Sarvodaya and the New World Coming

Transcript (PDF)

Gandhi
Presentation 11 of 13

Sarvodaya and the New World Coming:
The New Social Philosophy and its Religious Practice in India
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 15, 1983

Transcript:

This is the eleventh lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on Gandhi. Tonight's lecture is entitled Sarvodaya and a New World Coming: The New Social Philosophy and its Religious Practice in India. The date is September the 15th, 1983.

...Through a difficult transition in the history of human thought. It's a great difficulty to try and form for you in a reasonable discursive way the revolution that happened in thought from 1951 to about 1969. It's very difficult to explain because it called for an ordination of doubt in eastern and western thought that very few people in the world had at the time. In fact, recognizing the almost superhuman impossibility of understanding the full impact of the movement at the time. Vinoba, taking the responsibility as the conscientious forerunner of humanity in this direction, quickly outstripped even the closest persons to him and by 1969, was so far ahead in his thinking of where the development of India was going that almost no one was able to follow him completely. And so, it finally devolved down to a basic question of faith that the wise man, the warrior sage, the walking saint, knew what he was doing and, therefore, if we would just go along, help, and cooperate, we would come to eventually a position of being able to understand.

Now this position of Vinoba's has to be understood in terms of the change of thinking that occurred vis-a-vis the term satyagraha. Not only the term satyagraha, as an intellectual conception evocative of a universal idea, but really as a workable notion to inspire and enthuse and inform the actions of real human beings in a practical world on a massive scale. Now all this sounds complicated, and it actually is more complicated than it sounds. And I'll do my best to try and make this clear.

Satyagraha was what Gandhi called "soul force," and he actually meant soul force like we would talk about electricity or electromagnetism or gravitation - that it was a universal force. That man as a spiritual focus is able to, like a prism, focus this soul force and to play its spectrum out upon the world and actually direct this force to activities.

The basic activity was one of creative manifestation. Because of this, because soul force was of this caliber of dynamic reality to him, he would frequently develop programs that would encourage the development of the whole person. One such program, if you recall through the lecture series, was the development of khadi, of hand-spinning. It was not only to produce thread or yarn or handmade cloth, it was also to balance out psychologically the individual, whether he'd be literate or illiterate, no matter what station of life. It was also a perfect metaphor of bringing mind and hands and life purpose all to a single purpose, unified. It was also an element of basic education, that small children could be taught very early on how to spin, how to weave, how to produce their own clothing, how to trade it for other goods so that the children would have, by the time they were 9 or 10 years old, some basic metaphor of an ecology of responsible action in the world, that they could go out and plant seeds. Those seeds would grow into plants, that they tended them. They could harvest those plants. They could make a usable fiber from some of those plants. They could weave it together and actually make cloth. They could make clothing from this, and that they could exchange for other goods.

So that khadi had become a primary example of teaching the basic integrity of life and the responsibility that the life process always resides with the individual human being. Thus, the individual human being became, for Gandhi, a sacred manifestation of God, and that this was not due to any extraordinary qualities of a given individual, but it was structurally there as the primordial reality of the individual so that every single human being was divine.

This is why satyagraha was not a weapon against anyone but was a method of resolving all possible conflicts by a mutual epiphany, by a realization together, that there was a truth to an issue that was consonant with and resonant with, a truth which both parties had an opportunity to plumb in themselves individually. Thus, the solution was not a compromise, and it was not an imposition by either party. It was, in fact, a discovery mutually that there was a truth of the matter. But this was so difficult because it required a transformation of the mind. From politics to yoga, one had to really be a yogi to understand this and make this work.

If you were using it as an element of manipulation for political ends, you were forever preventing yourself from understanding the process, from ever really participating in the process. Thus, satyagraha would often decay very rapidly, almost without anyone realizing it, into another phenomenon known as duragraha - "dura" means enduring or stubborn. Duragraha is really stubborn resistance. "I won't do it. Nothing can make me do it." Of course, if one does not have the spiritual perspective, duragraha and satyagraha are so close together in an external shell-like presentation that it's only much later and after great suffering and hardships that one realizes that you were not participating in satyagraha at all, but in duragraha.

Many of the so-called peace marches were actually coercive in their essential nature. Many of the activities that have gone under the name of nonviolence, especially in this country [United States of America], have been examples of duragraha and have not worked accordingly because of that false nature.

In order to clear this up, Vinoba kept looking for a way to express, instead of a resistance to something destructive, a cooperation with something constructive. It's an assistance instead of a resistance. You assist the good rather than resist the evil. By doing this, he shifted the dynamic away from the temptation to decay and sink into duragraha to an open wondering: what shall we in fact assist? How shall we, in fact, assist?

Thus, sarvodaya was born in the time of Gandhi, but became the basic working tool Vinoba. When satyagraha, instead of being a lens of soul force, which one would bring into operation whenever there was evil discovered or wrong come up against in a classic way, satyagraha was then seen as no less whatsoever, but rather as a tool, if one likes, or, better yet, as the beginning of a motion whose other side was ahinsa, nonviolence.

As long as we were able to call it nonviolence, a- or non-, hinsa, violence, as long as we call it ahinsa, it was also a negative. Nonviolence, the term nonviolence, actually has very deep connotations of negativity and, if I may speak in terms of logical sense for just a moment, presupposes a universe of violence as a condition obtaining in all cases of application.

Vinoba changed this and instead of referring to it as ahinsa, nonviolence, he made it a dynamic active positive and called it ahmsa. Ahmsa. So that the very pronunciation, ahmsa ... It's almost like amen or alms or something like that. So, ahmsa became a positive dynamic, and its dynamic thrust was contiguous with satyagraha as soul force in a positive way.

