Salt March to the Sea at Dandi (1931)
Presented on: Thursday, August 4, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
Gandhi
Presentation 5 of 13
Salt March to the Sea at Dandi (1931):
A Case Study in Spiritual Revolution and the Walking Saint
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, August 4, 1983
Transcript:
The date is August the 4th 1983. This is the fifth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on the general subject Gandhi. Tonight's lecture is entitled: Salt March to the Sea at Dandi, 1930: A Case Study in the Spiritual Revolution and the Walking Saint. Lecture will begin in just a second.
After the break this evening, why, we'll go down to the library. I like to take us away from the Victorian model of the lecture hall. And get us closer to education if possible. I was trained as you've heard me say many times over a long period of time. And this was the least important aspect of education - the lecturing. Everything else is much more important. And there are - in good education - there are transferences of whole meaning, which are indelible, and which rise in our personal experience later on. The human consciousness is like a flow, but the human character is like a shape of wholeness in that flow, and it receives impressions of wholeness. And so good education not only tutors the perception of the flow but tutors the receptibility of the wholeness. And this is the more important part. It is in fact a universal phenomenon. And in contemporary physics the phenomenon known as the soliton is a good example. There are energy patterns on the atomic level that do not portion out their effect. They do not give out step by step or stage by stage their effect, but without interrupting the integrity of the atomic bind and flow, they give the emanation, the impress, whole of their entire energy structure. This of course was intuited by Plotinus and the Neoplatonic mystics in Alexandria some 1700 years ago. So that there is an emanation, but the emanation comes from wholeness and not from just one point equidistance from a cosmic everywhere. But all energy universal forms of integrity have that shape. And so, they must be given whole - they cannot be approached in a partial fashion. This was codified and known in antiquity as Zeno's Paradox - if you go halfway, you can theoretically never get there, you will always go just half, and half remaining and so forth. It is not just an intellectual paradox but it's a statement of the patterns in which wholeness give themselves.
And this is why it's so important in any kind of real education - as opposed to instruction - for there to be a companionability between the teacher and the students. And this is why Socrates was made to say over and over again by Plato, "unless we are friends, we cannot learn anything." We must be friends first. And so, the whole idea of an Academy which is the basis of the Western school tradition was to bring together, in a companionable mode the teachers and the students, to place them in a garden setting, and to learn through the dialogue - the interchange - how to perceive and engender the wholenesses that passed between us.
This of course was what Gandhi was attempting to do on a massive scale. We find in reviewing history that there have been great personalities - like Alexander the Great, or Ashoka, or even Li Xunin(sp?) the founder of the Tang dynasty - who have tried to convey to an entire culture, an entire civilization, the impress of the universality of man. They have more or less succeeded in terms of those histories in those cultures. But for Gandhi he was the first individual in human history, east or west, to attempt on a indelible massive scale of hundreds of millions of people to lay the foundations which would produce a universal man who would be conscientious and religious, not because of beliefs which he would hold or ideals that he would aspire to, but from daily practices which were a structural part of his life that he couldn't live any other way. And being a great rishi, a great sage, he knew that if you stop doing the wrong and you begin however small doing the right that that process will eventually clean out all complications. It's a very simple transference: Do not do wrong; try to do right. And so, in those two hands in tandem, in motion, eventually man as an individual, or mankind as a species, will run clear, will undo all of the problems, all of the illusions. Any resistances that have been conjured up by the pell-mell career that our species has had in this particular life way.
In fact, at the very height of non-cooperation, Gandhi wrote a personal message to the Viceroy of India. And he said I will call off forever. I will go into permanent retirement and never again propound any motion in this country if you will only agree to stop the abuse of drugs and alcohol among my people, and to let the villagers spin their own clothes. Such simple requirements, but he knew that even given that small hedge, man finds himself individually, one by one, and they find each other group by group. And finally, there was a resonance of integrity which even the ignorant and the greedy and the slothful finally come to sense that here is a people who are whole, they are healthful, they cannot be held in any kind of bondage, either individually, or severally, or as a group. And thus, they must be let go from the binds of illusions, from the bounds of senseless and arbitrary regulations - they must be given their freedom.
The Indian word for freedom was swaraj. Swaraj. And the old Sanskrit raj is king. The raja is the king. The princely king. The maharaja, the great king. Raj is king. King in the sense of being king of oneself - king of the destiny, the empire that one in their fullness constitute. The swaraj is self-kingdom, self-rule, that the individual has a responsiveness to his own wholeness. And that this wholeness is not an alienated independent errant fleck askew in the universe, but is an interdependent, living, organic pattern. For anyone returning to any sense of wholeness, even at the beginning stages, realizes how we need others and how they need us. And that societies are cooperative on a fundamental level and not on a political level, not even an economic level. And so, theory goes by the wayside of pleasant evening speculations around the campfire. Whereas the perception of what community is becomes a religious exercise in the ritual of wholeness perfection.
