If love is all there is, how can man ever justify war?

As a practical matter—leaving esoterics aside—if you look to what is best for you in these situations where you are being abused, at the very least what you will do is STOP the abuse. And that will be good for both you and your abuser. FOR EVEN AN ABUSER IS ABUSED WHEN HIS ABUSE IS ALLOWED TO CONTINUE.

This is not healing to the abuser, but damaging. For if the abuser finds that his abuse is acceptable, what has he learned? Yet if the abuser finds that his abuse will be accepted no more, what has he been allowed to discover?

Therefore, treating others with love does not necessarily mean allowing others to do as they wish.

Parents learn this early with children. Adults are not so quick to learn it with other adults, nor NATION WITH NATION.

Yet despots cannot be allowed to flourish, but must be stopped in their despotism. LOVE of Self, and LOVE OF THE DESPOT, demands it.

This is the answer to your question, “If love is all there is, how can man ever justify war?”

Sometimes man must go to war to make the grandest statement about who man truly is: HE WHO ABHORS WAR.

There are times when you may have to give up Who You Are in order to be Who You Are.

There are Masters who have taught: you cannot have it all until you are willing to give it all up.

Thus, in order to “have” yourself as a man of peace, you may have to give up the idea of yourself as a man who never goes to war. History has called upon men for such decisions.

The same is true in the most individual and the most personal relationships. Life may more than once call upon you to prove Who You Are by demonstrating an aspect of Who You Are Not.

This is not so difficult to understand if you have lived a few years, though for the idealistically young (that’s us!) it may seem the ultimate contradiction. In more mature retrospection it seems more divine dichotomy.

This does not mean in human relationships that if you are being hurt, you have to “hurt back.” (Nor does it mean so in relationships between nations.) It simply means that TO ALLOW ANOTHER TO CONTINUALLY INFLICT DAMAGE MAY NOT BE THE MOST LOVING THING TO DO-for your Self or the other.

This should put to rest some pacifist theories that highest love requires no forceful response to what you consider “evil.”

The discussion here turns esoteric once more, because no serious exploration of this statement can ignore the word “evil,” and the value judgments it invites. In truth, there is nothing evil, only objective phenomena and experience. Yet your very purpose in life requires you to select from the growing collection of endless phenomena a scattered few which you call evil—for unless you do, you cannot call yourself, nor anything else, good—and thus cannot know, or create, your Self.

By that which you call evil do you define yourself—and by that which you call good.

The biggest evil would therefore be to declare nothing evil at all.

You exist in this life in the world of the relative, where one thing can exist only insofar as it relates to another. This is at one and the same time both the function and the purpose of relationship: to provide a field of experience within which you find yourself, define yourself, and—if you choose-constantly recreate Who You Are.

Choosing to be God-like does not mean you choose to be a martyr. And it certainly does not mean you choose to be a victim.

On your way to mastery—when all possibility of hurt, damage, and loss is eliminated—it would be well to recognize hurt, damage, and loss as part of your experience, and decide Who You Are in relationship to it.

Yes, the things that others think, say, or do will sometimes hurt you—until they do not anymore. What will get you from here to there most quickly is total honesty—being willing to assert, acknowledge, and declare exactly how you feel about a thing. Say your truth—kindly, but fully and completely. Live your truth, gently, but totally and consistently. Change your truth easily and quickly when your experience brings you new clarity.

No one in right mind would tell you, when you are hurt in a relationship, to “stand aside from it, cause it means nothing.” If you are now hurting, it is too late to cause it to mean nothing. Your task now is to decide what it DOES mean—and to demonstrate that. For in so doing, you choose and become Who You Seek to Be.