Gandhi, Vinoba, and the Dharma Chakra
Presented on: Thursday, September 22, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
Gandhi
Presentation 12 of 13
Gandhi, Vinoba, and the Dharma Chakra:
Bhagavad Gita Spirit Warriors at Work in the Late Twentieth Century
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 22, 1983
Transcript:
The date is September 22nd, 1983. This is the next to the last lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on the general subject of Gandhi. Tonight's lecture is entitled Gandhi, Vinoba, and the Dharma Chakra: Bhagavad Gita Spirit Warriors at Work in the Late 20th Century.
We come to the last but one lecture in the series. And next week will be The Pictorial Gandhi. And I'll have slides on everything that we have discussed and talked about. Slides on Gandhi and Vinoba.
It's very difficult for us in the West to make an appraisal accurate to the circumstance. There have been Westerners who have gone to India ever since Pythagoras and very few have really understood because India is really a spiritual climate and doesn't exist adequately at all as a political phenomenon. Thus, in the famous and overwrought paraphrase of Gertrude Stein, "there's no there, there" except the experience that one is able to engender in one's personal mobility there.
Can you hear all right, should we close this door?
A westerner who went to visit the Gramdan villages in 1970. Educated Londoner, the wife of a famous writer. And she went to the second village to declare itself Gramdan in India. And after 13 years, she couldn't see the improvements.
Maybe we'll close that too.
The improvements had seemed to elude the external senses. From a material standpoint it seemed as if there was a level of poverty as she described in her notes almost inconceivable by Western standards. The village was a collection of 30 mud huts, and within the mud huts, it was in the rainy season, there was a constant dripping of water in the darkness. She said the clothing had that familiar gray as clothing gets in India after it's worn for generations in the dust. But almost every color is washed out.
And the promise of poverty infiltrates the color spectrum. The hair has no sheen. The skin tones, the eyes. And so, she asks through an interpreter, person after person in the village, "Are things better?" And they would look at her and smile and they would say, "It is our land this time. It is finally ours. And we are planning. We have wells that we are digging." And she would ask, "How long have these wells been being dug?" "Oh, we've been digging them for eight or nine years." And in her disgust with the squalor and the lack of scheduling time sense, she began to meditate there in the village on, is there a revolution at all? Does anything have a meaning?
And as she sat there, she noticed coming down a path between the trees, a young girl about 12 or 13 and she was carrying on her shoulder a milk pail. And the girl came by, and the woman talked to her through the interpreter, and she showed her what seemed to be about two cups of milk in the bottom of this milk container. And she was taking it to her younger brother and sister and a neighborhood child. And she walked on her way. And suddenly the woman realized that this girl probably starving herself, was willing to forgo her own innate need for nutrition, compulsiveness for food and nutrition to give to others. And then she realized that the Gandhian code of service for mankind had penetrated to even the illiterate, ignorant, malnutritioned population of hidden villages in India. And this was different. This was a change.
The animal level of scavenging, of egotistical bickering for every single scrap of whatever, had gone. That at the nadir of human society on this planet, the ignorant filthy impoverished Indian village in the middle of nowhere had learned a lesson which many persons never learn in the lap of luxury: that all of mankind is one and it is better to forego one's own needs for others every single time, whether it is an experience of the moment or a principle of many lifetimes. And then she realized that there had been a change, a monumental change that the tide of humanity in its downward spiral decay had been turned. And she stood up. And she said for the first time in her life, she had the feeling that man had been saved. That mankind had found a way because if it had penetrated to that extent here, then it could be understood anywhere by anyone.
This is the key. And whenever we see books by Vinoba, like Third Power, in parentheses it says, "A new dimension." They mean a new dimension - a totally new relationality that has been engendered. Vinoba many times in his speeches, Gandhi many times towards the end of his life said, the best thing that we can do is abandon the old value systems entirely because the universal truths that we really need will come back so fast, we will hardly have missed a heartbeat. And the values that we really didn't need will evaporate by the end of the week. Then in a year's time, you'll never miss them. And the next generation will never even dream that man would have had such errant values as to have one man owning 40 square miles and 100 million people having not even a handful of dust to call their own.
It's an inconceivable goal that it should ever have been true, not of an intelligent animal but of a spiritual being. That a spiritual being should ever have had to exist in such an incredible gap, not of selfishness not so much, as of ignorance, will in future generations seem like mythical demonic stories told to scare children in the night. That it could never have possibly happened. How could it have? It must be a fiction. The fact is that this condition has attained now for almost 6,000 years. Ever since civilization came to the horizon of man, we have had increasingly this aberrant gulf, not only between the haves and have-nots in terms of things (property, money, opportunity), but in terms of the more primordial qualities. The wisdom of understanding, the heartfulness of true compassion, there too. And these primordial values they are great goals.
In our own country here, we suffer from an ignorance which is almost the same as the economic poverty of India. We have a population of 260 million people more or less and the ocean of illusion and egotism is just wrapped and stunts the more realizable moments of retrospection. Our focus and our need - it's in the newspapers, it's on television - is in education. The place where reform, no Gandhi and Vinoba were not reformers. Revolution as in one complete cycle turn and begin something a new, a whole new cycle. That is a revolution. In India, it needed to be founded on the hundreds of millions of people who simply were starving to death. In this country it needs to be founded in the schools, it is education, not economics, that is the field of Gandhian activity in this country.
There have been two politicians who have tried to use Gandhian methods. One of them, of course, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of late. The other governor Jerry Brown of late. His economic adviser, E. F. Schumacher, studied with Vinoba for many years and small as beautiful as a discussion of Gandhian economics and modern Western terms. There was a third, Robert Kennedy towards the end of his life became very interested in this and was growing tremendously in his courage, in his capacity and may even have turned out to be a fine individual had he been spared more time.
But the difficulty for us goes back to a conundrum in our own character. We have a reluctance to absorb the overall comprehension of the spirit. We tend to reduce it and fractionate it into mental images, or into measurable codification, or into time-dated programs of development. And then we delegate all sense of reality and veracity to these external forms and lead ourselves a drift in the very core that makes all real, the sense of the comprehension that comes with spiritual presence in the individual.
So, Vinoba in his work often stressed the place of the individual agreeing to come into play with the service of all, sarvodaya. And as we have seen through the progressive change, that the whole idea of a truth force evolved from an instrument which one would use, Gandhi called it originally the satyagraha - the nonviolent resistance. Insisting that soul-force manifest itself in this nonviolent resistance.
