The Pictorial Gandhi
Presented on: Thursday, September 29, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
Gandhi
Presentation 13 of 13
The Pictorial Gandhi
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 29, 1983
Transcript:
The date is September the 29th, 1983. This is the last lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on Gandhi. Roger Weir was the American contact for the Gandhi Centenary 1969 representing the Gandhi Peace Foundation in Delhi and the World Without War Council in Berkeley. He also negotiated in republishing the book Gandhi: His Relevance for Our Times.
The present course on Gandhi was presented in Canada and the University of California at Berkeley.
So, I want you to know that I tried, and there are no slides. The machines are all right and the processes were followed, so I have to improvise for you. I can do one of two things. I can arrange us in a different kind of a formation, or I can ask you to seat yourselves closer, because I'm going to have to pass the books with the photographs to you. I know that some of you like to have your distance. I frankly just as soon you have your distance, but for convenience sake, if you'd come in a little bit closer.
Since I don't have slides, I'm going to have to pass them to you. When I get fidelity in it - it might be any day or who knows? As you know, probably as much as I, this is a very strange time in history. There's a universal law of compensation in the psyche and in the world at large. The world is alive, as you might by now surmise. As Carl Jung points out very often, any major step forward in consciousness always entails a compensation and a balancing.
So, I have inherited the wind this month and have been waiting for many things. Waiting for these slides, which will be the last little bit. But when the cake falls, it doesn't matter that your icing doesn't gel. I will try and - I know that many of you come continuously, and I'm very thankful to you. As you know, I don't much think of myself as an expert giving the facts, but rather as a creator trying to engender a situation in common with you. So, all of the situation owes itself to your presence and your attentiveness. Without you, I wouldn't do any of it at all. I don't seek publicity, and I certainly don't seek financial gain from it. So, it's just the excellence of your company, the pleasure of your company - that is the situation.
So, what I will do to sort of make up, I will try to get copies made of the best photograph I know of in the Gandhian field. This is Gandhi and Vinoba together in October of 1940. That was when I was born when this little conversation was going on. This conversation was about World War II and about the need for someone conscientious on a massive scale with profundity to step forth for mankind at a very crucial moment in time. Gandhi here is asking Vinoba if he will be that individual if he will step forth.
Vinoba, this is about the only photograph I know of him when he was younger. He was almost unheard of. He's unheard of now, but he was more unheard of when he was in his 20s and 30s and 40s, tut this is the young Vinoba talking with Gandhi. I'll pass this around. This is in volume six of D. G. Tendulkar's great eight-volume biography of Gandhi called Mahatma. So, there's that photo. I will try to make copies for you people. As soon as I can, perhaps by next week if I get some facility, I will just pass them out to you.
It's interesting to contrast that poignant conversation between Gandhi and Vinoba with a sketch of Vinoba done in his 80s. He lived to be 87. This is rather characteristic of him, what he looked like in his 80s. He was about Mr. [Manly P.] Hall's age here, about 83, 82 or 83. Of course, the temperature is very hot in India, and very often just a shawl. This case, it's a khadi handwoven shawl and his loincloth and barefooted, his typical costume.
This book, Swaraj Shastra - shastra is like the Hindi version of a sutra; swaraj is self-rule, raj is rule - so this is a little sutra on self-rule. Of course, you see Vinoba here on the front laid back, sitting back, ready to discuss in a very open way. This is the sign of the Gandhian. There's no flourish of power or authority. This is very disconcerting to many people. In fact, we had a lot of experience during the Gandhi Centenary where we sent booklets out throughout the United States and the world. In this country, the auspices were under the World Without War Foundation in San Francisco and Berkeley in tandem with the Gandhi Peace Foundation in New Delhi.
We found again and again that individuals would get all enthused about Gandhi and his methodology and techniques, and they would have all these grandiose ideas of how to use this as a real new power base and a fantastically efficient methodology of operation, and they would be constantly chagrined to find Gandhians absolutely uninterested in this. They didn't particularly want to not cooperate, but they weren't interested in power and authority.
This, of course in our time, bodes naivete. We think that those people who are like the Hobbits or the Gandhis are naïve. How could we listen to them? After all, the mega kill is now four or five tons per being on the planet. One has to be strong or facile in face of this. Even our automobiles must be vicious and given these names and be able to do zero to 60 in so many seconds, otherwise we might get caught. So, what are you doing with non-violence? My goodness. To say that a world class leader should be looking like this, caught looking like this on the cover of one of his books hardly sits well.
But the fact is that in some of the portraits of Vinoba, we find a characteristic which we've seen before in history, this little pencil sketch of him. Vinoba, from time to time, looks, for all the world, like the classic image that persons of my generation would have had of Jesus. When you see photographs of Vinoba walking across the river followed by hundreds of people and they're just with him and he loving every inch of the situation and nothing is more important than anything else, and his gentle capacities. You find it almost impossible to not see some of the parallels.
So, here's Vinoba on the march. I'll pass these around, and you can see him here with his vigor. All this comes actually from his years of preparation under Gandhi. We're often told that a genius is someone who steps out of the situation, who really transcends their time or their background. But quite frequently when we know the story, a genius is someone who gathers up and keeps gathered an enormous field of comprehension which has been passed to them and is able to use that, put that into operation.
