With the Frontier Gandhi: 1936
Presented on: Thursday, August 18, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
Gandhi
Presentation 7 of 13
With the Frontier Gandhi, 1936
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, August 18, 1983
Transcript:
The date is August the 18th, 1983. This is the seventh lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on Gandhi. Tonight's lecture is entitled: With the Frontier Gandhi, 1936. Mr. Weir will commence his lecture in just a moment.
I think we're halfway. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Yeah. This is the center. The center of the course. And it brings us closer to the concerns of the present age. We have - we have a peculiar series of coordinates in the situation facing us in our lifetimes, and it's so very difficult to get a grasp on it that it eludes us quite frequently and only the most elegant and learned of individuals have reminded us from time to time of the peculiar situation that we find ourselves in. We are in fact adrift in several different ways at once. And this makes our lifetimes very precarious in terms of stability and certainty of life and the process and pattern. And the transformative point really was the Second World War. The Second World War came on the heels of the hopeful expectation that the First World War had been an anomaly - had been the war to end all wars - and the fact that the storm clouds were gathering again, this time in an even more concerted effort, not so much for the purpose to have a victory for a side against another side, or a cause against other causes, or people who do not uphold the first cause, but it was a concerted effort to stamp out the humanity of man. And the Second World War is in many respects very much like the Trojan War. It was a war that the victors seemed to lose. That the victors who won the war had inculcated a sense of savagery - a sense of savagery that was self-righteously seen at the time, and for now two generations later, as being necessary to win. That one could only preserve the decent society or the decent possibilities of society if one were the most tigerish and simply quashed all opposition before it even arose. And in many ways the psychology of the Cold War - still with us, still suffering its protean transformations under the inexpert grasp of world leaders, changing its shape with every five to ten years but still with us. And by the late 30s to anyone having followed the patterns of world history as close as Gandhi had done, it was increasingly apparent to him that the storm clouds on the horizon were of an ultimate rather foreboding final nature. And as if paralleling in his own physicality the uncertainty in the world, Gandhi suffered through the 30s many health breakdowns. He had suffered several lapses in the 20s, but in the 30s we find him again and again almost broken physically and taking long courses of convalescence, and coming back to a little bit of activity and then faltering again. So, the overall picture of Gandhi in the 30s is of the great warrior of the spirit increasingly experiencing the sense of the crippling effects of this enormous cloud of obscurity which was being engendered again in the world. Having a sense that the parallels of history are often the cues by which intelligence and conscientiousness may most effectively move, Gandhi - again as he had done in the late twenties, with the Great Salt March in 1930 the roundtable conference in 31, the great epic fast in 32 - was searching for some fulcrum of insight on which to balance his lever and there seemed to be nothing offered to himself. The field of inquiry that he had opted for was the social work among the untouchables - which he renamed harijan, children of God.
Now the whole issue of caste in India goes back many thousands of years. Sanctioned for an enormously complex system of values, one which Gandhi, even as late as 1920, himself held even as late as 1927 when his youngest son Devadas Gandhi - born in 1900, so in 1927 he was 27 years old. Devadas Gandhi wanted to marry the daughter of one of Gandhi's closest associates, a man known in India as C.R. Rajagopalachari who was from South India. I think he was a Madrasi. But C.R. and his family were Brahmins of the very highest order. Whereas Gandhi was of the Vaishnava, the merchant caste. And under great consultation Gandhi and C.R. he got together with the family members and insisted that there be a five-year waiting period. And if after the end of five years Gandhi's son could then marry the daughter of Rajagopalachari. Fortunately, they had enough integrity and character to see the five years out and in 1933 with great pomp they were married. But the point is, is that even with the most conscientious leaders, who knew each other daily and over decades, this mirage of caste still had them - I think the only phrase is, by the throat; It still clung on until 1933 and it was after the epic fast that Gandhi changed his whole venue. That is to say he chose a new field for activity. He realized that since probably 1915-16 he had been working with the Congress leaders forming the Congress Party, inculcating a sense of leadership of the young men and women coming up. So that we have seen up to now consistently, Gandhi and Congress are one. But in 1933 Gandhi changed. He set aside Congress as his field of activity. Or, if we view him as I view him as a scientist, he set aside his congressional field of inquiry and changed venue and went over to the harijans, the untouchables. So that we find him in late 1933, 1934, making an enormous tour of India - eight, nine months he visited every major province in India, including Assam way up in the jungles, Burma those areas. And I am reminded by the same technique that Gandhi used when he first came back to India permanently from South Africa, he took a year off to make a tour of India. And I think in a no uncertain terms 1933, 34 marks a new beginning for Gandhi. That he had recognized that the experiment with homegrown, self-disciplined and raised, spiritual politicians he had come up with a not so very promising crop. The leaders were there. And in fact, in a couple of years there were to be elections. The first real elections in India. And the Congress Party would sweep the nation. But there would be a big to-do over whether one should take office - whether one should as a Gandhian accept the electorate office under the aegis of Congress rather than the new field of inquiry which Gandhi had already initiated. So that we find the leadership under individuals coming up like [Jawaharlal] Nehru and [Sadar] Patel. And many others who would become recognizable later on, ten years later, when India gained its independence, we find Gandhi searching for a new crop, a new field of inquiry, a new bunch of individuals that he could rely on. And it's very much the - the way in which a masterful general looking over a campaign of many years and a broad spread of troops and alignments, and recognizing that the battle would have to have a change, a major change, and there would have to be a marshalling of new forces because what one had to work with already had somehow decayed in the process of formation. That is to say, in the engendering of human manifestation there is a long plastic period - a transformative period - the longer it is kept the better. It's sort of the suspension of final judgment. It's keeping the creative flow alive. And as long as you can do that there's still a process of interchange possible, but there comes a time when forms are precipitated out of human endeavor. We simply can't help that, even a very great yogi like Gandhi knew that the time had come. And when the forms precipitated out in 32, 33 he saw that they would not work. They would be sufficient for gaining independence for India, yes. They would be sufficient for normal concourse of taking over from the British. Those things could be done and they were done. But the individuals who were constellated, the forms of relationality between them, and the bridging to the people, were insufficient for the vision that Gandhi wanted to recognize. We had the very same situation in this country in the 1820s. When under the aegis of the great mind of [Thomas] Jefferson and the administrations of [James] Madison, and [John] Quincy Adams, and [James] Monroe, the United States moved towards a new kind of constellation. And just when the forms were to be precipitated out, there was a miscarriage of the Jeffersonian democracy and what you got instead of someone like James Madison you got Andrew Jackson. And the whole process had to start over. And of course, instead of going into politics the - the force of the American vision went back out to the countryside. Went to Emerson and Thoreau in Concord, and went back into the pot to cook a little longer. To - to wait for a new form to come out because it could be seen by the 1830s that Jacksonian democracy was going to be a rough and ready tool for whoever was clever enough to use it.
