for meaning. We no longer have a myth, we no longer have a guiding compass or an ideal of where to go in life, and because of this, a lot of people have trouble getting out of bed in the morning. We have trouble kicking like little petty addictions and

you know we swirl in distractions and temptations because we have no guiding principle, no guiding purpose. So we're in a fight for meaning, and the more myth, the more story you can add to your life. I recommend doing this every week: choosing a story to immerse yourself in, choosing a symbol or an ideal that you want to embody, maybe in your training or your work. This really adds meaning to life, and also it helps you progress. And honestly, the reason that high thumos is such a mantra for me right now is I realize that happiness comes from self-overcoming, from progressing in some way, whether it's in my work, my meditation, my relationships, my play, my training. Like if I can have more spiritedness in making videos, more spiritedness in how I interact in my relationships, the better life becomes, and joy is in progress. So thumos, my friends, is the Creed for transformation, it is the Creed for progress, and it is the Creed of Heroes. Be a man of high thumos.

and if you want to set a laring goal for yourself, every week set a challenge to live with Mor thumos. I invite you to the men's Academy, my new men's group, where we do have a weekly call about the challenges, about the quest, and we help you get more accountable to yourself. That's something that interests you, there's a link in the description below. In conclusion, self-overcoming is freaking hard. It is so hard when the dark thoughts are upon you, when the temptations are upon you. What do you do? And I hope you remember to live with thumos, with spiritedness. Thanks for watching Wisdom Warriors. I'm Christian. Click here for more philosophical inspiration. I'll see you over there.

THUMOS - the spirit of Greek heroes

Wisdom Warriors

Embracing Thumos: The Ancient Greek Concept of Spiritedness

Thumos, meaning spiritedness in ancient Greece, was the driving force behind heroes and warriors, with both a light side of courage and a dark side of rage and vengeance.

In today's repressed society, harnessing thumos is essential for true development and transformation.

Plato's Republic describes thumos as the heart's energy, serving as a mediator between reason and desires, with justice achieved when thumos serves virtue.

Cultivating High Thumos: The Key to a Virtuous and Fulfilling Life

Plato believed that the key to a good life is having a well-aligned internal hierarchy, with spiritedness playing a crucial role in making moral decisions.

Thumos, the spirited part of the soul, is essential for directing courage and passion towards the pursuit of virtue.

Cultivating high thumos requires both psychological and physical training, involving the channeling of light and dark emotions, as well as engaging in activities that build up health and virility in the blood.

Embracing the Warrior Ethos and Harnessing Dark Thumos

Training hard and well is seen as embodying the warrior ethos, which involves bringing the fullness of one's spirit into every task.

Embracing the dark thumos, or the experience of grief and rage, is viewed as a way to consciously harness and express darker emotions, rather than letting them control life unconsciously.

The process of attending a men's Circle and vocalizing his anger allowed the individual to realize the power of channeling his rage, leading to a deeper understanding of the importance of embracing and properly utilizing feelings of anger.

Harnessing Thumos for Personal Empowerment

Thumos, or righteous anger and passion, can be a powerful tool for breaking out of cycles, especially when it serves virtue.

It serves as a key to liberation and can inspire courage and heroism.

Embracing periods of grief and despair can lead to transformation and the cultivation of more thumos in life, ultimately leading to greater spiritedness and metaphysical growth.

The Power of Heroic Stories in Shaping Culture

Heroic stories act as a form of software for the brain, influencing the development of individuals and cultures.

Immersing oneself in inspiring narratives can provide a sense of meaning and purpose in life, as seen in the example of training like a demigod.

The absence of a unifying myth or guiding compass in modern Western society has led to a struggle for meaning and direction for many people.

Immersing yourself in a weekly story or symbol can add meaning to life and aid in personal progress.

The concept of "high thumos" emphasizes that happiness comes from self-overcoming and progress in various aspects of life.

Setting a weekly challenge to live with more thumos can lead to transformation and progress.