The perception in India of the profound resonant depths of this particular attack upon human life was first sounded in India by the historical Buddha when he made a revolutionary revision in the fundamental procedures and bases upon which Hindu life had always been founded since time immemorial. The written Vedas, which are from 1500 to 1800 BC are very late. They come a thousand years after Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. And those great Indus Valley civilizations come thousands of years after a previous civilization. So, the ideas had been ingrained so long. And what the ideas essentially came to signify was that there was a ritual disposition that commanded man to be striated in a structure called the caste system - the varnas. And that everyone coming back and going out of this life countless times would eventually go through the entire structure, so that at any given time one deserved the place one had, and not a finger should be lifted to change this. Historical Buddha cut an oblique slash across the entire grid of this mentality, and instead of saying no, said simply this was all an illusion, that there are no ideas the images of which we may entertain in our mind which are real. Therefore, man is to live life and experience his life primally, without the crutches of preconceived ideas, without the presuppositions that would allow him a comfortable, manipulative hedge upon other men and himself. And so, the idea of the open spirit that has no place to rest but is consequently free in the entire universe was born. And the devastating resounding of this penetrating finger of apperception changed the whole tone of ancient Indian life. And one of the manifestations of this was those sages who could not bring themselves to be called Buddhists, or to follow the Buddhist way, who went back to their Hindu roots but this time revised it - wrote certain series of sacred writings, scriptures, which were brought together by the great poetic genius of Bhagavan Vyasa about 250 BC - and at the fulcrum of his great epic, the Mahabharata - The Great Indian War. Bharat is the ancient name of India. The Mahabharata. In the 6th parvan, or chapter, he wrote the Bhagavad Gita and placed the Gita there at the moving fulcrum of the great Indian epic. And in the Bhagavad Gita, in discourse two of the eighteen, the influence of the Buddhist penetration of how the cause dependent chain - called in Sanskrit pratityasamutapada - the chain of independent causation. How man is surrounded by an interlocked chain of events, which he in his ignorance initiates constantly over and over again. And that only by reducing himself down to the purity of being able to entertain a single pointedness of mind within himself, can he then synchronize his understanding, his life process with this chain of illusion - Step-by-step-by-step. And once having had that experience of synchronizing his life, his living beingness, with that chain of illusion he can proceed to undo the chains that bind him. Single cause by single cause. And as he does so a great transformation occurs in the human individual, and instead of being an individual enslaved by his own designs, by the arbitrary structures handed to him by his background, his society, his time he begins to have a universal view. Not arbitrary, not based on images and ideas, but a perception of the wholeness that actually obtains throughout the universe without dismemberment, without stage, or phase anywhere. And recognizing this, he is free to recreate the entirety of his life in terms of this wholeness. So, the Bhagavad Gita in the second discourse gives us the chain of dependent causation in the Hindu fashion. And it was here that Gandhi's perception of political and economic reality rests. It says, "For in spite of the wise man's endeavor the unruly senses distract his mind."
In spite of the wise man's endeavor the unruly senses distract his mind. Do what we can it seems like the metaphor that they used in the Gita; it seems like trying to catch the wind. How do you catch the wind? Well, you cannot reach out to catch the wind. If you were to catch the wind you must build a sail to receive it. And only that way may you catch the wind. And so, the whole purpose of yoga is to make a way of catching the wind of the spirit in yourself so that you can then navigate. So, the second entry here is,
Holding all these in check the yogi should set intent on me. For he whose senses are under control is secure of understanding. A man brooding on objects of the senses attachment to them springs up. Attachment begets craving and craving begets wrath. Wrath breeds stupefaction, [and] stupefaction leads to loss of memory, loss of memory ruins the reason and the ruin of reason spells utter destruction.
And so, the Gita gives us the Hindu version of the pratityasamutapada in the second discourse of the Gita. So, there is the diagnosis.
But the disciplined soul, the disciplined soul, who moving among sense-objects with the senses weaned from likes and dislikes and brought under the control of Atman, attains peace of mind.
Losing the addictive habituation to both pleasure and pain. To both heaven and hell. to the good life and the bad life. Not an indifference. Not a limbo. But an active whole awareness where there are no lefts and rights and druthers. The disciplined soul.
Peace of mind means the end of all ills; for the understanding of him whose mind is at peace stands secure. The undisciplined man has neither understanding nor devotion; for, for him who has no devotion, there is no peace, and for him who has no peace whence happiness? For when his mind turns after any of the roaming senses, it sweeps away his understanding, as the wind a vessel upon the waters.
So, you see the depth to which Gandhi plumbed. And this is from his own translation of the Gita - The Gita According to Gandhi. The gospel of selfless action. We must act. This world is in terrible shape, we must do something, but if we act with ignorance, if we act with attachment, we only increase the confusion. And increasing the confusion, sensing that, breeds despair because one soon comes to the exhaustion of all the good ideas, of all the good hopes, and one seeks then to look for others and of course there are no others, there are no experts who have good ideas. And so, in this state of a complete junkyard of civilization, as the Gita says, God sees man caught in an insoluble limbo - His own ignorance. And so, he always sends the sage - the rishi - to help. And the sage - the rishi - bring that free from the habituation, they stop the addiction to ideas good and bad. And they bring the Karma Yoga who teaches how to do. And the basic how-to dos of life. How to plant food and harvest it so you will have enough of a basis of life instead of having to fight each other for a diminishing animal supply. Turn from gatherers to the agricultural. So, all the stages of man's development really have been God sent in that sense of those primal beings coming to teach us how to do the basic simple aspects of life in a new way.
So, Gandhi, very much like a timeless rishi came in the early 20th century to try and bring a sense of sanity to the basis of life. And for him, as we saw last time, he key tool, the key process, the key fact of life where he was in India was handspun khadi, that anyone could spin. Anyone could learn to do this. And by spinning the hand-spun yarn one could make clothing and sell enough of the fabric or the clothing to earn a daily living. And that this is something that could be taught to anyone. And at the time that we review him now there were about a hundred and ten thousand people earning their living every day by khadi. And out of that, there were about a hundred thousand women. And the reason for this disparity was that in the villages - the seven hundred thousand villages - almost all of the men had succumbed to alcohol and drugs. And were in actually a stupor and it was the strength of the women in the villages who saved the day in India. It was they, unable to stand the man of their life corroding, unable to stand the children of their own starving, heard the message that was simply given to them in the days of their unruly lives, that if they will take their two hands together and spin to make this wheel of truth go around and this thread of reality come out and they would weave this into a pattern of basic integrity. That this would not only be psychologically true on a sophisticated level for those who had to have an idea, but it would be actually true on a real level of someone being able to get up off the ground and go and get that charkha and sit there and spin it off in the day to bring food for her children and to get some hedge on the family which had been torn apart.
