The Round Table Yogi: 1931-32
Presented on: Thursday, August 11, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
Gandhi
Presentation 6 of 13
The Round Table Yogi, 1931-32
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, August 11, 1983
Transcript:
The date is August the 11th, 1983. This is the sixth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on the general subject of Gandhi - the life of Gandhi. Tonight's lecture is entitled: The Round Table Yogi, 1931-32.
I realized that the lecture series are, for some people a murderous row of powerful ideas and it's somewhat exhausting. The next course will be a creampuff. The next course is on the Italian Renaissance we'll have lots of art and music and simple things. Beautiful things. Political intrigue where the only thing we have to worry about is that the nasty guys really are just rich -they aren't devious. The unnasty guys are richer and less un-devious. And we'll have a good time with it.
In this course unfortunately we're at the turn of the 20th century. We're at a fulcrum and so it's difficult to bring ourselves back off the streets of Los Angeles, and off the pleasant life which we enjoy here to the situation as it was. Most people, if you mentioned the year 1932 to them, it conjures up the notion of people having a rough time. And in fact, because life is a unity all the incidents in the world at a given time do have a pattern. It's just very difficult for the untrained mind to think of the world as a whole, as the pattern of an entirety, but there is even the fact that human beings and their lives have effect even on nature. And there was a time in 1932, early 1933, where Gandhi remarked about the huge earthquakes in Bengal as penance forced upon people of Bengal. And everybody took him to task and said you have just achieved the most monumental change in human history in our time, but how can you write such garbage? How can you possibly make such wild statements? And Gandhi's reply was nature is not different from us and if we could but see the entire pattern, the dismal qualities of nature reflect in fact the dismal qualities of our own travail.
So, it's a difficult perspective even for persons who are trained - Schooled, disciplined. It's a difficult perspective to keep in mind. And so, I might just reiterate and refresh that yoga is a science. Yoga is a science. It's just like physics or chemistry. It's a hard science. It's exact. The results are infinitesimally measurable and that the range of measurement is in terms of approaching a whole - an allness. And the old Sanskrit word yoga comes from an ancient root source, vowel laden syllable, which was primordial in ancient Indo-European languages thousands of years ago - how many thousands we are unsure. Six or seven thousand at least and probably more. But yog comes down in the Western declension of languages as both yoke. As the yoke that one would put on to a draft animal so that it may help you. May pull the load. Thus, one yokes wildness and tames it for a purpose. And so, our word yoke has that. there's also the yolk of an egg. The inner part. The center. The fertile center which feeds the embryo of new life. New life.
The press that was set up in Ahmedabad for the Gandhi trust is called Novo Jeevan, new life. Press, novo jeevan, is the old way of saying it. Novo, new, even there the words are close. Jeevan - Jive even there the words are close. So that the very language of classical Sanskrit inner science, have a resonance even today in western languages. And the principle of yoga is that once one element of a unity is organized, not so much organized as in its hierarchical structure, but organized in terms of its integrated and complementarity, oriented, dynamic flow, so that it is a unity. Once any particular aspect of a pattern is focused with yoga, all the rest of the pattern inevitably follows suit and likewise becomes organized. So that a yogi, who stresses say either the physical aspect or the mental aspect of oneself, or the work act aspect of oneself. These are all various types of yoga. And perfectly adequate descriptions of them were given by Swami Vivekananda in little, tiny books around the turn of the century - Karma Yoga; Bakhti Yoga; Jnana Yoga; or one could take the grand high road, the Royal Road and do Raja Yoga which is all of them together unified. These have been experimented with for thousands of years as we say. There are traditions. There are lineages. And though many lineages were suffering from a hiatus in the 18th and the 19th centuries by the 20th century many of the lineages of yoga or yogic techniques were brought back into manifestation. How? Because the lineages of certain yogas have a transpersonal focus in them. They do not depend upon a living contact from one person to another, but that the contact could be reestablished by someone living who literally tunes in to that lineage and that development. And this of course is what happened with Ramakrishna - totally uneducated, illiterate youngster who was plugged in to the ancient Upanishadic techniques and who became a master yogi almost instantly and spent the rest of his life passing that lineage on and bringing it back into manifestation. But the principle is in all cases the same. So, when I described Gandhi in 1931 and 1932 as a round table yogi, I'm talking very specifically about the fact that this man at that time was a master yogi of the very highest order. And what he was doing was taking his center - which had been established by this time for over 40 years - taking his center, his organization, and he had spent the last ten or twelve years trying to simplify whatever barriers there were between himself and the millions in India. He was attempting to - by mode of purification, detachment, and deletion by mode of sympathy and harmony and paralleling - attempting to take all the definitional resistances away from himself. So that he could literally be in contact with the millions. Actually, the hundreds of millions.
All through the 20s he was patiently working at this grand strategy. He had organized himself like a master yogi and now, if the science were true and he had also mastered the affinity with the hundreds of millions, whatever he might do in himself would be instantly transmitted to the hundreds of millions of people of India and those others who incidentally around the world had participated in this great sympathetic body of nascent humanity. So that in 1932 we're going to see Gandhi try an experiment that no yogi ever had done before in history. He was attempting to take his yogic power and transmit its integrity and effectiveness to about 300 or 400 million people simultaneously. Hoping thereby, to establish a case in point, that even if there is but one moral, ethical conscientious being in the world, or even in the universe, he may buy his own integrity than his own mastery impart that unity, sight unseen if necessary, to hundreds of millions at a time, ensuring thereby that the world and history and man and sentient beings could be saved - instantly if needed to - from even their own ignorance and errant ways.
