Life, Love and War ...
Dan S. Brown (DSBING Relentless)
I take a great deal of pleasure in writing and working on the playbook for positive transformation, a collection of thoughts and profound wisdom from great thinkers throughout the ages. While writing I was considering a few things that give me pause for thought and wanted to share those as a short s
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I take a great deal of pleasure in writing and working on the playbook for positive transformation, a collection of thoughts and profound wisdom from great thinkers throughout the ages. While writing I was considering a few things that give me pause for thought and wanted to share those as a short snippet.

My theme here is that life is war, an internal battle for growth in Life, far better and easier to navigate with those we choose to love, and the support of good and trusted friends. 😊

“Ultimately, we should not ask what the meaning of our life is but rather must recognize that it is us who is asked. In a few words, every human is questioned by life; and we can only answer to life by answering for our own life; to life, we can only respond by being responsible.” Viktor Frankl.

I often apply the term war to my life, and the idea of being a better person for me means I go to war with my own mind. Win or learn, it’s a fight every day. I seek out the breaking points of my own mind so that I can grow through them. Failure is fine. Quitting is the only real nightmare that I can imagine.

There is an interesting person you may know called Eknath Easwaran who wrote and translated the beautiful biography of Gandhi, called Gandhi the Man. Easwaran, who is one of the leading spiritual teachers of the 20th century (and translator of the Bhagavad Gita and Dhammapada) has this to say about the subject of war as it relates to living with more love.

“The Gita gives detailed instructions for crossing the sea of life. The battlefield where the narrative is set represents the individual human heart, where the forces of light and darkness, love and separateness, war incessantly for mastery over our thought and actions. In the dialogue which unfolds, Arjuna, the warrior prince who represents every man or woman, seeks to learn the art of living from Sri Krishna, the Lord of Love, who is the outward manifestation of Arjuna’s deepest self.

Arjuna is a man of action. He is not interested in metaphysics or airy theories; he wants to know how to make every moment of his life count, free from anxiety and fear. His questions are practical inquiries into the problems of living, and Sri Krishna’s answers are simple and to the point. We are born to fight, he tells Arjuna; there is no choice in the matter.

Our every desire must bring us into conflict. But we can choose how and whom we will fight. We can turn our anger against others, or we can turn it against what is selfish and angry in ourselves. We can use our hands to strike at others or to wipe tears away. It is a call to action, and that is why Sri Krishna describes the heroes and heroines of the Gita’s ‘way of love’ in the language not of sentiment but of war.”

So, as I contemplate going to “war” with myself, I feel the need to step back and remind myself that pretty much all great teachers have used the metaphor of war to capture the struggles we ALL face in our lives.

Socrates (who was also a former soldier) told us: “I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can… And, to the utmost of my power, I exhort all others to do the same… I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.”

Viktor Frankl, who found himself searching for meaning while confined in a Nazi death camp having witnessed the death of his family tells us; “Everything can be taken from a human being but one thing; the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

In short, to be a better person who lives with more LOVE and less aggression, I must go to war with all that is evil within myself, and that battle NEVER ENDS. It is life. That is the game. Life is, however, far better and easier to navigate with those we choose to love, and the support of good and trusted friends.

In closing, everything is the opportunity to master our own mind, to live, to love, and to navigate the battlefield of life, moving through all resistance with the people who matter the most to us, and having a positive opportunity mindset.

Bring it on!