Classically, of course, Aristotle was Aristotle because he had 20 years under Plato. Plato, of course, had most of his young life under Socrates. Socrates died when Plato was about 28 years old. So quite frequently we find that there is a linking up in history of outstanding geniuses, and they often, therefore, come in clusters. Not always in the same country, but that there are contacts, whether it by ideas or by blood. So Vinoba is really the child of Gandhi. He joined him when he was still a teenager and he didn't make a move on his own until he was in his 50s. So, I think it's quite interesting to put the two together. Of course, it brings the story up to date.
Now the classic book by Gandhi is [Gandhi:] An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth. The PRS's copy, that we have here from 1945, still has the photographs in it. Most of the later editions do not. When we see the photographs that Gandhi would give in his autobiography, the earliest ones show him to be a very ordinary, almost a vain young man. Even when he is in South Africa, 1904, this is very late in the game, he's 35 years old, he still has a bit of the Dapper Dan about him. He still has this not quite Victorian, but more of what we would identify almost as an Edwardian sense of self-grandeur, which is exemplified in these photographs.
But there is always before us this image of the humble peasant saint. I think this is the archetypal image of Gandhi, either this form or one of him sitting down. But I think actually, as you can see by this frontispiece "Lead, Kindly Light", which is very much like the cover, the lone quester. Pass these on around. The notion of Gandhi as having arrived very easily at his yogic understanding of life - rather than emphasizing politics, he emphasized yoga - actually came in bits, fits, and starts, bits and pieces. Here's a photograph of him in 1914. You can see he is still, here at the age of 45, recognizable as a westerner. Very much as a westerner so that there is a mystery involved with the transition of Gandhi.
I think, as you have seen in the lecture series, the crucial turning point for him was the correspondence with Leo Tolstoy, because Gandhi, like any human being, needing some sense of confirmation - we all need from time to time to be looked at, even when we are understanding our situation, comfortable in it, there is still the need for the confirmation, the legitimacy of spiritual presence of having someone whom we respect or admire look upon us - and in this respect, I think that Tolstoy did the trick for Gandhi.
After his correspondence in 1910 with Tolstoy, we find a whole different motion to Gandhi. Now the classic pose of Gandhi in transition is here in 1924 before an early version of the charkha. This is a charkha, which had been discovered in an attic. Somebody's aunt in Bombay had had this old antique. So, there's this photograph in here. We find Gandhi right on the verge of changing, and yet some 20 years before - I'll dig out a photograph later on for you - there's a photograph of Gandhi looking very much as he would at age 60, twenty years before this. The photograph was when he and his German friend, Hermann Kallenbach, had been undergoing personal discipline for several years together. They were disciplining themselves of giving up various food stuffs, of taking on various kinds of work, and then discussions between them of the effects of these acts upon their physiology and upon their psychology and their outlook.
Kallenbach, who was an architect, had a very much attenuated sense of design, a very vigorous man. In the film Gandhi, he is presented as bare-chested quite often, but I think in the photographs that you see of Kallenbach, he either is dressed as a dapper businessman of the Victorian period or he is in ascetics garb. The expressions on the faces of Kallenbach and Gandhi in these ascetic photographs show the intensity of the interior discipline. That is to say the little expressive highlights that often float to the surface in the secular personality are missing.
There's the pale, washed-out look that, on closer inspection, has a penetration to it. The washed-out look is because all of the pizazz has been eliminated. And there are just simple physiological structures expressive of equanimity rather than of any dynamic. So quite often on first glance, such personages or people at such periods in their lives have a bland look to us until we look deeper. Then when we see the live quality to them in their eyes, we realize that they are no longer leaning against their persona. The persona is a mask, classically and today. They're no longer leaning against their persona with their feelings and their ideas and so forth, but that they are in back of and alert in back of any choreography through the facial expressions of feelings or desires and so forth. So that quite often in these ascetic photographs, even when there is a moment of enjoyment - like this photograph between Gandhi and [Rabindranath] Tagore, we find them sharing something humorous. Of course, they're lively, and yet if you look close in these photographs, both Tagore and Gandhi are, by this time, 1925, extremely adept as what would be known classically as yoga kirtans[?], that is those individuals who have adapted themselves to a sense of discipline so that the discipline begins to permeate the entire field of their personality, and such that the quality of their perceptions no longer feed into the normal dead-ends of codified conceptions held by the mind in certain images, but that the flow of perceptions is clean. It flows through them, rather to them. So, the field of perceptual quality becomes - I guess the phrase that I would like to use is, electrostatically clear. That is that it no longer has the polarizing tendencies to net the dust of the world, to use a metaphor. Instead, what transpires there is a wholesomeness, a friendliness with the world, a wholesomeness with the world as with someone who is no longer influenced.
This quality in the photographs of Gandhi, I think, comes across also in this classic photograph. This is, as they say, a characteristic pose, but this is the classic concerned Gandhi. He is not obviously concerned for himself. He is concerned in a directed mode to a specific situation, whatever concern he brings up doesn't come from himself as in trying to hook onto a solution to help himself, but rather he is here in this pose attempting to give, in focus to an exact situation, all of the conscientiousness, all the talent, and the background which he can bring to bear.
