A Sign and A Conversation with God

Self-posssessed, resolute, act without any thought of results, open to success or failure. This equanimity is yoga.
(Lord Krishna, Bhagavad Gita)

Albert-Laslo Barabasi in his book 'Bursts' told a fascinating story about the freedom fighter Gyorgy Szekely who rose ranks from a nobody to knighthood when he slay an Ottoman war hero in a battle of Hungarian forces with the Ottomans in Belgrade during the medieval times. The church wanted to start another holy war against the Muslims to free Constantinople and chose Gyorgy Szekely to lead an army, mostly consisting of peasants, to march against the Ottoman forces. This was a break with tradition in many ways. Knights received special privileges for the promise to fight wars, so it was a new step to involve large forces of poorly equipped peasants. The aristocracy was in fact worried that if you arm the suppressed, they might use the opportunity to start a revolt. This was exactly what happened after a small army of Hungarian knights eradicated an outpost of Gyorgy Szekely's peasant army. Furious, he went after them and after a drawn out fight, the peasants won over the knights.

While this was obviously the end of the holy march on Constantinople, Gyorgy Szekely gave the peasant soldiers a choice. Either you return home to your oppressed life as a peasant, or you end this once and for all and help him fight against the aristocracy. He put up two crosses, one to mark the spot next to him to continue the mission, the other if someone wanted to lay down their arms. Well, pretty much everyone had enough of this misery and all they really wanted was to go home. But then the amazing thing happened, the second cross fell down. And while a monk put it up again, it fell down three times in total so that the superstitious peasants ended up thinking that fighting with Gyorgy Szekely was a holy mission. A freedom fight endured which started out promising but after a couple of months Gyorgy Szekely was captured and all the surviving peasants fled home.

Gyorgy Szekely was tortured to death in a gruesome fashion as it was customary in the medieval times and this is were Albert-Laslo Barabasi's story ends and my imagined Conversation with God starts. Just imagine what most have gone through Gyorgy Szekely's mind when his life departed. He probably accused God why it had to end that way when the sign of the fallen cross was so clear, and God may have reminded him that he was an important wheel in history that may have even set the Protestant movement in motion in outrage against the corruption of the Catholic church as well as the privileges of the prevailing aristocracy. It may have contributed to the fall of the Kingdom of Hungary, the birth of the Habsburg empire and that these ripple effects could be felt into the European world wars as well as the birth of Communism. He was probably told that he was just an instrument of the laws of karma that have to work their way through before the world was rife for the Second Coming. I am sure that this must have been a meaningful conversation for a medieval night with a holy mission; don't you think?

I find the story of the sign which sent our freedom fighter and those that affiliated with him into certain death an important insight. A Tao traveler neither anticipates to be successful, nor is she afraid of losing. Winning and losing, good and evil simply don't make sense from the perspective of a Tao traveler. A Tao traveler just is. You are connected to a Devine Force that leads you and you are secure in knowing what to do and that what you do is beyond good and evil and will most certainly be spiritually meaningful to you. Everything just is, and from the perspective of the Tao traveler, is just perfect.