Mahatma Gandhi

 

THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

 

 

November 5, 2020

 

Nancy Yeilding sent this excerpt from Love and Blessings, the autobiography of Guru Nitya Chaitanya Yati:

 

When I was in my mid-teens I saw Mahatma Gandhi, the founder and father of modern India. He was revered as a great saint. He believed fervently in the nonviolence of Christ, and he taught that India should be converted to a creed of pacifism. He taught that one should win another’s heart by love.

 

At that time, Britain was ruling India with full military force. To fight the British forces, which were armed with guns and bayonets, the Indians were made to march with slogans of nonviolence and peace. As a young man I thought this was very foolish. I had been extensively indoctrinated by the Marxist-Leninist groups, even somewhat brainwashed, to believe that the only possible redemption for India lay in a revolution organized exactly as the one in Russia had been. I had been made to believe that all of humanity could be divided into two groups: the exploiters and the exploited, the haves and the have-nots. However, it was difficult for me to decide whether my father was exploited or an exploiter.

 

This mythical division into two classes, two class interests, and class warfare all looked very reasonable to me. I thought that if only Mahatma Gandhi read a little of Marx and understood his true philosophy, India would be saved. Little did I know that he had lived in England and had every access to all the literature of Marx and Lenin, and that he knew all about revolution. I was so young and stupid, yet fanatically indoctrinated. So I found my way to the inner circle of the saint, and looked for an opportunity to present my gospel of class war to him.

 

When my chance came, I gave him a non-stop oratory on class warfare, as well as how useless his method of nonviolence was. He listened to me very carefully. That is my greatest surprise today. When I came to my final conclusion, he looked quite calm.

 

Then he asked me, “Are you sincere?” 

 

That infuriated me: if I were not sincere, would I have gone out of my way to bring him this great message? I shouted that I was very sincere. 

 

He went on, “You are speaking with conviction?” 

 

“Of course!” 

 

“Do you think I have no conviction about what I say?” 

 

I had never thought of that before. I said, “Yes, you must have conviction.” 

 

“Am I sincere?” 

 

“Maybe….”

 

“Are you not saying something which is in total contradiction to what I say?” 

 

“Yes.” 

 

“Don’t you see the possibility of two people with contradictory views both having full conviction and sincerity?” 

 

“Yes.” 

 

“You are asking me to stand in your footsteps and look. Have you ever considered the possibility of standing in my footsteps and looking? If I stand in your angle of vision, I will see what you see. That’s what you want me to do. Suppose I invite you to stand in my angle of vision and look at the same thing. Are you prepared for that?”

 

I was certainly not prepared, but I didn’t say so. 

 

He continued, “Young man, truth is many faceted. You can look at it from a number of points of view, and from each angle you will get a different perspective. All that you have said is known to me, but what I see you have no patience to consider.” 

 

I thought that was right. Although I had been listening to him for a week, waiting for my opportunity to pontificate, I had never really listened to him. I was only listening to myself, to my objections to whatever he was saying.            

 

This simple incident was a great turning point in my life. It completely silenced me. Thereafter, when I talked with another person it always occurred to me that there could be one more way of looking at truth. I learned to step down from my pedestal and walk over to the other person’s, to sympathetically get into his way of seeing. To me, this was the beginning of a great discovery of what a wonderful world we live in and how rich our human heritage is.

 

—Nitya Chaitanya Yati

*

 

My father was so convinced of the rightness of his opinions that he would raise his voice and try to browbeat people into agreeing with him. It never worked. He got into a lot of arguments and even lost some of his closest friends, because when they failed to agree with him he said abusive things to them that they could not forgive. They stopped speaking to each other.

 

Unconsciously, I learned to argue from my dad. I had to be right about everything. Mr. Know-It-All. I was self-righteous in my opposition to war—convinced that anyone who didn’t agree with me was dead wrong.

 

In my twenties, I was one of Nitya’s students. I lived with his teacher, Nataraja Guru, in India for a year. His diagnosis was: “You have too high an opinion of your own opinions.”

