#combat

Many will argue that there is nothing remotely spiritual in combat. Consider this. Mystical or religious experiences have four common components: constant awareness of one's own inevitable death, total focus on the present moment, the valuing of other people's lives above one's own, and being part of a larger religious community such as the Sangha, ummah, or church. All four of these exist in combat. The big difference is that the mystic sees heaven and the warrior sees hell. Whether combat is the dark side of the same version, or only something equivalent in intensity, I simply don't know. I do know that at the age of fifteen I had a mystical experience that scared the hell out of me and both it and combat put me into a different relationship with ordinary life and eternity. Most of us, including me, would prefer to think of a sacred space as some light-filled wonderous place where we can feel good and find a way to shore up our psyches against death. We don't want to think that something as ugly and brutal as combat could be involved in any way with the spiritual. However, would any practicing Christian say that Calvary Hill was not a sacred space? ↗

— Karl Marlantes

#spiritual-warfare #suffering #age

I love that as a black person I've experienced not being a minority. I think that's helped me to combat the minority mentality people can have here, which can stop them scaling the heights. ↗

— David Oyelowo

#black #combat #experienced #heights #helped

We support every effort to combat international terrorism through the formulation of international conventions and hope that the international community will take further steps to improve the anti-terrorism international legal framework. ↗

— Li Peng

#community #conventions #effort #every #formulation

Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon. ↗

— Terry Prachett

#centuries #combating #death #demon #doom

When the question arose whether I, as a member of the royal family, should take part in active combat in the Falklands, there was no question in her mind, and it only took her two days to sort the issue. ↗

— Prince Andrew

#active #arose #combat #days #falklands

Certainly from the rehearsal process with Elizabeth I think it was very clear. Well let me start again. We were initially supposed to be more combative. ↗

— Jennifer Beals

#certainly #clear #combative #elizabeth #elizabeth i

Were I to flatter myself with the possibility of success in such combat, it would indeed be presumption. ↗

— Anne Seward

#flatter #i #indeed #myself #possibility

Certainly we're going to continue to see those commercials that I call 30-second drive-by shootings. And they're going to have a lot of money to do it. But we're going to combat it. ↗

— Tom Barrett

#certainly #combat #commercials #continue #going

In the re-creation of combat situations, and this is coming from a director who's never been in one, being mindful of what these veterans have actually gone through, you find that the biggest concern is that you don't look at war as a geopolitical endeavor. ↗

— Steven Spielberg

#been #being #biggest #combat #coming

I can say now: all the combatants who participated in the fight for freedom in South America came to Algeria; it's from there that all those who fought left. We trained them, we arranged for the weapons to reach them, we created networks. ↗

— Ahmed Ben Bella

#america #arranged #came #combatants #created