Showing posts with label Mahatma Gandhi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mahatma Gandhi. Show all posts

Friday, July 21, 2023

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  


 
 

Saturday, January 20, 2018

the art of dying - training for nonviolence






Just as one must learn the art of killing in the training for violence, 
so one must learn the art of dying in the training for nonviolence. 

Violence does not mean emancipation from fear, 
but discovering the means of combating the cause for fear. 

The votary of nonviolence has to cultivate the capacity for sacrifice 
of the highest type in order to be free from fear. 

He reckons not if he should lose his land, his wealth, his life. 
Whoever has not overcome all fear cannot practice nonviolence to perfection. 




~ Mohandas K. Gandhi
art by picasso



Monday, January 15, 2018

Love


...


Love is the strongest force the world possesses,
and yet it is the humblest imaginable

...

~ Mahatma Gandhi