The same can be said of peace and war – one cannot exist without the other. For what is peace if there were no war? Traditionally, peace and war have been treated as mutually exclusive concepts. One implies violence; the other, non-violence. The termination of one is the beginning of the other and vice versa.

So we can now see that, to know peace, we must first know war, for one cannot be realised without the existence of the other. Though peace is the absence of war, it is uncompromisingly dependent upon its relationship with war.

In Taoism - the belief system from which the yin-yang originates - the view of life is much mellower, differentiated from the common view that life is a battle between the forces of good and evil. The hero is the hero, and the villain is the villain. It is not a battle – it is instead a balancing act. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Light and darkness are two halves of a whole. They are partners which work together, as a man and a woman who create life. Yin means shade and encompasses things which are dark, mysterious, cool, cold, unknown, water, earth, the night-time, women, negativity (not badness, just the forces that pull) and the like. Yang means light and encompasses the ideas of fire, air, that which is known, warm, hot, the daytime, men, positivity and the like.

The yin-yang breaks the idea of absolutes for within the white there is a black dot, and within the black there is a white dot, symbolizing that nothing is ever absolute. What this also shows is that everything has a little bit of its opposite within itself: even in the light there are bad things, and in darkness there are good things.

Life is all about creating balance, not suppressing your good, not suppressing your bad; for one cannot exist without the other.

Think of it this way: fire is light. Fire is both good and bad. Fire cooks our food, it warms our home. Too little fire and we will freeze. Too much fire and we will be burnt to a crisp.

The same is true of the darkness. Darkness is water. It quenches our thirst, it cleanses our bodies. Too little water and we will die of dehydration. Too much water and we will drown. Everything in life is about balance, about finding the right amount of everything so that we can live our lives fully. The adage “too much of everything is bad for you, but a little bit of everything is good for you” holds true in the form of the yin-yang.

These views enthusiastically apply to concepts of peace and war, where not all peace is good and not all wars are bad.

Many of us, under the common viewpoint of life, think of peace as a separate and competitive force to war. Yet peace is parasitic on war and not separate from it. What we don’t really understand is that war or evil is a source of moral intelligence in the sense that we need to learn from our shadow, from our dark side, in order to be good.

After all, everything begins on a mental level before it manifests in physical results. So, on this note, anarchy doesn’t necessarily mean chaos or disorder; it means freedom from an oppressive centralised authority, freeing oneself from the prison of one’s own false thoughts.

We are born into this world with a purpose, and one’s purpose lies in the form of passion. There is much talk about purpose and fulfilling our purpose, which brings us to the matter of choice. We convey into reality that what we choose constantly to think about. What we’re excited about or afraid of we allow to manifest into physical matter.

As acclaimed physicist Albert Einstein said: “Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.”

Thoughts are powerful, everything ever created started with a thought. We create our tomorrow with the thoughts we have today.

Taking control of thought give us a sense of stability, and with that stability comes peace and harmony. In other words, to change the outer world, you must first change your inner world so triggering a ripple effect.