ordinary citizens (us) who get caught in the middle of their petty ideological skirmishes.
Our inner tyrants are fixed patterns of behaviour that get in the way of our search for freedom and divert our attention from the real work of the sacred human being: to live fully the beautiful and finite lives that are given to us. They lead us inevitably into external tyranny since, if we have not dealt with our own issues we end up projecting them out onto the world where we see monsters and chaos all around us which, in our fear, we must oppose and destroy before they destroy us; or else we feel too weak to oppose such lunacy because this system and habit of war is so much bigger than us.
Magically, however, if we deal with the inner tyrants, the external ones vanish like mist. In this respect, the warrior pathway of the four gates is as relevant today as it ever was and probably more important than ever.
The quest of the warrior has always been to overcome the impositions of tyranny and find a unique code to live by so that he or she can harness wisdom and power and find happiness in the material world. In doing so, warriors from many different traditions and cultures have noticed that we all face four ‘enemies’ to personal freedom. These enemies can be seen as our beliefs about the world, which have been passed down to us from the tyrants around us – the leaders, power elite and self-appointed experts in our societies who have set up systems and institutions to enforce their worldview upon us. We have internalised these worldviews and while we believe that the world operates in a particular way we can never be free because we never see an alternative.
If we face these enemies,