like bees return to the hive

Learn self-conquest, preserve thus for a time,

and you will perceive very clearly the advantage which you gain from it.

As soon as you apply yourself to contemplation,

you will at once feel your senses gather themselves together:

they seem like bees which return to the hive

and there shut themselves up to work at the making of honey.

~ Saint Teresa of Avila

Complete concentration is complete relaxation.

 The ability to work on a job with total concentration, 
and then put it out of your mind when necessary,
 is a skill which can be cultivated. 
Through practice, 

 
we can learn to drop whatever we are doing

 and turn our attention to a more urgent need.
 When you are absorbed in a favorite book 

and your partner interrupts you, 
set the book aside and give your complete attention

 to what he or she is saying.
 If part of your mind is on the conversation

 and part on what you have been reading, 
there will be division and tension in the mind. 

 

When we practice this one-pointedness during the day,
 it will greatly help our meditation.
 The mind will much more quickly become recollected. 

~  Eknath Easwaran

.

.

I had learned to reduce myself to zero

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"It was only when I had learned to reduce myself to zero," Gandhi

says, "that I was able to evolve the power of satyagraha in South Africa." 

 

Satyagraha - Literally "holding on to truth" - is the name he coined for

this method of fighting without violence or retaliation.

 

 Gandhi had a genius for making abstruse ideas practical,

and one of the best examples comes when he explains the basis

 of satyagraha. In Sanskrit the word satya,  "truth," is derived from sat,

 "that which is." Truth is; untruth merely appears to be.

 

 Gandhi brought this out of the realm of doctoral

 dissertations and into the middle of politics.  It means, he said, that evil

is real only insofar as we support it. The essence of holding on to truth

is to withdraw support of what is wrong. If enough people do this - if,

he maintained, even one person does it from a great enough depth -evil

has to collapse from lack of support.

 

Gandhi was never theoretical. He learned by doing. Satyagraha 

continued to be refined in action all his life; he was experimenting up to the

 day he was assassinated. But the essentials are present from the very

 beginning in South Africa.

First is the heartfelt conviction that a wrong situation wrongs both sides. 

 

Europeans and Indians alike were degraded by race prejudice; a

lasting solution, therefore, had to relieve this burden for all involved. In

spiritual terms this follows from the unity of life, which is what Gandhi's

"truth" means in practice. But it is also profoundly practical, because only

a solution for everyone can actually resolve the problem and move the

situation forward. 

 

More than just both sides "winning," everyone is a

 little nobler, a little more human, for the outcome.

~ Eknath Easwaran

from Gandhi The Man  

 

 

how one man changed himself to change the world

 

 

 

 

 

 

 In these verses from the Bhagavad Gita, which is set on a battlefield 

representing the human heart, a warrior prince named Arjuna,

who represents you and me, asks Sri Krishna, the Lord within, how

one can recognize a person who is aware or God in each moment

or his life. 

The reply is:

 

They live in wisdom who see themselves in all and all in them,

whose love for the Lord of Love has consumed every selfish desire

and sense craving tormenting the heart. Not agitated by grief or

hankering after pleasure, they live free from lust and fear and anger.

Fettered no more by selfish attachments, they are not elated by good

fortune nor depressed by bad.  

 

Key words in the life of Mahatma Gandhi. 

~ from Gandhi the Man:

How one man changed himself to change the world

by Eknath Easwaran