Highly recommend reading the Bhagavad-Gita as well as any work from Julius Evola that borders on the subject. Physical training is of course important, but so is mental training.
Metaphysics of War (Julius Evola), is freely available on the internet in pdf form. A selection:
The Forms of Warlike Heroism[1]
he fundamental principle underlying all justifications of war, from the point of view of human
personality, is ‘heroism’. War, it is said, offers man the opportunity to awaken the hero who
sleeps within him. War breaks the routine of comfortable life; by means of its severe ordeals, it offers
a transfiguring knowledge of life, life according to death. The moment the individual succeeds in
living as a hero, even if it is the final moment of his earthly life, weighs infinitely more on the scale of
values than a protracted existence spent consuming monotonously among the trivialities of cities.
From a spiritual point of view, these possibilities make up for the negative and destructive tendencies
of war, which are one-sidedly and tendentiously highlighted by pacifist materialism. War makes one
realise the relativity of human life and therefore also the law of a ‘more-than-life’, and thus war has
always an anti-materialist value, a spiritual value.
Such considerations have indisputable merit and cut off the chattering of humanitarianism,
sentimental grizzling, the protests of the champions of the ‘immortal principles’, and of the
‘International’ of the heroes of the pen. Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that, in order to define
fully the conditions under which the spiritual aspect of war actually becomes apparent, it is necessary
to examine the matter further, and to outline a sort of ‘phenomenology of warrior experience’,
distinguishing various forms and arranging them hierarchically so as to highlight the aspect which
must be regarded as paramount for the heroic experience.
To arrive at this result, it is necessary to recall a doctrine with which the regular readers of
‘Diorama’ will already be familiar, which – bear in mind – is not the product of some particular,
personal, philosophical construction, but rather that of actual data, positive and objective in nature. It
is the doctrine of the hierarchical quadripartition, which interprets most recent history as an
involutionary fall from each of the four hierarchical degrees to the next. This quadripartition – it must
be recalled – is what, in all traditional civilisations, gave rise to four different castes: the slaves, the
bourgeois middle-class, the warrior aristocracy, and bearers of a pure, spiritual authority. Here,
‘caste’ does not mean – as most assume – something artificial and arbitrary, but rather the ‘place’
where individuals, sharing the same nature, the same type of interest and vocation, the same
primordial qualification, gather. A specific ‘truth’, a specific function, defines the castes, in their
normal state, and not vice versa: this is not therefore a matter of privileges and ways of life being
monopolised on the basis of a social constitution more or less artificially and unnaturally maintained.
The underlying principle behind all the formative institutions in such societies, at least in their more
authentic historical forms, is that there does not exist one simple, universal way of living one’s life,
but several distinct spiritual ways, appropriate respectively to the warrior, the bourgeois and the
slave, and that, when the social functions and distributions actually correspond to this articulation,
there is – according to the classic expression – an order secundum equum et bonum.
[2]
So on and so forth.