Now what happened to set this up, Gandhi kept it largely to himself. Those closest to him in terms of power structure, Nehru and others who were to become big names in Indian history, did not understand this activity. The few individuals who were very close to him who did understand have been largely left out of the picture. There were two. Next week we're going to see one - a man named Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the "Frontier Gandhi," and the other was Vinoba who we will see towards the end of the lecture series. I think the last three or four lectures are about him. They understood what he was doing, what he was attempting, and that without making headlines out of it he was saying I am but an average man who has come to the integrity of this yogic capacity. If there is anyone among you who will follow at least my pioneering this way you may come this far, and if you have better capacities, you may take this from here and develop it, and we'll see that someone did.
Essentially then the key to this entire series is the significance of whether a man, an individual - it could have been a woman - can take their own personal integrity and pass it on to others in its wholeness. In its wholesomeness.
Now Gandhi had developed, of course, a masterful way of organizing shell within shell within shell. A complex pattern of activity so that almost anyone from any perspective could view what he was doing in terms of making sense of his position. What was so very difficult was for someone to understand the whole in terms of a slice from the outside clear down to the center.
In order to ensure the yogic perception that we've just finished discussing. And I'm sorry those have come in just now have missed about 20 minutes of intricate detail on this, but the point was in order to make his yogic fulcrum visible, Gandhi did a commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita [The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi]. And in the Gita - as we've been coming back to it time after time - we now come to the part which concerns the responsibilities, the ethical responsibilities, of the yogi. And now you're able to see this in a larger light because he is presenting not only something in terms of ancient Indian philosophy, ancient Indian culture, but he's giving us a private view of what he is attempting to do in the 20th century. He writes in here, "The man who is able even here on earth. Here he is released from the body to hold out against the flood tide of lust and wrath. He is a yogi. He is happy."
So that one of the primordial, essential qualities of a yogi is the maintenance of the unity of the flow of his energy. And in order to guarantee the flow of his energy in this maintained, dynamic equilibrium, he must seal the primordial fulcrums of transformation. You can think in your mind in terms of cauterizing a wound so that the body may maintain its integrity. And you cauterize not to injure the body but to preserve the rest by sealing a wound. All the transformative stages in a person's capacity are necessary, but at the stage of the yogi who has attained he thereby cuts off those transformative centers to maintain that unity. This is why Gandhi took at the age of 37 the vow of brahmacharya ¬- a vow of chastity. He gave up sexual activity. It was to seal off that transformative energy and many of the other qualities of the brahmacharya vow were to make these seals, these yogic seals of integrity.
At this stage - 1931, 1932 - Gandhi would write that the triangle of yogic activity that he was working with would include satyagraha (truth holding), ahimsa (non-violence), and chastity, brahmacharya. He would later transform the brahmacharya - the chastity - into sarvodaya - the welfare for all. And the importance of that transformation is monumental because it leads away from the classic yogic pattern, which would have been understood from 10,000 years ago through the Upanishads right up to the present day, that one seals an energy flow within oneself. Whereas the transforming of brahmacharya into sarvodaya made the emphasis flow that one's own seal of energy integrity is tied ineffably with the welfare of all sentient beings. In other words, he opened up that corner of the triangle, that seal, not by breaking his vow of chastity but by seeing that the need was for there to be an example of how welfare of all, the sarvodaya, should be incorporated so that the yogis from here on out - however long it takes man to evolve, purify, conduct himself into a universal form, however long it takes - that the triangle will be holding to the truth - not the truth of course in a sense of a colloquialism, but satyagraha, that of all truths, only God is. That truth. Satyagraha. Ahimsa. That the perception of satyagraha is only possible from a non-harmful dynamic. That is, it doesn't go out against anything or for anything but goes in concert with everything. That's essentially what ahimsa is. It is a massive universal cooperation. If it is blood off tangentially into violence - and there are many forms of violence. Selfishness is one of the worst forms of violence. So, ahimsa, non-violence, is actually an encouragement of the integrity of the outgoing, interflowing.
And the third portion there became sarvodaya, the welfare of all. That is to say that all humanity must be included in any man's yogic dynamic cycle. That he may no longer seal himself off from the all. That that age of man has passed. The age of the independent Superman is over. That it is henceforward immoral even - immoral - for a person to have yogic capacities and to seal himself off from the evolving welfare of all sentient beings. Now this particular ethical doctrine that Gandhi brought into play - 1931, 1932 - was a replay, a mirroring, in a conscientious sociopolitical way, economic way, of what the Buddha had done 500 BC. Except that that particular style, that particular message at that time had had a development that had precluded, by and large, its application and visibility in terms of economics, politics, society. So that at this time in the early 30s there were a great many profound individuals in India who began to use a colloquial catchy phrase - "One Buddha B.C., One Gandhi A.D." - but in fact, the parallel between Gandhi and historical Buddha is not so exact as another parallel that was also drawn at the time, and which is more accurate. And that is if we look for a compliment of Gandhi in the BC period the figure that comes to our perception most accurately is that of Socrates, because it was Socrates who was no longer able to be the sage like Pythagoras going off to his own community. Or the sage like Thales [of Miletus] who would go and have just a few students. Or a sage like the Egyptian priests who would cover themselves with a ritual and a hierarchical inscape that would forbid anyone ever even approaching them closely. Socrates made his home in the public forum of Athens and that's the kind of sage that he was. He was willing to talk to anybody, anytime, about themselves or others or whatever it was. He was the gadfly of the city of Athens; Gandhi was the gadfly of the British Empire. He was the man in the public forum who incessantly asked not so much questions, philosophically, but performed actions which had philosophic illusions that could be elicited out of them. So, Gandhi is very much like a 20th century Socrates - very close to it. And in fact, when we get to the crux and the point, the action, the excitement of what happened in this time period somebody, his - later his private secretary Pyarelal [Nayyar] who is still alive, in 1932 wrote, he said, "For a parallel of the events of September 1932 one has to go back to the fifth century BC in Athens because we find ourselves educated Indians, we've read our Plato. And we find ourselves now every day going through actions which seemed to us like a dream because we've seen it before. We've read about it before, in Plato. Both disciples of Socrates, begged him not to use his life to challenge the state to recognize its fundamental errors about human nature."