And we have seen how that whole notion evolved and matured until finally it came to the realization that the manifestation of relationalities in the phenomenal realm takes place through a prism. And just as satyagraha, or truth-forming is the basis, it manifests itself in a wave in concert. And this wave of soul-force just like a basic primordial force like gravitation, or the electromagnetic energy, or the strong force, or the weak force holding atomic structure. Just so this universal force has a possibility of being focused by the circle of man's comprehension as an individual or as a group together on various levels of manifestation.
For Vinoba, one of the first social units to have this possibility was the village level. And they called that the Gramdan - dan meaning gift, gift of the village. Gift in the sense of a paramita of a perfection, of a quality capable of being raised to perfection. So that the gift of the village was an agreement by all those in the village that all of what they owned was pooled together. But also, all of what they were was pooled together not to dissolve the individual but to give free play for the individuals in a context of security and understanding because they would have to then understand increasingly the ramifications of whatever was done so that if they were going to dig a well, it wasn't just having the well.
The United States has given much foreign aid in the form of going and building hospitals or digging wells for underdeveloped countries in certain areas. And almost always, there is a lack of the use of the facility because the people were not ready to incorporate the facility into their daily living. So, you have to grow to meet the increased facilities. And in the Gramdan idea, there was the idea that the village would mature as a social and spiritual integrity, only to the extent that the individuals within it would realize how their lives interpenetrated with each other. And when they got to where they would be able to understand new facility, understand how it worked in the ecology of the entire village, they would then, as a group, appropriate those facilities for themselves. So, if it took nine years to dig a well, it might have needed to take nine years to dig a well.
Vinoba then having pioneered this form quickly jumped up the scale of development from the village to the block or the sense of maybe 60 or 70 villages working together, to the district where several 100 villages would work together, perhaps even 500, to the state where the various provinces or States of India would work together. And finally, towards the end of this life, tried to give the conception of how an international planet would seem as an integral single unit of mankind. And his greeting towards the end of his life was Jai Jagat, victory to the world. Not in the sense of the empire, but in the sense of integrating the planet and its beings together as a prism of purifying soul-force. Because what flows through us - it's not so much the blood and the lymph - not so much the thoughts and desires. Those are manifestations on a phenomenal plane of something undifferentiated. They are the rays as it were of soul-force. And so, satyagraha evolved from its discovery in the 1890s, it's re-understanding by Gandhi in terms of it having been the primordial quality that ancient man had always known about that we had forgotten about. And in fact, Gandhi many times said that his basic workbook was the Bhagavad Gita. Because it was there that this understanding of soul-force came into its best focus.
Vinoba, of course, understanding from a little boy the need for integrating wisdom into life learned from Gandhi a great deal of how to put the ancient understanding rediscovered into a practical working basis. So that if Gandhi was the scientist of the soul, Vinoba is the technician of the soul. It is Vinoba who made the technologies of the spirit, who took the scientific experiments that Gandhi developed and applied them in actual fact up to the level that Gandhi himself had hoped would be done up to an international level towards the end of a Vinoba's life. He died almost exactly one year ago today, September of 1982. He was 87 years old.
Vinoba when he was born in 1895, came into a very strange world. If you think back to 1895, and then you think up to 1982, you can see what a tremendous change the world went through. And he would always say, "This doesn't happen accidentally. This happens because some human beings remembered how to be teachers. And that the ancient name of teacher in Sanskrit actually means pathfinder. The teacher is the pathfinder. It is he or she who having gone that way herself knows how to come and shepherd others through, at least to the point that they have gotten to. And a good teacher will always stand aside for a student who can go on. A real teacher always will usher the student past them: "Go and explore. This is for you. The doors are open." So, the ancient name for a teacher was a pathfinder.
In the Gita, we are given the primordial quality of man's spiritual education that it happens most poignantly in a timeless sense and a spatiality of infinite plenitude. And the literary prototype is Arjuna in his chariot on the verge of participating in the great Mahabharata, the great Indian war and Krishna his charioteer sensing that Arjuna has frozen in a moment of fear because it is the poignancy of both love and terror to freeze phenomenal time, to stop the temporizing, to allow for the infinite expansion of space which becomes interpreted by the neurotic mind as the abyss. But in fact, in the Gita, the paradigm that is given of education is the fact that, in the Gita, the service of humanity is the kingly art. It is not so much the ruling. It is not occupying the throne, not having the scepter, not having the kingdom. But it is being the pathfinder for the people in the ways of the service of all that is the real kingly art.
And Vinoba, one time in the 30s when he was in prison, gave a series of lectures which were later collected. We have this in the PRS library. I think we have it in the bookstore for sale too, Talks on the Gita. And in this, the words are as follows:
"The moments of our daily life may appear commonplace but in reality, they are not so." He means to say, they are never so. "Life is never commonplace. There is never a commonplace moment." The analytical capacities of the ancient scientists of the spirit were able to analyze and come down to even dividing the basic quality of any thought moment into 17 different steps. They were able to grind that fine. And to go like our contemporary nuclear physics does into the atom of the moment and find that there were 17 stages and certain relationalities and processes. And that one could understand exactly, literally to the Nth degree, what phenomenal time-space was composed of, and our relationship to it.
So, he says "the moments of our daily life may appear commonplace but in reality, they are not so. They carry enormous significance. All one's life is a great yagna karma." Yagna is a mission; karma is a work. "We all have a life mission. The life is not a static photograph being carried through phenomenal time-space. It is a light wave which manifests as it moves through in its cyclic yagna karma." It's basic momentum. It's motion. The weft of its warp literally is the soul-force. So that the soul-force is not something I have. I'm not a container that it goes into. It is in fact the carrier signal, if you will, of the very reality of which I manifest. So, it is so close that it is structural. He says, "all one's life is a great yagna karma," a continual sacrificial performance. We are constantly sacrificing. We are making holy. In the Old Testament, what is left for man after the creation, all things are seen and done and are good. What is left for man? To consecrate it, to make it all holy. That's what's left for man. Why is the sabbath made for man? It's the space left for him to consecrate this universe. That's what its meaning is. So, to hear all one's life is a great yagna karma, continual sacrificial performance. What is sleep is a kind of samadhi, an experience of oneness. If we surrender all our enjoyments to the Lord before we fall asleep, what is sleep but samadhi. And so on.