This quality, to Gandhi, is I think one of the prized elements of his personality. When he gave up the leadership of the Congress Party in 1934, in fact, he asked the Congress Party if it would not follow him and tend to become more a service society to the people of India and later, of course, in independence, he would make this his last will and testament that instead of being a political party, it be a service organization for the people. Commensurate with giving up the last vestiges of political power, ostensible political power, he also gave his ashram outside of the city of Ahmedabad - very large city, industrial city in Gujarat State - he gave his ashram there at the Sabarmati River to the untouchables, and he moved to the center of India. At the center of India - around the cities, the little villages actually of Wardha, and about six or seven miles north in Pavnar where Vinoba had been since 1921 - Gandhi went there and began to work himself in, bring his whole field of manifestation into the receptive situation that Vinoba had been preparing all this time. This is always missed by individuals who simply write a biography of Gandhi and do not see that his work was carried on for decades after without a miss, without a hitch by Vinoba.
There, at Wardha, actually, were all the research facilities that the Gandhians had and their constructive program. That is to say all of the little niceties that Gandhi would talk about in his speeches, were niceties in the speeches, but they were working in Wardha on applying this, because he actually meant when he said that he was a scientist and that his autobiography was "his experiments with truth." As any scientist, he was interested in having the technologies developed based on this science and wanted to see the application.
So, at Wardha, all these large buildings were concerned with the constructive program. They modified the charkha. They made possible a great many other developments. Also, at Wardha, there's this very telling photograph of Gandhi emerging from his house. You notice that on the house, on both sides of a highly decorative window are the charkhas. Now this symbol is a modification of the ancient classic Buddhist symbol where the dharma chakra is presented and on both sides are the golden animals - they vary in the iconography - but they're attentive to the wheel of truth. The charkha is really the contemporary Gandhian dharma chakra - wheel of truth.
In fact, the continuity of this, when Vinoba was in the early 1960s developing his whirlwind campaign in Bihar, he emphasized again and again that, of all the places in the world, Bihar should be the first place to develop a non-violent society. But of course, he wasn't saying non-violent at that time. He was saying a sarvodayan society. We now understand that sarvodaya is a prism - it is a human unity - either by an individual or by a group of whatever size, and that this prism focuses soul force, universal energy that begins in satyagraha and manifests itself in ahmsa through the prism, through the sarvodaya. Since Gandhi had proved as a scientist that soul force actually exists, that it actually works in controlled experiments. It works in the individual, it works in any human situation which we have. It works in any universal situation. So Vinoba, in developing the technologies of that spiritual science shows Bihar as the first large district in the world to have human society, because it had been, in antiquity, the home of the Buddha, that Buddhism had once had its firmest foundation in Bihar, and that at one time - 2,500 years ago - Bihar was the most advanced area on the planet, that there were all the classic early Buddhist achievements and locations: Sarnath (Banares today), Bodh Gaya, the Bodhi Tree, all of these had been in Bihar.
So, at the site of the Bodhi tree, taking a cue from Gandhi, he had constructed a special school right at the site of the Bodhi tree, which would teach the unity of Vedanta and Buddhism. This was its main function. By bringing these two subjects together in one institution at the Bodhi tree as an indication of the higher intellectual capacities of the forming of the sarvodaya - because while we emphasize all the time the peasant aspect, the economic aspect of just getting enough food to eat - there also is a very sophisticated intellectual quality to sarvodaya. If you've been following the lecture series, I think that you're in a position now to appreciate that, understand that.
So there at the Bodhi Tree, Vinoba set up, again, another kind of an institution for the constructive program so that there would be schools of ultra-graduate level, if you wish, to prepare those kinds of individuals who could offer the gift of their mind. There is also the gift of the mind that was stressed in the sarvodaya philosophy.
So, Gandhi moved to where Vinoba was. At Wardha, very often you would find the situation of Gandhi back with the animals and the children - very much what he had started with. This quality is continuous from the days at Tolstoy Farm in South Africa through the Sabarmati Ashram through to the Ashram in Wardha. This concern of Gandhi's all the time with the animals and the children by stressing that no matter how sophisticated we get, we always have to return back to the real roots of life. In this continuous way, we're able to develop our wholesomeness.
Now here is his wife, Kasturba. I had a whole series of slides to show you of her in various times. The notion that Kasturba was somewhat alienated from Gandhi's activity is completely erroneous. She, in her 66 years with him - that's a long time to be with someone - was always by his side, always developing in her own way - hospitals, schools, and so forth - and always taking care of him. I think this photograph here, this is in 1939. You can see there's not a trace of veneration, but there's every trace of concern as a woman would be for her man. She's trying to get him to relax here. So, I'm sorry that I don't have slides to show you the evolution of Kasturba's face and form.
At the same time, characteristically all through Gandhi's career, whether he was a student in London, or he was a young barrister in South Africa, or he was the leader of the Independence Movement in India, Gandhi is in a million photographs at home with the statesmen of the world. You will continuously notice, if you scan those types of photographs with Gandhi, that he is always positioned as if in a yogic equilibrium. He always has his clothing arranged. He has himself seated with precision. There's always this quality. There is never the opened sprawl that you find when he's with the animals or the children.
