Page 20 - All India Magazine Oct-2025

of Karma against our adversary, the after-movements of which we
have no power to control. Vasishtha uses soul-force against the
military violence of Vishwamitra and armies of Huns and Shakas
and Pallavas hurl themselves on the aggressor. The very quies-
cence and passivity of the spiritual man under violence and ag-
gression awakens the tremendous forces of the world to a retribu-
tive action; and it may even be more merciful to stay in their path,
though by force, those who represent evil than to allow them to
trample on until they call down on themselves a worse destruction
than we would ever think of inflicting. It is not enough that our
own hands should remain clean and our souls unstained for the
law of strife and destruction to die out of the world; that which is
its root must first disappear out of humanity. Much less will mere
immobility and inertia unwilling to use or incapable of using any
kind of resistance to evil, abrogate the law; inertia, tamas, indeed,
injures much more than can the rajasic principle of strife which
at least creates more than it destroys. Therefore, so far as the
problem of the individual's action goes, his abstention from strife
and its inevitable concomitant destruction in their more gross
and physical form may help his own moral being, but it leaves the
Slayer of creatures unabolished.
CWSA 19: 42-43

Strife and destruction are not all
Strife and destruction are not all; there is the saving principle
of association and mutual help as well as the force of dissociation
and mutual strife; a power of love no less than a power of egoistic
self-assertion; an impulse to sacrifice ourselves for others as well
as the impulse to sacrifice others to ourselves. But when we see
how these have actually worked, we shall not be tempted to gloss
over or ignore the power of their opposites. Association has been
worked not only for mutual help, but at the same time for defence
and aggression, to strengthen us against all that attacks or resists

20 All India Magazine, October 2025