So that the phenomenon of satyagraha and nonviolence in Gandhi's thought became clarified in Vinoba's thought and became a positive dynamic motion of satyagraha and ahmsa together so that soul force always came out and was manifesting itself in ahmsa.

Vinoba, in searching for a way in which this could be focused for the human being, for the individual, for the group, for the society, suddenly realized the astounding perspicacity of Gandhi, that the day before he died, he wrote what was called, in retrospect, his last will and testament where he asked the Congress Party to disband itself.

He said, "This country does not need a massive political machine, and I want the Congress Party to transform itself from a political machine seeking parliamentary hegemon to transform itself into a society of service for the people." Lok Sewak Sangh, they call it in Hindustan. These servants of the people, of course, notion was unacceptable to the newly won political powers that the Congress Party had. However, there were many Gandhians who were able to understand that there must be a continuity from Gandhi to the post-Gandhian era.

And so, what was formed was an all-India service society for all people, and it has a very long, complex title and name. The short form of understanding this would be to use the term which Vinoba singled out as being most characteristic of this new understanding, and that is Sarvodaya, the welfare of all, meaning 100%, all. So that this motion, this river of life from grasping the truth, not as a weapon, not as a realization by which to cleverly or not so cleverly lever your way in the world, but as a basic yogic realization which has continuity to what you do in application in the world. So, that satyagraha and ahmsa as a wave form of universal soul energy then acquired a basic continuity by being put within the creative circle of Sarvodaya.

This was the form that was in Vinoba's mind for three years, from the time Gandhi was killed until the spring of 1951, because a yogi on that level doesn't think in terms of the regular forms and ideas and images which the prosaic mind has. This was their enlarged grand strategy.

Liddell Hart, a great writer on military strategy, once made a good distinction. He said there's such a thing as strategy. Then there's such a thing as grand strategy. It is the total picture at all times. A real great general not only has a sense of tactics and strategy, but he also has a human understanding of the grand strategy.

So, Vinoba carrying this around, was looking for some way to creatively manifest this Sarvodaya circle in the world. It was in the Telangana area of Hyderabad state, as we talked about last week, where he found the notion of Bhoodan, land gift. B-H-O-O-D-A-N, Bhoodan, land gift.
With this discovery that he could claim land. He used the great Mahabharata epic as a template in his mind. In the Mahabharata, there are five Pandeva brothers who are fighting to reclaim their kingdom, their land. But there was a sixth brother, Karna, who does not go into the regular warfare scheme. And so, Vinoba came up with the plan of asking for one-sixth of the land of those who had land. Holding that one-sixth share in trust, he began with the very simple way of saying, "I want you to adopt me into your family. Consider me an heir along with the rest of your children. Only I would like my share of the inheritance now, not for myself but for the landless poor." By doing this over and over again, he began to collect an amazing acreage. In fact, within several weeks, he had collected about 1200 acres this way.

Nehru, who would become a political Gandhian - We have to realize that there were three basic groups of Gandhians after his assassination. There were the political Gandhians like Nehru. There were the institutional Gandhians like the Gandhi Peace Foundation and so forth. Then there were the revolutionary Gandhians like Vinoba, revolutionary in the sense of they wanted to make one complete pattern, one complete circuit of life ring true.

Vinoba once said that the ... The old Sanskrit word for revolution is kranti, and he heard students chanting, "Kranti! Kranti! Kranti!" He observed that if they had really understood, they would say it just once. Kranti is plenty because a revolution understood in all of its fullness, one is enough, one is plenty.

Well, Nehru as a political Gandhian got wind of what Vinoba was doing as a revolutionary Gandhian. Of course, Nehru, being a very astute political master, wanted to somewhat keep tabs on the situation, so he did what a very wise politician does: he invites his co-worker for a conference to Delhi to sound him out. This is a much easier way than sending spies or arresting someone or ordering them to come.

So, he sent him an invitation. Vinoba, of course, accepted it. And, of course, because he did not believe in taking modern methods of transportation - it would have interrupted his yogic pace. He said walking is the correct pace of thinking. He's known as the walking saint of India. He walked from Hyderabad state to New Delhi, and it took quite a long time. It was about 800 miles. And on his way there, he was collecting more and more land.

Now as he got to Delhi, it became apparent that he had collected enough land, he collected somewhat near 200 square miles of land on this pilgrimage. While there were some newspaper reports saying this is amazing that a human being in this gritty age could collect 200 square miles of land in just a few months, and yet there were other articles saying if we compute this, at the rate that he's going, he will manage to free India in about 19,500 years, and then let it go with that.

But Vinoba, of course, even though he read international newspapers a half hour every day of his life, was a yogic and not a politician. What he was looking for was just to keep the integrity of the flow of the soul force, knowing that if you keep that flow open, it will eventually manifest the right shapes, and the right shapes will come together in the right ritual, and they will make the right pattern. The only thing man has to worry about ever is his honesty and the part of it, because as soon as he is dishonest, the entire situation changes its character and very quickly decays. Man seems to be almost the particle in the universal bubble chamber. It doesn't take very long for misintegrity to distort a manifesting spiritual shape. It goes very, very quickly.

As Vinoba approached Delhi, he was thinking in his mind, according to his writings, of what to do when he arrived in the big city with the big political gang and his old cronies, Nehru and Rajendra Prasad and a number of individuals there. And so, searching in himself for the right way to present the emerging nascent Sarvodaya order, when he got to Delhi, he went to the area of Delhi where Gandhi was cremated, and next to the cremation spot constructed a reed hut. During his conferring with Nehru, he was there in the reed hut next to the cremation gap. Now this image drew ... At the time the great Bombay Statesman newspaper recorded this as the rebirth of Gandhi and how shameful the Indian government had become in such a short period of time. They looked like thieves and criminals next to the saintly Vinoba. Of course, this was very good press, and Vinoba probably could've run for office and the sort of thing had he been that kind of a character.