The same thing happened in India in the 1930s. And Gandhi was enough of a sage, enough of a shrewd politician, to see that he had come up fulsome for a political victory, but empty-handed for producing the kind of universal man that was needed to liberate man for once and for all from his travail. So, he went back to the drawing boards. He toured the country again. Left himself open. He was searching. And very much like a old hermetic master not having any plan in mind, not having any sense of design in mind, but just moving in a conscientious way creating a reverberating pattern in his motions, looking for the sign, looking for the omens - the tell-tale qualities by which the intelligence always in its primordial wholeness augers the moment. Because there is always in the whole flow of the moment the key to its wholeness. The structure is always there. What is required is a - an ultimate openness to the whole of it, to let it circulate in one's sensibility, one's intelligence until the images begin to occur in their paralleling's. For Gandhi - he went through the entire national tour and nothing came up. He went into 1935 feeling somewhat ill at ease with himself. We find him writing in the newspaper - which used to be called Young India now called Harijan - writing again and again about the villages, as if the only idea, area, that still occurred to him as being fruitful was somehow with the harijans and with the villages - village work, village reconstruction - that somewhere in there was the set of coordinates where the vision could be seen.
1936 came. Nehru came back from a long stay in Europe. He became the president of the Congress for that year. In fact, for 36 and 37 both, Nehru was the president. Whatever he wished to have instituted was in fact instituted. And then the next years - 38 to 39 - a very radical individual a man named S. C. Bose [Subhas Chandra Bose] - B-O-S-E - came in and was president of the Congress. Very forthright and yet pushy individual. One who differed somewhat from Nehru. Nehru said I believe that I've understood history. In fact, he had written a huge book called Glimpses of World History, which were letters from prison to his daughter. And he said that he had become a socialist - not a Gandhian but socialist. S. C. Bose had organized an inaugural parade for himself where he rode in khadi in a bullock cart to the inauguration but it was pulled by 51 royal Brahman bulls. The image of the Royal fallacy beginning to creep in. Gandhi in fact was so perturbed by this flamboyant effrontery that he came in very hard against S. C. Bose in many speeches and forced a change in the individual. But it was still there.
So, all during these years - 35, 36, 37, up to the beginning of 1938 - while he searched it became apparent that the world situation was also turning in this monstrously grim way. The National Socialist Party in Germany had in fact come into power in 1933. So that we find there again that the European scene was beginning to congeal. It was beginning to have its forms precipitated out and these were very highly magnetized images. The National Socialist Party under the leadership of [Adolf] Hitler was an extraordinarily electrifying stage show. And at the same time while India was having its forms precipitated out with the young leaders going either for socialism or for violence, or perhaps for some kind of modified Gandhi pose. You had at the same time in the Soviet Union the great purges of Stalin coming up. You had the Great Depression in the United States. And Roosevelt's tussle with trying to find some way to make America work. So, it seemed that the world was suddenly thrust in the 30s, about 1933, into a situation where it was simply raining peril. Everywhere that one looked the forms of power were beginning to take their stand and the powerlessness of individuals was becoming more and more apparent. So that by 1937 the world looked as grim as it perhaps has looked for many a century. The gap, the gulf between a conscientious individual who would not pick up a gun and not shoot some other man from disagreement. That individual was being swept under the rug, while the armies of concerted violence were gaining the forearm everywhere in the world.
It was in this situation that Gandhi finally found the fulcrum. He finally found the place to go. The condition to emphasize. Because he was like a master strategist who used not his mind and the ideas but his entire life. He would move himself like a major piece on the board to the spot. And go through the activity himself which he wanted to focus in upon. And if we do, we find the symbolism there. And then we can read the temperature of the times.