 

Fast forward to 2006, when I began facilitating meaning-of-life dialogues at Two Rivers prison in Umatilla, Oregon. In my proposal to the administration, I named the program “The Stories We Tell Ourselves: How Our Thinking Shapes Our Lives.” The first thing I noticed, sitting in a circle with twelve or sixteen guys, was that we all had different backgrounds and beliefs—different life experiences. Each of us had formed our own understanding of who we are and how the world works. It would be impossible to get everyone to agree with all my views. And it would be disrespectful of them to try convert them to Johnnyism. The beauty of the thing is that we weren’t all alike—like robots. If we listened to each other—without arguing or trying to convince the others to think like us, to believe what we believe—we might learn something.

 

In 2014, we did the play “Twelve Angry Men” at Two Rivers prison. The play is aptly named. In that jury room, everyone’s anger is on a hair-trigger. And they are all convinced that anyone who disagrees with them is a moron. Gradually, because of one man’s patience, they learn to listen to each other, minds are changed, and the defendant is acquitted.

 

No one ever seems to “win” an argument. We stop listening to each other. In Nitya’s story above, he says that he hadn’t really been listening, he had been waiting for his turn to pontificate. When I was a teenager, I noticed that my dad didn’t listen to what I said. In the first sentence I spoke to him, he would pick out a word that suggested to him a kind of pre-recorded speech. He didn’t hear the rest of what I said. He made no reference to it. When I finished talking, he would give his pre-recorded speech, based on a word or phrase that I had said early on. I had heard his speech many times before.

 

At present, it seems that our society has broken down into warring factions—each convinced of the rightness of their side and the wrongness of the other side. One books that illuminates the current situation is HATE, INC  by Matt Taibbi. There’s an election tomorrow (11/3/20), and both sides seem to think that if the other side wins it will be the End of the World.

 

But maybe the world will continue to go round. Outside my window, squirrels are scurrying up and down the old maple tree in quest of seeds. The sky is bluer than blue. I’m happy to be alive on this beautiful green planet.

*

 

Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) was mostly known by the honorific title “Mahatma,” which means “great soul.” He is best known for leading a nonviolent campaign for India’s independence from England.

 

He was born in India, studied Law in London, and became an attorney at the age of 22. He lived and practiced Law in South Africa from 1893 to 1914, where he led a nonviolent campaign for human rights and against racial discrimination.

 

The East India Company invaded India in the 18th Century and ruled India from 1757 to 1858, when rule of India was turned over to the British Crown and India became a “colony” of Great Britain. When Gandhi returned to India in 1915, he became one of the leaders of the movement for Indian Independence, based in part on his experience with civil rights reform in South Africa.

 

In the 1920’s and 30’s and up until he was assassinated in 1948, he was the most influential and charismatic of the movement’s many leaders. His ideas about civil disobedience were inspired by Henry David Thoreau and his nonviolence was inspired by traditional Hindu beliefs and by Leo Tolstoy. His successful campaigns of nonviolent resistance in turn inspired Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Nelson Mandela, too, was inspired by Gandhi’s nonviolent civil rights struggle in South Africa, but, unlike Gandhi and King, he said that violence and nonviolence were not mutually exclusive strategies for change.

*

 

Here are some quotes from Mahatma Gandhi:

 

If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. We need not wait to see what others do.

 

A man is but a product of his thoughts. What he thinks he becomes.

 

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

 

A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.

 

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

 

Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.

 

Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served.

 

If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.

 

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.

 

In a gentle way, you can shake the world.

 

If I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.

 

Hate the sin, not the sinner.

 

Glory lies in the attempt to reach one’s goal, not in reaching it.

 

Whenever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love.

 

Permanent good can never be the outcome of untruth and violence.

 

The future depends on what you do today.

 

To give pleasure to a single heart by a single act is better than a thousand heads bowing in prayer.

 

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.

 

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

 

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

 

It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.

*

 

 

peace & love

Johnny