Way of the Sith

The way of the Sith is both natural and unnatural; unnatural because it flies in the face of the way humans survive as a society. It teaches that one does not need to apologize for being an individual. It teaches that one can shape reality rather than be shaped by it.

Yet the birds and the wolves and the creatures of the wild do not apologize for being what they are, and thus this idea that one can simply “be” and the world will rearrange itself accordingly is also inherently natural. There are two phases in the Sith development – first the angry, rebellious determination, the need to communicate to others that you are not like them and that you will not conform; second the quiet act of simply being yourself in such a way that others realize they cannot force you to conform, and you forget that this is now your hard-earned truth. I refer to this second phase as the return to the wilderness, where one is able to forget that one is a human and supposed to live by all the human rules, because all the other humans are accommodating the rules you have decided exist; It is difficult to achieve and requires maintenance, and often one slips back into the first phase in order to maintain, until “embodiment” can be achieved.

When one embodies the wild, it no longer requires maintenance.

This is what the Sith progression and advancement is; because it is inherently unnatural to the human, it must be taught to the human. That is the process of Awakening, ideally achieved in becoming a Sith Knight. The Sith Knight is not the perfect embodiment of the Sith Path; rather, the Knight is one who has progressed from a state of apology over who he or she is, and agreed to go into the world on their Knightly “quest” with full ownership of who they are and what they take with them. This is also present in the Nightsister paradigm, “Slaying the Sleeper,” the first trial.

What is the Knightly quest? I wholly subscribe to the paradigm that it ought to be individual, material, measurable, something that one either fails or succeeds at, and always learns from. It could be getting an entrepreneurial business out of the planning phase and actually out into the world. It could be the attainment of a PhD. It is a piece of work that captures in some way the spirit of the Sith Knight. For my own self, finishing university with double honors and an invitation to an extraordinarily prestigious academic society was one such quest; becoming a published author was another; – and then there are the quests I did not complete, such as taking on the DA; such as not getting into a very particular PhD program that I wanted to get into. In the Nightsister paradigm, this is alchemical, where one takes one element and transforms it into another – I.e., the elements you took ownership of when you became a Knight, transformed tangibly into something real. In the fiction this is referred to as creating The Waters of Life from the harvested body parts of the Sleeper. It is a Rite of Passage; although the Order can confer Knighthood upon you, an actual quest that one either fails at or succeeds in must be undertaken in order for one to understand what it is to be a Sith Knight.

There will many quests in one’s lifetime, and many academies and Orders do not question what lies beyond the first phase of proving yourself unnatural, or undertaking many quests. The question of how one embodies the wilderness to the point where one forgets they are wild is the next step. You learn how to be a Sith by Awakening; you go out as a Knight and demand action and alter the world to your liking; and then gradually this becomes so normal that you forget you are doing it. It becomes as breathing.