He chose the most violent area of India to go to - the North-West Frontier Provinces. Those provinces which today border Pakistan and Afghanistan. And even today - 1983 as this lecture is being given - there are more than 1 million refugees living in tents along the same frontier. It has been since time eternal one of the most violent interfaces of world civilizations. It was in fact through the Khyber Pass area that the invading armies of Alexander the Great came and advanced as far as Taxila - down in the plain. It was there that Gandhi went in 1938 to bring the armfuls of relentless possibilities to set them down in this most violent of interfaces as if it were the place where the plates of history met and disappeared or rose up. And it was as if along this fault line of time and civilization that Gandhi positioned himself to deliver what has become the finest statement of his entire program. And the fact of the matter is that this refinement was given not to university professors, not to the Congress leaders, not even to the persons who were his chosen field of inquiry - the harijans - but to the violence-prone Pathans [Pashtuns] of the North-West Frontier. The very tall, strong individuals who normally are associated around the world and through history as being individuals with swords hanging even at supper time from their waist. In the 30s the image of a Pathan would have been cartridge belts strung over the chests and thoughts in his mind of who he was going to get next. The idea of blood feuds going on for generations. The idea of incredible family plans to massacre some other group totally. This was the psychology. This was the decor of the scene that Gandhi chose. And he chose it well.
And just as there is a recursive function to any large strategic action. That is to say, whenever there is a comprehensive wave towards expression, there always occurs some focal point independent of the wave of expression that is its complement at the center of the ignorance. At the center of the not-knowing. There's always that. And so, a sage generally will look for that recursive outrigger of the very possibilities that he's engendering somewhere in the never-never-land. And he showed up as an individual who's come down to us in history known as Abdul Ghaffar Khan. A very tall Pathan - probably 6' 6" or around in there. This is what he looked like at one time. If you've seen the film Gandhi [1982 feature film] they portrayed him as that very, very tall man. Extraordinarily huge. One of my favorite photographs of Gandhi is with Ghaffar Khan and Gandhi and a couple other individuals - Dr. Sushila Nayar and Pyarelal [Nayar] and Mahadev Desai - going, arm linked in armed, up the slopes to see the ruins - the archaeological ruins at Taxila. The place where Alexander was stopped, not with swords, but with the wisdom of the Buddhist Mahayana masters at the time, who simply displayed such elegance of understanding and learning and penetration to Alexander and his generals that they were totally stopped. They hadn't a single argument to offer; a single glory to promise; a single military vision that wasn't patiently analyzed and before their eyes made to evaporate into the foolishness of boys at play are not men carrying an ecumenical vision of civilization at all. A chapter unfortunately lost in great part to history but remembered in India; remembered by Gandhi in 1938 so he went there. He went to the very place. He said I have come to the place where ahimsa was born and was a victor to the world power at the time. Because Alexander the Great to his enemies was just as terrifying as Hitler was in his day. The Macedonian phalanx which had been unbeaten across the entire face of the known world was very much in its day what the Panzer divisions were in the late 1930s, early 1940s. So, Gandhi masterfully positioning himself exactly at the only spot of comprehension. That someone strategically could get in view all of the details that counted. All of the aspects that were viable and needing to be brought together in his time, but also all the depths of history that needed to be consulted and wove into the fabric of some resolution of sanity - some plan of action; some way out of the impasse that was increasing. And by September 1938 it was very clear - this was long after Munich - it was very clear what was going to happen in the world. There was no doubt in anyone's mind by late 1938 that the world was on the edge of catastrophe. And where it would lead very few people would know.
In the wonderful biography that D.G. - D.G. Tendulkar has written on Abdul Ghaffar Khan [Abdul Ghaffar Khan: Faith is a Battle] he has this: "in an article, If I were A Czech,' [Czechoslovakian] dated Peshawar, October 6, 1938, in which he characterized the Anglo-French agreement with Hitler a peace without honor,' Gandhi wrote: I want to say to the Czechs and through them to all those nationalities which are called small' or weak' ... that the small nations must either come to be ready to come under the protection of the dictators or to be a constant menace to the peace of Europe. In spite of all the goodwill in the world England and France cannot save them. If I were a Czech, therefore, I would free these two nations from the obligations to defend my country. And yet, I would not be a vassal to any nation or body. To seek to win in a clash of arms would be pure bravado. Not so, in defying the might of one who would deprive me of my independence, I refuse to obey his will and perish unarmed in the attempt. In doing so, though I lose the body, I saved my soul, that is my honor...'
But' said a comforter, Hitler knows no pity, your spiritual effort will avail nothing before him.'
My answer is, You may be right... If Hitler is unaffected by my suffering, it does not matter. For I shall have lost nothing worth while. My honor is the only thing worth preserving. That is independent of Hitler's pity. But, as a believer in non-violence, I may not limit its possibilities. Hitherto he and his like have built upon their invariable experience that men yield to force. Unarmed men, women and children offering nonviolent resistance without any bitterness in them would be a novel experience to them. Who can dare say that it is not in their nature to respond to the higher and finer forces? They have the same soul I have.'
