Page 39 - NAMAH-Jul-2022

Namah War and Peace

possibility begins to emerge, through which vain cycles, say others; in progressive cycles,
the challenge is eventually overcome. Here is the most optimistic conclusion, leading
again, we see the principle of inner and outer through whatever trouble and apparent
clash of forces and energies that wrestle and confusion towards a higher and higher
adapt and eventually help the organism to approximation to some divine apocalypse.
evolve and grow. However that may be, this is certain that
there is not only no construction here without
In other words, war at this level helps bring a destruction, no harmony except by a poise of
change wherein something totally new and contending forces won out of many actual
unexpected emerges through this process. and potential discords, but also no continued
That is why it is said that war is the father existence of life except by a constant self-
of all things. 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 by battle
and struggle and by absorbing into thyself
other life. The first law of this world that I
have made is creation and preservation by
destruction (2).”

At the level of mental evolution, war takes
a more and more subtle form. It is no more
about physical violence and gaining more
physical space alone but about ideological
battles, economic supremacy, religious
“War, said Heraclitus, is the father of all things, conversions , to fulfil political ambitions.
War is the king of all; and the saying, like Through all this clash of ideas and ideologies
most of the apophthegms of the Greek thinker, humanity evolves, turning the challenges
suggests a profound truth. From a clash of and oppositions and resistances of the
material or other forces everything in this animal and primitive humanity into an
world, if not the world itself, seems to be born; evolving godlike humanity of the future. It
by a struggle of forces, tendencies, principles, may take the form of physical or even worse
beings it seems to proceed, ever creating new moral violence, emotional tortures, and
things, ever destroying the old, marching one ideological expansion to fulfil political
knows not very well whither,— to a final self- ambitions, economic sanctions and so
destruction, say some; in an unending series of on and so forth yet it is at its bottom an

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