Why was there such a reluctance on the part of the mighty British Empire to do away with drugs and alcohol? Very simple old story - money. It was an incredible source of revenue. It brought so much revenue in that the British Raj was really almost incapable, unwilling, to even recognize that the ruin of the country was approaching totality. On the other hand, the use of foreign textiles in India had produced this anathema of no longer having confidence that they could do anything. And so, Gandhi could have chosen almost any basic handicraft to make a primal good of life work. He chose clothing because it was plentiful - cotton and yarn and so forth was very plentiful, very cheap. It was an activity which was helpful, and it could be sold on a daily basis.
So, he emphasized then this development in the midst of his 1920s experiences - the great 1921 non-cooperative movement and its fall out. He'd been arrested. He'd been put in prison for years. He'd suffered a health failure. They let him out early. He was so weak that he had to observe a whole year of silence - 1926. And when he came out in 1927 and began moving around before three months was up, he had a mild heart attack and it laid him low. He was down in southern India, down near the tip - there's a large city there, about million people called Bangalore and it's in Mysore State. And they feared moving him very far so they took him to the seacoast, and they put him up in a small series of huts and lean-tos and gardens where the sea breeze could come in and for months, he lay there writing. He was unable to talk very much. He was unable to really read. But all this time - as a rishi would do - his spirit was moving in that familiar pattern. Not so much thinking. Not thinking with ideas. Not thinking with images. But allowing the wholeness of the spirit to have its flow. And in this integrity of the pattern in this motion, there was a gathering impress of what to do. And a sage experiences not so much the idea or the image of something as the total impress of what to do. And in order to find out what it is he must go and do it. He must go and begin. And years later one can see what that was, but it comes as poetically expressed in several places in the world's literature as an invisible image. As a dark shadow of reality come directly from the beyond. And all you know is that it is there and that one must do this - one must begin. And the only guide that you have is holding to the integrity of yourself because only the accurate moving of the integrity of the stylus that is the yogic mind, and the integrity of the being could sketch out in reality what that wholeness was. Otherwise, it never takes shape, it never was, it never existed. And this is the way that the spirit comes and impresses upon the phenomenal universe - through this process of the invisible dark shadow of reality. And so, in this time Gandhi was circulating in himself this tremendous apperception of a wholeness coming to be born. And it took three years for it to occur to him what it was that he was doing.
In all this time there had been many viceroys of India. They were usually very powerful Lords. At this time the new Viceroy was a man named Lord Irwin [Edward Frederick Lindley Wood]. Who was a highly religious man in his own right, which made him all the more self-righteous and fierce when it came to enforcing the regulations that he felt were good for everyone. And at this time the secretary for India in the British Empire was a wealthy lawyer - they're usually wealthy lawyers - who Louis Fisher says in his book have no eyes, they have only the desire to put it in the portfolio and under lock and key, which they have, they will then portion out the access to those who have eyes and thus keep control. And a man named Lord Birkenhead [Frederick Edwin Smith] was the secretary for India. And it occurred to him that India should be canvassed and that a whole survey should be taken because perhaps they were not squeezing as much as they might. The last survey had been taken in 1896 and it clearly stated in the rules drawn up in London that every 30 years they could have a complete assessment of their possession - you see it was a back yard to them and they had the right to cut the trees down and dig up the flowers anytime, but every 30 years it should be done because a regular cleaning of one's possessions is a sign of conscientiousness. And so, India was to be subjected to a total review by a British Commission called the Simon Commission. And early in 1928, the Simon Commission was sent to India. The response on the part of Gandhi was to never make a mention of that Commission. He never once mentioned it. He ignored it, totally. And he acted thus in a guiding teaching role as a master rishi must do. To show that the events that seem so overwhelming were actually illusory. That the persons who seem so infallible were operating under delusions and should not be taken into real consideration for life processes in their integrity. That one could be conscious of the fact that they exist, but one should be conscientious to go your own way and not give them credence. Just as a parent must teach the child not to carry the wound or the cut around in front of them all day long. Yes, you are hurt; it will be better; and now we go on.
So, in this way Gandhi began to school once again all the leaders of India. Persons like Nehru, who were extremely wealthy, educated from England, chomping at the bit, secretly wanting to have a position of power. Really enjoying, as young men, having been with the Mahatma in the early 20s but not really so certain now they were becoming forty that they wanted to take it easy and not do something. Besides there were all sorts of possibilities that they might win. And of course, there's nothing so beguiling and destroying as victory. Triumph is the final image. It's the final surprise in the litany of horrors facing man. Triumph is the very image, according to Milton, that caused Lucifer to be cast out. The idea that he might win produces the insufferable tragedy of manipulation towards the end of victory. And when the end becomes domineering over the means we call that tyranny. If it happens in an individual, we call it madness. So that the means must be the only attentiveness for us. And the end will grow out of those means naturally. We needn't worry about it. It will occur. It is the means that we have to pay attention to. About this time Aldous Huxley wrote a great essay called "Ends and Means." Which was a wonderful assessment of this whole movement in man's conscientious history to understand himself.