And so, with great remarkable penetration Gandhi brought in this place at that time the focus of the only point that cannot be lost. That the workability of ahimsa and satyagraha and sarvodaya pivots around the unmistakable, irreducible actuality that they have the same soul. That there is no being so far removed by design, or purpose, or condition, or even madness, that he does not share the same soul. He is not excluded from the continuity of the life-wave which manifests itself as human being. And therefore, all of the arguments that are brought to bear are in effect rationalizations upon the fact of habituated experience. That, remarkably convincing though they might be, in their array, or individually in their impressive forcefulness, they are by structure, by yogic realization wrong - they are not right. That there is no rationalization that makes them right. There's no accumulation of brilliant arguments that could make them right. There is no lesson so bitter and undigestible that could make them right - they are wrong. And Gandhi alone it seemed in the world at this time opening his hands, opening his eyes, inviting everyone to do likewise, and saying where in reality could we go other than here. And the whole program of non-violence, of ahimsa - just as it was presented to Alexander by the great unknown, unnamed, untitled Mahayana masters in Gandhara 2,300 years ago - the inescapable vision that comes to all those who will pause and have it, is that we are related structurally at our most primordial, realistic manifestation. And if we channel the situations that occur in phenomenal time-space increasingly towards their universality, towards the historical parallels, towards the understanding of the widest ecology of what is going on, we will inevitably come closer and closer to understanding - each in our own way no matter where we start from, no matter what process or what periodicity we approach it - we will come closer and closer to the truth. The truth is one. That we are one. That there is no way to force, or cajole, or trick the unity of the universe into real multiplicity. That it cannot happen. It does not in fact ever happen. It never in all of the experience of all time and space has ever been.
So, Gandhi brought himself in this single point but surrounded it with an increasingly formative context of implication. Now we find - Tendulkar did an eight-volume biography of the Mahatma - and he was working up to this enormous event. And its enormity of course at the time was seen by very few individuals. There were probably, besides Gandhi, just a handful - I would say no more than five or six individuals in the world at the time who saw this - there was Ghaffar Khan and his brother, there was Vinoba, there was Pyarelal, Mahadev Desai, maybe Patel. Very few others who understood the ramifications of what was being done at the time, but the key to it is that after the epic fast, after the 1933 precipitation of forms.
The very first chapter in Volume 4 of The Mahatma by Tendulkar is called "Village Industries." Village industries because it is the quality of how we earn our living that most poignantly convinces us of where the truth is. That our perception of the unity of the divine does not come most readily in philosophic arguments, or even religious rituals no matter how elegant and ornate and time-honored they are, but the most convincing forceful arguments are the ways in which we live - It is the daily life. How do we obtain our food today? How do we obtain the shelter we have? The clothing we have? How do we obtain that for our children? For our families? In opposition or in cooperation with others, how does this happen? How does it in fact turn out? What are we going to do today and what are we going to do tomorrow to affect this? This is the line of inquiry that is most poignant. So, we come to village industries because it was there already in 34 not fully visible to Gandhi that he was already searching in the right place. He's already putting the focus on the fact that if we pay attention to how we live every day, how we gain our livelihood - the Tolstoy phrase bread labor.' Bread labor. You want a source of morality? Bread labor. How are you going to earn your bread tomorrow? That's the root of morality, not a code that you could recite however beautifully, elegantly to yourself or anyone else. What are you going to do tomorrow to earn that livelihood? That's the source. That's the tap road morality. And if you call it sila, or if you call it morality, or any other name, there it is because it's what you're actually going to do tomorrow. Now that as a focus anyone can keep in mind, in heart, in perspective. And it's practical. You needn't convince yourself that it's real - that you have to do it - because you're going to do it tomorrow and you're going to do it the next day. And if you're keeping track on the movement of that spotlight, of that focus, you can show yourself what kind of morality you actually have. It's very easy to see.
So, village industries. So, in the village industries 34 and 35 there were about a quarter of a million people in India earning their living at that time from kadhi. Spinning and weaving and counted for few tens of thousands, or there might have been about 270 thousand people out of 350 million people. So, you can see that after 20 years of activity it had only scratched the surface. To use that old colloquial phrase. Yes, it was famous; Yes, it was big. People paid lip service to it. They did not daily do it. They do not today in India daily do it. After almost 70 years of concerted effort it still doesn't obtain because of the simple fact that everyone is keeping track of the score and not keeping track of what they're doing with the ball.
And so, Gandhi is one of these real universal geniuses. A man of such incredible insight that he almost had to argue with people to convince them that they should be looking at their own hands. What are your hands doing? And he had longed for 15 years, almost 20 years, had tried to get the point across symbolically, physically, put your hands together. Don't just give a namaste make them work that spinning wheel. Make them bring the chaos into the thread and then learn how to weave that thread into a fabric and cut that fabric into a cloth which you can wear because there is the only real ecology of metaphorical philosophy that you need to know. That you can do all those transformations with your hands because you're doing it every day. It's the only thing you have to teach yourself.
So, by 1936, 37, realizing that the Congress Party, which was going to be a very strong political structure - it still is in India - but it wasn't ever going to do the trick. It was never going to be the non-violent army that Gandhi had hopes for. So, he already had turned away, had already begun walking away. But he was doing at this time in a covered personal way. In 1947 we'll see him when he does it openly. An old man, older even still. 1947 will take his lacquered bamboo staff and walk away and say it's all wrong. Much like [Jiddu] Krishnamurti had to do a couple years ago, disowned the Krishnamurti Foundation, saying you've fallen the way that all organizations have fallen. You've believed that you're moving around the building blocks of power by your authority. And you're just adding to the illusion. You're just padding the sense of maya. Not to say leading those who don't know yet. The young ones who haven't yet the experienced. Leading them away down the garden path.
