The Craft of the Warrior

Book excerpt: A big house, fancy cars, and money in the bank seldom lead to a fulfilling life, a life true to one's potential and essential nature. Ordinary life can be a prison, but it doesn't have to be that way. In this updated edition of The Craft of the Warrior, author Robert Spencer asserts that a new myth is emerging—one that guides people to a life of conscious living, where they escape the rat race and forge a new destiny based on real choice. The warrior's way leads from compulsion to freedom, from boredom to adventure, and from darkness to awareness. Synthesizing the works of Carlos Castaneda, Dan Millman, G.I. Gurdjieff, and Chogyam Trungpa, and combining personal growth processes including the Feldenkrais Method and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Spencer opens the gate to anyone with enough spunk to enter this way of life. "The amount of free will we have is directly proportional to the degree of freedom we have from our compulsions," writes Spencer. "Getting that freedom is the task of the warrior's life."