WHAT IS WAR?

Often the mystic likes to isolate itself despite living in the world; but it's just a pause, an unconscious alienation, recharging of batteries... and nothing better than going out into the world, discovering new places, stepping on soils where its feet have never stepped, finding answers and facing questions. So did Rohden during 1969, undertaking a trip to the ancient lands of Palestine, Egypt, and India, cradles of so much history.

For what? In search of truth? Looking for men different from ours?

Not! Men are fundamentally the same everywhere...

Rohden travelled to the outside diversities to feel more intensely his own inner unity - unity in diversity, that is, the socioecological philosophy that describes a sense of unity despite physical or psychological barriers.

From this journey through the outside world and his inner world, he wrote a book, MINHAS VIVÊNCIAS NA PALESTINA, NO EGITO E NA ÍNDIA, first published in 1971, a book which transports the reader to the earliest days of past civilizations and at the same time within the ideas of a great thinker of our times. But it is not a tourist guide, it is the account of the discoveries of the inner world, of this vast repertoire of knowledge alienated by external circumstances that lie dormant and do not spill over... and within, how much wisdom!

 “…While travelling the worlds, I commanded the worlds to travel through me, to show the same man already known but in different perspectives.

Never does a man know himself so well as when he receives the impact of other men. The metaphysics of different characters from other catalyzes and intensifies our self-identity. It crystallizes our self-knowledge.”

And it was inside a rocky cave in the mountains near Beirut, where, while savouring the silence, the cicada sings and the hullabaloo of birds, when he heard the following dialogue between two invisible hermits, both also travelling far away from its dominions in Thebes of Egypt, and close friends of St. Anthony:

 

 “--- Do you know, brother, that there is war out there? It is true, it seems that man only lives in war!

--- War? Replied the other. But what is war?

--- Well ... Replied the first: war… war... is a very ugly thing that should not be done.

--- But, after all, explain me better?

--- I can't explain... But let's play war, to understand what it is. Look here, I have a book; you have no book. I say: this is my book! You answer: no! This book is mine! I scream: NO... this book is mine! Then, we start trying to get the book out of each other and so the war begins. Understood? So, let's play war:

This book is mine!...

---?

--- Answer!

--- Answer to what?...

--- Shout out loud: NO... THIS IS MY BOOK!

--- How can? If this book is yours, then it's not mine...

--- You really don't understand anything!

--- Well, well... You don't have any vocation for war... You already ended the war before it started... Men out there don't do that. They fight endlessly over things that are neither of them. They die, and everything is left behind destroyed!

--- It's true, we have no skills for war...

--- Also, we have nothing to fight for...

--- Patience... We can't even play war...”