In 1937 trying to again look for the field of inquiry - he'd been working with the harijans, he had not yet got to Gandhara, not yet got to the North-West Frontier Province. Before the year 1937 he felt that somehow education might have been the realm. So, there was an enormous meeting, a conference, an All India Conference on Education in 1937 [All India National Education Conference; Wardha Educational Conference]. I brought a couple of copies of the book that's still in print - printed in 1937 [titled: Educational Reconstruction (1937); or, Basic National Education: Report of the Zakir Husain Committee and the Detailed Syllabus (1937)]. It sold so few copies that in 1983 you could still buy the printing from 1937. We've got a few down in the gift store. They'll be there and next year sometime I'll buy them just out of sentimental sake. It's unbelievable.
In 1937 the Conference on Education came out with a series of proposals about national reconstruction based upon the motion of basic education. And the taproot of basic education was that every child should have primarily a handicraft around which the metaphors of learning would have some real basis. They would have some way to assimilate what was given to them as information. What was presented to them as learning in a personable, coordinated, individual way based upon a natural ecology of activity, which the hands focuses the cutting edge. It could be spinning, it could be ceramics, any basic handicraft. And that before you bombard the child with ideas. Before you draw his allegiances out by wonderful flashing images. What can be more flashing than the arcades of computer games? It's all a sham. Absolute sham. Before any of that you provide a structure of understanding. A meaningful way of assimilating the information, the knowledge, the impress, the ocean of images by giving them a way to some personal fulcrum with themselves - some way to go in to see the world. Because it doesn't matter how big the world is, it matters only that man has some template that he can hold up to measure it by. And if he can do that, he can plan himself. But if you don't give him that then he wanders and responds only to those drums that are the loudest and those lights that are the flashiest. And that's what's wrong. And it always has just been that. There are no bad guys. The only thing that's wrong is that ignorance still obtains. We are still babies crawling out of our cribs before we learn how to walk and grabbing onto things because they're bright and colorful and their mine. And once you have them you can't have them. That's the ignorance. And that's the root that Gandhi was addressing himself to again and again.
And in 1937 with the basic education, it cleared his mind enough to be able to see the range of mountains in the north of India where the Himalayas and the Pamirs come together. And it occurred to him there, where Ghaffar Khan had his terrain. A man they called the Frontier Gandhi.' The Frontier Gandhi, Badshah Khan. Well when they sent someone ahead to make plans and inquiries, they went to his home and the people there said oh he's, he's never at home. Where is he? He's in the villages. He keeps going from village to village. That's all he does until he'd get into a scrape and the British arrest him. He spends a couple of years in jail. And then when he comes back, he comes here for a little while and then he's out there working again all the time. That was the man that Gandhi went to see. And he went to see him twice. He went to see him in May for a week. And then in September he went for a month. Because he realized that that was the guy. That was the place. And he brought back into the picture at that time, Vinoba a little bit at the educational conference and then Ghaffar Khan into his life. And from there on out it seemed that - Pyarelal, Mahadev Desai, Ghaffar Khan, Vinoba - these would be the individuals that were really the generation who were to produce the Gandhian vision of man. Not those individuals who came into political power. Ten years before they came into political power, they had already been seen for what they were capable of. And this is not to berate them; they were great individuals. Nehru was a great statesman. But they were not the universal social yogis that Gandhi was looking for. The individuals who were really not there themselves, they were out in the villages with the individual here, the individual there, and over a lifetime with the millions. And that's where they were. But it was peculiar - peculiar - peculiar that this should be so. In the educational angle which I have to stress just for a minute here. He said, "I hold that the highest development of the mind and the soul is possible under such a system of education. Literacy is not the end of education. Not even the beginning. It is only one of the means whereby man and women... woman can be educated. Literacy in itself is no education. I would therefore begin the child's education by teaching it a useful handicraft. And by enabling it to produce from the moment it begins its training." That is to say go through some concerted motion with some material from nature and change its form into something useful so that the child immediately understands that he is a molder of reality. He works with nature and he produces all usefulness. But that in this he has to keep a continuity of the flow in order to finish it and do it. And this gives him all the motive, all the metaphor that he needs for integrity. It's the only way to teach it. They have to learn how to do it.
He said, "Only every handicraft has to be taught not merely mechanically, as it is done today, but scientifically. That is the child should know the why and the wherefore of every process." It isn't just sending them off to like a camp where they learn how to make beads. That's not it at all. It's the ability to see what are all these steps and phases. What is wood? What is clay? What is clay and its forming and fire and glaze and a cup? What are these transformations? Because it gives them, the child, the understanding that we facilitate in a very real way the motion of the world from its natural base as it is through the precipitation to forms that we wish to have. For usefulness and purpose. And what is that purpose? That purpose is to increasingly help disclose, in every small way, the truth of the situation. The actuality of the universe. That even with a small child producing a little bit of yarn to be woven into clothing, there is still the integrity of the universe there in that process. That given a chance to grow up in that way, in that mode, after ten or twenty years it's going to be hard to put handles of manipulation on those kinds of people because they aren't going to be very easily moved by threat or by lure. And Gandhi saying again and again that's exactly the point that the power people understand and that's why we're having no traction. Because anyone, regardless of what they believe, are holding on to it by authoritarian structures which recognized very really that there's going to be no one to boss around if you have a population of people who've grown up understanding the process of making things real themselves. You're going to have to talk with them individually every step of the way. And you're going to have to show that what you're doing actually leads to something good. And if you don't know what you're doing, well then no one's going to follow you, and you're going to end up alone.