But instead, being a yogi, he realized that there was a movement flowing in the world. His great mantra is jai jagat, victory to the world. The world deserves to live, and it deserves to live in its own unity, and man is a part of that unity. Jai jagat.

And so, sensing that there was a live motion in the world again, he hadn't felt it since Gandhi's assassination, he began to move like a sage always would. He began to leave Delhi and go on a pilgrimage. He had no object in mind, no purpose in mind, other than to just keep doing the same thing to see where it would lead.

And so, he went into the great province called Uttar Pradesh, the great northern provinces. This is where most of the classical Indian history has taken place. Uttar Pradesh is a very populous area of India, nearly 100 million people at that time, and stretched from Delhi all the way over almost to Patna on the Ganges.

While he was in Uttar Pradesh, he began, of course, collecting land gifts again, and the Bhoodan movement began to gain momentum. As it did, Vinoba began to then structure a shape of manifestation. He began to notice that many of the younger people, people in their 20s, who had been just teenagers when Gandhi had been assassinated, were starting to come to him, "What can I do? Where can I go?"

And so, Vinoba began to spin out the structure of the Bhoodan movement and, under the aegis of the Sarvodaya Sammelan, the great brotherhood of Sarvodaya workers, they began to actually collect an amazing amount of acreage. And so, Vinoba then, taking as his cue the basic template of one-sixth, Karna's share, one-sixth, he posited a goal that by 1957, the Sarvodaya workers should collect one-sixth of the total land area of India, some 50 million acres.

Pursuant to that, he felt that because he had discovered this Sarvodaya form in the soul force movement on April the 18th, that on that day of every year, there should be a meeting of all the Sarvodaya people. He posited that in three years from 1951, that is by 1954, they should have collected some 2.5 million acres.

And so, with that goal in mind, having thrown that out, having started this in motion, Vinoba then looked around for the weakest link of the chain, that is, where was the poorest area of India? What was the hardest nut to crack? It was the province next to Uttar Pradesh, the province known as Bihar.

Now Bihar had, at that time, about 50 million persons living there. It was more populous at that time than England. Bihar in the north, heavily jungled and capable of agriculture. In the south, subject to a devastating wind called the loo[?], which blows with 120-degree temperatures and creates a dust bowl effect. Anything that has grown in the month after the monsoon season, within a few months, have simply withered, wilted, blown away, and what you have left is clay and heat and insects.

So Vinoba went to Bihar. It was the poorest area of India. When he got there and was making his first tour around Bihar, he realized that the poorest area in Bihar, that is the nadir of India economically, was at Bodh Gaya in the Gaya section, the Gaya district of Bihar, which is the place where the Buddha had had his enlightenment some 2500 years before.

It had seemed to him an incredible irony that one of the great prideful attainments of India spirituality should have fallen so far as to have become the economic nadir. So, he went to Bodh Gaya and there held the great conference that changed the nature of the Sarvodaya movement.

While he was there at Bodh Gaya, he made a series of talks and speeches and so forth. This is an excerpt from one of them. This is from a book called Vinoba and His Mission by Suresh Ram, who was there. "Let me tell you that I am following in the footprints of the Buddha. The essence of the Buddha's teachings is to deliver the unhappy amongst us from their misery, to render succor to those who lived uncared for as the castaways of society."

If you remember, Buddhism completely broke the caste system. It rejected the validity of the old Vedic rituals. It rejected the validity of a priestly hierarchy over human beings. All of this was rejected at that time.

So, he says, "This is also the teaching of the ages. We have now to practice this teaching and, hence, I've taken up the land problem." In other words, the land problem was a part of the practice of the universal teaching of wisdom of all the ages. He says, "I invite you all to cooperate with me and to carry this task to a successful conclusion." Then he said, and this is where he began to envision, "We should create..." and I use the term swatantra janashakthi, the self-reliant power of the people. "What we need to create is the self-reliant power of the people." This phrase, this self-reliance, almost in Emersonian, Jeffersonian type of resonance, was worked in. He said, "Let me make it clear. It should be distinguished from the other two forms of power: the power of violence and the power of the state. The power of the people is the opposite of the power of violence."

Now what's the opposite of the power of violence? Nonviolence or ahmsa. If we're seeing ahmsa as rooted in soul force, practically the same wave form energy, this is what he's talking about. "The power of the people is the opposite of the power of violence. And though there is no direct opposition between the power of the people and the power of the state, yet the two are qualitatively different. We do not aim merely at doing acts of kindness, but at creating a kingdom of benevolence."

In other words, if you have power vested in a state, in some kind of an organizational form, representative or not representative of the people, implicit in that structure is the sense that under this aegis, one may do acts of kindness, or one may not. There are expediencies, there are necessities, there are vicissitudes in life. So, it is different from creating a kingdom of benevolence. Vinoba is saying that in his vision of the power of people, he's not thinking of a socialist idea. He's not thinking of a communist idea. He's thinking of a democratic idea, but in its primordial spiritual reality.

One of his great books is called Democratic Values. On the cover of the book, which is usually all green or gray, there's a little single cell, a little white space with a blue dot in it, and it looks for all the world like a cell. That's exactly what he's thinking of. He's thinking of the individual human being aware of his self-reliant capacities, but also aware that in cooperation with others lie larger organic forms and manifestations, and that if they are all from the same energy source, they will all be modulated and participate in a harmony of manifestation, not of bureaucratic structure but in terms of manifestation.

