Announcement
Throughout the month of October, the worldwide BMCM community is celebrating Easwaran’s life and teachings by reflecting on the theme of “Seeing the Divine Everywhere.” Learn more about the Celebration curriculum in our BMCM News Story.
The eSatsang will be spending four weeks working through four modules of the Celebration curriculum. Anyone who wants to participate and discuss the material will be welcome to join in the eSatsang conversation. This will be the online hub for meditators and others who are following Easwaran’s teachings around the world to come together for sharing and satsang.
In November, the eSatsang will return to its regular content focusing on the teachings of Easwaran’s eight-point program of passage meditation. At this point, and at any point, you are welcome to unsubscribe, but if you’re finding the community helpful to your practice of the eight points you’re welcome to stay.
Reading Study
Gratitude to all for sharing insights and encouraging messages throughout September. We spent the month exploring spiritual transformation through the impact of Gandhi’s example on Easwaran. We hope that our in-depth reading study of the Summer 2019 Blue Mountain Journal has given you new ways to envision and strive to transform anger into compassion.
Is there one thing you’ll be taking away from this month of reflection and practice? Do you have something new you can incorporate into your practice of the eight points?
We’ll close this reading study with a final article by Easwaran. In the comments below, we’d love if you’d share a line or two that is meaningful to you, or a practical step you’d like to put in place for yourself and others.
This article by Easwaran is entitled “Nonviolence in Practice ” and can be found in the Blue Mountain Journal, Summer 2019.
In mystical language, a river of divine love is flowing in the depths of every one of us. When you and I return kindness for unkindness, that cosmic river carries our act of love into the depths of the unkind person’s consciousness. Only a fraction of this river’s effect may be visible, yet it goes on — silently, and over a long period. When Gandhi insists that only one man or woman, acting constantly out of such love, can change the course of the whole world, he is talking about the power of this cosmic force. This is what he named satyagraha, the power of love in action.
When we return kindness for unkindness, we are stirring the unkind person’s consciousness. When we do good to those who would harm us, as Jesus pleads with us to do, not only are we protecting our own mind from anger, we are educating the perpetrators of harm too — in a manner of which they may not even be aware. This is the basis of Gandhi’s long-drawn-out campaign to get British rulers to leave India: a sincere appeal to their sense of decency, “until they tire of exploiting us.” This grand faith in the nobility of human nature — which he demonstrated tirelessly, day in and day out, over a period of some fifty years — is what distinguishes Gandhi from any other world leader I know.
Satyagraha in America
Perhaps no man or woman in the West has enacted satyagraha so visibly as Martin Luther King, Jr, whom I had the privilege of hearing speak at the University of Minnesota.
As a young man King listened to a sermon by the president of Howard University, recently returned from a trip to India. He spoke of Mahatma Gandhi. “His message was so profound and electrifying,” King writes, “that I went out and bought half a dozen books on Gandhi’s life. I became deeply fascinated by his campaigns of nonviolent resistance.”
King did his research for a doctoral degree on Gandhi’s methods. “As I delved deeper,” he tells us,
My skepticism concerning the power of love diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform. Gandhi is probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale. I came to feel this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.
King brought satyagraha into service for black Americans with a variety of moves: lunch counter sit-ins, marches, strikes against bus lines, and legal suits to desegregate schools, all backed up by a thorough program as to its nonviolent purposes. The turning point came during the drawn-out strike (ultimately successful and never violent) against the municipal bus system of Montgomery, Alabama. “Living through the actual experience of the Montgomery protest,” King wrote, “nonviolence became more than a method; it became for me a commitment to a way of life.”
Throughout the struggle for basic services and liberties, Martin Luther King never lost sight of what it was his people were really hoping to accomplish:
True pacifism is a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love — in the faith that it is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since inflicting violence only multiplies bitterness in the world. Receiving violence when struggling for a just cause may develop a sense of shame in the inflicter, and thereby bring about a change of heart.
Along the way of life someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate.
This gets at the very kernel of Gandhi’s faith. “I hold myself to be incapable of hating any being on earth,” he declared. “By a long course of prayerful discipline, I have ceased for over forty years to hate anybody. I know this is a big claim. Nevertheless I make it in all humility.”
The critical phrase is “a long course of prayerful discipline.” Gandhi is telling us plainly that any individual undergoing the same kind of disciplines can attain this saintly stature. This is the goal we should aim at always. In it the human personality becomes a lighthouse, lighting the course of every passing ship in the treacherous currents of turbulent times.
Teach children to love everybody
One of the most terrible arguments against war is that when we train young men and women to fight and kill, we are teaching them not only to combat the official enemies of the nation but anybody they come in conflict with: their friends, their partner, even their parents or children. Under duress, and especially under the stress of sustained frustration, a person’s will breaks down and all that combative conditioning is released. Tragically, even one’s nearest and dearest are often the victims. You cannot train a person to kill without weakening the bonds of his basic humanity.
Encouraging children to hate even one person can erode their relationships throughout life. If they are going to be kind, they must practice being kind to everybody; if they are to learn love, they must practice loving everybody.
This can have far-reaching effects. I am proud of the fact that, by and large, the people of India have forgotten the exploitation they were subjected to. The young people of India today have not been bequeathed a legacy of resentment. That is one of Gandhi’s greatest contributions. He showed that when conflict is resolved through love in action, both sides emerge stronger and closer; upcoming generations can grow up free from the onerous burden of hate and fear.
If we can start teaching our children that it is every nation’s responsibility to help bring lasting peace to those who are at war, I am convinced that by the time they reach the age of discretion, they will be in a position to build a vastly safer world.
The ultimate triumph
The world can be very harsh. We have to learn to deal with unfavorable circumstances, unmerited condemnation, labor that goes unappreciated. Because Gandhi puts his faith in the essential law of unity, he would say that this occasional harsh reality of life gives us the opportunity to learn never to be shaken by attack, never to retaliate, but to continue actively loving and respecting those very people who attack us.
This is Gandhi’s winning strategy. What he has in mind is something far more than the outcome of individual battles for good causes, no matter how meritorious. He has in mind the ultimate triumph of the forces of good in our lives.