So, he made his point by saying it's not that this won't work, it's that it will work inevitably that seems to be the lure of those individuals who would like to stop this. They understand all too well that there are going to be no chiefs and no Indians. That there's going to be human beings who have to get together and this is why he said again and again that a non-violent community acts only when it is unanimous. Now, unreformed, violent, authoritarian man is so addicted to his hodgepodge of pull and authority that it occurs to him that that's a total impossibility. How could human beings be unanimous? But the Gandhians say on the other hand from a totally different perspective that's the only way you can do anything. Because if there's someone who doesn't understand there may be something there. So, go over it again and again. Look at it until everyone understands and when it's unanimous then it happens effortlessly. And not only that it stays done. And you don't have to go through this every generation of trying to wait until somebody's forty or fifty or sixty years of age until they can understand what to do - can look over the hedge rows of all these labyrinths of obfuscation that are handed to every generation understand what there is to be done, but only have five or ten or fifteen years and limited traction to try and get something together to teach somebody. And maybe you get it across to one or two people and then they go through that experience, their generation. What Gandhi was after was to eliminate by solution the entire incredible mélange of problems once and for all. That there was no longer any piecemeal activity that was acceptable to man. We grew out of the sandbox. We got to the stage where if we don't work together, we're going to eliminate ourselves - simply.
So again, in this broad do-or-die kind of a presentation, Gandhi was showing that the issue is for us to see quite clearly that there are primary fundamental qualities and they all lead down to perception of truth. Satyagraha doesn't mean grasping your point, it means understanding the truth. And as long as there's someone who is saying I don't see it, then don't move. Go into it. Because it's a quality that should be there. Thus, a society based on these villages, which are like the little testing ground, little republics for universal man. A thousand, two thousand people. If they get if they get to the position where they can live with a sense of unanimity then it's going to be very easy for people to see that in fact it works well.
And so, from 1934 on, increasingly, the village reconstruction movement - centered around primarily basic education - became the coordinate, he spinning top, which was to be the center of Gandhian development. We'll see in the last three or four sessions of this course how after Gandhi died the story was not over at all, but the whole thing, the whole sequence of village reconstruction. It was called then, and is today called, gramdan - dan is a village. That there is a motion of integrity. There are Gandhian villages, there's plenty of them, there are hundred thousand Gandhian villages in India, but they're not covered by the press because they don't do the normal things they do the real thing. They move by unanimity to supply the basic needs of life of the community. And their teaching to see truthfulness and not to propound the authority. And of course, those individuals who are addicted to authority, these villages have no use to them, they don't do anything. You can't really tax them. You can't push them around. What can you do with them? Well you have to ignore them.
In 1937 at the basic education conference Vinoba Bhave was invited to speak. He said that the proposition that the primary education should be free and self-supporting had seemed to him to be self-evident the moment he read it. It may not be a new thing but it was presented in a new light. He was certain that all the ills of the world sprang from man having and the revolutionary proposal would cancel the ills at a stroke. Given his experience Vinoba Bhave said,
"I have an industrial home at Nalwadi where the boys from four to five miles are coming to do their eight-hour spinning, between 7:00 to 11:00 and 1:00 to 5:00. They have to leave home early in the morning. To give them their day's meal their mothers have to get up at a very early morning hour. When I examine the life they lead I find enough to learn there from. A legislation making education compulsory will not solve the problem. The problem will be solved only when we enable the children at the end of seven years to add substantially to the income of the home. The school atmosphere has to be revolutionized - the children's books, their posture, their way of talking, walking and so on. Most schools are nothing but dusty and dirty places. It's absurd to suggest that school masters will be slave drivers. Far from it. The schools will automatically evoke an unprecedented interest in the parents who keep vigilance with them."
So as early as 1937 there was the poignancy of a new vision. It had taken about four years for it to come up to the surface. And in 1938 it was broadcast very loud by the actuality of Gandhi's visit to the North-West Frontier Province. And this lesson at the time was seen by just a few individuals but it is those individuals that we will follow through the rest of the course - the second half of the course - because it is they who understood increasingly what needs to be done, why. And we'll see that by 1983 they have refined it very, very far indeed. We have come a long way. We no longer have the Model T. And we no longer have the kinds of clumsy satyagrahas that were there in the 20s, or the incredibly difficult one-man fast from the 30s. We have a real science of self-government that looks remarkably like something we recognize.
Well let's take a break. I'll be earning my living on the street. And then we'll go to the library after the break.
Sorry to speak so forcefully sometimes but the issues have been important to me for a long time. and most of the people that I started with in these concerns are... are gone. And so sometimes I get... I get haunted by conditions that are real to me but perhaps not so real to you. But the emphasis I think is still well-placed. We have to envision, and we're only able to get parts of this story, he gave away his ashram to the untouchables out across the river from Sabarmarti in 1933. And he moved his headquarters to the center of India - to Wardha. And in fact, he didn't even stay in Wardha, he went out to Sewagram which was a little tiny village even five miles further out. There wasn't any electricity. There wasn't anything. And people who should have known better said what are you doing? You know, we've worked really hard to get where we are. And without saying that's just the problem the old man just went to work again like a champion always does.