This tent-like, pyramid-like quality, I think, is really quite excellent. There are classic photographs, this one here of Gandhi towards the end of his life, wandering like an aged angel. We always think of angels as being about 23 years old or putti being six years old with smiling, cherubic features. But I very often think of angels as being ancient, old. Here he is in November 1946 in Noakhali, which is in the south part of what is today Bangladesh, the jungle parts. This, of course, is where he went after the independence of India, and he went there because the constructive programs had shown over a lifetime, more than 50 years of intense scientific experiment, that there is a real foundation in life on the phenomenal plane of spiritual activity, but that it cannot be founded upon the facile images or ideas that are integrated by sources of authority or power.
It's like writing on water. It just simply will never hold. One has to continuously assert the power and extend it and protect it and so forth, so that the foundation for actuality in the constructive work was finally found by Gandhi in 1946 and 1947, the last two complete years of his life. He died in January 48. Entering into the mud huts in the villages of Noakhali, and this, of course, would be the characteristic movement of Vinoba for the rest of his life.
I think that the face they wanted to see, address themselves to, is most poignantly presented in the starving peasant woman on the bottom of the page here. There is a legitimacy to suffering, which if we do not shirk from or gloss it over, has a poignancy very much blending terror and love together. Suffering is an odd moment. When brought into focus, it reveals a completeness. Thus, suffering is constantly spoken of as a universal threshold through which real maturation may commence.
The suffering of that woman, I think, mirrored in the intensity of the old Gandhi near the end of his life, age 78, in his expression here. Quite often, the expression bapu, father, I think indicated the sense that one could almost go to this individual as one would go to one's father, or in the American Indian tradition, to the grandfathers, to someone who knew, but knew in a sense not so much of information but knew as one who could look directly upon and share with anyone the poignancy of their side.
Now this capacity in Gandhi was passed on and brought to Vinoba, and I think in Vinoba's work, quite often the photographs that I'm able to find of him - here is Vinoba spinning and you'll notice that in this, he is upon a political stage, and he's paying absolutely no attention to the situation, the speakers, his own preparation, whatever it might be. I'll pass this around. This is in the frontispiece. This quality of Vinoba, and I'll put a marker in here, is also apparent when he is in the villages listening. That is to say when he is listening to the villagers, he is in the same mode as when he is listening to his own secret self.
That soft voice within him commands the same presence, the same tone, the same psychological mode, as when he is listening to the suffering in the villagers, which is why they responded to him, because they were not able - they had no yogic training of their own, they had no capacity really - but they could sense, in a primordial way, that this man was so close to them that he was, for them, their own universal self, and that he was listening and providing the experience for them of an advanced samadhi so that they were able, just on the spur of the moment - I rather think this was the appeal of Jesus also - able to come to him and almost instantly have that experience of an advanced sense of universal presence within themselves, literally given and bestowed by the resonance of a masterful person then. So, these two photographs in this book give that indication.
Vinoba, having learned from Gandhi, not any particular range of ideas, but the integrated quality of soul force coming and able to manifest itself in non-violence, or as we would say now, ahmsa, I think you can see in the poignancy of the expression here past the glasses, the quality of attentiveness that Vinoba expressed and carried through. This, of course, is the attentiveness of a master strategist who is attempting to bring 100 years of experience to bear on any issue of the moment and to keep the integrity of all that had been learned flowing, to keep the field of his perception cleared enough of personal qualities and aggrandizement to focus as a personal prism this enormous technological application of the science of soul force. That's what we find in the personality given here in this photograph.
Then a little later in here, the photograph that I will mark in here with a bookmark for you. Characteristically, when Vinoba went traveling, in this case, he's in Assam, the far northern province in India that's next to Burma - Burma and Nepal. The quality of his features here as he is touring with the villagers again, he is manifesting for them a sense of unity. He really is like the pilot of an oceanic movement. He is bringing the sense of the currents of this ocean to each village and each individual in the village by a sense of immediate, we would say, transference psychologically.
But I think we have talked about the phenomenon of the soliton here. Have we not talked about that? About a soliton in advanced plasma physics is able to convey its unity, the energy of its unity, not in partial fragments, but in the unity. It's like a smoke ring. If someone blows the smoke ring, the particles of smoke don't come out one by one, but they come out together. So, this phenomenon of an integrated energy pattern of very high intensity conveys its totality rather than any fragmentation, which is why very often great ideas must be grasped in comprehension by the all. They don't come in bits and pieces. We say, "that went over my head," meaning that all of it did, or in more colloquial moments of understanding, we say, "I have it," where all of it occurs to us as a piece. Then when we seek to express it, we have to search around, as I'm doing now in my mind and in my language, to try and express a concept by either a line of argument or by a buckshot pattern hoping to hit in the general area and force language into this metaphorical realm, Buddhic realm, actually.
But for someone yogic in their training, like Vinoba, he would carry the comprehension of the moment not so much in the verbal fragmentation, such as I am attempting to do here, but he would just bring it and manifest it in this same soliton way of giving it wholeness. The villagers, of course, no matter what language they spoke, would understand this very well, because it was the wholeness, the wholesomeness that one feels when one drinks fresh water or feels the good earth. It is a primordial quality.