So, he gives us in here this basic quality of thusness which appears in the individual, but it appears in the individual in such a primordial way and form that it also partakes of the entire reality of the universe. Just so, other human beings are not separate from oneself. They are modulations in different manifestations of the very same soul-force. So, it is the height of ignorance to harbor violence and viciousness against another being who in truth is a soul-force and a manifestation woven upon it, the same as oneself is. What then is a community? It is not an aggregate of disembodied egocentric, static beings, jostling for position - hegemony. It is a movement needing a harmony, a movement of forces needing a prism to focus the disparateness back together again. And that's what a Gramdan is. That's what a single planet would be in large.
It would be a prism - historically, technologically, socially - to refocus the disparateness back to its unity. And the more that that happens, the more the actual generative vitality of the soul-force comes back into play. Just as Vinoba will say time and time again, in ancient times, the Rishis knew this, but they knew it individually and felt that anyone could attain this with proper application. So, you would have to go to the Rishi to learn. You would go to the high Himalayas or to the depths of the forest to learn one to one. And you too would then stay there. But he says in our time, everything is upside down. Everything is topsy-turvy and the Rishi must go to the people because the ignorance by now is so massive. They do not even know that they do not know. They do not even understand that they are completely polarized and, in their polarization, subject to all kinds of magnetized grandiose illusions. Especially that final one of one crowd thinking of the atom bomb the other crowd thinking that they'll have done something right.
Well at that stage, the Rishis have to come out of the mountains and out of the forest and out of themselves and open up for all. And so, we find Vinoba and Gandhi working just like Rishis of all only putting the ancient wisdom out for everyone. In his Lectures on the Gita in 1932 in prison, Vinoba gives us a rundown very briefly of the first half of the Gita. And he does it in chapter 10. And he says here, "Friends we have come to complete the first half of the Gita before we proceed to the second. It is good to look back. In the first chapter..." And there are 18 chapters in the Gita. So, he's talking about nine chapters. He's talking about what Plotinus would've called an ennead, nine, nine steps. Orpheus in his cosmic mode had a nine-string lyre, whereas in his terrestrial mode, he had a seven-string lyre.
In the first chapter, it was made clear that the Gita aims at destroying delusion by making us pursue svadharma, which is self-truth. The realization that we ourselves individually can realize truth. It is not beyond us. It is not outside of us. It is certainly not in the expert to give it to us. There is a conviction that, say what you will, believe what you will, rationalize as you will. And Arjuna does all of these things in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna, agreeing that they are all wonderful statements but have no application to Arjuna in this condition.
And what is this condition? He is frightened to the Nth degree. Time has stood still for him. Space has opened up for him and suspended existentially there in a conundrum. He can neither go forward nor backward. He can only go inward. And this is where svadharma comes. We saw then he says in the second chapter, the basic principles of life, the way of action and the image of the steadfast seer. So, in the Gita as in the primordial teacher, once the teacher convinces the student, you can learn, it is in you that learning focuses. This learning is not mine to give to you, but this learning is yours to have yourself individually. And all I can do for you is to start the process by giving you a primordial image, a guiding star, and in the Gita, the guiding star image is the steadfast sage.
Vinoba wrote a book on it called The Steadfast Wisdom. It's called sthitaprajna-darshan. Darshan means to see. But it means to see it in a revered way. And it means to see with penetration and exactness. One has darshan of a sage, or of a saint. Or in a colloquial way, one has darshan of a handsome man or a beautiful woman. One sees and understands, "Darshan is that..." sthitaprajna-darshan means to see the steadfastness of the wisdom. What is that steadfastness? It's not the static but it is the truthful cyclic undulation of the real. As Plato says, there comes a point in the unfolding of a mythos where the philosopher sees what is just so. And when he does, there is that recognition, re-cognition.
So, in the Gita, we have this. In the second chapter, we have the basic principles of life, the way of action, karma, and the image of sthitaprajna, the steadfast seer. Then in the third, fourth and fifth chapters of the Gita, which was the workbook for Gandhi, it was the workbook for Vinoba. They carried it with them. They memorized it whenever they would have an occasion to talk before a village or before an urban crowd or among themselves, this is what they would open up. These were the basic steps which they would review time and time again in many circumstances. So, the fourth, third, fourth, and fifth chapters of the Gita deal with karma. Vikarma and akarma or akarma.
Karma means the performance of svadharma. That is to say, it isn't just the action that is happening. There is no real random action just happening. There is no unconnectedness. We talked about action in the Greek, the derivation of the word pragmatic. Karma is pragmatic. It really happens. And it happens according to law exactly. And so, karma in the third chapter of the Gita is this exactness as it turns out by law. The performance of svadharma, self-realization, is the law of karma. It is the integral motion just like the soul-force is the integral motion of the life-wave that we think we are. Vikarma means the inward action which is performed to support the outward action. So vikarma is the inward action. It's what we think about - our thoughts, our feelings - that supports the karma, so that the karma, the action of the world which generates all the cause and effect is dependent upon a previous layer, another conditionality which is inside of us. It is there.
When karma and vikarma become one. And how do they become one? They synchronize just like watches synchronizing together, the inner rhythm and the outer rhythm synchronized. Well, if one is talking about the karma of a lifetime, you can imagine what has to develop inside to synchronize with that - great deal of preparation. When they come together, the mind and the heart are purified and cleansed. Why is that so? It is because they then go through like a circular shape, this is a metaphorical image, a circular shape, a purifying shape. And it's like a river, stream, which running over rocks will purify itself after a certain run. It's the same way that the karma and the vikarma when they're harmonized together tend to purify their motion. That is, they come down to the essential cyclic reality of their manifestation.
When they become one, the cravings that we have acquired, weaken. Tanha was the ancient name for craving. And tanha is always grasping to have. It's a compulsiveness. And tanha loses its grip. The inclination to grasp simply begins to dissolve. It isn't there. One doesn't need a cigarette. One doesn't need any more food. One simply doesn't need - the tanha, the grasping, the desire is weakened, it is gone. Feelings of difference vanish. And then the state of akarma is reached. akarma, no karma, non-karma. This state of akarma, it has been said is of two kinds. In one, you feel, though you worked day and night that you are not working at all. The sage never feels the work. And there is no burden. And there is no effort. It is effortless doing because it is akarma. Is no longer karmic action, it is akarmic action. So, it is always doing, there's no effort. There's no strain. There's no particular triumph. There is no particular glory. There is no particular lack of it. There is no anxiety over whether it's going to work or not work or whether it did work or is working.