So, it was, it was interesting because there at Sewagram is where the Gandhian house was put up that has the charkha in the stucco on the side of it. When we get to The Pictorial Gandhi, we'll have that. And it had the picket fence. I guess they're about three and a half, four feet high, un-varnished wood pickets with just a simple little veranda and a couple of rooms. And then in the same little village there is an enormous structure that has a patio, a courtyard in the center. And has the building around all four sides. It's like this library. About this kind of dimension only much larger. And it was there that they experimented with the constructive programs. And you almost hear nothing at all about the constructive programs. But along with satyagraha and ahimsa, sarvodaya, not brahmacharya, even though it was very important to Gandhi. It was his life vow for 40 years, very important to him. At this time, he was making such a primordial change in himself that it began to manifest of course in, in primal images - it always does. It just kind of comes right up to the surface. And he had a dream in 1937 of wanting to see a naked woman. And he woke up and he was absolutely shocked because he had observed a vow of chastity for 40 years. And to him he was shocked where in me does this come from? And of course, in the morning when he talked it over, brought it out, it was a matter of terrifying concern to the moment to him. Where - where does this come from? Where in me is this still there? Why is it there? Why does a 70-year-old man have this kind of an image come to him? The fact is, is that his integrity went right down to the center line of the primordial core of the individual. That threshold where going beyond the individual no longer obtains as that individual. There's just the geometric patterning of the energy. And the dynamic universality of the sine wave of the life phenomena. He changed himself, changed his direction, at that core - at that level. And he says in here. He says, "It is self-acting. The soul persists even after death. Its existence does not depend on the physical body. Similarly, non-violence, or soul force too, does not need the physical aids for its propagation or effect. It acts independently of them. It transcends time and space."
So that while it was extremely difficult and dubious that it was understood for him to get across the niceties of satyagraha, when it came to the profundity of ahimsa, soul force, he was literally for years on end at a loss on how to convey this because it was not an arcane structure that needed to be understood by the mind no matter how refined. It was a sense of the universality of the motion of wholeness that transcends time and space and is not dependent upon physicality at all.
Now it's easy comparatively to train someone in yoga about the law of tapas. That you perform certain sacrifices and there's a law in the universe that those sacrifices build up a receptivity to the divine energy. And by tapas the yoga - yogi builds his discipline. But what he's talking about here transcends even that. That is not depended upon physicality no matter how well it's refined. No matter even if the purposes are for the universality. Hence where does man have a hedge? And the truth was that man has no hedge - he has no hidden handle. Which is why he can have no plan; no real strategy and he must work. The good person must ultimately recognize that he must work openly all the time. Which is why the need for absolute honesty and integrity is paramount, because unless you are working openly in honesty all the time nothing's happening; nothing can happen. So that the - the bottom-line was to have a transparency of honesty so open that whatever grace - can we use that word? - whatever grace is bestowing its notion upon man can have a way to work. Now if you say it in colloquial language it sounds like a sentimental homily that people have heard around the world in every religion: Man's misfortune is God's opportunity. A hundred percent out of our hands. But we cannot begin with that because if we begin with that as an idea it's an ultimate doubt - an ultimate skepticism that scotches any beginning whatsoever. It's a privileged realization in moments of profound insight, that we're helping along a motion of wholeness that moves independent of us anyway. But that by our cooperating to help you along we build an ethical structure in phenomenal time-space that is workable for that transcendency to manifest. And that in effect that's all we really can do. Describe it as we will, that is all that we can do.
And so, the simplicity of Gandhi was that of a practical man who had come to it a thousand times in his life and had seen that that's all that really can be done. Therefore, what can be taught is an ethic of making ourselves and our lives as honest and transparent as we can towards the best good that we can and let life happen.
So, when the generation who had begun to come into power said well you have no electricity. He said it's beside the point. It doesn't matter whether we have electricity or not. It doesn't matter that we're - we're here in farmland. And that increasingly people are not paying attention to us. We have to do the best we can, the right way because there's an enormous motion going on towards integrity that needs to be born and we're trying to make the only possible threshold through our honesty and our concerted effort through which the divine could ever pass into manifestation and bring that here. So, he says, "Soul force too does not need the physical deeds for its propagation representative acts independently of them. It transcends time and space. And it follows therefore that if non-violence becomes successfully established in one place its influence will spread everywhere."
If we do it right anywhere once, it's here. And it will move with the comprehensiveness of universal grace throughout the whole of humanity. And the only reason it has not so far is that it hasn't been done right ever once. And so, he would say to his people don't be discouraged - you've been at it twenty years; you've been at it thirty years; I've been at it forty-five years - it's nothing because we don't know when we're going to get it right because when we do that will be it. It will move through all of mankind. Vinoba is quoted later on and I'll dig it out for you - I'll get the specific. He said, "if it takes a thousand years or if it happens tomorrow, we're trying to be ready." Trying to be ready. So he says, "It follows therefore that if non-violence, if ahimsa, soul force, becomes successfully established in one place, its influence will spread everywhere so long as a single bandit robs somebody here - [He's giving this in a place called Pootmansaii (sp?)] - I shall say that our non-violence is not genuine."
