Gratitude to all for sharing insights and encouraging messages throughout January. We began the month with the question: How can we contribute to a sense of hopefulness in ourselves and others? We hope that our in-depth study of the articles from the Special Issue of the Blue Mountain Journal has given you a well of pure waters to draw on when you feel oppressed by difficulty.
Is there one thing you will be taking away from this month of reflection and practice? Do you have something new you can take away from this exploration?
We will close this study with a final article by Easwaran. We ask you to take this opportunity to contribute to Easwaran’s message of hope together as a satsang. In the comments below, we’d love if you’d share a line or two that really stood out for you, or a practical step you’d like to emphasize for yourself and others.
This article is entitled “The Practical Power of Nonviolence” found in the Special Issue Blue Mountain Journal, Winter 2018 .
South India is full of snakes, and every year as I was growing up, when the earth was warm after the monsoon rains, I used to marvel at the sloughed-off snakeskins scattered across our fields.
“Doesn’t it hurt a snake to shed its skin like that?” I once asked my grandmother. “It has no choice,” she replied. “It will strangle if it can’t grow. It has to slough its skin or die.”
In the same way, I would say, civilization outgrows the skins of old ways that begin to strangle it. If they are not discarded, they become so constricting that civilization begins to turn on itself and become self-destructive.
In the last fifty years, we have come to a crisis in human evolution where we have to choose between violence and nonviolence. If we choose to tread the path of violence, not only do we impede our evolution but we invite destruction upon all of us.
The forces in our minds
The mystics assure us that that there is a vital connection between the violence or nonviolence in our minds and the conditions that exist outside. Although good people around the globe today are deeply concerned about taking the external steps — political, economic, and social — necessary to promote peace, we must search deeper if we want a real solution.
If we look at the question of violence through the Sermon on the Mount or the Bhagavad Gita, another largely ignored dimension appears: the mind. If we acknowledge this dimension, we can hope to do away with war; if we continue to ignore it, no external measure can be of lasting help.
In order to do effective peace work, in order to bring about real peace between all countries and all races, there has to be peace in our mind and love in our heart. If we pursue peace with anger or animosity, nothing can be stirred up but conflict.
We are so physically oriented, so externally oriented, that we cannot understand that what we do with our hands is an expression of the forces in our minds. Even our technology is an expression of some of our deepest desires. The predicament of our technology, which could create the conditions of paradise on this earth and yet threatens to destroy it, only reflects the deeper spiritual division in our hearts.
Spiritual practices unite
The political and economic philosophies on which our modern systems have been based are breaking down. We can see how little we are aware of the unity of life, and how little political bonds are able to hold people together.
But spiritual bonds do hold people together. Spiritual practices like meditation and repetition of the mantram can unite people for all time.
Meditation is a tool. Anyone can use it for releasing tremendous inner resources, and these resources cannot help flowing into loving service. The kind of action taken will vary from person to person. The job of meditation is simply to release the resources, and wherever they are released, in whatever field, they throw light on how pressing human problems can be solved.
Start in our own home
We can start to make our contribution right in our own city — beginning, like Mahatma Gandhi, in our own home.
Here I can make a few practical suggestions. A nonviolent home is a home that eschews violence in every form: not only in action, which is absolutely necessary, but also in word and even thought. A home that is nonviolent in thought, word, and deed is governed entirely by love. You can see why Gandhi said that civilization itself depends upon nonviolence. Such a home is the very cornerstone of a civilized society.
We have to correct domestic disharmony before we start trying to set right the disharmony in the community. Training in the bosom of the family, learning to be able to forget our petty little interests in promoting the general welfare, is what prepares us to play our part as citizens in promoting the welfare of our community, our country, and our world.
This secret applies everywhere, from home and community to national and international relations. It is when we contribute to the greatest good of the whole that we benefit most. If we can keep our eyes always on the welfare of the whole, we shall find that even if we sometimes have to make small concessions in the give-and-take of daily life, everyone benefits permanently.
Healing divisions
One of the first lessons Gandhi learned in South Africa was that everywhere, the secret of peace lies in healing divisions — first between individuals, then between groups and communities, eventually within countries and even between nations. As we grow spiritually, opportunities for this service will open for us, just as they did with Gandhi.
To change course like this, we human beings have to learn to talk to each other even when our opinions differ. No problem is insoluble if we are prepared to sit down and listen respectfully to what the other person has to say. I think many of our troubles, from personal quarrels to global conflicts, can be attributed to our inability to put aside resentments about the past and focus with clarity and common sense on the problem at hand.
In bringing people together like this, it is essential to learn to practice the words of Jesus: “Bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate you.” We have to practice this at home before we can carry it into our community and our place of work. Whenever you are irritated, instead of breaking off communication or retaliating, that is the time to repeat the mantram, respond with patience, and keep communication open.
Give up fault-finding
“Judge not,” Jesus warns, “that ye be not judged.” When we keep pointing a finger of judgment at others, we are teaching our mind a lasting habit of condemnation. Sooner or later, that finger of judgment will be aimed point-blank at ourselves. It is not that people do not sometimes warrant judgment; fault is very easy to find. But judgmental attitudes and a suspicious eye only poison a situation. To right wrongs and help others correct their faults, we have to focus on what is positive and never give in to negative thinking.
Love, sympathy, and forbearance require steady strength of mind. The key to this is giving — our time, our talents, our resources, our skills, our lives — to selfless work, some cause greater than our small personal interests. By working hard to give what we can, and by cultivating kindness and compassion under every provocation, we can escape destructive ways of thinking.
This does not mean playing Pollyanna or closing our eyes to wrong behavior. It means simply that we will never lose faith in any person’s capacity to change. Without that faith, people lose faith in themselves, and without faith in yourself it is not possible to improve. Everyone deserves our respect, for all are children of an all-compassionate God. This is the most effective way to help others remember their true character.
It is an astonishing truth: there is only one person in the world I can hope to control, and that is myself. I may learn to govern the way I think, but I can never govern the way you think. I can only change myself: but in doing that, I do influence how you act, too. There is no other way to help a person change.
A climate of peace
To be completely nonviolent we have to draw upon the peace and security that lie in the depths of our heart. The daily practice of meditation enables us to draw upon this immense power so that we can return love for hatred even under the most unfavorable conditions. If each of us, through the example of our own lives, can inspire two more people every year to meditate and to live in peace with those around them, it will have an incalculably great effect in creating a climate of peace.
In your own city, if a few hundred people establish peace within themselves and learn to return good for evil, love for hatred, the whole city will take on this climate. Such a city has an influence far beyond its borders. Any place free from violence becomes a beacon because this is what people everywhere are yearning for. Your city can influence the whole country — and one country’s example, particularly today, can influence the whole world.
We should not expect a civilization to change as easily as a snake sheds its skin. Progress is won slowly, over centuries. Remember that old, constricting habits are not shed by governments or institutions. They are shed by individuals — ordinary people like you and me who go on to influence others.
It is we, the ordinary people of the world, who have the power to change our lives. We make history together, all of us, by the sum of our choices and desires.