So, it's distinctive. It's a tone of ebullience which carries on timeless ebullience which is there. And this is, though you work, day and night, the feeling that you're not working at all. And then the other, which is the complement to it, though you work not at all, you work unceasingly. Though you're doing nothing in particular, you were still working unstoppingly. It's an unceasing activity. So that Gandhi when he would talk this way, the people who were politicizing his yoga would think, "Well, he must mean that he's plotting. He's thinking new things. That's what he's doing. He doesn't mean work unceasingly without doing and then constantly work without effort. He couldn't mean that."
Well, you see they didn't understand. And Vinoba, who lived some 34 years after Gandhi was assassinated, could understand in retrospect the entire effect of Gandhi's activity. And he could see where it had fallen through. And he could see that the fact was that the emphasis had been put back into illusory terms, back into delusory structures. And that we're on our way out again. Only what was through that door was not just more time wasted, more centuries of sloth available, but the end of man. Because man is no longer a child. Man technologically, if he turns into a killer, will do the proper job, and end it all.
So, there was no door to go through. There was no possibility. There was only the bringing back into play. The process of discovery that Gandhi more than anyone, Vinoba - tremendously educated individual - quotes Sri Aurobindo or Rabindranath Tagore. He is well acquainted with sage upon sage, ancient and modern. But he says the peculiar quality of Gandhi was that he made it possible for all, for everyone to understand. He found a way to take the Rishi knowledge and put it into forms that the most ignorant peasant in the farthest away village in the most impoverished country in the world could live it. He may not be able to tell you all the ramifications, but he could live it and he could live it smilingly and teach it to his children.
And this is what man needed. We don't need more egotistical sages. There's a lot of spiritual egotism rampant. There are a lot of crests of the flamboyantly phony flying over encampments around the world. There are hundreds of millions of people starving to death. There are hundreds of millions terrified to death - and increasing. So that then there needs to be this application.
And he says here that in the Gita, from the sixth chapter onwards are described the more important methods of vikarma. And that is the work that goes on inside to cleanse the mind, to purify the heart, to synchronize with the penetrative understanding of how karma cycles itself so that the two can come together and produce an akarmic condition. Not just for one individual who is privileged and spectacular because he's had a great Rishi teacher who just literally made it possible for it, but for everyone. For every being on the planet to have this opportunity, free of charge in the sense of no one having to pay from himself to someone else, what would they do with that? What is a fee?
The charge, the fee, is the truthful requirement that you actually do it. And so, when Vinoba would ask for sampatidan, meaning gift of wealth, he said, "I want a sixth of your wealth." And then reluctantly the big landlords and rajas would get out their checkbooks. And he'd say, "No. It's not that way. I don't want your wealth. I want you to take a sixth of your wealth every year. And I want you to give it to the places that you see need it." The responsibility for understanding what is wrong with the world is with you, not with me. I understand and I'm doing the most I can. We're not letting you off the hook. You're not giving this so some self-righteous social worker can then dispense it. You have to dispense it. And you have to do it every year, all the time. It's a way of educating everyone, what is there to be done?
And after a year or two of this of course it occurs to someone that we've hardly even begun. That almost everything necessary for a planetary-wide dharma is lacking. We have almost no ground to stand on. We have nothing really, basically there. If we rub our eyes too hard, it's not there. If we're thinking in terms of the material manifestation. Many people would go to Vinoba, and they would say, "I couldn't find your organization. You don't have a switchboard. You don't have offices. You don't have hierarchy, really?" And he would say, "Well, none of that is real. We're not trying to displace one mess with another. We are trying to unravel the mess so that it leaves nothing in its wake.
And we found a way to do this. And we're educators. We are pathfinders. And it's not something we can tell you. It's something you're going to have to do with us for a while in order to understand. And if you just do it with us for a while, I think you'll understand. And then if you want to go back to the old way, if you want to climb into your cage of possessiveness again, well, that's up to you. But try it this way for a while. Try and see what mankind looks like, what this world looks like from the moving experience of an integral unity, a penetration of vision for all. The sarvodayan society.
So, he says the sixth chapter onward describes the most important methods of vikarma useful for cleaning the mind from within and attaining the ideal state of akarma. The sixth chapter describes the means to this one-pointedness, meditation, and as aids to meditation, practice, and detachment. The seventh chapter teaches us the noble and comprehensive means of devotion, bhakti. How do you go to the Lord? You go to the Lord with love, with love. Go in search of knowledge, go seeking the good of the world. Go for your personal need. Go for whatever reason only reach his presence once.
Give this chapter the title of prapatti yoga. The yoga that impels you to surrender, what? Surrender your possessiveness, your ability to enforce the tanha. It can't operate without your permission. It can't work without you letting it. And it can't grasp without you endorsing it. It's got to always check back with you. It can't write its own checks. It can't pay for its own mischief. You're the only bank that it has for operating and if you cut off its credit, it'll go away. It'll cease to exist because it's not real. And if you have self-dharma, svadharma operating, it stops.
And because every single moment on the life-wave is filled with soul-force in the same modulation, it can happen at any single moment in time-space. Man is ultimately instantly free at any the moment he chooses to exercise his sovereignty. That's why the universe is a spiritual basis. It is an energy phenomenon with a spiritual basis. The material realm dances to the tune of the invisible drummer - always has. So, he says then, "This surrender has to be constantly practiced." Now you're beginning to understand the need for what Gandhi always said of himself, that he was constantly busy. He was a karma yoga. Because you have to practice this constantly. It isn't something you build up to and then do. It isn't something that you've done and therefore you rest on your laurels, and you say, "My God." It only actuates when you do it. And you have to do it constantly. And constantly seems like a lot of effort. But when you do it constantly, there's a synchronization that comes into play and the effort goes away.
And it's like an eagle soaring. You couldn't imagine how foolish you were before to think that this would be tremendous work and effort to keep track of every moment. So, he says, "It has to be constantly practiced and the yoga of constancy is then found in the eighth chapter of the Gita." Because all this was known to man, always has been known to man. Gandhi would say, "I had nothing new to teach the world. This wisdom is as old as the hills." It's just that we're actually like spoiled brats and have been for so many generations that we've forgotten the primordial wisdom that made man the sacrificer of the universe.