And he says, "Time and time again it occurs to us hour by hour but just as Socrates gave up his life our Gandhi is going to give up his life over the similar issue." That is to say that if everything that we have said about the yogic capacity of individual man tying in with the primordial patterns of other human beings - and in fact all life - the entirety of the phenomenal time-space world. And if a yogi can transfer his organized dynamic to another, why could he not then transfer it to all? And this of course is very close to the kind of mystical theology that one finds in the Eastern Greek church about Christ.
All of these events were rushed to the surface and rushed into a time sequence that in less than a week they became a crisis paramount in the world in September of 1932, and the master behind all this, the choreographer was Gandhi.
We've had now five lectures, I think, on Gandhi. We've built up to this. This is really the climax. This is the fulcrum of his life. And even though he lived beyond it - he lived beyond it by the grace of circumstance - and we can see how at this watershed he realized increasingly, from 1932 on, that there were many individuals who were in positions of growing power who were close to him who should have been able to understand but did not. And that there were only a handful, maybe two handfuls at the most, who did perceive the - I used the word elegance - the elegance of the whole plan. He had a strategy and part of the strategy was to train, to educate people. And he was educating a new generation of leadership. And he could see by 1932, already then, that many of those who would come to power 15 years later, when India was actually free, had not the capacity to understand, but that the one or two who did he fed them carefully, silently, off on the side. Nurtured them. So that when the time came, they were able to carry on that lineage. The lineage of the yogi who refuses to seal himself off from man. Refuses his own perfection. And throws in with the whole lot of humanity. And until they are all helped, he will not use his perfection for himself, even though he has the capacity.
And of course, those who were here for the Bodhisattva series recognize that this is in fact the ancient Bodhisattva vow of the Prajnaparamita. It's the same dynamic that powered the Neoplatonic vision through Plotinus. It's the very core of the transforming sap of the world tree all along. Gandhi was a great traditionalist - he was extraordinary in the fact that he brought the tradition back perfectly. So that he has a great example of how many disparate strands of this great tradition can be collected back together by an individual in a short lifetime and applied and furthered. So that he writes, "The man who is able even here on earth, ere he is released from the body, to hold out against the floodtide of lust and wrath, - he is a yogi, he is happy."
Why lust and wrath? Wrath is the going out from one's equilibrium against something else. Lust is going out from one's equilibrium for something else. Both are wrong. Both are wrong not because they're not nice or unseemly or get you into trouble. Both are wrong because the seal of the equilibrium is snapped, broken. And if that is such a danger then opening one-third of all of one's capacities is clearly a danger fraught with peril. And only a real master can undertake this kind of a suture.
He goes on and he says, in his translation of the Gita, "He who finds happiness only within, rest only within, light only within, -that yogi, having become one with nature, attains to oneness with Brahman." Brahman. And of course, that attaining to one with Brahman through the integrity of oneself is exactly what the brahmacharyan vow is all about. So, I hope some of you are seeing this.
"Knowing Me as the Acceptor of sacrifice and austerity," he writes. He's talking now from the standpoint of Brahman, of having come into contact with the divine. And the divine then manifests this utterance, this statement. "Knowing Me as the Acceptor of sacrifice and austerity, the great Lord of all the worlds, the Friend of all creation, the yogi attains to peace." Peace. Ashanti. This of course is the key to what we're talking about this evening. And I hope that you'll keep it in mind as we go into this.
All this is in the background when Gandhi came back from the second roundtable conference in London. He had precipitated the events by his Great Salt March to the Sea in March of 1930, as we went into last week. The breaking of the salt laws by millions across the face of India had produced a political crisis in London. They had to invite the leaders of India to London for a roundtable conference. Which they did. They had left Gandhi out, which they could not. So that the powers that be in London realized that very quickly they needed a second roundtable conference with Gandhi. When Gandhi went to London, he realized he was being played for a fool. He was also very wise in the political machine intelligence that we're familiar with in this country. He saw that the room was filled with the mementos of the Empire. He could see his loin cloth reflected in the great mirrors behind the round table. and in those mirrors, he could see the costuming and the posturing of infinitely egotistical masters of property and authority. He knew he had no place there as a yogi. His whole program, his whole development, had no place there. There was no traction for it. There was no fruitful ground. There was no nourishing ground. He was alone - very much like Lincoln in the office and the Civil War, very often found himself having no one that he could really talk to he had to carry it alone, because the conscientiousness of what it all was about was left to himself - and Gandhi was that way in London, 1931.
