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was true about slaves: one could destroy them, one could murder them. There was no appeal for them, no court, no justice existed for them. They were not thought to be human beings.
The same has been true in the past about women: they were also treated as slaves, as property. In China it was not a crime to kill your wife. You could sell your wife in the marketplace, there was no problem about it -- she belonged to you.
Whenever one rules others one is being very immoral, very irreligious, one is being a criminal, a sinner. One can be a noble ruler only in the inner world. That means you rule your own mind, body, soul, you have mastery of all that you are, you are not a victim of unconscious instincts any more. Hence the real mastery is of the inner, not of the outer.
Alexander conquered the then-known world, but all his victory was simply violence, murder, arson, destruction. He was a calamity to humanity. All the great conquerors, the so-called great conquerors of course, have been calamities, curses. But a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu, a Krishna -- they are pure blessings to humanity. But their rule was of a totally different world: they ruled themselves. They were in absolute inner discipline. There was no conflict within them, they had come to understand their whole conscious and unconscious, their totality. And in that very knowing one becomes a master.
So be a noble ruler, but the only way to be a noble ruler is to go in. Possess yourself, be absolutely rooted, centred, integrated, so that you can move according to your light, so no unconscious instinct forces you to move in a certain direction, so you need not go into something into which you never wanted to go. But this is really the situation. That's why in all the languages phrases like 'in spite of myself' exist. It simply means you are not the master. You become angry and then later on you apologize and you say 'I never wanted to be, but I became angry in spite of myself.' What does it mean? What are you confessing?
You are confessing that there are forces inside you over which you don't have any mastery. They can do things which you don't want to do. But what kind of a life
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