"The road that we have set out on" Vinoba writes, "the road that we have set out on, we should tread without stopping till we reached the end." There was no hope of ever reaching the goal if we walk how and when we like. We should never grow disgusted or despondent or complain how long are we to go on doing this sadana? We just do it because the vanity fair is to begin to daydream about the end, to begin to covet the triumph, to begin to sense it coming and look for it. It's like Orpheus trying to lead Eurydice out of hell. He can't look back at her or she will be gone forever. That mythic image. That the spiritual being who plays the nine-string lute charms the captive out of hell by not coveting the possession of his soul image at all.
It simply leads out like a true pathfinder and the soul image, the anima, the Eurydice will follow. How could it not? It was a complementarity there. It was a modulation of soul-force. There is a life-wave integration which is thus and so, it never has been different. And understanding that, one need never look back or forward. It would be the epitome of hoodwinking oneself to look back or forward. So, he says, "having introduced us then to this sadana," which is called satya yoga - satya yoga. The yoga of constancy. "The Lord in the ninth chapter teaches us a truth commonplace in itself but capable of transforming the whole quality of life. And this is raja yoga." This is Raja yoga. So, in the ninth chapter of the Gita, having gone through the seven chapters up to the eighth chapter which teaches satya yoga - the yoga of constancy - then comes raja yoga. The whole, all, the completeness. And we have some interesting phenomenons when we get to the ninth chapter of the Gita and various translations in English. And we start to notice the primordial differences in the translations, the ways in which different persons or different generations would give us the ninth chapter of the Gita. One can almost take the ninth chapter of the Gita, like the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching and understand the spiritual temperature and tone of a generation. It's all there. It all registers to the receiving eye. It's all there. The same as to a Rishi any moment in time-space declares the all. It was in the overpowering awesome penetration of the ancient civils is to hold up and fill you the universe in a handful of dust. In the ninth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, this wonderful translation here, Govindacharya with a translation of Ramanuja's commentary. This was done in Madras in 1898 [Vaijayanti Press] and the first verse runs like this: "This, the highest mystery of jana" - wisdom - "the highest mystery of wisdom, coupled with vijnana" - seeing, understanding - "I shall declare to thee the artless knowing which thou shalt from all that is impure be delivered." That first little sloka in the ninth chapter, when it was translated by Annie Besant and Bhagavan Das, not too distant from that actually, first edition 1905 [Theosophical Publication Society], just seven years later, this is how they translated that. "To thee, the uncarping, verily shall I declare this profoundest Secret, [metaphysical] wisdom with [physical science] combined, which, having known, thou shalt be freed from evil."
Now, this is really interesting and it's profound. This is a typical learned Indian, wise man, wouldn't really call him a Rishi, this is the tradition that came down as it manifested in 1898. It is full of obscurity, where the translation by Annie Besant and Bhagavan Das, who's a magnificent mind - I have a great big, huge thousand-page book by him on India - this translation goes right to the core of what the Gita is talking about. That metaphysical wisdom and physical science are like the karma and the vikarma, that they modulate, that physical science has a possibility of synchronizing with internal wisdom. And Vinoba would get to this time and time again in his lectures and he would say:
"Don't think I'm against science. Science is wonderful. Science, in fact, is the complement to what we are doing internally, is the development of science that is really a bright, shining star for man. But he has to bring his vikarma into synchronization with it or the karmic motion of science will literally shred reality. Man will have an atomic war that will end him, not because of some petty reason, not because some mad man decided to do it, but because the basic failure of man to integrate his interior, spiritual capacities into a synchronization and produce an akarmic condition in the world. It's not the fact that science exists so powerfully in the 20th century, it's just as it should be. It's that man inside hasn't really done his work, hasn't really lived that effort and that's all he has to do. Because when he integrates his metaphysical capacity inside, it will mesh in synchronization with the manifest forms of the karmic, physical science perfectly and produce an akarmic float momentum, no effort whatsoever."
So, Vinoba, again and again in the villages would tell them, "Don't worry about science, our brethren on the other side of the world are doing their part on science, science is wonderful. But if we don't do our part here, inside, it's going to tear. And it's not going to tear for political reasons or economic reasons, it's not going to tear because some Napoleon finally decided to do it, all of that is irrelevant, it has absolutely no bearing on the truth. The truth is, it will tear if we don't produce a synchronization of metaphysical integrity within ourselves."
So, he says, "This is the only thing that we have to do. We don't have to bicker and fight over who owns this well. We don't have to worry about rajas giving or not giving. To get distracted on that level is truly to fall into the trap of just paying attention to illusion, because none of that matters. What matters is the bringing together, through Sarvodaya, the svadharma capacity of the individual. And if we just do that, it will all come into synchronization. And man will be free because he would have earned it, to a T, guaranteed."
Well, we're going to take a break. I'll be down on the street hawking my cassettes to get money to buy food, that's my living, and then Elda's going to open up the gift store so that if people want to buy some Vinoba and Gandhi books. They've got some on the counters in there. I hope you all got stocked up with inexpensive Vinoba books. I always have much more material than I can drag out, so forgive me for having all these wonderful books up here with marks and not ever getting to...
A word about the courses coming up for our school on ... we start on October 1st and October 2nd. On October 1st I'll have two courses that'll be complementary, and which will be primordial. That is to say, these two courses form the first level of a series of eight levels of delving into material, into learning, into education, and the eight levels parallel the development that we went through as a species, so that devoting a quarter to each level, it takes about two years to go through a complete cycle and one would then have gone through in a way the development of the history of human consciousness, the way in which we actually came to where we are now, which is at a very advanced stage, we are very close to having a lot of capacity and facility, and some already do. But the first course is just an opener, and one half of these two courses is about nature, we have to literally understand that we are somewhere. So, we take nature, but we have to take nature in nature 1983. And nature 1983 is, fortunately or unfortunately, largely a scientific perspective, an understanding. So, the four materials that we're going to work with there, the first one is the revised version that just came out, just this month, 1983, of The Tao of Physics, the second revised version. The second one is The Double Helix, the discovery of DNA in its critical edition, which just came out a couple of years ago with all of the reviews and the updating and so forth. Timothy Ferris' great Sierra Club book, Galaxies, which came out just a few years ago. And then a book which just came out in paperback last year by Ellis B. Leakey's son, Richard Leakey, on Origins.
