Living trapped inside yourself
certainly not tasty;
Peace at any price is not peace,
it is slavery.
-King
It is better to starve than to be a fat slave.
-Aesop
No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom.
unless you are vigilant in its preservation.
-General Douglas MacArthur
Everything in life has its price. The price of freedom is the greatest price of all because there is nothing greater than freedom: the right to live as we choose without interference from outside forces and sources, as long as we do not infringe on the rights of others. Untold numbers of souls have fought and died to preserve their freedom and that of their loved ones. Indeed, as General Douglas MacArthur put it succinctly and eloquently: No man is entitled to the blessings of liberty unless he is mindful of its preservation.
On the contrary, there is nothing worse than slavery, whether we are held by another or trapped within the confines of our separate prisons, attached to their walls with shackles of our own making, forced to eat the fruit of the seeds and works we plant.
We must fight for freedom… every moment of every day with our will, our discipline, mind, body and, if necessary, the physical tools and materials of self-defense. If we refuse to defend our life, our freedom, our values, then we have no one to blame but ourselves if they are taken from us, as they surely will be if we refuse to protect them. Even if we have to fight to preserve our life and liberty and die in the process, at least we die having fought for something significant. In doing so, we would not have died in vain. Far better to die preserving life and liberty than to live in vain and shame by submitting to the chains of slavery.
Pythagoras said, No man is free if he can’t control himself. Therefore, freedom begins with our own discipline, self-control, right thinking, and right action. Great freedom demands great sacrifice in the form of persistent discipline. As the famous American actress, Katharine Hepburn, said, Without discipline, there is no life at all. Discipline is the crux of success. Without it there is no control, and without control there is no freedom, only the potential for enslavement.
Too often, do people operate under the premise that peace must be maintained at all costs? All costs? Would you give your life to an attacker to keep his peace? If you don’t value yourself or your life, then what is your life worth? What are your values worth? If you are a woman and some predator wants to rape you and take away your dignity, your health and your well-being and you believe that by being passive and allowing him to do what he wants with you, you will acquire peace, no.
There is an erroneous belief that peace equals passivity. This is incorrect. Peace is not passivity. Peace is an active state of balance between the opposing polarities of passivity on the one hand and activity on the other.
To understand this, let’s use cancer as an example. In a sense, cancer is a disease of passive growth. If we were to equate peace with passivity, we would say that cancer is a peaceful disease. Could not be farther from the truth. If the cancer gets out of control, violent measures may have to be used to destroy it: chemotherapy, radiation, surgery. They are violent but necessary measures to return the individual to a state of balance and peace. The moral of the story: peace sometimes requires great and violent actions to preserve it, as if one had to defend one’s life from someone who wanted to destroy it. If we accept under threat of harm by believing that peace at that price will bring peace, then our deception will enslave us and we will deserve exactly what we get… slavery. As the great Winston Churchill said, an appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will be the last to eat it.
All decent people want peace. The problem is that there can never be peace in East world due to its polarized nature of opposites: positive/negative, light/dark, up/down, back/forth, hot/cold, day/night, male/female, yin/yang, and so on. In a wobbly world, struggle is the way of life because we are always struggling to keep our balance, as we should and should have a full life. It is due to the intrinsic nature of this world that the 20th century Master, Charan Singh, admonished people to, Just live in creation and come out of it.. Outside the? Yes. Mystical teachings explain that there are other worlds, other mansions, other realms that are beyond the physical plane, which is where we currently live.
The important thing in the mundane world is that if we want peace, we must be willing to fight for it, just as if we want balance, we must be willing to fight for it. Selling everything we own, including our freedom and our lives, in the hope of creating peace will never work. Peace cannot be created through pacification if someone is bent on taking our lives. Unfortunately, sometimes we must fight to preserve a life in peace because peace at any price is not peace, it is slavery.
Copyright Richard Andrew King
All rights reserved