At 5:17 pm on January 30, 1948, Gandhi was walking with his nieces to a prayer meeting when he was killed by a Hindu nationalist.
A few moments later, a living legend succumbs, for the glory of living as a spiritual legend for humanity. He was 78 years old.
"Historians of the future, I believe, will regard this 20th century not as that of the atomic era, but as that of the Gandhi era." Wrote E. Easwaran, one of his biographers.
“A conductor of his people, not supported by any external authority; a politician whose victory is not based on cunning or techniques of professional politics, but only on the dynamic conviction of his personality; a man of wisdom and humility endowed with invincible perseverance, who strives to assure his people a better fate; a man who faces the brutality of the British empire with the dignity of a simple man, and therefore has become a superior man - future generations will hardly comprehend that lived on earth, in flesh and blood, a man like this... the greatest man of our century.” - “I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men of our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything we believe is evil.” Albert Einstein
A "Great Soul", and whose life was entirely Christlike, although he was not officially a Christian. His greatness is not that he was a great mystic or that he was a skilled politician. It is to have balanced in his soul two worlds that are almost always unbalanced in other men - prayer and action. With the Gandhi phenomenon, the history of humanity entered a new phase of evolution. Today's world has not yet understood the greatness of this man ... these are the words of Huberto Rohden.
The spring of this 21st century lives under the gloomy winter of past centuries in human history, where multitudes are still dragging through the barren valleys of mediocrity; valleys and precipices where the ephemeral peace of armistice only reigns between the constant wars provoked by human greed and selfishness. However, overcoming all the vicissitudes, a man emerged who climbed The Himalayas! And with this positive future perspective, where the same can happen to many, it provides, although melancholy, the vision that one day the environment on the earth can be inhabited by beings who rise to the heights of higher knowledge and Peace.
In a beautifully illustrated edition of the 1950s of almost 400 pages, the book “MAHATMA GANDHI, the Apostle of Non-Violence” by the Brazilian philosopher, educator and theologian, Huberto Rohden, traces a philosophical profile of Gandhi's personality and even indicating the path to reach the same level of consciousness that the Hindu master reached. Added to these writings, opinions of other famous characters of the history about this great soul that was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and other information.
The excerpt below is part of the introduction to this book and is a tribute to the 72 years of Mahatma's death.
“Humanity knows some mystics and many politicians - but a mystic-politician or a politician-mystic is something very strange and, at first sight, impossible. The mystic deals with the things of God and the spiritual world; the politician deals with the things of men and the material world - is it possible that, within the same human individual, these two worlds, so distant and so antagonistic, harmonize?
If cosmic monism were not a postulate of logic, if we did not comprehend that there can be only one eternal principle of all things, be it on material or spiritual level, we would be willing to profess Zoroastrian dualism and deny the compatibility of elements as incompatible as mysticism and politics.
In ordinary people, with narrow internal spaces, there can, in fact, be no friendship and harmony between the God of the world and the world of God.
When a man appears with vast internal spaces; where a whole planetary system can rotate freely, without collisions or catastrophes, around a single sun, which all illuminate and vitalizes, then a dynamic tension forms within this system, which, to maintain balance, must intensify its centripetal force in direct proportion to its centrifugal force, in order to establish a cosmos that does not succumb to chaos. But every now and then a cosmic man of that nature appears, a man who balances extremes and synthesizes seemingly irreconcilable antitheses.
Gandhi's greatness is not that he was a great mystic, nor that he was a skilled politician - it is that he has balanced in his soul two worlds that are almost always unbalanced in other men.
Politics is worth what it gives or accomplish. The mystique is worth what it receives and what it is. Politics is considered active - mystics are said to be passive; in politics, activity is generally maximum, to the point of sterilizing its passivity. In the mystical the passivity is maximum and that although the activity is minimal, it is not sterile.
The balance lies in being dynamically passive, or passively dynamic - that is, therefore, the central problem of human life, the secret of its greatness and happiness and the supreme source of its realizing force within humanity.
The mediocre, active man lives in the collective hallucination that his human ego does the great things in the world; which is his intelligence and cunning, his money, his scholarship, his incessant social, commercial, industrial, political, diplomatic struggle, that these factors be the real and main cause of the things he does or tries to do. And if someone tells that, behind all these ponderable and palpable elements of noisy activity, there is an imponderable and intangible element that, in the final analysis, is the initial and profound source of everything that happens in his life, this dynamic man shakes his head in disbelief, and considers a poet, philosopher or mystic, or at least not practical, the man who utters such strange things. This man ignores what is dynamic passivity or creative serenity. He is not aware of the immense reservoir of cosmic forces, that invisible ocean that expands, immeasurable, mysterious and infinite, beyond all horizons of physical-mental perception. For him, there are only the small streams that spring from his well-known ego, running to nowhere. This mediocre and short-sighted man does not even suspect that this stream of his feverish activity goes to the silent sea, where it came from.
Gandhi was of vast activity and profound passivity, and everything he gave to his fellow-men, horizontally, received from God, vertically. For this reason, meditations on Monday, the Day of Silence on Thursday, where he only communicated in writing, was the most important thing for him since it was the silent springs of his dynamic passivity that fed the noisy rivers of his ceaseless activity.
The people gave Gandhi the name "mahatma", that is, "great soul" because they intuitively felt that, in addition to the scenario of his visible human achievements, there were mysterious regions of invisible divine realities - and his greatness was precisely in constant connection between his visible world and the invisible world; all his foreign policy was based on his internal mystics. It is easy to work in the visible world - the vast majority of profane men lives solely on that level. Difficult is to contemplate the invisible world, far from all visible worlds, like mystical ascetics.