At this time the Mahatma then was schooling India again, especially the leaders, in ways in which the means which we undertake today need to have an integrity. And he used to hold up a hand. He said we must have a sense of religious unity. And we have to have a sense of village industries. We have to have a capacity to grasp truth. We need to have a sense of getting rid of the untouchables and breaking the caste system once and for all. And we need to recognize that women are human beings and the full equal of man in every endeavor of life. And that this hand, these five fingers depends upon the wrist of non-violence. That only when we link all of these together to ahimsa - that's a better word than non-violence. ahimsa is actually a directive, assertive, positive noun. ahimsa. That ahimsa then takes all of these problems and makes them workable and graspable. In a sense of proportion which man can understand. The hand can be schooled, a sense of social responsibility can be schooled, without having to depend upon images and ideas. But by the openness of just doing, it right, day in and day out, year in and year out, one will learn to have that face of humanity known as the conscience. You will know. Your character will begin to develop. And Gandhi was the great rishi and teacher, not of consciousness, like the Yogis in the Rolls Royces, but of character. Because the man of truth knows that if you train character, consciousness will manifest just as it is because it never is anything other than what it is - it just needs to be discovered - but it is character that is able to go on the adventurous discovery that is needed. So, the training of the wholeness of character was based upon the perception of all of these activities take place in an integral way, if they are done with ahimsa because violence - like the wrath in the Gita - curls up these blinders and the first thing that goes is memory. Just when you get mad how much can you remember. If you get really mad, could you remember anything. It's like a blur. It's like an eraser. And why erase reality to stomp your foot to make sure that some little privative image gets across to someone else who's going to forget it in a minute anyway. So, the whole thing is a form of madness. To make man sane there needs to be ahimsa. But ahimsa being part of a universal structure, an integrity of wholeness, also has for its manifestation satyagraha which is truth-holding, which is an integral part of ahimsa, and it has sarvodaya - service to all - is an integral part. So that we're not speaking of an altruistic aspiration of some sentimental purpose which we hope is going to happen. We're talking about a universal structure, like a set of proportions, that when you bring the 1 to 2 the 2 to 3 the 3 to 4 into manifestation, you're going to have music because those ratios are true. They are real. And so, if we bring ahimsa and satyagraha and sarvodaya into manifestation, man will develop a character. He will become, in fact, whole. He will become capable in his fullness, his openness, and what flows through him is this notion of the ongoingness of the process, history. History. Society. Life. Lives. Biographies. Families. All of this flows through, and as it flows through someone who has established the wholeness of character that much more of life and history and time is purified. And all we need then before us is the example of just one person to be able to do this with truth. And anyone then can understand that they also may do likewise. So, the increasing production of whole persons was what Gandhi was after in the late 1920s. He wanted to produce the wholeness of the person not on a one-to-one basis as had been done since time immemorial - in the Himalayas, in any mountains, any deserts - but he wanted to do it a hundred million people at a time. He was even aiming at 300 million people at a time.
And so, as the survey of India by the British Empire to see how much more they could collect was happening, the sage was trying to mature and manifest in his life that dark invisible shadow of the wholeness of God that had come to him on the seashore in South India in Mysore State. And it wouldn't manifest. And he would be asked, and he'd say I have no idea. And it was true - it was technically true. He had no idea. He wasn't looking for an idea. They would say "do you think that we should offer satyagraha somewhere?" And he said, "yes, I think that's a very good point, but I have no inner voice that tells me where or why. I can do nothing." And the externally trained ideationalists like Nehru were getting impatient because the old man was getting to be 60. Maybe he really didn't have it anymore. All these opportunities were seemingly flying by the board - there was provocation galore.
And so, Gandhi one day, on the exact anniversary of the first really powerful satyagraha - which he had called off some six years before - initiated a satyagraha back in Bardoli state. The same place at the same time six years later and started a chain of events from there. In other words, he went back in a parallel fashion. Sometimes this is the way you have to move. You're not sure where this goes but it must go in some complement to this. And so, if you've been moving in this way then you have to move in this way. And so, he went back to Bardoli, initiated the satyagraha there. And this, if you recall, we talked about somewhat last week was an issue where the land had been reassessed in value. And had been - the taxes had been raised 25 or 30 percent - in some places sixty percent. And the Gandhian viewpoint was that these increases were unjust and should not be paid but in fact none of the taxes should be paid until the increases were repealed. And of course, in response the British government being owners in their minds began to repossess from the people who were delinquent about paying their taxes. And they hired extra collectors to come in - They always can find these people who love to be officious over you, they enjoy it. So, they brought them in by the hundreds. And they began slowly to repossess all of the belongings of all of the people of the state of Bardoli. So that the people began to lose their farm animals - which in India they love like children; they take care of them; they have names - all the household goods and furniture. And of course, they had no place to store these things because they were coming in by the hundreds of thousands of items. They would sell them at auction for almost nothing but pretty soon there was no one to buy them. The animals began to die in the holding pens around the police station and this was very very bad for the image of the British. And so finally Gandhi began to assert the basic reality of the situation that you cannot take everything from everyone. There is no way that power can manifest itself to that extent.
So, the unreality of the basic position began to be so apparent that everyone could see that it was a form of madness. And so, the couple of thousand British landlords facing the millions of dispossessed people had to make a repeal of the increases of taxes and everything was given back, or their equivalents, and the British government had to pay enormous sums. But what Gandhi had done is he had brought the conscience of the nation back awake exactly to the same point that it had been before. And this was 1928. So then at the end of 1928, late in December, he said that he would give one year's time for the maturation of the viewpoint that he was hoping the British would understand. And that if on midnight December 31st, 1929 - at the end of the year - India was not in some way moving realistically towards swaraj he would declare it independent anyway and go from there. This of course was taken in London to be a challenge to their authority - not as a statement of wholeness, this never even occurred to them. But at this time, there were beginning to be individuals, journalists, ministers, students, even housewives and individual workers in the factories in Lancaster that were out of work because of the khadi movement. They began to understand that there was something else a foot here in India. That it wasn't simply a challenge to authority, but this was a different phenomenon. In fact, it was a noumenon, a numinous experience because wholeness gives its impress whole. The sensation of it. The impress of it. The feeling of it is in its wholeness. And it took all this time throughout the 1920s for that capacity to emerge in people around the world. And so, Gandhi was now bringing it to a close.
All through 1929 the tension mounted. And exactly at midnight he unfurled the flag of independence and freedom. And of course, on the flag at that time was a charkha, the spinning wheel. And later the spinning wheel was changed to the primordial image of the Dharma Chakra - the wheel of truth - which is today on the flag of India. But the charkhra was the symbol originally on the flag that Gandhi unfurled on January 1st, 1930. Exactly at the moment. And what he was doing was he was synchronizing the mass satyagraha movement of India with a sense of spiritual timing and unfoldment. And this began to have its impress.