What he was giving, of course, was the integrated pattern of soul force as it manifests in an adult human being, so that it comes across as wholeness. So that this quality, which he imbibed and learned from Vinoba is quite often hinted at in Gandhi, but I think when we go into Vinoba, it is probably the easier aspect of him to see.
In Mr. Hall's collected writing, volume two, is his own tribute to Gandhi. It appeared in the PRS Journal, I think it was in 1948. It's about the time I think that he modeled the sculpture, the head of Gandhi, which is in the auditorium. But he says in here, Mr. Hall writes, "Already the inevitable critics are attempting a negative estimate of the qualities and attributes of Mohandas Gandhi. They point out the peculiarities of his disposition and seek out the flaws in his diplomacy. Those who understood nothing of either the man or his work will pass judgment upon both. They will attempt to tear down the hero and reduce him to their own level. They will discover impulses in him which exist only in themselves and will assume that his appearance of virtue concealed an array of ulterior motives." This is called rationalization, and in fact, with a spiritual quality, very often the rationalizing tendency is just this, to pop shot at it, to try and understand it in bits and pieces so that the intricative relationality of the whole is a casualty. It is lost. It is not there.
This, I'm sure, that all of you will be able to find. The publication, this was done originally by the Glide Foundation in San Francisco. The Glide Foundation was a church in the Tenderloin in San Francisco. They put this out for the Gandhi Centenary. The Glide Foundation started by taking in the drug addicts off the streets in San Francisco in the mid-1960s and working with them and eventually came to admire very much Gandhi the man.
What they attempted in this publication when it first came out was in a somewhat different form from this. When this first came out, the attempt was by Eknath Easwaran, who has done a translation of the Bhagavad Gita, was to present the whole man in one publication using a lot of photographs and so forth. The publicity at the time used this photograph of Gandhi, which Robert Payne liked and used sometimes.
What is here is the directness of the whole man coming to bear on the situation. You can imagine to yourselves how much you are able to get done when you bring everything that you are to bear on a situation. So, you can imagine and see here the tremendous power, not in the sense so much of physical power, but in the sense of the wholeness, the wholesomeness.
I had wanted to show you a number of slides of Gandhi with crowds of westerners who were not diplomats, because very often in an array of five or six slides rapid fire like that, the quality that was always there comes through. The westerners who are around him, whether they're working women in Lancashire or they're journalists on a break with him - they love him. They love him in the way of a favorite uncle. They love bantering with him, putting their arms around him, chumming with him. He had this quality of being a pal. He was a very good pal. I'll leave this open here.
You can see Gandhi looking very much like a religious figure in a classic way, like a pope or a Dalai Lama bestowing blessings, only what he's doing here is enjoying the moment, the banter of the moment as a man. This endearing quality once characterized him as - one of his grand-nieces said to him, "Bapu, you are our Mickey Mouse." That sort of quality. His ability to take this loveliness, which even a child could understand, and in the same movement, in the same tone of wholeness, take the Mickey Mouse and make of it almost a Wagnerian hero walking into the sunset, was the wholesome cycle that he was able to engender.
I think, I hope, that in the lectures as I've been able to present them to you, you could see that this quality was carried on by Vinoba and brought right up to September of 1982 when he passed away last year. He was incidentally carrying five or six major diseases at the time: malaria, dysentery, ulcers, and so forth. So, when he passed, it wasn't because he got ill. It was after the attrition of years and decades and decades of living with these most debilitating diseases and still working and walking everywhere that he passed on.
I had also hoped in the slides to show you some contrasts by bringing in some of the characters who surrounded him. I wanted to have photographs for you of Tolstoy and Tagore especially, because I think that those two individuals influenced him at the moment when he realized that the change in his life had become a sea change, not just another phase. We all note if we live long enough that we are different from what we were 10 years ago or 25 years ago, but that there are moments in our lives where the transition is of a major tone. We have changed key. We are no longer a composition in C. We're now in D minor, and we wish to then explore and understand how are we in this new key?
I think that after the 1910 to 1916 era in Gandhi, he realized that he had been singled out and looked at by at least two of the major human beings of our time and had been not found wanting, and therefore assessed himself in a new light. I think this new light led to the increasing discovery by him that what he had found was not just a truthful way of problem-solving, but was, in fact, the universal panacea, if we may say. I know it has a bad sound in our time. The universal panacea for all ails.
After 1916, he becomes, of course, increasingly the classic Indian sage in a 20th century setting. This, of course, I wish to illustrate to you by several more sets of slides that we are often caught in the position of admiring individuals who lived hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. There comes a time when we would just like to know is there anyone alive now? Is there anyone in our time? I know that I went through that in the early 1960s after having been disillusioned through about seven or eight years of political involvement and seeing that everything comes to a mess no matter what tack you take. The question is then is there anyone alive? Do we always have to live on the laurels of the past? So, it's interesting to find individuals, especially like Vinoba, who lived right up until last year, who are managing to make commensurate with our times all of the qualities that one would admire in any stage throughout history. This, of course, is astounding for us to, I think, realize. We often think of our time as a jungle, as the worst of all centuries. But the fact is that we live in a very great period of time. It's just that the change is so large that the outer edges, as it sweeps into a new orientation, seem to indicate a blur to the fragmentation that is the mind that sees just part from pieces. But the whole feeling has an integrity to it.