A good metaphor is that there are many different kinds of vegetation on this planet, but they're all life forms of this planet. They all share a basic harmony because they have a manifesting unity and use the same life force to manifest. So, there is infinite diversity. There's no sameness there at all. But there is a telltale sign of having come into manifestation through a similar source of energy.

So, Vinoba then, in sensing that ahmsa and satyagraha, moving through a Sarvodaya form, would perform the required manifestation, began then to think of this problem in terms of a larger manifestation. The Bhoodan movement proceeded so that by 1954, they had achieved their goal of 2.5 million acres. They, in fact, ran over it by some 700,000 acres.

While they were making the announcement at the platform that they had not only achieved this goal, some very wealthy maharaja made a gift of some 400,000 acres, putting them over by more than a million acres. So, they had more than 3.5 million acres some three years after the beginning of the movement.

By 1957, when it should have reached 50 million acres, they were somewhat short of the goal. They had, in fact, collected only about 4.2 million acres. The reason for this was a change, a new modulation, in Vinoba's vision.

One of the provinces of India is called Orissa [presently Odisha]. It's south of Calcutta and north of Madras. It's on the Bay of Bengal side of India. In Orissa, in one of the very poorest areas, a village named Mangroth, which had just one really large landlord, had sort of worked on him to give up some of his property for Bhoodan.

Finally, in a realization of shame that the fact that he had been the only big fish in the pond, he decided to give all of his land. This so inspired the people in the village that they got together and they decided that everyone in the entire village would give all of their land to Vinoba. When this gift came, Vinoba held up a sheet of paper and he said, "We have something new. We have a new manifestation. We no longer have Bhoodan. We have Gramdan." Gram means village.

So quick was he to proceed that there was a change in energy level, that people were not giving land anymore, that the maturation of the spiritual manifestation doesn't take millions of years for that evolution, that it had reached the point where a whole village had donated itself, and thus the problem was then to execute the rearrangement of the entire village so that the entire village became self-sufficient.

So, they sent workers down. They brought in a basic education worker to set up schooling for the children so that they would learn to do things with their hands. So that instead of having a clerically based education, which would make them desire to go to the big cities instead of staying in their village, they were given a practical education so that they were able to equip themselves with the tasks of adult life in the village area.

Then, of course, they would bring in people to recite the passages from the epics. Most of these village people would have been just numb from centuries of poverty and ignorance, absolutely like mindless children in a way, needing every basic beginning tact. And so, they would have sent these people in.

As soon as Mangroth was publicized as the first Gramdan, Vinoba left the Bhoodan movement to go in its own way and put his energy and his focus on the Gramdan movement. In other words, even though he had posited this goal for Bhoodan and was working hard towards it for many years, day-by-day, walking from village to village to village, he now saw very quickly that the manifestation had jumped a quantum jump, had gone into a form of true unity.
And so, with the Gramdan movement, Vinoba had collected, by 1957, instead of the 50 million acres, he had collected about 2,000 Gramdan villages. By 1964, he'd collected about 6800 Gramdan villages.

Then he realized that one of the problems that had come with this new manifestation, that had slowed the movement down, there were many people who got out of the movement. They liked the action and when there wasn't action, they went elsewhere. They were seeking action and not results. They were not really understanding soul force. They were understanding attainment.
So Vinoba realized that the jump from individual capacity to community capacity was too large, too much all at once. So, he modified the whole notion of Gramdan, simplified it, and made it possible for villages to declare themselves for Gramdan and that they would, in their own time, work out a way to affect this. Instead of actually signing the papers today, they could declare for Gramdan and then take as many months or as many years as it would take to actually work out the details.

So having come to this realization, Vinoba then upped the energy. He raised what was called a tufan, a whirlwind tour. He walked four miles an hour constantly when he walked. That's fast. That's really cutting along. His arms would not swing. He would walk like this. He was about 5'6", but in India, somebody 5'6" often, unless you're in the Punjab, looks very tall. Very, very thin.

We'll see in the pictorial Gandhi, he has a white beard, and he has thick glasses and usually just a thin white shawl, which sometimes he would wear over his head, and his white loincloth. He would get up at 3:00 in the morning and he would start with his storm lantern, and he would just start off.

Everybody would have to get up and follow him. They would walk until they would get either to the next village or until about 7:00, 7:30 in the morning. He would raise a white handkerchief because all this time, you see, he would be meditating. Not meditating in a prosaic way, but trying to manifest in his own motion this soul force energy continuum, trying to register it.

There is in the Buddhist Abhidhamma a record of the thought process sequence, which is very exacting. In that sequence, the last stage is the registrant consciousness moment. And so, what he was trying to do was to be that, totally in himself for this thought, to let it register so that when he would then bring himself into play during the day, and day after day, he would bring into play the integrity of that manifestation.

So that it was just like an electrical charge having a certain amperage and a certain direction and vector, and whenever it would come into contact with matter, it would deliver that charge intact. And so, he was just like that. He was like a cosmic plug cued in to this manifestation. Wherever he would go during the day, small problems or large, the tactics of this landlord or the strategy of the whole movement, it would all have the same characteristic touch all the way through.

So, this tufan whirlwind declaring for Gramdan was initiated. By the Gandhi centenary in 1969, 140,000 villages had declared for this. This was one-quarter of all the villages in India. So, by the centenary of Gandhi, this was 14 years ago, it seemed as if Vinoba had finally brought the millennium into manifestation, because he not only had discovered the Gramdan, but as 1968 came around, he realized that the pattern of certain villages was forming contiguous blocks.