So, we have a book on physics, we have a book on DNA and the biology, the biochemic structure, and we have a book on man, and we have a book on galaxies. And so, we cover the four cardinal corners of nature 1983. And it's as up to date as we can make it and still have it comprehensible. The only thing beyond this, really, are just the articles in professional journals, there isn't anything more up to date. So, we're going to do that from 9:00 to 11:00, Saturday mornings, starting October 1st and going through to the end of December. So, you can either take that or you can take that plus its complement, or just take the complement. The other course is on symbolic consciousness, because as we look at the external, we have to bring the internal up at the same time, same level. There's a synchronization there. And the four materials that we're using, the fourth one I didn't bring because my edition is huge and bulky, it's the I Ching. And the I Ching is one of the great accomplishments of man and it's just as timely now as it ever was done for tuning our symbolic consciousness.
The other one is Carl Jung's Mandala Symbolism, which is just exquisite. And aside from its content, the color mandalas that he has in here, I think there's 70 or 80 illustrations in here in the paperback, it's only $6.95, I think. So, we're going to use the I Ching and Mandala Symbolism by Carl Jung. We're going to use Kandinsky, who's a great Russian artist of our time, masterful, Point and Line to Plane. This is the sequel of his little pamphlet called Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which is in a Dover paperback for about $1.95 in our bookstore. But this is the sequel where Kandinsky actually goes into how it is that we see, starting with a point, developing to a line, and how the conception comes into a plane, a horizon, as it were. And then the fourth one is a little $2.00 book called Language and Myth by Ernst Cassirer, because in developing symbolic consciousness, we have to bring language in. And we have to do it in a way which will fold into the sophistication that we're using here. But don't let the term sophistication throw you. These are introductory courses, these are come as you are, with whatever you're bringing in. The only emendation that I would make, as an educator - because I've run these kinds of courses since 1966 - that you come continuously. It's the continuity of being there, in this kind of a pattern, that allows for the maturation of a shape of learning. There's a shape of learning and it's like trying to remember a geometric pattern and you struggle and sometimes you can remember it. And the cartoon way of expressing that is the light bulb goes on.
Well, this is a shape of learning which is primordial, which you already know, and you know in such a basic way that it's a part of your reality. And what the educator is trying to do in this regard is to coax it out into the open, just for a glimpse. And that usually happens right at the end of the course, but you need that continuity to build up, so that you have some receptivity, some conditionality, which is not based upon your normal, habitual life, good or bad or in between, but is based on an individual and shared experience happening in an educational situation which has a stacked deck. I've stacked the deck so that this will happen if it can. It doesn't always work, but generally does, it generally does.
I've run these courses, ran them in San Francisco for four years, ran them in Canada for five years, and very often there were students just like yourselves, or even younger farm children, 18 or 19, from the wilds of Saskatchewan and various places, and it works. I had Blackfoot Indians who, they had never been to college, come in and in about a year just blossom and go on and get degrees. They were the first Blackfeet to ever get college degrees, there were three of them. And the tribe were just amazed, how, how does this happen? And then, they could tell them because they knew, they knew how it happened.
So, these are being offered and it starts on the 1st of October and the address is 2029 Hyperion, just one mile from here, 2029 Hyperion. And then in the January, February, March quarter, we'll go to the second level, which is rituals, after we have the introduction. Then we go to the primordial learning experience that man had, which were rituals. And then after that we move to mythologies where it turns into language, we sing about what we're doing, we tell about what we've done. And then it goes on from there at various levels. So, it may be of interest to you. Sunday we're offering a course on Early Christianity. A friend of mine, Basil Jenkins, who's the director of the Fowler Museum in Beverly Hills, is offering it on Byzantine civilization and the first part of it is Early Christianity, up to Constantine. Because Christianity really, in its early matrix, was a Greek-Hebrew Byzantine synthesis. It wasn't Roman until after the Councils got it going. Sunday is 4:00 to 6:00 in the afternoon, on Sunday. Starting October 2nd.
Then in the morning of Sunday mornings, starting October 2nd, we're having a course on Chinese. And it'll be Chinese language, but it'll be Chinese language completely for beginners by someone who learned Chinese as an adult, he was from Sri Lanka, he was a Buddhist monk, and he went to China, and he learned Chinese from masterful Chinese teachers in the monasteries who said, "You don't want to have these textbooks getting in your way, you want to learn as a human being." And so, he's going to teach Chinese so that you learn to speak it and recognize it in an integral fashion. And he's pretty good. He's also literate in Japanese and Sanskrit and Pali and English and many other things, so he knows lots of languages. So that's on Sundays. And we're going to do our best to make it a real pleasant learning environment - plants and fresh air and openness and a little bit of kindness mixed together in an open matrix - and the best quality of teaching that you can find. So, all that's coming up.
Vinoba was concerned with democracy. He wrote this little book called Democratic Values, which we have two copies in the bookstore, and I hope they were sold. Democratic Values, and the Practice of Citizenship. And he's very much like Jefferson. In order to have a democracy, we've got to do it. We can't hope for it, we can't expect it, we can't have it and then let it go, we can't not have it and hope somebody else will do it, to have a democracy we have got to do it. And if we do, do it, we will have it, because this kind of a manifestation has all the efficacy of a yoga and the reason that democracies usually fail are the reason that students usually fail in developing their yoga capacities - they give up on it, or they get shoddy about it, or they get hit and miss.
So, in a very fundamental way, the promise of a democracy is dependent upon the truthful application of its citizens to make it happen. And so, it's a beautiful plant, because when it does happen, it happens because the people have earned it. And it's not theirs as a possession, but it is theirs as a manifestation which they have ensured by the fact and actuality of their doing and can be sustained indefinitely.
So, Democratic Values, there are selections from the addresses of Vinoba Bhave from 1951 to 1960. In chapter two here it's called "The King, The Rishi and the People," - The King, the Rishi, and the People. And he says here, "People usually agree that the best possible rule would be that of the Rishi - that is Plato's philosopher king. But the difficulty is that we cannot recognize the Rishi because a real Rishi looks like everybody else, seems just like the neighbor next door. It's only the phonies collecting shekels, as Krishnamurti would say, that look like gurus. They used to have the turbans and the diamonds in the 20s and now they have the Rolls Royces and who knows what all. So, the difficulty is that we cannot recognize the Rishi. Remember that Wallace Stevens poem I always quote? The Good Man Has No Face. "And then the people murmur, the good man has no face, as if they knew," writes Wallace Stevens.
