Page 21 - All India Magazine Oct-2025

in the struggle for life. Association itself has been a servant of
war, egoism and the self-assertion of life against life. Love itself
has been constantly a power of death. Especially the love of good
and the love of God, as embraced by the human ego, have been re-
sponsible for much strife, slaughter and destruction. Self-sacrifice
is great and noble, but at its highest it is an acknowledgment of
the law of Life by death and becomes an offering on the altar of
some Power that demands a victim in order that the work desired
may be done. The mother bird facing the animal of prey in defence
of its young, the patriot dying for his country's freedom, the reli-
gious martyr or the martyr of an idea, these in the lower and the
superior scale of animal life are highest examples of self-sacrifice,
and it is evident to what they bear witness.

This too is Mother
All which seems to show that here is an element in existence,
perhaps the initial element, which we do not know how to con-
quer either because it cannot be conquered or because we have
not looked at it with a strong and impartial gaze so as to recognise
it calmly and fairly and know what it is. We must look existence
in the face if our aim is to arrive at a right solution, whatever that
solution may be. And to look existence in the face is to look God
in the face; for the two cannot be separated, nor the responsibility
for the laws of world-existence be shifted away from Him who cre-
ated them or from That which constituted it. Yet here too we love
to palliate and equivocate. We erect a God of Love and Mercy, a
God of good, a God just, righteous and virtuous according to our
own moral conceptions of justice, virtue and righteousness, and
all the rest, we say, is not He or is not His, but was made by some
diabolical Power which He suffered for some reason to work out
its wicked will or by some dark Ahriman counterbalancing our gra-
cious Ormuzd, or was even the fault of selfish and sinful man who
has spoiled what was made originally perfect by God. As if man

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