There had been a sham round table conference - you know a round table, everyone is equal. There had been a sham round table conference in London. Many important people had been there, nothing had been solved. So, in February of 1930, Irwin began to conceive in his mind a way to steal the thunder from Gandhi. He would slowly make sure that all of the factions in India were fed propaganda encouraging them to think that they were going to have a share of the British pie. So that all the egotistical maharajas were assured by private correspondence that they would have a seat in the government. And all of the Moslems and all of the untouchables and any faction whatsoever was encouraged to begin thinking in terms of themselves. Because power always works this way. What is the rule of Empire? Divide and rule. Divide and rule. Always that.
And Gandhi sensing that the spiritual motion had been engendered finally found the activity which could express this and bring it into reality. And this is the most important and delicate part of a rishi in his teaching is how to bring into actuality - not into an idea; not into a symbol - but into actuality, the energy flow of the wholeness image of that time. So, Gandhi announced, about the same time that all this encouragement was going on in the British part, that everyone should prepare themselves for a massive nationwide satyagraha. And this would be the first time that satyagraha was not offered just in one district or even a province. But India-wide, 350 million people. And pursuant to this, Gandhi - keeping a little quiet about his purposes - gathered together a list of 78 key satyagrahis. They represented all the various provinces of India. They had lived together for 15 years at the Sabarmati Ashram. And he told them, he said I have never used you people in a satyagraha campaign until now. This is the most delicate time in history, and we have lived together all this time and prepared ourselves and schooled ourselves for a generation almost. Now is our time to see if we can do this for man. Bring into manifestation this image of wholeness, this flow of the primal integrity of life, regardless of man's arbitrary ideas and regardless of his aberrant images that he wishes to foist upon life. Life has a reality, one which anyone can see and understand given a glimpse in the right way.
So, in March of 1930 with 78 co-workers that he had trained and lived with and worked with for 15 years Gandhi set out. He had a 54-inch bamboo staff that was lacquered and had a metal tip. He started out walking towards the sea. And all along the way various villages had been alerted. There were 20 satyagrahis under S. V. [Sardar Vallabhbhai] Patel that had gone ahead to make sure that going through the villages that there would be corridors left for them and to make sure that there were rest stops along the way. They had planned to do ten miles a day. Well, the first day they did 15 miles. They were aged 16 to 61. And the 61 was Gandhi he was the oldest. And he was in incredible shape, his blood pressure was that of a much younger man, his doctor said. He had recovered totally from the heart attack. And Gandhi would say many times that he really was nowhere else except with the millions in India. They had completely given over himself to this gospel of selfless action. And since he wasn't there his heart wasn't going to bother him very much. He was just the motion of reality itself. And increasingly this impress began to season the air. And for 24 days Gandhi led these 78 people and as they went it was like a lightning bolt across the face of history. And the world press became attuned to this, and the population of India became attuned to this. And when he reached the sea at Dandi in early April 1930, it was simply the eyes of the entire world were fixed upon him. And that's when he reached down, waded into the water up to about his knees and took some salt that the waves had left on the shore. He said there is a tax on salt. The tax is equal to three days labor of the poor in India. It sounds so small to the British but it's three days labor for every one of my people. How many billions of man-hours goes into this? This salt is free. But we're going to break the salt monopoly of the British and we're gonna sell this salt for just a few annas, a few pice. We're going to take that money and go back and make more salt. And so, it was a signal. And all across India people began making salt. Take a pan of water and put it on the roof and let it evaporate and you have salt. It was so simple. So easy. But the incredibleness of it was that it focused the ferociousness of the greed of authority upon an infinitesimal point, a grain of salt. And yet balancing on that grain of salt was the courage of man to have a sense of spiritual wholeness even over the smallest crystal occurring in his natural life. That was what the Mahatma was after. To give the impress of that wholeness.
Well, we're going to take a break. I'm going to go down to the street and sell my cassettes so I can eat. And then we'll come back and go down to the library.
My first course on Gandhi at the University of California, Berkeley - it was in Dwinelle Hall. I don't know if you know Berkeley's campus or not - Dwinelle is the Classics building and it's just behind the huge Student Union and it was right next to the main auditorium, Wheeler Auditorium and about the... We'd been having problems in the Berkeley/San Francisco area for years and had gotten to a state of martial law. And it had gotten to the state where fear had become endemic in the psychology of the community. I don't know if any of you have had the misfortune of being in that kind of a situation, but you've all had individual feelings of fearfulness from time to time and anxiety. And what happens is, is that it gets into the air. It's almost like, a smoke. And if it's there for years on end it sets in and it becomes like a spiritual grind. And people begin to get really askew. And they scent that they're getting out of balance. And so, violence is very often a triggered response hoping somehow to neutralize the inner fear. And so, the increasing violent tone of life is like an indicator. And there's almost a geometry to it, in truth there's a mathematics involved.
Anyway, I was offering the Gandhi course on the Berkeley campus to do what I could to steal the strength of the fearfulness. There's an old hermetic technique known as stealing the thunder. So, I was giving this course, and it was really starting to have an effect. In fact, when I brought the Mahatma film in - 7-hour film from India. We had several thousand people there to see this film in Berkeley. It was really something. But about the fourth or fifth meeting of the class one of the worst riots occurred on the Berkeley campus. And several of the revolutionary groups threw incendiary bombs into Wheeler Auditorium and it burnt - burnt - charred the whole insides. It was the major auditorium at the time of the UC Berkeley campus. And it was burning. And there were fire engines and there were platoons and mobs of police with the glare, glass and the batons and shields. And thousands of students. And people were running and screaming. And in this fearfulness, it was like a Hieronymus Bosch painting of hell. And so, after about 20 minutes of just staring at this, I asked them if they wanted to cancel the class - if they felt endangered - and unanimously they refused. And we sat down, and we went back to this material. And that's when I knew that the touch of the material was efficacious. And those people were able to go on from there - many them have done a lot of good. That was about 15 years ago.