Therefore, the rule of the Rishi, good though it is, is not very practicable. The rule of the King is obviously bad. Today, therefore, the rule of the people must be and is being practiced. What are we left with? We're left with the people. We're left with the people. Everything depends upon the people's wishes and whatever the majority wants is done. It happens sometimes that wise and good men are of one opinion and the common people of another. One cannot say what the majority wants is sure to be good. That is why we need to seek out the Rishis and take their advice." You see characteristic of Vinoba; he gives you reasons and alternatives and you count them off and then pretty soon he's got you back at the beginning again. Well, we do need the Rishis. And we need the people.
So, you have to leap ahead with your sense of putting things together, you have to outstrip your mental capacity just to simply register information and you have to follow him by becoming a pathfinder, a self-educator, and you have to leap ahead and say, well, if we need the Rishi and the people, then they have to meld together in a way that they are a single phenomenon. So that he says that this, in fact, in the next chapter produces a sense of freedom from government, government taken as the dross, the bureaucratic structure that we lean on like crutches, because we can't walk ourselves. The best government is the government that governs least, not just as a maxim, but as an actual, pragmatic workability. He says, "We have before us three different theories of government. The first is that the state will ultimately wither away and be transformed into a stateless system, but in order to bring that about, we must in the present exercise the maximum of power. So, those who accept this theory are totalitarians in the first stage and anarchists in the final stage."
Vinoba wrote a wonderful introduction to a book called Gandhi and Marx, where he held Marxism up and he said, "This is so full of holes and those holes are full of teeth and every time you try to make this thing work, you're going to get caught in the traps, because the whole thing is riddled with impossibilities. You end up killing everybody else at the beginning because they don't agree with you, and you end up being killed by everybody else at the end because you don't agree with them. It isn't that we have to fight against it, it's just that, on inspection, it falls apart. If you inspect it in the right way, it simply doesn't hold. It's no good, it's not usable."
He used to go into the Communist areas of India and sit down there and he would collect all the arguments from the Marxist professors and the revolutionaries and so forth and he'd hold them in his memory and then, one by one, he'd bring them out and he'd just display them and show them that it's just tinsel. You can't use it. It doesn't work! Not because somebody isn't strong enough to make it work, because it's not workable. So, why waste your time?
The second theory is that some form of government has always existed in the past, exists now, and will continue to exist in the future. A society without a government is a sheer impossibility. In other words, we have to have something. We've always had something, we've got to have something, so we might as well take this. We'll complain about it, but you got to have it. It's not true. It is not true. That also does not hold. On inspection, that falls apart.
He says, "The third is our own theory. We too believe in a stateless society as an ultimate goal. We recognize that in the preliminary stages a certain measure of government is necessary, but we do not agree that it will continue to be necessary at a later stage. Neither do we agree that any kind of totalitarian dictatorship is necessary, because it's a violence, to ensure progress towards a stateless society. On the contrary, we propose to proceed by decentralizing administration and decentralizing authority. In the final stage there will be no coercion, but a purely moral kind of authority and it's not the authority of telling, it's the authority of morals as an applied, ethical realization that thus and thus is so, not because we think it's so or like it to be so, but because the structure of the very energies and modulations of reality are so. This is how they are. We can see it, we can understand it, there are acts that are right, there are acts that are wrong. And it's not cultural relativity that makes them right or wrong. There is a truth and there is a justice, therefore we should have it. The establishment of such a self-directing society calls for a network of self-sufficient units. Production, distribution, defense, education, everything should be localized. The center should have the least possible authority. We shall thus achieve decentralization through this individual and group and regional self-sufficiency."
He says, "This is the basic difference between our point of view and that of planning commissions. We don't want to have commissions. We want to do it and we want to do it right. And if this decision involves such and such people, they should make the decision. Is it cumbersome? Well, therefore, let it be cumbersome. What makes it cumbersome? Let's look at the conditions which make it cumbersome and work on simplifying those conditions. If we're working with a structural solution, then everything that is a problem has to have some kind of a kink or bend in its manifestation up to this point. Let's throw all these phony solutions away and let's look at them from the beginning. Why is this cumbersome? That's the order of business, before we can have any kind of a decision."
So, the Gandhian way of thought eventually comes down to the center, down to Satyagraha, and engendering in everyone the capacity to be able to receive and hold a truthful quality in their presence. So that if someone doesn't have it, you don't argue against them so much. You don't hate them because they don't have it, you try to find out how can this be engendered? How can they learn? What must we do? As Tolstoy would say.
Thoughts on Education follows Democratic Values in a very real way because teachers are the center, they're the core of this whole issue in a very real way. We have to, in a yoga, become our own teacher, we have to discipline our own self, we have to teach ourselves, so that education as a process is a fundamental process here. The schools are really the ashrams, East and West. He says here in chapter 35, "History is Dangerous," he says, "Freedom of thought there must be. And along with it there must be a science of thought. Thought does not spring from the senses, it's not sensorially based, it doesn't spring from the feelings, from nose or eyes or ears. Thought is of the reason. So, when we control our senses and our feelings and then attend to our reason, we find out how to think. We enter upon the science of thought. It is a science that should be studied by every citizen and student."
This is the kind of language Vinoba always used, citizen and student. Bertrand Russell said, "Men fear thought like the plague," because thought is wild, it doesn't always go where you hope it will for your gain or for others' put down. Thought essentially has a truthful element to it, it occurs to us that we could be wrong about something on the basis of reason. We don't like to see this.
Then he has a chapter, "The High Calling of the Teacher." The High Calling of the Teacher. In the Vedas, the teacher is called gatuvid. Gatuvid in English is pathfinder. Gatu is the road to be traveled, Gatu, the road to be traveled. Gatuvid is he who searches out the road. There is a road to be traveled, there's a way, there is a Tao. And the teacher is he who searches out that way and gives it to the students, gives it away. This is the special title for a teacher in the Vedas. The Vedas regard the guru as a very strong pathfinder or guide. The teacher must never be weak-minded - in the teacher's hands, his supreme authority, he holds a great position. The teacher, by giving up his wisdom, may be the pioneer and guide into the future. There can be no greater power than that. But if the teacher is weak, the guidance that he gives will also be weak, the plans for the future will be faulty and the whole nation's life will be weakened," and you might just as well say, "and mankind is in jeopardy."
