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of people came and said to him, "We have heard any number of musicians and they all play a number of different notes. How come you are stuck with a single note?" The man answered, "I have found the right note; others are still searching for it. That is why I stick to the right spot. I need not search any more."
Our minds would like to choose a single note of life and deny all others. But only in death can one find a single note. As far as life is concerned, it is composed of different and contradictory notes. If you have seen an arched door in some old building, you might have noticed that, to construct it, opposite kinds of bricks are laid side by side. And it is the opposite kinds of bricks, placed together, that hold the heavy burden of the house on their shoulders. Can you conceive of using the same kinds of bricks in the construction of an archway? Then the house cannot be constructed; it will collapse then and there.
The entire structure of our life is held together by the tension of its opposites -- and war is a part of the tension that is life. And those who think that war is totally harmful and destructive are wrong; their vision is fragmentary, myopic. If we try to understand the course of development that man and his civilization have followed, we will realize that war plays the largest share in its growth. Whatever man has today -- all the good things of life -- were found primarily through the medium of war. If we find today that the whole earth is covered with roads and highways, the credit should go to war and to preparations for war. These roads and highways were first constructed for the sake of waging war, for the purpose of dispatching armies to distant lands. They did not come into being for the sake of two friends meeting or for a man and a woman belonging to two distant towns to marry. The fact is, they came into being for the encounter of two enemies, for the purpose of war.
We see big buildings all over. They all came in the wake of castles. And castles were the products of war. The first high walls on this earth were built with a view to keep out the enemies, and then other high walls and buildings followed. And now
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