And so, he conceived the pattern that if you had 100 villages in a solid contiguous block, that this could constitute what he called Blockdan. They had realized some 1,030 Blockdans. When he saw that there were even larger possibilities, that there was such a thing as a Districtdan. By September of 1969, just before the centenary, he realized that it was conceivable, it was possible for an entire province of India, the province of Bihar to declare itself Bihardan. They fell short by 2%. So, they only got, by the centenary, 98% of the entire province of Bihar, some 65 million people at that time.

But, of course, at that scale, nobody dared report this, nobody dared cover this, because there was no political organization. In fact, it was an acid that would dissolve any political organization they came in contact with. There were no powers that be that could touch it. You couldn't join it. There wasn't any way to use it to manipulate it. There was no way to get a compromise with it.

One either joined, and if one joined, one changed one's whole thought structure about what was possible and conceivable for man. One changed the very way in which one lived. One opted for a pattern of wholeness and cooperation. Truth, light, and love instead of being pleasant words of altruistic meaning became the only way to do business.

Well, this ideology of Sarvodaya, as some people have called it, has three basic elements, sort of a triple program, Gramdan just as one of them, and you can see that that develops itself. The second one was khadi because Vinoba really was a successor to Gandhi. He kept the khadi alive, the hand-spun cloth alive. I'm sorry, this is as near as I can come to khadi. I gave my khadi away in Canada.

The third one was called Shanti Sena. Shanti, of course, means peace. Sena means army. It was a peace army. Vinoba, taking William James at his word in his great essay The Moral Equivalent of War, realized that there had to be some way to displace the armed forces, the police forces domestically, the armed forces internationally. And so, he developed what was known as the Shanti Sena, the peace army.

He wrote a book on it. We have it for sale in the bookstore. It costs just $2. There's only 7,000 copies in print in the world. I think we've got two copies down in the bookstore. We've got a lot of Vinoba's books down there. They're only about $2 or $3. When they sell out, we'll know that there are at least a few people hearing the message.

The Shanti Sena begins with Vinoba making this declaration. He says, "The basic problem of the whole world today is the establishment of peace." Now he's thinking in terms of being in consonance with this truth force ahmsa within an organized focus.

He says, "Perhaps in no other age has there ever been such a world hunger for peace." By the time he's writing Shanti Sena, he's speaking of the world as a gift, that there is such a thing as a Worlddan, that the whole planet is a gift and man must make this a gift to himself.

"Perhaps in no other age has there ever been such a world hunger for peace. There are countries whose whole way of thought up to yesterday was deeply dyed with violence. Today, even those countries long to find release from violence." Why release from violence? Because violence is not just a sporadic action, but it's a permutation of a universal energy, and violence actually is an electrocuting force. The longer you hold on to it, the more intensely you hold on to it, the more it will electrocute you. It will short-circuit you. Madness and death, the only ways that manifest through violence.

And so, he's talking about a release from violence as in letting go, no longer holding on to the validity of those methods. What happens when one does that? One becomes dynamically open to ahmsa. Ahmsa no longer is just a pleasant idea. It becomes a living reality. It becomes a fresh wind. And you realize how could you ever have not gone this way? How could the world never have gone this way?

Well, Vinoba says these are academic problems which we can talk about later, but right now we have to learn to let go of that violent electrocuting energy and go with the creative manifestation in terms of whole structures, wholesome structures, for ourselves.

He says, "Even those countries where revolutions have taken place through bloodshed today desire peace. And, why? Because whereas, in former days, the weapons were in the hands of men, it is no longer. Men are now in the hands of the weapons." They become, ironically, afraid of war because they realize subconsciously, they can no longer control it. So, they can no longer let go and they can no longer control it. The perfect definition of madness. So, we have a theme laid out, and that is the transformation in this mode.

Well, we're going to have to take a little break. We'll come back and continue this. I'll be selling some cassettes of my lectures down on the sidewalk and then I'll be back.

Programs are out for the fall. So, if you haven't picked one up, why you can get one here. There are some back there. There are some back there. They have vacations here. They have holidays at PRS, and my background taught me not to have too many holidays. That was a bad form, very egotistical to think that you're doing something and you take time off and get away from it. If you're anxious to get away from it, maybe you're not doing it as really, as you thought. So anyway, if that's just a scramble for you, forget it. If not, why, that's how I work. The Thanksgiving lecture that should have been here will be given at the Gnostic Society and it will be somewhat special. We'll have food, nutritious food, and the lecture will be on Botticelli. It'll be on Botticelli and the way in which he was really the most wonderful esoteric artist, probably of all time. He embodied certain Hermetic and Neoplatonic features, mythological features. Botticelli was the first artist to seriously paint the mythological images as artistic. He's the first one to bring them in, the Primavera and the Birth of Venus are very interesting. So, we're going to have that special lecture on November 24th, which will be a Thursday. So, if you're not particularly fond of your family situation, spend it with us where our friends are our family anyway. Then the December 29th lecture will also be a special lecture. Also held there and I chose Raphael for that. So, Botticelli and Raphael do not appear on this list because they're singled out. The third artist that I singled out is Michelangelo and he'll be done on Saturday morning. He really needs to be treated somewhat special, as he always expected he would.