What is that power? What is that weakness? It's not this power, it's not this weakness, it is the modulation of the integrity of his soul force in tandem with the modulation of the manifesting universal energy, the karma and the vikarma together to make an akarmic modulation, that is strength. It is strength because the harmony is in tune. That famous book that Ralph Waldo Trine wrote, In Tune with the Infinite, "When man is in tune with the Infinite, what is there to go wrong?" Nothing! Nothing. So, he has this in here.
Then he has a section on "The Growth of Fearlessness." And he puts it this way and now we're able to see that he's talking in a Gandhian way. "Fearlessness means that we should neither fear anything, nor inflict fear on others. If we're inflicting fear on others, we are certainly not displaying fearlessness. Both these things are parts of fearlessness. A tiger cannot be called fearless, it may not be afraid of any other animal, but it is afraid of a gun, and it also inspires fear in other creatures. True fearlessness has this double aspect. It involves the power to recognize that one's self is not identical with one's body or with one's possessions or with one's position or with one's money, all of this. No animal possesses that power, the physical life is all that it experiences. The most important thing for any kind of education, whether in school or society, is to bring about the recognition that we are other than our bodies."
And then he talks about how, until education is really based on fearlessness, there is no hope of any reform in society. "If we desire reform, we must teach the lesson of fearlessness. We ought to teach children never to submit to those who beat and strike them, but nowadays children are getting a regular education in fear. Not like from the beatings they get, but from the psychological expectation of coercion. How many interviews and reviews have we seen now of school children in the West who are casualties of the Cold War? They act as if the atomic war has already happened, and it has psychologically for many of these. What is the punk movement but a requiem for the youth psychologically dismembered."
So, all of this Vinoba holds firmly in this realization that in teaching, in education, one of the primordial qualities is this fearlessness, to allow that to come out in its double aspect, fearless of that and fearless because this does not cause a fear. Ahmsa, nonviolence, as we've seen is integral with truth. When truth moves, it is ahmsa. When truth resonates in its wholesomeness, it is truth. The form that man makes to discern this, is that laboratory of integrity, that magnifying glass which he is able to put on the movement of soul force is his form of the individual or the society in its various levels - that Sarvodaya circle. He either manifests as a Rishi for himself or it is manifest by the people for their democratic wholesomeness because it's only in that form that they can detect and manifest the flow of truth.
In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu is always talking about whenever you have terms for government, you have no real government. But when the people don't even think of terms for the government, then you have a government, because it happens, as it should, and it doesn't occur to you that something's not happening. So, the whole idea of political parties, the whole idea of a bureaucratic structure, civil service, and IRS and so forth, all of these are phenomena which indicate problems. Problems. In his little book on Random Reflections, he says, "The seeker after Spirit should be like fire, wisdom is his light and asceticism his heat." Asceticism in learning that you don't need 15 pieces of chalk, one will do. You don't need to own the room that you teach in, it can happen, that kind of asceticism. It's not just a simple relief of not having it and doing without and being proud of the fact. It's doing what is necessary with just enough, that's asceticism.
He says, "Humility is resilience." Humility is resilience. "In resilience, there is the power of tenacity, not tanha but tenacity, the art of winning over and the climax of heroism. Man is a hero, he's a hero because in his pathfinding, he leads to freedom the enslaved. He himself was there in those cages and everything that he loved - now they are out, now they are free." So, in his book on Third Power, and I'll just end with this because we're running out of time, he writes, "Mistakes due to our narrowness of outlook have distorted our economic life. Man seems unthinkable and unable to even think beyond my house, my friends, my fields, my wealth, my family's happiness, my country's welfare. The result is that one man's prosperity blocks another's way, that when I become rich, another is made poor, and that his success threatens me with ruin."
Every time I see the Los Angeles skyline with more and more skyscrapers, I wonder how many more people are unfed. Because there's always a complementation, there's always that kind of a flow. He says, "This economics is a breeding ground of hostility. It is this economic system which makes the developed nations wealthy at the expense of the rest of the world, the same narrow individualism which distorts our economics is to be found also in our thinking about spiritual matters. The mistake in economic ideas which make me consider only my interests and my prosperity isolate me from other people. The same selfish individualism in spiritual things shows itself in a phrase like my salvation.' People realized this long ago. Some put it very clearly in their prayers to the Lord. Many divas and sages, it is said, desired to see their own salvation and do long penances in jungle solitudes in order to obtain it, but I have no desire to find my salvation alone. I cannot abandon these poor people. This attitude is as relevant today as it ever was," says Vinoba. We have taken no steps to correct our mistake. My liberation is a contradiction in terms. There is no such thing as "my liberation." Where in the Universe would that happen, that you would be free to have your liberation at the expense of others, without others, where would that happen? In what time-space could that be? In what modulation of the soul force could that ever attain? Only in a fiction sustained by constant ill-habit. If I seek only my own enlightenment and am content that everyone else should remain in darkness, I am throwing away with my own hands all hope of liberation. We've still not realized that "my" can never lead us into freedom, but only into slavery. Our spiritual gurus have always urged us to rid ourselves of our bondage to "I" and "me," but they have paid little attention to what this actually means in practice.
There is a riddle in the Mahabharata, "What word is bound in two syllables and released in three?" The answer is the word "mama," which in Sanskrit means "mine." Mine. And "namama," which in Sanskrit means "not mine." In short, unless one gets rid of the ego, freedom is impossible. Yet, even in the spiritual field, our practices may strengthen the ego. A man may discipline himself through austerity and thus achieve certain esoteric powers, and yet be as self-centered in spirit as another man who goes after money." People who refine themselves in tarot or astrology or yoga or whatever can still be as self-centered as the guy who's willing to shoot his neighbor for the property. There is that kind of blindness. He says, "the spiritual aspirant becomes then a sort of spiritual capitalist. People seek his blessing and feel convinced that his blessing has given their children happiness and brought their family prosperity. Both the aspirant and his devotees are basically selfish in their outlook and consequently this is how our society has grown selfish.
"So, the impasse," he says, "finally comes down to the fact that the people have not been ignorant and selfish so much as the teachers, the so-called teachers." So, in a very real way, Vinoba, like Gandhi, is emphasizing the reason the Rishis have to come out of their caves is that they are the ones who are responsible for the mess. If they had done their work right originally, we would never have come into this nightmare. Therefore, the only thing for them to do in all conscious is to get out of the mountains and forests and back into the farmlands and the huts and the cities and go to work.
Well, that's all until next week.
END OF RECORDING