What I learnt from Gandhi, The Man

Gandhi taught us the power and value of living intelligently!

A friend’s Facebook post caught my attention yesterday and set me thinking! My friend announced that he would unfriend anyone who made racist or unqualified remarks about Gandhi. And sure enough he did what he promised – he promptly unfriended those who shared unfounded sentiments about the great man! I liked my friend’s in-the-face approach. Over the past couple of decades, I have been noticing a disturbing trend. People seem to revel in Mahatma-bashing. From calling him names to questioning his ideology to even doubting his relevance, it almost seems like it is fashionable to shred Gandhi.

I have obviously not met Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. But I have studied him – not the Mahatma, not the Father of the Nation, not the political master strategist, but Gandhi, The Man.

My study of Gandhi almost never happened. Way back in 2007, there used to be a bookstore called Connexions opposite my office in R A Puram, Chennai. This was basically a gift store, with a collection of books that the owner personally curated. One afternoon, while browsing through the store, I found Eknath Easwaran’s  Gandhi, The Man, staring at me. I liked the way the book defined its purpose – ‘to tell the story of how one man changed himself to change the world’. Around that time I was embracing mouna, the practice of observing silence for an hour daily. I had begun an inner journey, to understand my Self better even as I was asking several existential questions of me, of Life. While the book interested me, I did not pick it up. I had not heard of Eknath Easwaran then. And I didn’t think then that there was anything new a book could tell me about Gandhi, that I didn’t already know!

But just the next day, I read a newspaper interview in which Rajnikanth, yes – the Tamil film Super Star, named two books that changed his Life. One was Living with the Himalayan Masters by Swami Rama and the other was Eknath Easwaran’s Gandhi, The Man. I had known of Rajnikanth’s spiritual side, but didn’t quite imagine he would read books. Nor did I ever expect that he would name a rather unheard of book, that I had just stumbled upon the previous day. I rushed back to the bookstore and found Easwaran’s book still there. I bought it!

The book changed my Life.

I had for long been dealing with anger. People on my team called me chiefscreamer – punning on my title, chiefdreamer! That’s how lousy my reputation was. Reading Gandhi, The Man, helped me realize that anger was energy, which when channeled, could be deployed very constructively. I also learned from the book how beautifully Gandhi separated the issue from the people connected with it. He famously said, “I don’t hate the English, but I hate the way the English rule my country.” In a way, he practiced ahimsa, not just as non-violent action, as is popularly perceived, but as non-violent thought. But all of this, I realized, Gandhi ingrained in him thanks to his meditations of the Bhagavad Gita. The second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita ends with unveiling the highest state of consciousness a human being can attain. Krishna, replying to Arjuna, says (presenting here only the relevant extract that Easwaran too shares in Gandhi, The Man):

“…He lives in wisdom, who sees himself in all and all in him,

Whose love for the Lord of Love has consumed

Every selfish desire and sense-craving

Tormenting the heart.

Not agitated by grief,

Nor hanker after pleasure,

He lives free from lust and fear and anger.

Fettered no more by selfish attachments

He is not elated by good fortune,

nor depressed by bad.

Such is the seer….”

Gandhi, according to Easwaran, meditated on this verse for 50 years every morning and night and devoted all his life to translating it into his daily action. This was the key to his self-transformation.

I have internalized the essence of this verse too. And I have seen myself transform from being stressed out, angry, worried and insecure, to being centered, anchored and at peace with myself and my Life. I am happy with what is. I work daily on continuing to remain unmoved and unfrustrated about all that which happens to me, around me. I owe this transformation in me to Gandhi for leading the way and to Easwaran for telling me, through his book, how Gandhi changed himself first before attempting to share his way of Life with the world. Just for this one reason alone, though there surely are several other reasons, I feel none of us must ever question Gandhi. We don’t have the right to do that unless we have achieved what he had in his lifetime – which is, to be the change that we wish to see around us!

 

You are the peace that you seek

You cannot have the cake and eat it! The same way, you cannot cling on to things in Life and still want inner peace!

When you are clinging on to things in Life __ which is when you are attached to family, job, salary, EMIs, worries, problems and emotions, opinions, prejudices, you cannot live freely! You have been brought up to believe, just as I have been, and just as the way we are bringing up our children, that living equals ‘earning-a-living’. But does earning-a-living give you joy? It may give you comfort, but does it give you joy? And so, that’s how, in search of the true meaning of Life, your transformation from struggler and climber to seeker happens.