We're moving ahead with our Saturday morning courses. And I thought I would just display to you a few of the texts that are going to be used for that. I developed in San Francisco in the 60s, a program, which would allow for the integration of educational experience instead of just it's agglomeration, the interpenetration and pursuant to this, the program that I developed at that time was brought into eight different levels, eight different horizons of activity. And the first horizon on that was a simple introduction. Where are we now? And there were two courses in that which I'll offer starting in October on Saturday mornings. The first course is on symbolic thinking and just to give you an idea of the kinds of texts, I'm going to use Carl Jung's 'Mandala Symbolism', I'm going to use Kandinsky's 'Point and Line to Plane' and, you know, great Russian artists, and Ernst Kirschner's 'Language and Math'. And of course, there'll be a couple of other goodies. This will be the core of the materials, but I'll have something next week for you. You can see the whole program.

The second course, which is complimentary to the symbols course is just simply designated nature. Which, by nature, I mean, what do we see as of 1983 in terms of our understanding of nature and its broadest and deepest possibilities. And one of the texts will be this volume by Timothy Ferris on galaxies. You know, the discovery of galaxies was right here in Los Angeles, right up here, Hubble up here at Mount Wilson was the one who finally realized what we had been seeing for some time and actually posited the accurate description of galaxies. So, we're going to use that. We're going to use this edition of 'The Double Helix', the discovery of DNA, which has really profoundly changed the way in which we look at life. We know now that it is a hermetic phenomenon by design and implication.
And this little book called 'The First Three Minutes' about the creation of the universe. And once you know, the first three minutes, you've got a beat on the fourth minute and the fifth and so on. We're ready to have that. Those two courses and they'll run roughly about two hours each. One of them will be from 9 to 11 and the second from 11 to 1, and then we'll serve a gratis meal. You could take one or the other of the courses, or you could take them both together. They really compliment each other. One is the exterior and the other's the interior.

When we say interior, I always have to pause because I'm one of these persons who considers the external nature is the real subconscious of man. I don't think that there is any fantasy level, which is the unconscious, but nature itself is the underside of our being. And thus, we belong in an integral way to where we are now. And just in that way, the universe really is a mother to us in a very, very real basic primordial way. So those two courses are going to be offered starting in October, and they'll be on Hyperion Boulevard, not very far from here. And we'll, I'm always somewhat open in this situation, but I was taught that lecturing is the least part of education. And the thing to do is to get rid of the lines of chairs, to get it into a living space with plants and flowers and tea and open spaces. And I function better in that kind of an environment. I function better with a lot of disparate activities going on too. So, we'll set up something that's interesting there.

I was also taught that when students begin to learn, get out of their way so that they can learn and so that you don't end up telling them all the time. So, I'm very sensitive to that. I like to get to the point where I can get out of the way. I'm essentially lazy at that point, and I enjoy not doing anything. So, I'm, I'm not needing to be a chief.

The figures for the Sarvodaya movement after 1970 are almost unobtainable. When I was the liaison for the Gandhi Peace Foundation in the United States, '68 and '69 and '70, it was possible to get information because there was a direct tie-line. I could write to T. K. Mahadevan, who was the head of the Gandhi Peace Foundation, who was in a position in Delhi to simply find out from somebody what was going on. And if we needed material, we could simply go through him or go through the Consul for India in San Francisco and distinguished Madrasi at that time named Ragona. But since then, conditions have closed up, information has dried up, the direct sources seem now to be lost in a labyrinth of bureaucratic red tape. Our own state department makes it very difficult sometimes to just obtain materials from India. So that one of the last books to do a survey of the effect and effectiveness of the Sarvodaya movement is published by Oxford University press and it's called The Gentle Anarchist. And they get the title because Vinoba was always talking about gentle, gentler, and gentlest. And he was saying, if something gentle, doesn't work, try something gentler. And if that doesn't work, then try something to very gentlest.

That realization is commensurate with the design and structure of the world and of our nature. And if it doesn't happen it is because we're not doing it right. Not because it is difficult or because it is wrong or impossible, it is simply that we haven't gone through the right motions to let it happen. Therefore, instead of getting angry because it's not happening, back off. Instead of forcing it, analyze. Instead of manipulating by clever imagination, cooperate. That these techniques are not just old saws of etiquette, but they're actually the tools by which we are able to piece by piece unravel. And then we get to a certain dexterity of being able finally to see that, even though it seemed like a mess, that the mess is actually, a mass, which has a structure and that given a key, we can decode that structure and understand it no matter how complex it seemed at first.

So that in the movement, the basic notion of orientation comes from a sense of the presence of truthfulness in oneself. We can ask like Pilate, 'what is truth?' And get off when we're trying to describe it discursively. But there is nevertheless, in a very practical way, a sense of rightness which accompanies us, and this can be honed, encouraged, cultivated even, to an extraordinary sentence. In fact, the science of yoga is pursuant towards discovering for oneself in many disciplined ways, exactly how this is accomplished. Now, one doesn't have to be a Hatha yoga master with the split tongue, able to stop up the breathing passages for days on end. This is beside the point. The key is not to stop your heart from beating, but to be able to transform your heart energies from a kind of ego-centered selfishness to a universal flowing, which allows then for other energy modulations to occur to you as a joining and not as an opposing.

This transforming is a very delicate operation at its origins, but very powerful when it comes into manifestation. The Sarvodaya movement has so many facets to it which are interesting to look at. And because it comes to us almost brand new, to use a phrase, I picked out the little declaration that would be read to a village if they were going to consider declaring for Gramdan as a document, in point. And this is, this is what would be read out and explained to the villagers patiently. If it took several days, if it took several weeks until everyone understood the profundity of it all. The first part - there are in this seven parts.

The first part, any person holding land directly under government and any tenant enjoying permanent rights might join Gramdan. In either case the person joining must donate his entire land. A landless person living in the village might also join by making a declaration of his desire to participate in the Gramdan community.
The willingness of the one to participate is complimentary and able to the property that one would have to donate. This already assumes that one has a different conception of the land of property.