So, he took himself out away from the power center. The seeming power center. And he went around London. He lived in a little working flat area. He went to the varied factories that had been closed down because of his native clothmaking program in India. And they loved him. because he was like a grassroots war politician. He came in there just as he was. He sat down with them. He was there with them. They could see that he meant no harm to them. He was rooting for his own in the way which man always understands. He was a decent fellow as they would say in the East End. He was alright. And the photographs we have of that time show the London housewives from the working-class areas loving the fact that he was just a fine sort of a character. He was half naked and brown, it's true. And little, small. But he was lovable, and he was honest.
And so, Gandhi built up his constituency there. He took that same constituency back to India. Where instead of being several thousands of people it became several hundreds of millions of people. The peasants of India were very much like the working-class in England. They were his true constituency because if it is true that if a yogi may organize his own power dynamic to a sealed perfection of energy flow. And that if he tunes himself to the universe even the universe reflects that unity. Then all one need do is go to the fruitful natural flow of life and one will have that contact. In other words, the poor, dumb, millions of India were very close to Gandhi in a spiritual sense. They had no barriers between them. They were refined in the natural way. They had no barriers constructed already. He was refined in the educated sense. He had had to teach himself how to give them up.
When he came back from London, he brought absolutely nothing back in terms of a political resolution. In fact, when he came back, he learned as soon as he got off the boat that Nehru and a bunch of other power leaders of the Congress had been arrested. And in fact, there was a series of emergency power ordinances passed that greeted him. This was Christmas time he came back. He complained in a letter saying I thought that the English were Christians and that at Christmas you gave presents to people. Look what I've had to open in my country. The emergency power ordinances authorized the military to seize buildings, to impound bank balances, to confiscate wealth, to arrest suspects without a warrant, to suspend court trials, deny bail, deny habeas corpus, withdraw mailing privileges from the press, disband political organizations, prohibit boycotting and picketing. The Sir Harry Hague, the Home Minister of Interior, was quoted in the London Times as saying, "We're not playing a game with artificial rules." In other words, they slammed the door. They sent him home with nothing to take. And as soon as he got home with nothing, they put a cage over the whole situation thinking that now they were in control again.
So, what a yogi does in this aspect is to show the transparent-ness of apparent and arbitrary power by ignoring it totally. And by showing that the very power structures that exist, exist not because of someone's intent to possess them but because they are structural manifestations in making things work. And so, Gandhi set out to educate his leadership, to tune his yogic capacity to the hundreds of millions. And to display incidentally to the British Empire that they no longer controlled anything.
And so, all of the rest of the activity that we will follow tonight he did while he was arrested and in jail. And from a little jail cell in India, he went through this enormous complicated yogic transformation discipline for hundreds of millions of people around the world. He did it in six days. Of course, with all of these emergency power ordinances passed, the persons in India who were in a responsible position felt themselves stymied. They had very little chance to begin to even organize themselves. And when Gandhi appeared on January 2nd, he wrote "his Excellency the government can hardly believe that you or the Working Committee can contemplate that his Excellency could invite you with the hope of any advantage to an interview held under the threat of the resumption of civil disobedience." And the point was that sense an autocracy had been reinstated the whole idea of a private citizen parlaying with the representatives of the British Empire was an obvious absurdity. And so, Gandhi, would take that obvious absurdity and hold it forth and suspend it. Not let it get lost. And all the time now for the rest of this sequence he will hold the obvious absurdity that he is but a private citizen and this is the British Empire. But at the same time, he's turning that absurdity over and showing that he is a master yogi. And that the British Empire is an arbitrary structure in time-space that has very little to do with any real universal structures. And that it is he who is in control. If anyone was in control.
They arrested him on the 4th of January. He was arrested again just as he was in the salt march under in 1827 act. An act that was over a hundred years out-of-date. And had no real technical authority. He was put into Yerawada Jail. And Louis Fisher writes, "a few weeks earlier he had been the guest of his, his and her majesty in Buckingham Palace. Now he was thrown into a jail in India."
He loved Yerawada prison. He called it Yerawada Mandir - mandir is a temple. He said it is here that I worship God. He said in this prison if you see this as a prison you're accepting the arbitrary structure, the cardboard shadows that are being given to you in this lifetime. Whereas, in fact what we are doing is of universal consequence and therefore this is not a prison but a working area. And since our object is not to show that we can grow beautiful gardens - man has grown beautiful gardens, we don't need to show that anymore, we can do that. And we don't need to go to the nice cool Himalayas and find some beautiful valley - we have done that; we no longer need to do that. But what we haven't done as Yogis, is show at the very nature of society, the economic structures the very political basis of history...
"...And so, at the very nature of society, the very economic structure is the very political basis of history can also be tended like a garden or like a beautiful valley and we may change that. And therefore, this Yerawada Mandir is the temple where we worship God. And we're doing his work in this way at this time."