At the end of the day, everyone is seeking peace. But do you need to have worked so hard, not lived any of the 70 years of your Life, and then discover that peace is easy to find and easier to retain, if only you stopped clinging on to things in Life!? There’s a story that Swami Rama, the legendary Himalayan Yogi, used to say. It is the story of two monks. The two monks were on a journey by foot. And the younger monk asked the older one how detachment can be practiced. “By letting go,” said the older one. “But my worldly responsibilities refuse to let me to let go,” complained the younger one. The older one did not reply. They retired under a big tree for the night. The next morning, when the younger monk woke up, he found the older one hugging the tree’s trunk. Saying that it was getting late, the younger one respectfully invited the older one to continue their journey. But the older monk complained that the tree wouldn’t let him go! The younger monk tried pulling the older one away from the tree. But to no avail. Finally, disgusted at the older monk’s childish behavior, the younger one said, “Master, you are foolish. It is not the tree which is holding you. You are the one who is holding on to the tree. You have to let go to be free and go along on our journey.” The older monk smiled and replied: “But how can I? I am attached to it pretty much the way you are attached too, with your worldly Life?” The younger monk got the lesson. And hopefully you too have got it!

In reality, we are the peace we seek. We don’t have to find it, or seek it. We must just stop clinging on to all that which is an impediment to us feeling our inner peace. We must just let go of everything that we cling on to. What will then remain is only peace!

The password for attracting miracles into your Life: “Let Go!”

Miracles happen to you only because you need them – and not because you prayed harder or that you deserve them over someone else!

In continuation of my post yesterday on Shirdi Sai Baba, some readers pinged me wanting to know more about the miracles he is known to have created and continues to create in the lives of his followers. Well, the miracles Baba created in his lifetime are well documented and I don’t wish to enlist them here one more time. However, let me share my personal perspective on miracles here.

First, let’s get a better understanding of what is a miracle. The truth is that you are a miracle. I am a miracle. This moment, and your ability to read this post, is a miracle – you are educated, you have a laptop or a PC or a mobile device, have internet connectivity and, above all, have vision (eyesight), which is why you are able to read this post! Isn’t that a miracle? There are millions who don’t have any such luck! You and I are miracles – because, think about it, else, we may well have been created as the swine that gives the flu than be created as the human being that receives the flu! But we are all so obsessed with the rat race that we run, earning-a-living, that we don’t consider any of these as miracles. We simply take everything that we have for granted and keep pining for what we don’t have!

Deepak Chopra, in his beautiful book, ‘Why is God Laughing?’, says that miracles happen when mind-body-soul are in alignment. He says there are three levels of mind-body-soul alignment and hence three types of miracles are possible. At the most basic level of mind-body-soul alignment, he says we can BUY whatever we want to. And that is a miracle. Believe me, the ability to BUY something with money is a miracle. I have, through the years of my family’s financial strife, and the several spells of pennilessness we have been through, known what it means when you can’t afford to BUY even groceries for everyday survival. At the second level of mind-body-soul alignment, says Chopra, when you WISH for something, it often happens. For instance, if on a hot summer afternoon, you wished for a cold lemonade or beer and a friend passing by decides to drop in with some cans for you. This may have happened, in our own ways, at least once in our lives. Chopra says that whenever this must have happened, our mind-body-soul may well have been in alignment. If that alignment can be consistent, at that level, more of what you WISH happens to you or comes to you! At the third, and perhaps highest, level of mind-body-soul alignment, says Chopra, you can actually CREATE whatever you think of or visualize. This means you can CREATE an object or an event or a situation. And this is what the Himalayan Masters (please read Swami Rama’s ‘Living with the Himalayan Masters’ for a better understanding) or Shirdi Sai Baba or Swami Sathya Sai Baba were capable of. In the name of rationality, the less spiritually evolved folks, dismiss this ability to CREATE miracles as “cheap magic”. Fine, so be it. To each one, their own. To me, Chopra’s reasoning is both powerful and true.

So, how does one attract miracles into one’s Life? Is it by praying to someone like Baba or to a Higher Energy? Or is it by following rituals or tantric practices? Actually, if you can just let go of this view that you need to do something about your Life, your mind-body-soul will reach a basic level of alignment for you to be able to attract miracles into your Life. Again, let me reiterate that the most profound miracle of them all is the fact that you are human and are alive. But if you want more “apparent” miracles to happen to you, please let go! You will then attract the right people, the right opportunities and the right energies. Which means you will get the job you want, the companion you have been longing for, the wealth and assets you wanted and everything that you once thought was beyond your reach. So, the password for attracting miracles into your Life is “Let Go!”.

This is where Shirdi Sai Baba, or any of the world’s greatest teachers, comes in. He teaches Faith and Patience; and in championing Sab Ka Maalik Ek (There’s only one Creator for all of us; one Higher Energy!), he invokes in us the spirit to let go!  “Let Go!” means to simply stop wanting to control your Life. It means to live with the awareness that this lifetime, from your birth till your death, is nothing but a series of pre-ordained experiences. Unless you go through all the experiences, your lifetime will not be complete. Letting go, therefore, means to let Life take over and you simply (learn to) accept whatever comes your way. This is how your mind-body-soul get aligned in a special, natural, sub-conscious manner. Then you will notice how things happen to you. You will realize that the miracles in your Life are coming to you, happening to you, not because you have prayed harder or that you deserve them over someone else – they are there simply because you need them and because you have “Let Go!”