If you remember the great French anarchists in the 18th century predominant, you said property is theft and wrote a whole book, making a case of the fact that the whole concept of having this as opposed to someone else having this, brings in the reality of theft as a viable human activity. Because in order to have, one can take, or if you do have, someone else can take. so there's all this uncertainty and all of this actually is a form of violence. Is a form of violence. It is a misconstruing of the universal energy known as Satyagraha - truth force, soul force.

This is why Gandhi would always in a Satyagraha, speak of offering Satyagraha. And in the offering of Satyagraha he would say that the only real discovery here is what is true. That nothing else is real. Which really at his word meant that none of the goods, none of the positions, were real in terms of this level of searching. So, any person in this village, whether you owned land or whether you just had the desire to participate, could come in to this unity.

2. A village could be declared Gramdan if it met the following conditions:
A. Gramdan declarations must be confirmed in a respect of 50% of the total land held under private ownership in the village,
B. not less than 80% of the total number of persons owning land and residing in the village must join and
C. not less than 80% of the adults living in the village must also join.

And you see here a typical Vinoba tactic, instead of making it a hundred percent, give a little, give a little, there will always be a problem. We're not looking for the ultimate resolution. And by not looking for the ultimate resolution, it will happen. We're giving up this searching for a hundred percent because that kind of searching has an element of violence hidden in it. The need to be complete is a desire to own that completeness, in an odd way, and we have to give that up. 80% is fine, it'll do, and quite frequently, it isn't just 80%. But as we saw, like with Bihar, it was 98%. So let some of the problems go. Take the compulsiveness away from it. This is the key to gentle, gentler, and gentlest.

Third, for the purpose of Gramdan a village might be defined more broadly than the concept of the revenue village. In other words, for tax purposes, this is a revenue village. And therefore, this is a taxable unit. This is such and such property, such and such facility, these are things, people own them. We can assess them, and it has such and such an embodiment then as a revenue village. You're saying to scrap this idea. This is a mask. It's been fooling us for several thousand years. This is a mask that no one obtains for human social structures. We are not revenue units. We don't belong as a possession to anyone or anything.

The familiar administrative unit then was revenue village. Thus, a hamlet could be treated as a unit and regarded as a Gramdan village if it met the above conditions. That is, if they were 80% of a certain population, 50% of the land holding persons and 80% of those residing in a general area. The land for... The land donated in Gramdan should be vested in the Gram Sabha, a corporate body representing the village community and consisting of all adult residents and persons owning land in the village. Villagers not joining in Gramdan would retain all their rights in their land. They don't have to join. We're doing this as a cooperative together. There are some who are not going to cooperate. They are not outlaws. They are not ostracized. They have a right to continue their way of life. They're going to see how we're operating. We're going to be able to increasingly live out rather than explain what we are doing. They are human beings like us. They will be able to see that what we are doing has a validity to it, a soundness to it, that's not based on factual argument, but on a living reality. If we have confidence in that, in the truthfulness of it and in the manifestation of it, they will eventually, or their children, or their grandchildren, will eventually be able to see that they can ascent to this wholeheartedly. This is for them.

So, they retain all their rights in their land, but nevertheless would be entitled to participate fully in the deliberations and the management of village land and properties as members of the Gram Sabha. So even though they don't want to join, they're still invited to be members. They could still participate and if one of them came to a village meeting, then the whole village would have to bring in to the sense of unanimity, any objections that they would bring up. So that they then de facto operate as if they were members. And this realization that it is in fact happening, even though they say they don't want to be a part of it. That discrepancy is what they need to see. That, that discrepancy doesn't just occur out there, but in their minds, they have created this discrepancy for themselves. And that by seeing that it doesn't hold out here, that they are able to get over that resistance on their own energy, their own realization within, and that'll put them more in touch to be able to come into contact with truth. They will then understand that it is true, not because someone says it is true, but because they too realize that it is so, and that it in fact works this way.

Five, the lands vested in the Gram Sabha might be cultivated directly by the Sabha itself or might be allotted to the residence, including both donors and the landless, either singly or jointly on such terms of the Sabha might determine. Where individual allotments were made, the allotee's were not to have heritable or transferable interests in the land so that periodical redistribution of lands on an equitable basis would not be impeded.

Conditions change, different generations will have a different makeup, different constitution to themselves, different requirements. There is always the sense that one would think that this is a grand level, like sort of the 19th century socialist idea that everybody's got to be, have this equal share and so forth, nothing like that whatsoever. If someone is a better farmer, he should have more land to work, up to the point of his capacity, his competence. If so-and-so can make better shoes, then whatever materials come in, more of that should go to them because they can actually do this. Vinoba says it's like hands, all human hands tend to have five fingers, but the capacities of those hands are all different. And we would not be acting in truthfulness if we didn't recognize that. So, it's like that. So, there is periodical redistribution of lands, not in any set times, but as the conditions arise, as they would change.

Six, in addition to managing the lands vested in it, the Gram Sabha, sorry the village council, would undertake development functions as well as administrative functions normally performed by village panchayats or councils in the area.