And as he was there, he began to read. And many other individuals were arrested - I think the total was somewhere on forty-five thousand in about two weeks. All the higher-level echelon persons involved in the Congress party in India were thrown into prison, so that it seemed by August of 1932 that the British Empire was not only in control but was in control in spades, as they would say at that time. It was then that the Prime Minister at that time was Ramsay MacDonald - A labor working individual man who'd done a lot of his own promoting in his lifetime. A tough character but one who was ethically open. And the man named Sir Samuel Hoare - H-O-A-R-E - was in charge of a lot of the British Empire connections in India. They decided that there were to be separate electoral entities created in India. This was furthering the policy of dividing India up. Divide and rule. And since there were to be separate electorates for Muslims and Hindus, they would split the Hindus more by making separate elections for the untouchables. And what they were doing of course as they were not only carving India up politically, making political factions, and engraining the political factions by making those factions parties. This is all well known in history. In fact, the greatest writers on this are Americans - John Jay and James Madison - this is what they were writing. If you read the Federalist Papers, the whole idea of factions being frozen into political parties is the sign of a degeneracy of a political dynamic and you have to guard against that.
So, they were attempting to inculcate this whole insidious practice into India. But Gandhi who was looking with yogic eyes saw that the spreading and splitting off of the untouchables from the rest of the Hindus was taking away forever by law their chance to integrate Hinduism as a just religion by working the untouchables into the integrity of Hinduism. And that by taking away the possibility of working the untouchables into Hinduism it made a travesty of the entirety of the Hindu religion and forever forbade it from being ever again an effective yogic power. You have to have integrity in your lineage for it to work. You can't have a 90 percent possibility. The spiritual realm doesn't work that way. It's 100 percent or nothing. It's an either/or as Kierkegaard said. Therefore, you cannot have a viable Hindu matrix out of which to have future yogis - out of which to have a future chance for wholeness if you split the untouchables off. This is why Gandhi renamed them; he said they're not untouchables they are harijans - they are children of God. Why are they children of God? Because they are essential to the family of religions just as children are essential. Yes, they've been left out, but they are the key to the wholeness that is to be and if they are split off and kept split increasingly by a political form, we are indeed doing an evil thing and we cannot permit this to happen. And of course, almost everyone around him said but this is absolutely foolish. Why be so concerned? They're untouchables. And then he knew that they didn't understand; but Gandhi understood. And so, he wrote a letter Sir Samuel Hoare and he said, "this problem that you have engendered is of such a primordial serious nature that I will offer my life to oppose it and on the 20th of September 1932 I will commence a fast until death taking only water and salt and bicarbonate of soda until I am dead unless this is repealed."
And of course, this letter was received in London as some sort of bogus threat; this is a side issue; he can't possibly be concerned. Very few people understood the essential universal quality of what Gandhi saw in the issue, but to him his entire ethical wholeness was at stake not as something which was a matter of pride and it needed to be fed - Can you not see that? - it was a matter of understanding what it meant, what it was worth. And so, he set himself - he believed that this was it for him - and the reason he set the September 20th starting point is that his birthday would be on October 2nd - he would be 63 - and he thought that under the conditions he could probably live for about two weeks. And that he was thinking that maybe somebody, in times to come would look at his life and see that he died on his birthday - why did he die exactly on his birthday? What were the events? In other words, he was setting it up because one cannot always count on the present understanding spiritual wholeness. It is so comprehensive, so basic, that many people in the present simply can't see it. It takes a long retrospective in time. It takes many events and a lot of maturing for people to begin to have a perspective to see: "Oh that's what was going on; that's what was being done." It looks so ordinary as if anyone could do it, as if it was just happening, but the extraordinary happens in just that way. It looks as if it were just a piece of wheat or just a handful of water and it's the staff of life. So, in just this way Gandhi was offering up his life.
All of the accounts of this fast show it to have been the crucible of understanding. After this event, India was free in the way that a master yogi could have given her the freedom. It took about three or four days for the news to percolate down to everyone and the questions to start coming in: Why are you doing it? Why are you starting the 20th? Well let's see, what day is it, it's the 17th already that means in three days... What are the issues? Who's involved? And of course, the blaming finger - which is a form of violence incidentally; blame is a form of violence - the blaming finger was looking for a culprit and of course the culprits were... couldn't be the British, I mean this is such a stupid issue it must be the untouchables. It must in fact be the leader of the untouchables. Well, who is the leader of the untouchables? Well, it turned out to be a real Gandhi hater, a man named [Bhimrao Ramji or Dr. Babasaheb] Ambedkar. He really didn't care for Gandhi - he called him a political machinator - but the wonderful quality of Ambedkar was that he was an integral person in his own right, he really wasn't untouchable, from birth, forever. And his understanding of the issues were very, very deep and profound, so that when they brought Ambedkar to the power centers of decision in Pune. And many of the famous people of the day - I can name them for you but we aren't going into names here - Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, [Madan Mohan] Malaviya, [Ghanshyam Das] G. D. Birla - all of these individuals, powerful individuals in India and the 30s. Here was Ambedkar, Dr. Ambedkar. Sort of a gruff course individual. He said, "I want to have the guarantee that the Hindus are not going to water down the untouchables yet again. We must have separate elections. We must have seats set aside for ourselves that no one else can occupy except untouchables." And of course, everyone saw that this was an impossible position, except for the grand man named Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru. Sir Tej is masterful and listening to the hours and hours of argument and then thinking to himself that the fast had begun and that Gandhi was on his way, and it was just a matter of days really. Sir Tej had the sudden inspiration. They call it a sudden inspiration, but you can see that what was working here was a yogic power. There was a wholeness being transmitted without words or contact and Sir Tej in his purity picked up on this aspect and he suddenly suggested, why not have primary elections, and then have a runoff from the winners of the primaries? This way we can bring the two groups together. We can have certain seats set aside but we can have the harijans nominate their own people. And then on the runoff all of India could on the candidates thus offered. And it was a great compromise, but it was more than a compromise. It was a flash insight into the only possible loophole in the conundrum. In other words, the problem was of such vast political and longtime historical associations, riddled with the obscuring anxieties of religious associations and social associations that there really was only that one loophole in the whole welter of the mess and Sir Tej saw it and offered it up. Someone asked him could you elucidate on it, and he said, I honestly cannot. I think this account is in... I have two accounts there. Brijkrishna Chandiwala, At the Feet of Bapu, and Pyarelal [Nayyar], The Epic Fast are the primordial documents - they were there, they took part in the actual dialogues, and in their own account this is what I'm giving. So, he couldn't elaborate on it. He said it came to me in a flash and I have nothing more to offer but that, but I do offer that. So, they went the next day, by train, to Yerawada prison outside of Pune. They got there very early in the morning, and this is an account from Chandiwala which I think might be interesting to you - are we getting to the break? Let me give you this, then we'll have a little break.
