Living trapped within your self
certainly isn’t savory;
Peace at any price is not peace,
it’s slavery.
Better to starve free than be a fat slave.
If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.
No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation.
The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall.
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 upon the rights of others. Untold numbers of souls have fought and died to preserve their freedom and that of those they love. Certainly, as General Douglas MacArthur succinctly and eloquently stated: No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation.
Contrarily, there is nothing worse than slavery, whether we are subjected by another or trapped within the confines of our separate prisons, stuck to its walls by shackles of our own making, forced to eat the fruit of the seeds and deeds we planted.
Freedom must be fought for … every moment of every day with our will, our discipline, mind, body and, if necessary, the physical and material tools of self-defense. If we’re opposed to defend our life, our freedom, our values, then we can blame no one but ourselves if they are taken from us, as they most certainly will be if we refuse to protect them. Even if we have to fight to preserve our life and our freedom and we die in the process, at least we died having fought for something meaningful. In doing so, we would not have died in vain. It is far better to die preserving life and freedom than to live in vain and shame for submitting to the chains of enslavement.
Pythagoras said, No man is free who cannot control himself. Therefore, freedom begins with our own discipline, self-control, right thought 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’s 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 of slavery.
Too often, people operate under the premise that peace should be maintained at all costs? All costs? Would you give up your life to an attacker to maintain his peace? If you don’t value yourself or your life, then what is your life worth? What are your values worth? If you’re a woman and some predator wants to rape you and take away your dignity, health and well-being and you believe that by being passive and allowing him to have his way with you, you will acquire peace, you won’t. On a personal note, in my martial arts career I have seen the effects of rape. They’re horrible, often crippling women for the rest of their lives, not to mention the lives of those they love and who love them.
There is an erroneous belief that peace equates to 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 one sense, cancer is a passively growing disease. If we equated peace with passivity, then we would say that cancer is a peaceful disease. Nothing could be further from the truth. If cancer gets out of control, violent measures may have to be used to destroy it— chemotherapy, radiation, surgery. These are violent measures but necessary in order to bring the individual back into a state of balance and peace. The moral of the story: peace sometimes demands great and violent action to preserve it, just as if one had to defend his life from someone who wanted to destroy it. If we acquiesce under threat of harm by believing that peace at such a price will bring peace, then our delusion will enslave us and we will deserve exactly what we get … slavery.
All decent people want peace. The rub is that there can never be peace in this world because of its polarized nature of opposites: positive/negative, light/dark, up/down, back/forth, hot/cold, day/night, man/woman, yin/yang, and on and on and on. In a teeter-totter world, struggle is the way of life because we’re always fighting to maintain our balance, as well we should, and must to have a fulfilled life. It is because of the intrinsic nature of this world that 20th Century Master, Charan Singh, admonished people to, Just live in the creation and get out of it. Out of it? Yes. Mystic teachings explain that other worlds, other mansions, other realms exist that are beyond the physical plane, which is where we are currently living. To learn more about these mystic teachings, read Messages from the Masters: Timeless Truths for Spiritual Seekers available at www.richardking.net.
The thing of note in the mundane world is that if we want peace, we must be willing to fight for it. To sell whatever we own, including our freedom and lives in hopes of creating peace will not work, ever. Peace cannot be created through pacification if someone is bent on taking our life. We must sometimes, unfortunately, fight to preserve a life of peace because peace at any price is not peace, it is slavery.