You're going to realize we need to have such and such an irrigation project. Well, maybe we can't do it ourselves. Maybe we're going to have to ask four or five villages together because this irrigation is going to come in. So that means that we're going to have to cooperate with them. So, our whole village is going to have to get together and find some way of coming together with these other villages for this project. And if we're going to bring in more water, we're going to raise more goods. We're going to be able then to have more of a surplus of melons or something, we're going to have to do something with that. So, we're going to have to find outlets for that.
It's teaching the ecology of action. It's making karma yogis of the people. It's educating them. In a most primordial way, just like in basic education, to see that everything that we do fits into a flow pattern. It's all part of a large flow pattern. And inevitably, inevitably just like Balsam wood rising to the surface of water. The primordial universal issues will come up again, and again, and again. What is the nature of man? What is his relation to the divine? What are we doing here? What is this world? Those kinds of issues. Naturally, as the ecologies of meaningful action become larger and more integrated it'll occur to people that these are legitimate questions to ask. These are areas to put before the councils of man and slowly man will civilize himself. Not by empire, but by the realization that only together could we ever hope to manifest what we could find out from any of these questions.

The seventh in the Gramdan certificate then, in the management of lands and village affairs, the decisions of the Gram Sabha should as far as possible, be based on unanimity or at least near unanimity.

If there's one person that just can't see their way, or two people, they just can't agree. If after a certain reasonable time, and everyone is agreed that you've done as much as you can, and they disagree, then do what you can, but try to get unanimity. And the reason for this is that only by this gentle, gentler, gentlest, waiting for the unanimity, does one have time to let the profundity of the issue, whatever it is, sink in. And when that happens, when we're willing to sit together, what often comes, is the sense of presence of reality, of the unity of all of us being together addressed to that issue. It's not magic - although primordial man must certainly have experienced it as that.
If you've ever sat into a Zazen session or a Quaker's Friends session, or just sat alone with other human beings in moments of great grief or great joy. It used to be the family prayer around the supper meal, those kinds of moments. There is an accrual of relationality between people. It becomes tangible. And that, in these kinds of Gram Sabha deliberations, becomes so poignant, so tangible, that the pettiness of disagreement falls to the wayside because it's irrelevant in face of the actuality of this experience that we are getting along together. We're all eating now, we're clothing ourselves, our children are going to be all right. Why should we bicker over whether or not somebody is going to have banana plants? Why should we bicker over the fact that maybe the cobbles on the walkway are not right? All of these other issues begin to pall, and the basic unity of man comes through.

Realizing that khadi work, the constructive programs, and the Gramdan work are essential and necessary, but realizing that they still exist in a transitory point in world history, Vinoba brought in the peace army, the Shanti Sena. And the Shanti Sena pledge runs like this:
"I believe in the establishment of a new society based on truth and ahmsa. That all conflicts in society can and should be solved, more so in this atomic age than ever before by ahmsa."

And you notice that instead of saying Satyagraha, they tend to say just truth. They let that truth holding go, because you don't have to even grasp truth. You don't have to even grasp it. One doesn't have to hold onto truth. It is of its own accord. So, truth and ahmsa.

"So that even in this atomic age, more so than ever, ahmsa is the means. I believe in the fundamental unity of man. I believe that war blocks all human progress and is a denial of an ahmsa way of life. Therefore, I hereby pledge that I shall work for peace and be prepared if need be to lay down my life for it. To do my best, to rise above the distinctions of sect, color, cast, party, because they deny the unity of man. Not to take part in any war. Help in creating the means and conditions of ahmsa defense. Devote regularly a part of my time to the service of my fellow man. Accept the discipline of the Shanti Sena."

The Shanti Sena by the early sixties, had a force of about 12,000 people and the first international conflict they were called into play was when China and India had a border battle. Two border areas, the Aksai Chin over in the Ladakh area, and then up in the areas just north of the Sikkim area. It looked for a while as if the Chinese were going to make a provocation to come over the Himalayas. This is 1962. And the Shanti Sena was sent there by Vinoba and they were quite effective in dampening down the fearful tensions on the part of India. That is to say, China was sensing, like a bloodhound sensing a prey, that India was fearful, very fearful of this encounter and was reacting to it. And the Shanti Sena when they went in, in '62, took away a lot of the onus of this fearful atmosphere. And consequently, the whole situation devolved rather than evolved. And the border dispute between one and a half billion people was averted. It could have been a real catastrophe.

This devotion of one's life became known also, in a domestic way, as Jivandan. Jivan means life. Navajivan, the name of the press that publishes all of Gandhi's works, means new life. Nava means new, new life. Jivandan was the gift of life. And actually, the first person to make Jivandan was one of the most famous and popular heroes in India. A man named Jaya Prakesh Narayan. Who had been a dynamic communist in the '30s. He had been arrested by the British government, thrown into a prison. He escaped from the prison and gone into the jungles and become a heroic revolutionary leader. He was very handsome. He looked like a movie star, and he was the first one to declare that he had been wrong in his assessment of what men needed and the techniques needed to get there, and therefore he, in 1954, made a pledge for the rest of his life of all of his capacities.

So Vinoba, seeing this, then made possible a number of different kinds of gifts. That there are some people, for instance, who have intellectual capacities, they could make a gift of the service of their intellectual capacities. That is to say, they would then keep a self-vow through life that whatever service they could put their mind to, their ideas to, for the welfare of all, that they would do so. He came up with a pledge called sempadedan, that one would devote one's entire wealth to the service of man. Not that you would give the wealth to Vinoba, you would still have your wealth, but you would be committed to, by pledge, to a life of using that wealth for the service of man. And thus, instead of collecting materials, Vinoba transformed the Bhoodan movement into simply the declaration of pledges. And it was these pledges, which he collected and registered. And as long as his registering of those pledges was seen to be universally accurate, a manifestation of truth itself, those making those pledges felt themselves bound and committed. And we'll see next week that Vinoba takes this quite a ways, even beyond where we have gotten to, but that's for next week.

Thank you.

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