Gandhi went in incidentally weighing 106 pounds - he went into the fast weighing 106 pounds. Two weeks after the fast was over he weighed 99 pounds. So, he'd gone down to probably 95 pounds, something like that. He was 5 foot 4.
"We visited him. We found that he had been shifted to a separate ward. He was lying in his bed looking rather exhausted. Sadar Patel and Mahadev Desai were with him. Just opposite to the Yerawada Jail was the female jail. So Sarojini Naidu was allowed to visit Bapu... [Bapu means father.] ...Bapu daily and spend some time with him. that day when Bapu prepared to do his quota of spinning, he jokingly told her that he would like to have her spin on his behalf. She promptly replied that her thumb was aching. Hearing this Bapu laughed and said that just as in East India Company days weavers of Bengal cut their thumbs in order to defy the authority of the company, so did she seem nervous and afraid of him, or she would not offer a painful thumb as an excuse to avoid spinning and everyone was amused about this."
But they could see that under the jocularity that the toll was being taken. And I think the image to keep in mind here is even though Gandhi in his lifetime perfected fasting as a tool and could go through a 21-day fast. One can only go through a fast like this with utter yogic control. You keep track of all of your physiological body processes. And just as in controlling breathing and you portion it out, everything metabolically is portioned out. In this fast until death Gandhi threw away the towel. He didn't keep track of anything. He burnt himself up because it was not a fast for any limited length of time it was a fast until death. And so, he was like a meteor going out. And that's what they began to understand.
Well let's take a little break. I'll be selling my wares on the street - my cassettes.
I hate to interrupt education. I feel best when you talk to each other. And the less that I have to occupy a podium, the better. This is just a crunch and hopefully we'll soon have possibilities of doing real education of having real interchanges and not just lectures. It's much better. But this is a fascinating story, and it deserves to have the highlights.
There's a little pamphlet called Fasting in Satyagraha by Gandhi - they did about 20 of these, 30 of these little pamphlets - and in Fasting in Satyagraha he has a number of quotations. Most of the books on Gandhi are collections of quotations from his writings. And in this one under a heading "Ethics of Fasting," it's about four pages. In 1933 Gandhi wrote some of this material here on the ethics of fasting and at the end of it, it says in here published in Harijan on the 8th of May 1933 - Harijan. Harijan means children of God and it's a term that Gandhi applied to the untouchables. And what happened was that after the epic fast he no longer published a newspaper called Young India, but he published a newspaper called Harijan.
In other words, as you contract to change conditions in phenomenal reality you also change. If you're going to introduce an ethical note the transformation happens not only out there but in here. If you are going to perform an integration, what is integrated is a part of you, and part of the world. So that there comes increasingly a sense of the ethics of yoga - the conscientiousness, the sense of what are you doing in the largest scheme. There are many partial yogis who draw thousands and make millions and are famous in our day and age around the world. There are many sham situations, but almost never do you hear of the ethical responsibilities of integration. But for Gandhi they were paramount because the changes then mean that you are no longer what you were, and your capacities are thus also changed. And just so he could no longer edit a newspaper under the title Young India, it had to be a publication called Harijan - children of God. The epic fasts had changed him. The taking on the issue of the harijans and raising it to the universal level had changed his capacity. So that he now instead of calling himself Young India would call himself Harijan.
So, this is what he wrote in Harijan very soon after the title change of the publication, about the ethics of fasting and it appears in Fasting in Satyagraha. And since he had performed the integration through a fast, we're now looking at the cloud chamber of the nuclear physics of high-power yoga in the 20th century. This is what it looks like when you look into the very center of the process. What is it that you are seeing?