It is, in fact, what Gandhi and Vinoba often talked about is a revolution. Man is coming back, returning back to an interest point. Just like in the old mystical cycles of having ambulated one way and then come back another. It doesn't come back to the starting point, but comes back to an entrance to the sense of the center. We actually are very close to this threshold now. We're at a point where different cycles of manifestation have come back to a moment of equilibrium. Not quite there yet, although rapidly coming. At this point, always the affect is if we can bring the whole duration, the whole cycle to bear in its integrity, we may pass through the gap. We may pass through the threshold.
If we make the mistake of trying to choose our favorite things and taking bits and pieces and fragments that seem to go together, they're color coordinated, they're time matched, they're all of the same sort of personal mode, "Well, we'll take this, this, and this, but that can't come," then we find ourselves trying to go through the sense of the presence of the times through the gap into the sense of center by taking bits of pieces. Of course, the whole form disintegrates. It does not hold. We have to, like the [inaudible] painter, we have to move with our brush of understanding without hesitating by taking the entire duration, because it is the wholesomeness of the completed form that includes the threshold. If we dismember the form by bits and pieces, by rationalization, we have then a mental net and not a living situation. The mental net, of course, bags us. We're the first thing to get caught in our own mental net.
So having the wholesomeness of the cycle brought to the moment of release, and especially in the pattern of a Navajo rug with the spirit trail leading off, it is the thread that seemingly doesn't fit that could be the key to it all. If we are willing then to follow that thread against the conditional of an integrated pattern kept whole, very often it is that aberration that leads to freedom, out of the pattern into a new realm. So quite often with Gandhi and Vinoba, there was the feeling tone of developing a sense of wholeness and not too much of an inclination to promote a part or to develop one aspect rather than the whole.
Well, I hadn't planned any of this lecture. I had planned to show you slides. All this had to come out on the moment, so let's take a break. I think after the break, if I can sell some cassettes down in the street, then we'll come back in and go down to the library.
END OF SIDE 1
They noticed a six-year cycle, epicycle, where they would have six years where things would be easy and grow, and then six years where it would be fallow somewhat, and another six years where it would gain momentum again. And remember that they are scientists, they're experimenting and exploring the unknown. We have never known, as a species, about this phenomenon. We've never investigated it as scientists. We've never looked upon the vicissitudes of the relationship between the interior spirit and the external phenomenal realm as an area of technological responsiveness until now. Gandhi and his All Men Are Brothers, in the section on international peace, had something interesting to say. This was put together by the United Nations, UNESCO, as the first publication ever done about the writings of an individual by the United Nations.
He wrote, and it was quoted here, "I do not believe that an individual may gain spiritually and those that surround him suffer. I believe in advaita." The one, oneness. "I believe in the essential unity of man and for that matter of all that lives. Therefore, I believe that if one man gains spiritually, the whole world gains with him and if one man falls, the whole world falls to that extent. There is not a single virtue which aims at, or is content with, the welfare of the individual alone. Conversely, there is not a single moral offense which does not directly, or indirectly, affect many others besides the actual offender. Hence, whether an individual is good or bad is not merely his own concern, but really the concern is the whole community, nay of the whole world."
So that the notion of a larger family moves very easily in the Gandhian view, from the larger family that live and have their being, around oneself or with oneself is more accurate, to finally larger units. And one only stops at the planet because it's a convenient parenthesis to put around a quantification in terms of time space and in terms of population. And in terms of experience, it can very easily be trans-planetary, no reason why it should not. But in this quality, when it enters into the thought pattern, what becomes a casualty of the belief in the efficacy of lines of argument, we're always trying to be bent by phony education into thinking logically. That is to fashion our thought into spears of syllogism that can drive a point home against someone else, and this is false and also phony.
We are forever trying to, even as children and as students, and as adults who have grown out of this false education trying to assess the wholesomeness, the patterns. And rather than fashion spears of argument, we're more interested in taking the blinders off as much as we can and taking a look around to see what the effect this is having. And of course, this moving to the understanding of an ecology of the mind, as opposed to lines of argument, posits for us, in the late 20th century, a very odd mentality. We're no longer concerned with reason that might be characterized as being fastest with being able to pigeon hole and categorize bits and pieces, fragments as thought, rationalizations, reductions of experience, to countable and measurable quanta.
But rather we're coming to understand, even in advance of our ability to believe in what we understand, at least we're beginning to understand that perhaps reason is not the ability to categorize experience into measurable molds. But reason is the ability to address from scratch, novel situations with our whole selves, and from the encounter, and developing relationality, build an understanding of ourselves in this new conditionality, in this new context.