So, he's constantly looking for the situation that is pure. Constantly moving toward the basic principle on which the practice of non-violence rests, is that what holds good in respect of yourself holds equally in respect of the whole universe and the quickest way to put the blinders up in yourself is to hate someone. Right away the wedges are coming up. The labyrinthian coils of innuendo begin curling around and you're done for immediately. As soon as you hate someone, immediately all that comes into interplay because it's been there structurally from the beginning. It is what hate is. It is what violence is. It is not a half way. It is what it is. And we're trying to not just overcome it, but we're trying to defuse it at its nuclear base. And if we do it right just once it'll be here in the manifest. All mankind in essence is alike. That is, in this basic regard all mankind is alike. Permitting a situation to occur where someone else can hate someone else, when you could have done something to mitigate it, is an immoral act on your part. An immoral act. Why? Because it allowed for them to manifest violence and it's contagious. It's like the worst plague. Violence is like a real plague. It is so subtle and it creeps up in the most incredible canny, uncanny ways. So, the knack is - is increasingly to have situations that permit a feeling tone of the universal flow unhedged by violence of any kind whatsoever. And to give it a name in English he called it soul force. Soul force. Soul force.
"What is therefore possible for me is also possible for everybody. Pursuing further this line of reasoning I came to the conclusion that if I could find a non-violent solution of the various problems that arise in one particular village, then the lesson learned from it would enable me to tackle in a nonviolent matter all similar problems in India."
And one could add anywhere. So, he went like a scientist to his bevatron. Only his bevatron was the purity in the high energy simplicity of a single village in the center of India. Because when you're keeping track of everything, the most simplest actions become just suffused with the most complexity. If you try to keep a continuity of awareness, like in a light samadhi or something, available for several hours at a time - just watching leaves move in the sunlight is almost more than you can handle. It's just incredible.
"And so I decided," he says. This is a speech to the fierce Pathans in Gandhara. This is what he was telling them - He's laying it out. He's opening his hands and saying this is what I'm doing and I've been doing a long time. Probably as long as all of you have been alive. And this is what I'm doing.
"And so, I decided to settle down in Sevagram. [Sevagram means service village.] My sojourn in Sevagram has been an education for me. My experience with the harijans, [the untouchables,] has provided me with what I regard as an ideal solution for Hindu-Muslim problems which does away with all these different pacts. And so, if you can set things right, say here at Utmanzai your whole problem will be solved. Even our relations with the English will be transformed and purified if we can show to them that we really do not stand in need of the protection for which their police and the army are ostensibly kept."
And he gives a little parable in there. He talks about our primordial man made an error, mistake. That there was a serpent, poisonous serpent, who was his servant and wanted to protect him from that which could harm him. And so, man had grown to the point of trying to get over needing this poisonous serpent to guard him from others. And so, he took the poisonous fangs away from the serpent. But the serpent said well now are you going to be safe maybe you better leave me with my hiss at least to warn you. And man decided that well maybe he should. That's the fatal flaw. Hedging our bets on the homes and the integrity of the divine is man's downfall because it supplants the actuality with his supposition of what it should be - or might be, or what it could possibly be at its best. And it's that false idea that magnetizes the whole range of images. It polarizes the whole mountainous area of conceptions. And the mind works overtime trying to piece together some strategy of protection. And we're in it again. Because everyone does the same thing. Everybody is an arsenal of protections. How are we going to do it? How are you going to stop this? The only way you can stop it is together, to come to the truth of the situation. What is that truth? It's increasingly apparent that in order for any of us to really live with integrity, we've got to all live with integrity. That so-and-so's violence interferes with my ahimsa. And likewise, and so forth. So that we've got to do it in an ecology of honesty together.
So that increasingly then, this sense of - as Gandhi observed, "There is no such thing as Gandhism. There's no idea of what I'm trying to do because as soon as you make it an idea you've already done a violence to the integrity of the whole flow of what soul force could manifest. There's no such thing as Gandhism and I do not want to leave any sect after me. I do not claim to have originated any new principle or doctrine. I have simply tried in my own way to apply the eternal truths to our daily lives. Therefore, there is no question of my leaving any code like the Code of Manu. (It's a classical Hindu law code.)"
Someone pointed out to him - or was it - no it was to Pyarelal about two months, three months after Gandhi was assassinated, they'd already carved a statue of Gandhi with the glasses and the staff on one of the Hindu temples. And there he was with the ten thousand other gods and goddesses already put in. And I think Pyarelal - I think he just shook his head. I don't think he smashed the statue. But it was a graphic example of misunderstanding exactly what it was that he was doing.
He is accused by civilized people of being an anti-intellectual, when in fact he was of poignant intelligence refusing to go into Gandhisms because as soon as you play with that kind of dice you've loaded the game and you're never going to understand what's going on. So, it isn't a question of anti-intellectual; it's a question of first doing something to get your basis for metaphor whole and really related to nature. Then being able to check yourself out. Can you come clean? Can you live openly and honestly for days on end, weeks on end, maybe years on end? And if you can maybe you get into a position where you begin to require that that be so with those around you. And then maybe something like an understanding of universal human community could arise in your experience. Not the idea of it, but the perception that just maybe that direction could be explored. And he says again and again the more I explore this the more I realize that there's no doubt whatsoever that this is man's future. that's the only future we have.
Well we're going to see him in World War II next time. I plan to have you speak but I can see by the silver on my wrist that it's time - it's beginning to tarnish. So, I have to go. There'll be some time when we cannot have deadlines... We can have patios and fireplaces...
END OF RECORDING