So, it's interesting how good material in a basic way can begin to have an impress upon ourselves, upon our lives. It doesn't have to register as an idea. It doesn't have to register as images that we like or don't like. It's just a feel that something good has happened, has transpired. And that we have given our assent to cooperate with it. To, to let it take root if it will. To let it have its wings and fly. And Gandhi was such a master at this aspect of encouraging individuals at first to believe that it's possible, that it could happen. And the old format in ancient India was that at the end of the day all the farmers and their families and their children would gather around after the evening meal. Around a village campfire. And there'd be an old storyteller who would tell the episode of the evening from one of the epics like the Ramayana or the Mahabharata. And these were actually sessions of bringing the human unity together around shared images of wholeness. And when this was done of course over a lifetime there was an integrity to the life of field that was unassailable. It was such a high level of civilization at one time that of course it produced some of the greatest spiritual sages of all time. Well, Gandhi was trying to reinstate that. And so, all during this period - 1928, 1929, 1930 - he would hold evening sessions, where the people would all sit around together and at the campfire, they would burn foreign cloth. And he would go through these stories, saying now we're not bringing this because this isn't a good piece of clothing. And we're not burning this because we don't like the person who made this. We're trying to exchange this energy for another. And we're doing this visibly and symbolically and actually, so that you can envision to yourself that the exchange is actually happening, that all this is going up in smoke and at the same time people around India are making new clothes for you all the time from their own hands.
And what he was doing was using these campfire talks, much the way FDR used the old fireside chats over the radio and the depression, to lift up the spirit from despair because we are fragile in certain ways, and we are subject to such profound belief that we even can believe that despair is interminable. And this of course a very sad situation - a dangerous situation - and it is incumbent upon those who can then to break the charm, the spell, of the sense of despair. And one of the best ways yes through a community of good people coming together in a regular fashion to participate together in aspects of truth. Lecture series like these serve that purpose in some fashion too. But it's especially efficacious if it is outdoors if there are primal images of fire and water - transformative images. And the wholeness of the psychological processes comes into being - it comes into actual fact. And without anyone knowing it, or even perhaps understanding it, there comes to be a social yoga and people become capable. They become capable of honesty and of cooperation among themselves and of a sense of human dignity. And these are the building blocks that society always depends upon.
And so, Gandhi all this time that there was a great transformation - and he always said that India became independent on New Year's Day 1930 - that it was inevitable, and that history should follow it because they became spiritually free. They were able to conceive of themselves as individuals and of India - instead of it just being a caste system where somebody thought of themselves as I'm a Bania or I'm a Brahmin or I'm an untouchable - they were simply Indians. And that there was in fact an integrity capable among groups of such persons which produced the phenomenon known as India.
One of Nehru's great books is called The Discovery of India. The Discovery of India. The discovery that one is not living in an endless Hindu time culpa - one is living here. One is not living as a member of this or that faction against those factions - one is here. The Discovery of India was a discovery that there is a wholeness to life which we and our fullness participate in. And in doing so, create the reality that actually obtains. And that eventually it is this reality and not the arbitrary, inculcated systems that take hold and actually grow and obtain. And in this way, we shuck off the illusions without fighting against them. And just by not giving them energy - by not cooperating with them - and by building in a real way together the actuality, the illusions vanish as they always do. Phantoms fade. And without having given them too much due, undue attention, eventually we noticed that they no longer have a hold upon us. We have changed. Conditions are different. We are viable in a way which we had hoped we would be, imagined we might be, but without being able to retrace exactly the steps we are.
So, he trained from 1928 to 1930 a whole nation in this mode. And then of course it occurred to him that this was true for India now. And what he needed to do was to plant the seed of this realization in the English spirit - in the English mind. And so, Gandhi was chosen to be the sole representative of the Congress party and the 300 million persons that they represented because they had geared themselves down to the actual simplicity and privacy of peasant life in India, through the khadi, especially. Through the village industries, through their own humility and self-effacement, they had actually come to represent actually, the hundreds of millions of India. And Gandhi himself became the sole representative to the second roundtable conference in London. And the political ramifications of the second roundtable conference were nil - nothing happened. They might have even lost many advantages, but Gandhi was able to take the wholeness of that spiritual pattern which had obtained in India and had conveyed that to the British people - not to their leaders, but to the British people.
In the last session of this course, the pictorial Gandhi, I'll show you slides - I'll show you pictures of this. There's a famous photograph of him in front of the Lancashire textile mills - which had been closed because of the khadi movement - and all the workers and their wives lovingly smiling are with Gandhi holding his hand. They loved him because they realized he had not an ounce of hate in him against them. And what he was doing was a moral action for the betterment of humanity. And they could understand in their wholeness because they had had to deal with the same kind of oppressive authority themselves. And so, there was an affinity.