Reason and intelligence in this light, prefer an ecological balance rather than those spears of sharp pointed syllogistic argumentation. And the polarizing personalities of the past, who seem to dominate situations quite frequently, not from the veracity of their own aggressiveness, but from the sheer hypnotic effect of having someone high powered in high places go after it, and carried thousands, if not millions, along with them because of the dynamic they engender. We seem to have somehow escaped that nightmarish doom of following such leaders into their perdition and have come round to where some leader like this appeals to us. And it's in the appeal, rather than in the definite statement, that we find our earliest clue about a change. Change, sometimes called the change in consciousness. There've been many books in the last 10 years about this.
One comes to mind, Gregory Bateson's great book on towards an ecology of the mind [Steps to an Ecology of Mind]. Capra's great book on The Tao of Physics, and so forth. Even the wonderful writings of Peter Tompkins on plants. But the overwhelming indication coming is that we're laying down our spears of argumentation, and we are bending them into plow shears, to try to harvest a more fertile ground of patterned understanding. And we're losing the electrifying desperation tinged need to make someone understand what we need. Instead, we're a little more attentive, too pat perhaps, understanding with someone else what a situation which we might share in common could signify. And this is a change. This was once the province only of yogis and advanced minds of larger than life persons, spirits, polits. And it seems now to be the provenance of the individual world round, in whatever situation we are found, in our individual numbers as in this country, or in our dumb millions as in India. Even in China in our massive hundreds of millions.
And quite often the epicycle of nature of years of great advance, and then years of lying fallow, or perhaps even smaller epicycles of months. Many people have observed how the month of September, 1983, has been a blah sort of a month of not being able to get much traction. And yet, there have been months in this year when great openings seem to come. These vicissitudes balance themselves out easier in an ecology of the mind. We've become less prone to the bait of triumph or the bait of despair because triumphs and despair are both polarizing. The carrot and the stick, trying to lead us outside of ourselves, to lead us that we might, to expect that we might exist if we could just get out of ourselves.
Lead us away from that kind of illusion, or delusion, because it's actually more of a delusion, to think that we could exist as we are outside of what we are. That by participating in the wholeness, in the ecology of the movement of life, we have more affinity with countless others that we had seen as strangers before, or even invisible before. And now they seem like companions along the way. And in just that change, the perception that almost anyone could be a helper and a companion in one's life, in its realistic intensity and significance, is a saving grace. We've become less ready to throw anyone away, to bar anyone from our way. And this is a change.
The occurrence of this, rather than the fact of this, is a change. The fact, as a possibility, has been noted since civilization began, almost immediately, it was codified as a feminine response to life. The earliest epic presentations of this were all of the great goddess, whether she was called Inanna in the old Babylonian, or whether she was called Isis in the Hellenistic, or whatever. It was thought to be a feminine virtue, very nice to have, not practicable in the world where spirits were needed to advance.
And now it seems more that it may be the very needed vehicle, not only of survival, but of realization. And I think in a way, the excursion over just three months, we've only spent three months on Gandhi and Vinoba together, we could spend years. I had to ignore all of the details and tidbits and examples and so forth, and had to bring you just the skimmed froth, as it were, from time to time. But all of this is founded upon a century, at least in the case of these individuals, a century of assiduous, day by day, towing it out with life, with situations that were often externally intolerable, to bring it to the condition to where I suppose the lack of information is because the wide-spreadness now in India, of this way of life, has dissolved by in large, the five year programs in Delhi, has dissolved the chance even for ambitious politicians to control the country.
I suppose that they have seen the handwriting in the eyes of the villagers, by their cheerful confidence that even though they may still be starving today, they are on their way to getting those wells dug. And they're on their way to understanding that anyone in the world will be able to see them eye to eye and work with them. And I suppose that a great deal of the strife in our own country in the last 15 years has come because of an unwillingness to experiment with this new form. And yet in the last 15 years, what has taken place is that there has been a change of emphasis in the population of our own people.
We've come back, I suppose to a point that Emerson and Thoreau probably had raised in conversations on the front porch in Concord. That if we could only talk together long enough about a situation, we could eventually come to understand it, and we would all be better for it.
So, I think that the place of the individual in a democratic condition, actually beyond hope is going to obtain. And I think from what we have seen increasingly obtained, not out of a sense of hopefulness, but out of a sense of determinance to have it be.
Well, if there are questions or observations, give me a chance to sip this tea.
If not, we have no fireplace, we can go home. We will have a fireplace on Saturday. Our school opens 2029 Hyperion, 9 to 11, and 11 to 1. You can take either course. And it'll start where we leave off here. This is a starting point. This is a threshold. It sounds like a conclusion, but these observations are a starting point. And most of my training is at this starting point. I had to learn how to lecture because they ignored that and said, "No you don't need to know that. What you need to find out is all these other relationalities that are going to be invisible." So, I'm better off in these Saturday courses. I'm at home there. This for me, is work. Especially in view of my incapacity to function. I want you to see the limits.
Question form audience: Roger, are the experimental [inaudible 00:17:25] at Sangrahalaya still functioning?
To my knowledge, there are museum pieces there, and there are a few individuals who are trying to carry on, but no, there hasn't been that much. There really hasn't been that much. There are some, but not that much.
Whatever happened to the Tolstoy Farm?