"The fact of a fast even by the offender does not remove the offense from his deed. Much less can it do so when it is vicarious. What the fast does is to prevent repetition of evil. Most, if not all, evil comes from attachment to the flesh. If therefore the flesh is mortified, attachment to it is likely to decrease. No doubt this is dependent on the motive with which a fast is undertaken. There is a great deal of truth in the saying that man becomes what he eats. The grosser the food, the grosser the body. Plain living is said to go hand in hand with high thinking, but plain living is only a few steps removed from fasting. Plain living may itself be said to be a mode of fasting. Complete fasting is a forcible reminder of the fact that man does not live by bread alone but assume that there is some force in the argument you advance for the offenders fast. What about vicarious fasting? Might say the correspondent. The answer is that just as there is identity of spirit, so there is identity of matter. And in essence the two are inseparable. Spirit is matter rarefied to the uttermost limit. Hence, whatever happens to the body must touch the spirit and whatever happens to one body must affect the whole matter and the whole of spirit."
Can you see how precise he is now in terms of the context which I've styled for you?
"It is within the experience of us all that often wrongdoers are touched by the loving acts of their friends and relatives especially when they consider the latter to be better than them. Fasting for the sake of loved ones is a forcible and unmistakable expression of love. And affects those for whose sake it is undertaken. Those whose love encircles the whole of life cannot but affect the whole creation by a supreme act of love. If the necessity of fasting is admitted, the argument that it is unnatural or an act of violence to one's own body falls to pieces. Just as a fast for regaining lost health is neither unnatural nor criminal self-torture, so is not a fast for purification of self or others. But all my argument is useless if it cannot be sustained by practice. And if there is any soundness in it the unbroken practice of all the sages and others from time immemorial clinches the argument. Skeptics however need not rely either upon argument or past testimony. Let them acquaint themselves with the rules and the science of fasting for purification and then test its efficacy themselves. That fasting does not appeal to people brought up in the midst of the dazzling materialism is an additional reason for people like my correspondent not to reject summarily one of the most potent methods of purification and penance."
Right in the core of the whole issue. And you can see that what I styled for you in the first hour here was a great circumambulation of what actually was the true amphitheater in stage of the activity at this time. I am always creating a sense of presence for you as much as I can, so that later on in retrospection - listening to the cassettes or talking about it or trying to live it in your life - you will see that what has been given is not an object on an intellectual assessment but a dramatic perambulation defining, by its own motion and hopefully integrity, the area of experience within which one could look with oneself with one's own life and see how those stagings bring into phase manifestation the actuality of the experience itself.
Gandhi did this activity for hundreds of millions of people at a time - he was a master at this. And those who come later are just in awe, like myself, to understand how it's done. To be able to do it somewhat and to be absolutely in awe that it could be done publicly for 40 years and 50 years for hundreds of millions of people. Is it great showmanship? No. It's masterfulness. It's masterfulness.
So that in the epic fast as the situation developed and became poignant the individuals coming to see Gandhi realized that he was flaming out, he was not disciplining himself in the fast. He usually took water every hour scientifically because he was keeping track just like a metronome. He was keeping track of the pace of his metabolism. And he would take say three measured swallows of water and have a sequence of pacing and then maybe take three more and that would be it. Or he would add salt every other hour and maybe every fourth hour bicarbonate of soda, in order to keep track of one's metabolism. The inner sense of equilibrium is so refined that almost any kind of a quiver is noticed. And of course, the corollary to this is that someone integrated into the cosmos feels the wholeness of life as a manifest. Which is why Gandhi at this period whenever he would write of God would simply say God IS. With no object appended after the verbal formulation. Simply that He IS. He IS so real that there is no way descriptively to approach. So, while this was going on - while he was flaming out; while he was not keeping track of his metabolism - many people were coming to see him. Dozens of people. The world press had free access to him. And they began to realize that in one day he looked very weak and in two days he was unable to get up unassisted from the bed and after the third day it was nauseating to him to talk. When you're undisciplined in the fast the metabolic response is nausea - the urge to throw up, the sense of vertigo, like you're falling, the dizziness - and what it does of course it comes in pulsation waves. And if you want to experiment with it what you can bring it out and actually keep track of its periodicity and you can find how your particular metabolic system nauseates. There are exact patterns and so forth. There are even inter-relational patterns which will be experimented with from time to time. But what he was doing was throwing himself to the wind and it was soon apparent to everyone that this is what he meant to do. That he meant that the issue was so important and so unsolvable from the outside materialistic view. It was a problem that had gone on for thousands of years and had not ever been solved. So, there was no sense in hoping that some reasonable time limit was necessary. What was needed was a guts, all-or-nothing intestinal reaction: Are you going to let me die or not? If you're not going to let me die, then make something up. If you can't think it through, make it up. Agree to it at least on this. Make a fiction. Let's stick to the fiction. Whatever it is. But there is no longer any time to deliberate. Like a meteor he was going out. And by the fourth day it was apparent that he was dying. His blood pressure had risen sky-high. And it was then that his wife came into Yerawada Mandir.
Now during most fasts, the metabolism of the body becomes very creaky. And one has to go through massages, literally, to iron out the wrinkles that come up - metabolic wrinkles. Gandhi had not allowed a single massage up to the fourth day of the fast. His wife Kasturba - who was marvelous; she understood him perfectly - came in and in the midst of all of the worry, instead of bringing out the worry, she came in as the eternal friend - the companion - and she said simply again the same old story and immediately sat down and began to apply a massage to him.
This is how it was described by Chandiwala, who was there when she came in. He saw it himself - 1932.