When Gandhi, coming back, thinking on the boat all the time - he never did fly in an airplane. All the time he was coming back he was thinking to himself of the new responsibility. The fact that if the 20s had finally produced a free India - an Indian individual, an Indian nation - his responsibility in the 30s was to try and extend that to all of man, to mankind. And through the 30s we'll see next week how that sense of responsibility began to occur to him more and more that he was no longer just an Indian, but that he was a timeless human being. That had a worldwide audience and that perhaps man as a whole was approaching a point of maturity. At least to him it was worth a try. And in this, in order to find - we'll see - in order to find some way to get to the core of fearfulness he chose an area of India that had been unsettled since the times of Alexander the Great. It was called the North-West Frontier and there were still aboriginal wild tribes of people living up there. But there were also the Pashtuns. These very tall six and a half foot warriors who - constantly fighting amongst themselves, constantly fighting with each other. He decided to go to the North-West Frontier - and we'll see that next week in detail - and there was a man there whose name was Abdul Ghaffar Khan who was called the "Frontier Gandhi." And he was very tall - he was almost seven feet tall. And the "Frontier Gandhi" and the Mahatma together form some very interesting experiments in the late 1930s in ways of human evolution. Possibilities of society that still haven't been fully appreciated. In fact, they're called the "Red Shirts" - Khudai Khidmatgar - they actually took over the whole city of Peshawar for a week, non-violently, and ran it as a commune for a whole week before the British could send reinforcements and take back the city. And of course, when they came, they didn't have to fire a shot, it was given up. But the experiment had been very interesting because a whole population of several hundred thousand people working together as a unit had taken over their own destiny and had done everything for a week and run the whole city and everything had worked beautifully. Just one of the experiments. And so, we'll see Gandhi in the 30s next week taking the pulse of man and deciding that, if India could mature maybe man as a whole could mature and wouldn't that be a surprise.
Well, I think we should take a few minutes if you don't mind just to have your words for each other. I have no need to be the teacher all the time or the center. So, whatever words you have they don't need to be questions but just observations. It helps each other for you to hear from each other. I know you do during the break somewhat. And I'm glad for that. Those are the interchange points.
The old religious patterns were that those who were making the forms should always just make them that far. And then leave the gap and let the people have the experience of bridging that gap themselves. That's the old pattern. I'm still trained in that way.
Indeed...
Speaker from classroom: "In the second conference how did Gandhi bring the situation to the English people?"
He went on tours, and he refused to live in downtown London. He lived out in a working-class district among working-class people. And he sometimes had to walk five miles into the conference and then walk back. And he would get back home about 2:00 a.m. in the morning. And he'd sleep for a couple of hours. And then he'd get up. He'd get up he said for his prayers. But you can see what he was doing in his prayers, was that he was making a pattern of wholeness. Prayer is different from meditation. Prayer is a welcoming in. Meditation is a going-out. In meditation you can meditate on something. But with prayer you don't pray out to but you welcome in. And so, what he was doing was he was making a space in life, in history, in this person, for the fullness of whatever was happening to come and manifest. So that's what he was doing. He would... And he was constantly going out to various working districts. He went to universities like Oxford and Cambridge. They asked him to give lectures and so he would give little talks. And what he would do sometimes - one of his great techniques was he would come into an unruly situation, an audience. Mainly scoffers or people who really didn't care. And he would wait until they would get silent. And then he would sit there in silence and then he would smile at them. Give a Gosho, and then he would leave. And these were sermons without words. And what they were meant to convey was that I have no ideas to tell you. I have no images to paint for you. I have only this wholeness which is in you too. And this eventually even got through to the "working class" English mind. They understood him perfectly.
When Charlie Chaplin asked for an interview, he asked who Charlie Chaplin was. And someone said he was the famous film star. And then they realized that Gandhi had never seen a film. He'd never seen a movie. But when they told him that Chaplin had come from a working-class family in the East End in London he said, oh by all means bring him in. Bring him in. And the first thing Charlie Chaplin asking was how do you relate to machines. And he and Gandhi had a little interchange about machines. And it was later on that Chaplin made Modern Times - with men and you know being trapped by the machines. Yeah.
It's amazing. You see that's what a rishi is, is different from an instructor. An instructor can teach you to take a part of carribine in the darkness. But a rishi can give the impress of wholeness as it is. It's different.
Question? Observation? Whatever?
Speaker in the class: "Have you seen the film?"
Yeah, I did a couple of times. Interesting, an interesting presentation. I felt that I was really moved by it. Tearfully moved. And I saw it about the second week in Hollywood. I've been around Hollywood a long time - I know how jaded people are there and it was a... there was a general calmness and humility coming out of the film afterwards. And I thought that's really interesting. I knew a lot of the people in the crowd as a Hollywood cognoscenti would know them. And I thought well even so and so touched. So that was an interesting experience.
On the other side they left out Vinoba. They left out the whole reality that all this went on from there. Vinoba didn't die until September of 82, last year. And the work is still going on. And they develop these ideas enormously. Gandhi's always emphasized the fact that he was a clumsy pioneer. He said you can think of me in any way you want. And they eventually, even before he died, they were having statues of Gandhi with his glasses and his staff carved on Hindu temples in among the billions of other gods and goddesses. But he always claimed he was a pioneer and that others would come after him and refine him and that he would look like a cranky old creaky model.
And in fact, some of the Vinoba's experiments as we'll see - just incredibly sophisticated - but of course the world press doesn't cover these items because no governments based on authority and power can afford to let the idea out that man is free. Free. Really free. Not just a good idea. He really is. He is free. And that he's...he is a spirit and has no handle. And as soon as that becomes apparent then that changes everything. Then everything is changed. Every aspect.
And so unfortunately, I have been assiduous for a long time in gathering obscure volumes and publications. And I have about thirty books chronicling Vinoba and all those things. So, we're going to have about three or four weeks on Vinoba. We're going to see what happened. And some of the publications will be interesting to you because they're so beautifully simple. Just the feel of them, the look of them, the design and everything. It's just... just what you had hoped that there was somebody mature, someplace in this world that was doing it right. And they were. The film was good except for that, I think. He got around it by saying a personal view, and he had to bring in Nehru, but as you see never was really not a Gandhian. Really not a Gandhian.