I think that largely could still be visited. You could still go there, but it really doesn't exist as a Gandhian memorial. There have been some attempts for that. Now, during the Centenary, a lot of questions like this came up, and persons actually went to these places to take a look and see. But no, not much has been there.
The tendency for Gandhians very often, is not to have too much of a historical mind about this. Or if they do have a historical mind, to try and put it down, get it down, get it into books.
This is why Vinoba was so valuable because he was able to show that another light can be lit in just that way. And that's important to see. There are individuals who are around. There's a paperback version of this book called Gandhi to Vinoba, by an Italian man named Lanza Del Vasto, and he's still around. And here he is walking along. There are many Vinoba proteges who are around. Many of them are women and quite a few of them no longer even mention Gandhi or Vinoba.
Well, Vimala Thakar is one that comes to mind, who has written a number of New Age wisdom pamphlets that you'll find around. Vimala Thakar. And you could go to the Bodhi Tree [Bookstore] and buy half a dozen of her books. And you never find the mention of Vinoba. She was with him for 20 years.
The odd condition that has come up in the last 10 years, I suppose, is that there are less and less persons who are looking for the expert, or for the leader, and more and more people are just doing it on their own and experimenting on their own. And so, I think that's the sense where we would find that more in South Africa.
I hadn't realized till now how pleasant it is not to say anything.
[Question from audience:] There is a land reform sort of movement. Not related to disease, but to be kind of all the lands that were granted in his name, or whatever, to be offered [inaudible 00:21:11].
Yes. I don't have that information. I've been trying to get... The latest information I can get is about eight years.
I have one little comment. I have a friend in India, he had a family of two children and a wife. He told me in a letter about a year ago, India had taken back his land, they blocked, he was an American man, and then he was having a lot of trouble getting a house built in this area he's into. He's not a realtor, he's looking for an apartment building. That's part of the problem.
Have you been to back to India recently? Mr. Mohan?
Yes.
Is the Gramdan Movement viable in Maharastra, in Madhya Pradesh? It's hard to say sometimes.
Yeah.
This is why it's so strange because from the outside very often, activities of profound wholesomeness look so nondescript from the outside. It seems like nothing is going on. It's only when you are a part of it that you realize the dynamic of the swirl, and the extent of its process. That's the odd thing about it. You can look at Gandhian from the outside and it seems this, almost not of interest, and yet so much is going on. And only when you attune yourself to it, do you realize what a tremendous scope and dynamic is actually operating there.
They're like fresh water. You don't realize how valuable that is until you see what can be done with it. So, it's hard from the outside to tell. And it's hard for newspapers to tell. I remember, in 63, and 64, 65, I was reading the Bombay Statesman daily. You would find incredible articles. And then you would find editorials along with it saying, we don't know where this is going to lead. And Mr. Reddy says such and such, and Miss Saran said so and so. That was all the rage. And then after that, there was a period where it was fallow. It just, no news at all. Nobody mentioned anything. And you wondered whether it had died out. And then years later, 72 and so forth, I began to hear about all these great leaps forward. There were 140,000 in Gramdan, in Bihar alone. I said, "My goodness."
All this is going on and nobody's mentioning anything about it. So, it's hard, hard to tell. I did my foot work and went to UCLA and read material. There was no way to tell from what I could read. And nobody that I knew at that time is unfortunately alive and viable. I had a lot of casualties in the last 15 years in my circle. So, I just don't know. I don't know anybody who was there. I don't know anybody who is there anymore.
I've been to the new city. The development there is not the [inaudible 00:25:22] it used to be.
New Delhi.
...It's outside of [inaudible 00:25:24] philosopher. It's a city where people assume they'll live forever. They're developing towards that.
You don't mean in South India, out of Pondicherry, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.
That's right.
Yeah, Auroville.
Yeah.
Auroville. What used to be French India. Sri Aurobindo is a very powerful mind, Vinoba talks about him all the time. He died in 1950. His ashram was carried on by a French woman who was known then as the mother. And she was able to engender very talented people from around the world. They were very much, in India, what Rudolf Steiner's organization is in Europe. A lot of highly intelligent and dedicated people coming together. And they've actually made a futuristic city - Auroville.
I have some documentation on Auroville from the late seventies, soon as I get my library up. It's interesting what they were able to do. And they have as the center of the city, a world peace temple, which has, I think a pail full of earth from every country in the world that went into making the foundation of it, and it's a globe. It's a huge globe, which you come in underneath and come up into, and then you have your seating up there, and then the rest of it is a huge globe.
It's like the old observation a friend of mine made coming back from India. She said, "Everything is there, including the next century." And all out on the streets. Nobody's hiding it. The problem is adjusting yourself, so you can tune into one thing. Because it's just too much.
This particular friend of mine had a very interesting mystical experience. She was in a small jet and they were flying up along the Himalayas, and she suddenly caught the little shadow of the jet against the mountain. And she said for the first time she realized that in this huge modern technological, powerful jet, she was like a little goldfish in this huge bowl. She said it really scared her at first, and then as she sank into it. Sort of transmuted itself into this ineffable flow, and this shadow of the jet flowing across, along the Himalayas. She started to get into that and she thought, well, maybe this will work out all right. The shadow never crashed into any peak.
To add that for the tape, do it yourself. Good night.
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