Page 18 - All India Magazine Oct-2025

Lord of all existence as the universal Creator but also the universal
Destroyer, of whom the ancient Scripture can say in a ruthless im-
age, "The sages and the heroes are his food and death is the spice
of his banquet." It is one and the same truth seen first indirectly
and obscurely in the facts of life and then directly and clearly in
the soul's vision of that which manifests itself in life. The outward
aspect is that of world-existence and human existence proceeding
by struggle and slaughter; the inward aspect is that of the univer-
sal Being fulfilling himself in a vast creation and a vast destruction.
Life a battle and a field of death, this is Kurukshetra; God the Ter-
rible, this is the vision that Arjuna sees on that field of massacre.
War, said Heraclitus, is the father of all things, War is the
king of all; and the saying, like most of the apophthegms of the
Greek thinker, suggests a profound truth. From a clash of mate-
rial or other forces everything in this world, if not the world itself,
seems to be born; by a struggle of forces, tendencies, principles,
beings it seems to proceed, ever creating new things, ever de-
stroying the old, marching one knows not very well whither, — to
a final self-destruction, say some; in an unending series of vain
cycles, say others; in progressive cycles, is the most optimistic
conclusion, leading through whatever trouble and apparent con-
fusion towards a higher and higher approximation to some divine
apocalypse. However that may be, this is certain that there is not
only no construction here without destruction, no harmony ex-
cept by a poise of contending forces won out of many actual and
potential discords, but also no continued existence of life except
by a constant self-feeding and devouring of other life. Our very
bodily life is a constant dying and being reborn, the body itself
a beleaguered city attacked by assailing, protected by defending
forces whose business is to devour each other: and this is only a
type of all our existence. The command seems to have gone out
from the beginning, "Thou shalt not conquer except by battle with
thy fellows and thy surroundings; thou shalt not even live except

18 All India Magazine, October 2025