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THE KET OF KNOWLEDGE.
metaphysics and morals altogether. You shall love your neighbour as yourself,- because you are your neighbour, and mere illusi makes you believe that your neighbour is something different from yourself."
The fact, however, is that the principle of neighbourly love depends entirely upon the Law of Karma which teaches us that in injuring or belittling others we do more injury to our own souls than to the object of our
hatred.
For the effect of actions—whether mental or physical or those originating in speech-is preserved in the constitution of the ego and bears fruit in certain characteristic forms, virtue leading to desirable and happy results and vice to all that is unpleasant, undesirable and painful. And so far as the temporal world is concerned, it is easy to see that all manifestations of the emotion of true Love carry with them a feeling of expansion, or "more-ness,' and actually go to increase the vigour of life, while the opposite kind of feelings give rise to a sense of shrinkage, or 'less-ness,' and oppression in one's own self, and also produce mutual distrust among men; and it is a characteristic of this kind of distrust that it seldom fails to lead to the state of tension which can only be described as “armed truce. The freedom of one's neighbour, then, is the measure of one's own. He who would be free himself must, therefore, set his neighbour free in the first instance.
The advantage of Love over the opposite kind of emotion appears clearly in the life and death struggle of nations for their independence, for, while a settlement brought about by the agency of the former involves neither bloodshed nor an estrangement of relations
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