Many are unclean among the unclean. Few are those who live pure. Very few manage to live pure among the impure. The latter the true "mahatmas", the great souls, the cosmic men, fully realized. The supreme goal of the Gospel of Jesus is the creation of these men, of these “new creatures in Christ”.
India has always been the country of yogis, ascetics, mystics, masters of renunciation and spirituality. Gandhi also founded his spiritual retreat colony. It was a kind of farm where numerous people of disciplined life and without individual property lived. Mental concentration and spiritual contemplation; abstaining from meat and alcoholic beverages; manual and agricultural work; worship meetings - all of this was observed Gandhi’s ashram, and he himself was a kind of patriarch of that community.
So far, nothing special; all of this had been practised for centuries and millennia in India.
It happens, however, that this solitary mystic appears in palaces of kings and heads of states, in the great European courts; take part in political debates around national and international problems; stir up issues of great relevance; because this man is a skilled lawyer, graduated from the University of London, who knows and uses all the dialectic of lawyers and has all the insight of great statesmen. And in his own country, he appears in the National Congress and pleads, against a powerful empire, for the political emancipation of 430 million enslaved countrymen; but he does not use any of the material weapons his antagonists use. He replaced the weapon with the soul. This man does not accumulate money for himself; he lives in extreme poverty and simplicity, nourishing himself with a few fruits and the raw milk of a goat, which was not even his. He wears a loincloth and walks barefoot, or in sandals, even in the salons of European tycoons, who nicknamed him "half-naked fakir". Through the hands of this strange man, as solitary with God as in solidarity with men, immense fortunes passed - but he has no residence and spent only a few cents a day to his maintenance.
For fifty years, surrounded by the filthiest international politics and diplomacy, this man has not strayed from his line of absolute truth and sincerity; does not allow shady manoeuvres; knows no game behind the scenes. Maximum defender of his people’s freedom, he admits a single tyranny for himself: unconditional obedience to his silent inner voice, as he calls the voice of conscience.
Gandhi’s enigma is as diaphanous as sunlight - and as mysterious as a starry night. Always solitary in God, he never ceases to be in solidarity with men.
With the Gandhi phenomenon, human history has entered a new phase of evolution. Finally, it is proven that these two things considered incompatible are compatible, the most intense inner mystics and the most extensive external dynamics. This man accomplished in his life the great synthesis of spirit and matter, fire and water. In him, the Word became flesh!
With this example, the materialist no longer has a justification for his lack of spirituality - and the spiritualist no longer has the right to defect from the material world. The great synthesis was carried out, and what was possible once in India is possible everywhere. Mahatma is not from India, nor from the East - he is from the world and humanity.
In times past, when a man had his contact with God, the first step was to become free of all things of the world; to abandon the world of God to live in God alone. The culmination of ascetic life was the desertion of the world.
With Gandhi, a new form of asceticism appears - the asceticism of liberation, replacing and perfecting the asceticism of desertion. Whoever deserts material things shows goodwill - but does not prove true comprehension.
From a man who expects nothing from the world, everything the world can hope for.
But there is, in addition to the dynamically active and the statically passive man, a third alternative, which is the dynamically passive or passively dynamic man. With this qualification, we designate the cosmic man, that very rare man who, after identifying himself with his divine Self, starts to manifest his mystical implosion in a vast ethical explosion, overflowing his divine experience in human experience. Since man has attained the awareness of the unique paternity of God, he is in a position to realize the universal brotherhood of men. And in this case, ethics is not just morality, which can exist even without mystical experience; but its external action will be the spontaneous overflow, an irresistible explosion of his intense mystical implosion.
When someone suggested to Gandhi the idea of leaving the profane world of politics and retreating into a cave to live as a mystic, he replied: "I bring this cave inside me". Whoever manages to transfer this cave into its interior, taking refuge in that sanctuary when it feels the need, has reached the culmination of its liberation, of the "glorious freedom of the children of God". But for anyone to attain that freedom, it must voluntarily submit to the greatest tyranny, "tyranny of the silent voice from within", and pay unconditional obedience to the divine dictator of conscience. This is the "narrow path and the tight door that leads to the kingdom of God". So that the widest freedom presupposes the most complete tyranny - voluntary tyranny.
"The Truth" - writes Gandhi - "is hard as a diamond, but it is also delicate as a peach blossom". Whoever does not voluntarily accept the harshness of Truth, will not get to enjoy the delicacy of the peach blossom. Fully free is only one who voluntarily enslaves himself. And this spontaneous slavery refers not only to God but also to men, our fellow men; to serve voluntarily is to be free. Nothing more enslaving than the desire to "want to be served" - nothing more liberating than the desire to want to serve! Whoever is not a voluntary slave cannot be a free man - this strange paradox characterizes Gandhi's life. So great is this man's inner freedom that he becomes, outwardly, a slave to his countrymen, a slave to the British invader, a slave to the whole of humanity.
Whoever does not feel free should avoid serving others and should assume an air of domination, because where essence is lacking, the appearance must prevail. But whoever bears the testimony of its freedom within itself, can be the servant of all, because this freedom does not need to be supported with pseudo-freedoms. Whoever is wise can admit the appearance of a fool, but the fool must carefully avoid these appearances and assume the appearance of a sage so that its pseudo wisdom does not succumb to the impact of its ignorance.
Today's world has not yet comprehended the true greatness of Gandhi, undoubtedly one of the most authentic disciples that Jesus had among men in these more than two millennia of the Christian era. But the spirit of the Mahatma is working on human consciences, like divine leaven, slowly leavening the profane mass and preparing the way for the great Christlike dawn.
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