Later on, in the early 60s, Nehru in fact in a civilized assessment said that he thought that finding maybe Buddhism might be the answer. And it was interesting that he should do that. That was when they refurbished Sanchi, which was the great Buddhist stupa built by King Ashoka about 250 BC, in the center of India and they refurbished it about 1960. They went in and swept out the junk and cobwebs and everything and refurbished it. And Nehru in a speech then at that time said that it could well be that Buddhism would come back to India and be the saving grace. And it was only about three years later that the leader of the untouchables converted all the untouchables to Buddhism. Six million people converted to Buddhism because they said that if someone like Gandhi had not been able to crack the caste system permanently but then they would just not be Hindus anymore at all. So, they... they went back. So, it's interesting, but those kinds of issues were left out of the film. they were just... And I didn't have time to get it. I'll write. I know people who are still there at the Gandhi Peace Foundation in Delhi. I'll, I'll bring one of these times that film Mahatma. Which was made specifically for the Gandhi centenary. And it only showed in the United States once when I showed it in Berkeley in 69. But it's seven hours long. But it doesn't have the sophomoric undertones that Attenborough's film had. It's an unsalted real whole-wheat wafer. It has the tone of integrity. There's no feeling that this was a great story as one would tell a story. But that it was a timeless happening. That you know given an impasse where man had to have the truth, he was given what he needed. The truth. Undoctored. One way or the other. And the opening scenes of Mahatma are of some rishis in high Himalaya chanting in ancient Sanskrit some of the Upanishads and as they chant this, the camera's eye pans across the mountain range, and you get the sweep of Indian valleys with all the poverty and everything rising up to this mountain range. And this gorgeous cumulus cloud structure in behind them. Just rising up as if this was the realm of the gods. And then the camera pans up almost into the sky and then you see the Himalayas that just dwarfed these mountains and clouds together. And you realize that that's what they're saying. That man when he has to even rises above the level of the gods. When he has to be real, he can be. And then you see that what they're talking about isn't just nice stories or even fantastic stories, but the inconceivable possible truth. And that really gets to you. And the editing is beautiful because it's like cinema verite. It's newsreels and then private film clips and so forth. But put together so that you get this incredible feeling that he was just like a dynamo all the time. And every chance he could get to get somebody to take control of their lives and do things he would step aside and let them do it. Increasingly. So that he was really happy. We'll see in the thirties, several times, when he was out of commission, other people just took it up.
Speaker from the room "There was a period when India...when India...when the Indians felt that this was India. This was their land. What were the factors that brought about the divisions of the Muslim and the Hindus and the separation of the state? Because in the film and also in the early part of the years of the movement and all, there wasn't any strife. Now towards the end though, there was this strife."
At the first roundtable conference, which was about eight or nine months before the second, [Muhammad Ali] Jinnah was there in London. And he was made substantial private offers, not as an individual, but as the leader of a Muslim community.
Speaker from the classroom: "so to divide and conquer...?"
Yea, yea. And Gandhi always was very clear in his writings of saying that he was a failure about Hindu-Muslim unity. But what he didn't develop because they refused in his time period and his capacities refused to develop, was the context realization that maybe Hinduism and Islam were incommensurate religious experiences. Maybe they were arbitrary in themselves. And that's why they didn't come through. But he never got to that size of context and expression.
But later on, someone like Vinoba who specifically went into these kinds of problems. He wanted to know why. Why were we unable to do this? And so, he would learn the languages. And he would read these sacred books and literatures in the regular language and become a person of that religion for years on end to learn what it was like to be. He was like a great actor who tried on all the roles of religious humanity to experience them all. So that there were at least have been one person who was all these and to see where are they... where are the incommensurates. Like a master yogi who, trying on all the various costumes of men's religious nature, tries to see why do these not fit. Why they don't come together.
And Vinoba one of his favorite phrases down then towards the end was "Victory to the world." He said we can't have any other unity basis. It's got to be the world - the planet. It's a vic... Victory to the world. And you could say that to people, who would come up to him and say well you know are you for this or for that. Interesting.
Arnold Toynbee at the end of his life came to the same conclusion. He said man in order to survive has got to understand that the earth is his mother. And he has got to love her and take care of her. And without that family relationship he will kill her because he won't be able to stop himself from trying to break away and subconsciously will ruin the whole situation without him even wanting to, without him even knowing.
That was a major problem in our time. Not that man might be so mean that he might destroy himself. But that man in his pride thinking he could stop himself from doing it might do it unconsciously because he didn't understand the structures of his own nature, that that was the problem. And therefore, he who can, should make clear that it isn't what you are able to think and imagine that is the total story. There might be something else that has you. And you want to make sure that you don't accidentally, unconsciously do this. This is why the whole sham of just experiences of consciousness-raising, there has to be character building that's much more important, much more difficult, but much more rewarding because it actually can be seen to grow even in the short duration of time - one month or three months or one year - you can sense that you're a better person. You're not doing that anymore, or you're doing less of it, or doing more of this. You actually get a sense and that's better. So, the wholesomeness of character is the problem of our time. Man has never had a problem of consciousness. We've always been able to have consciousness and there's no sense in talking about raising it. But the growth of character that's always been a problem. And it is. It just is. And the basic structure for character growing is a family continuity. Family continuity. Not just the physical mother and father and children but the realization that groups of human beings can come together like a family. Care for each other like a family and do something together. And that that has not only a political right, but it has a universal efficacy. And that it is true beyond any arbitrary hope. It is true because it's a structure. And that family capacity is what needs to be given back to human being. And of course, all the monstrousness of our time is to grind up this very continuity of the family - to dismember it. Divide and rule. Not necessarily that there are bad people somewhere trying to do this, but that it's in the ignorance of the very situation.
I used to think that education was a problem because people at the top were no darn good. And it was a great shock to me to get to some pinnacle of authority and power in education and find out that that wasn't true. That it was an endemic problem in the very structure of it. Talk about being crestfallen. I thought there were dragons to fight but there weren't any. It was unbelievable. Took months to digest that. That there were no bad guys that it was the situation in its own ignorant mis-formulation. Which meant increasing realization of what kind of work, actual work, was to be done. There were no bad people to point the finger at, there was just an awful lot of basic work to do. So, you just finally trudge back down to the fields and pick up your tools and go to work. That's a hard thing to do.
People are falling asleep. Time to go home. Time to go home. More next week.
END OF RECORDING