A Chapter Thirteen Excerpt
Path Perilous: My Search for God and the Miraculous
We are left to fight our battles alone, in the quiet corners of ordinary lives, yearning for a freedom we cannot quite locate or achieve.
A True Story of Civilized Enslavement
What would Spartacus[i] make of our world now? Would he recognize the same decay, the same illusion of excellence masking a rotten, hollow, hedonistic core? Would he see what I see—a civilization where ambition is neutered, motivation strangled, where mass production replaces craftsmanship? Mediocrity was the norm then, just as it is now. “Good enough” is the enshrined altar where we all kneel.
But what he would not have seen—what I see clearly now—is that slavery never ended. It only changed form. Our shackles are no longer iron but linkage far more subtle. The Emancipation Proclamation traded one bondage for another. The whips are gone, but the lords remain. Society brands the young and corrals them into compliance. The super-rich no longer use the lash, but they still own and manipulate the masses. Those who dare climb too high get dragged back down, their voices silenced and spirits broken.
Where is our Spartacus? We are left to fight our battles alone, in the quiet corners of ordinary lives, yearning for a freedom we cannot quite locate or achieve.
And so I find myself confronting the hardest truth of all—that true freedom is not found in wealth, or power, even in breaking off our chains. Because even the richest man in this world must die, and all his wealth goes to others he never knew. No, if freedom exists at all, it is found only in peace of soul from a self-conquest that unshackles the mind enslaved to desire. That realm has infinite dimensions that even the soul unsullied can scarcely fathom.
[i] Spartacus (c. 103–71 BC) was a Thracian gladiator who was one of the escaped gladiator slave leaders in the Third Seville War, leading a heroic slave uprising against the Roman Republic.
From the memoir-in-progress, nearing publication:
Path Perilous: My Search for God and the Miraculous
—a spiritual epic for truth-seekers, contemplative mystics, and all who long for God.
Visit www.RMDellOrfanoAuthor.com
THE TRIQUETRA OF LIFE: Wisdom, Wealth, and Wellness 
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