"We were both allowed to stay in jail to nurse him. Though Bapu got weaker each day, yet he did not give up spinning. Shrimati Kasturba, who was also in jail and was allowed to stay with him. Bapu lay on his bed which was placed under a mango tree in the courtyard. He could now drink water only with great difficulty as nausea had begun. He got very little rest since people with diverse opinions came to visit him throughout the day and discuss various topics. As he had to argue with them in order to convince them he became exhausted by continuous talking. For full five days these discussions went on, especially between him certain Hindu leaders and Dr. Ambedkar. One day in the course of conversation he said that when a man is born, he comes to earth with a fixed number of breaths allotted to him by God. These he has to take in his lifetime, and they constitute his age. Bapu believes this to be true. The sooner we exhaust our prana shakti the nearer we approach to death. On the other hand, if we husband our breath, we can also to some extent postpone death to a later date. Death is predestined for every single person but there is a question of correct expenditure of these allotted number of breaths. But Bapu's condition became critical on the seventh day. His blood pressure mounted up. Anxiety was visible in his face."
Why is anxiety visible in his face? Because it is painful. Because what one is doing is starving to death. It is painful because what the body tells you through the blood vessels, through the bones even, through every system, is that you are dying - you need food, you cannot go on this way. And this message comes repeatedly through the nerves, through the feelings, through the intuition, the cells. Everything tells you don't, don't, don't. And of course, this mounts up into a cacophony of anxiety. It becomes a nightmare - about the fifth or sixth day without food it's a real nightmare. Though the spots appear before the eyes at that time. And what happens is that the cells in the delicate areas, like the retina and so forth, are beginning to die faster than they're replaced. And so, the very sensitive areas of the body literally began to die faster than they're replaced, and you begin to have spots blanked out. There is sort of like white, blue spots that just begin to appear and dazzle. As if someone had snapped a light bulb and everywhere you look and blink and there they are. It's a deterioration of tissue. And of course, you have the concomitant thrust of heart energy telling you, "Don't! Life cannot go on this way. Don't!" And what you have to do of course in a fast until death like this is to control this urge to respond lifelike to the conditions. It's like steering a ship into the maelstrom where you want to go into it. Everything goes against it.
She came in and Kasturba began joking with Gandhi trying to change the situation. And as she joked, as she brought this quality in, Dr. Ambedkar who had for several days now realized that Gandhi was the most extraordinary person he had ever met. That he'd seen him, had heard about him all his life but had never been that close continuously, could begin to get the impress - not the sense impressions, not the idea - but the impress from the yogic capacity of Gandhi to projected out, that something large was happening. Something disciplined and fine was happening. And he could not fail but finally began to change. and began to realize and hear. We select in our hearing all the time. And when the attitude changes, we select a different brand of periodicity and so we hear everything different. Which is why change of attitude is the key. This is why we tell fairy tales to children for their spiritual education, so they get the experience of the uplift. They have to have that. They have to be able to recognize that. And in the uplift the whole world is different. And what we select out are the elements of scintillation. They are there equally with despair all the time. Joy and despair is exactly equal. There was no predilection one way or the other in the universe.
So, the experience of Ambedkar was he began to see Gandhi as a hero for the harijans for the untouchables. And he began to think that Gandhi couldn't be left to die because he was really the champion for the harijans and not a champion for the Hindus. He could see that the Hindu leaders kowtowed to Gandhi out of tradition and habit and veneration but not for the actuality of the man. Whereas Ambedkar - tough, untouchable, rebel rabble rouser as he was - saw Gandhi as his own kind of man. And so, he began to support the effort. And with Ambedkar the change happened. And they quickly came on the sixth day to a realization that India was going to be united. They were going to have the harijans have the capacity to select a number of candidates and offer them up and then the winner of that would be put on the national elections. And that way there would be some sort of a quote compromise. But it wasn't really a compromise. It was a working of the harijans back into the fold so that India was preserved.
Then they sent this off to London. And it was Sunday in London. And Ramsay MacDonald had to rush back to Number 10 Downing, and they poured over the document. And what happened was a miracle from the outside but was a plan to yogic action from the inside. The British government under this extreme world pressure, which was created by the yogic integrity of Gandhi, had no time or chance to think that they were being told what to do by India. They forgot all about the British Raj dominating India and making their point with all the emergency powers acts they quickly acted to save the life of Gandhi and in doing so monumentally, strategically admitted that Indians ran India. The fast was over - he broke it with a glass of orange juice. And what he'd won was everything on every level. All the way down the line. He had brought victory to man. He'd brought victory to India. He'd brought victory to himself as an honorable human being. It brought victory to the harijans who were no longer to be called untouchables ever again. And all the way down the line on whatever level one would like to look at it. We passed through a fulcrum in 1932 because of that individual and this capacity for the single good man to still count even in a materialistic Empire Society was affected.
For the rest of the 30s Gandhi took himself very seriously as the hero of harijans. He not only changed the name of his publication but made many tours. But the most astounding thing to India and to the British government was after this monumental six-day fast until death, six months later Gandhi went through a 21-day fast but this time of course he did it as a purification for his own ashram. A rich American beautiful lady had gone to the ashram and caused a lot of consternation and so, Gandhi, to purify the ashram went through a 21-day fast to show them that he was in fact in control and what it was all about. And then he gave the ashram to the harijans. And he said we're going to move to Wardha - in the very center of India. And of course, who was in Wardha? Vinoba. All that time. Vinoba.
Well, we'll get to him next week and see what he does the [Abdul] Ghaffar Khan, the "Frontier Gandhi."
END OF RECORDING