In the month of September, we’ll reflect on the Summer 2019 Blue Mountain Journal, “Gandhi & Nonviolence: Love In Action, Transforming Anger.” This special issue was published in honor of the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth and the 20th anniversary of Easwaran’s passing. Its focus is Easwaran’s unique message on the significance of Gandhi’s example: that even ordinary people like us can transform anger into compassion, through the practice of meditation.
Please enjoy the following preview from the journal that highlights the topic of the transformation of anger, which we’ll be focusing on this month. Easwaran demonstrates Gandhi’s relevance in the here and now:
I offer Mahatma Gandhi as a shining beacon in a world whose hope is rapidly fading. I offer him as an example of how universal forces of goodness will come to act through the day-to-day life of any individual who gives them the chance. He stands, as Jawaharlal Nehru said, “as a rock of purpose and a lighthouse of truth.”
How did Gandhi make himself like this? This question is of monumental importance, because in a world so intertwined and complex we do not have the luxury of lying back and watching forces at work. Every one of us has a personal stake in history. Every one of us must do all we can to avoid a worldwide conflagration.
Gandhiji put all his faith in the individual. His way was for each of us to make a personal contribution in our own home and community. His genius lay in knowing how to transform the raw material of daily living into opportunities for growth and service, so that routine events become spiritual occasions.
In looking at his life, an inspiring picture takes shape: of how one person can be immersed in solving the problems of the world without ever being overwhelmed by their demands.
Over the course of this month, we’ll explore a series of excerpts from the journal through a reading study. We encourage our eSatsang community to share reflections with each other every week so that we can deepen our understanding of Easwaran’s teachings, and gain insights together that we might not have become aware of just from reading these excerpts on our own. We also encourage you to read the whole journal (or read it again if you’ve read it already!)
Below is our first excerpt for our reading study on the theme of transformation. Please share what stands out to you and feel free to summarize what you understood, or share implications for your practice of the eight points. We look forward to hearing from you as we explore this new theme together!
This is an excerpt from the article entitled “Gandhi’s Message” by Eknath Easwaran in the Blue Mountain Journal, Summer 2019.
In India, Mahatma Gandhi is officially Father of the Nation. Under his leadership India attained freedom from the British Empire through a thirty-year campaign based on complete nonviolence that ended with both sides allied in respect and friendship. I would say that he belongs not so much to twentieth-century history as to the timeless lineage of the world’s great mystics, kith and kin with Francis of Assisi and other luminous figures.
The mystics, though they teach universals, are also each unique. Each has an intuition or insight, so to speak, a particular message that arises as a deep response to the needs of the times. Gandhi’s message was to show us the way out of the greatest problem of our age, that of the downward spiral of violence in every sphere of life that threatens to drag civilization back into barbarism if we do not learn to master it.
Most precious of all — like every great spiritual figure, but belonging to our own times — he gives us a glimpse of our evolutionary potential as human beings. He shows us that the spiritual life, far from being otherworldly, means living to one’s highest ideals and giving full expression to every facet of personality in a life of selfless service.
Gandhi’s early years
When Gandhi was born in 1869, India had already been under foreign domination for centuries. The long-term effects of this kind of domination on consciousness may not be obvious to those who have not lived under such conditions. After two or three generations, beyond the political deprivation and economic exploitation, a people begins to lose confidence in itself. Indians grew up in the belief that they were inferior, born to be ruled over, not fit to be masters in their own home. The best and brightest went to London for their education and returned to careers in the bureaucracies of British India — or, occasionally, to terrorism or revolution. In any case it was axiomatic that any road to success, personal or national, had to be by imitation of Western ways.
Into this world, just twelve years after India became a Crown colony, a boy named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born. He appears to have been, as he says, a very average youth, timid, inarticulate, painfully shy. Like everyone else whose family could afford it, he was sent off to London as a teenager to learn to become an English gentleman and to study law. Depressed by failure on his return, he decided to “try his luck” in a temporary job in South Africa, where a handful of Indian traders had made a niche for themselves in a community of a hundred thousand indentured Indian laborers working in mines and fields. A decidedly unpromising nobody, he left India in 1893 and dropped out of sight completely.
When he returned in 1915, the nobody was hailed as mahatma, “great soul.” Those twenty years in South Africa hold the secret of the essential Gandhi. We will return to look there more closely, for it is that transformation — not just an extraordinary success story, but the utter remaking of personality — that holds Gandhi’s ultimate significance for us today.