Page 21 - All India Magazine Oct-2025
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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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