“Man! Renounce the world, give it to God! And then receive it back, purified, from the hands of God!” Gandhi
Man is a social being, and therefore political by nature, inherent in his context as an intellectual, philosophical and analytical being. And within this context of a social being, politics, in particular, in his conscience, is restricted to his ethical and moral values, i.e., the result of his experience in the society in which he developed, and since are rare, nowadays, the number of human beings living in caves, human society lives politics. At first, imposed for reasons of conscience, there can be no harm in doing politics, as it is a human value.
However, the dramas and dilemmas created in this context appear, when the reasons of conscience are closely linked to free will to make politics a game of personal interests, of groups or parties, and for that very reason, selfish. And this effect is disastrous, leading to conflicts and outside the broad context for the well-being of the human community as a whole, putting even more at risk the democracy that still stands fragile, false, fragmented and on crutches, in the so-called democratic societies in all countries in modern times.
In the midst of this moral and ethical chaos where this lame democracy is sustained, a man appears on the political scene of the twentieth century, showing the life of an ascetic, almost rickety, humble and half-naked, who changes the foundations of the political thought and launches a warning cry for future generations! Yes ... for future generations perhaps, as the vast majority of today's politicians still crawl along the barren plains of mediocrity, sinking into the swamp of mud created by shady personal interests and their affiliations in groups of power no less honest and trying to hide their cunning manoeuvres of corruption. Using politics, only in the dirty game that can be played with it, without paying attention to the principles, of the primary cause, of the moral and ethical precepts on which human relations must be based on their totality, alien to social condition, conscience, character, religion, ethnicity and geography.
Of him, Albert Einstein, that famous universal scientist, a mystic, visionary, humanist, pacifist, expresses himself: “A conductor of his people, not supported by any external authority; a politician whose victory is not based on guesses 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.” And he adds: “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.”
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the mystical-political paradox, was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist and ethical politician, who insistently used nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule and, in turn, inspiring civil rights and freedom movements around the world, having Martin Luther King Jr as one of his greatest disciples.
Humanity knows some mystics and many politicians - but a political mystic, or a mystical politician is a very strange and, at first sight, impossible thing. The mystic deals with the things of God and the spiritual world; the politician is interested in the things of men and this material world. And is it possible that, within the same individual, these two worlds, so distant and apparently so antagonistic, harmonize? If cosmic monism were not a postulate of logic; if we do not understand that there can be only one eternal principle of all things, be they on the material level or the spiritual level - then one can profess Zoroastrian dualism and deny the compatibility of elements as incompatible as mysticism and politics.
From time to time, a man appears with vast inner spaces, where an entire planetary system can rotate freely, without collisions or catastrophes, around a single sun, which illuminates and vitalizes everything. Within this system, a dynamic tension is formed which, to maintain balance, must intensify its centripetal force in direct proportion to its centrifugal force, to establish a cosmos that does not succumb to chaos. And a cosmic man of that nature appeared here on Earth, a man who balances extremes and synthesizes seemingly irreconcilable antitheses. The greatness of Mahatma Gandhi is not that he was a great mystic, nor that he was a skilled politician, but that he balanced two worlds that were almost always unbalanced in other men. In ordinary people, with narrow inner spaces, there can, in fact, be no friendship and harmony between the God of the world and the world of God.
Since time immemorial, there have been mystics, deserters from the world who have found their perfection and happiness in the silent solitude with God, in some cave, in the vastness of the forest, on the summit of the mountain, in the suggestive silence of the desert - or behind the walls of a convent or monastery. On the other hand, there are dynamic men, experts in dealing with money, masters in politics and diplomacy, national and international relations, men who, after being dead, usually have bronze or marble statues in the public square and whose biographies fill the shelves of libraries.
The profane man lives in the hallucination that he is only his human ego, who does great things in the world; which is his intelligence and cunning, his money, his way, his scholarship, his incessant social upheaval in all sectors of life, which is the real and ultimate cause of what he accomplishes on Earth. And if someone tells him that behind these ponderable and palpable elements of his noisy - and empty - activity, there is an imponderable and intangible universe that, ultimately, is the initial and profound source of everything that really happens in the life of that man. However, this dynamic and incredulous man considers poetic, philosopher or mystic and not practical, the man who utters such strange things. This man ignores what is dynamic passivity or creative serenity. He is unaware of the immense reservoir of cosmic forces, that invisible ocean that expands mysterious and infinite, beyond all horizons of physical-mental perception. For this man, there are only small streams that spring from his well-known ego, and which run to an unknown destination. This mediocre and short-sighted man does not even suspect that these waters of his feverish activity go to the silent sea from which they came.
For Gandhi, his foreign policy was based on his internal mystique. Many are impure living among the impure. Few live pure among the pure. Very few can live pure among the impure, and these are the true “mahatmas”, the great souls, the cosmic men, fully realized.
This solitary mystic appears in the palaces of kings and heads of states, in the great European courts; he takes part in political debates around international and national themes; agitates questions of great relevance; because this man is a skilled politician and jurist who 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 the powerful British empire, for the political emancipation of 430 million enslaved countrymen of the time, but he does not use any of the material weapons his antagonists use. He replaces the weapon with the soul. Gandhi does not accumulate money for himself; he lives in extreme humility and simplicity in all aspects. He wears minimal clothes and walks barefoot or with a poor sandal, even in the most luxurious salons, which earned him the playful nickname of “half-naked fakir”.
Surrounded by the most filthy and decrepit international politics and diplomacy of the time, he does not deviate from his line of absolute truth and sincerity; he does not admit to shady manoeuvres, does not accept manipulations from behind the scenes, but only to his inner voice, the voice of his conscience.
With the Gandhi phenomenon, the history of mankind enters a new phase of evolution, as it can be proved that the most intense mystique and the most extensive external dynamics, the God of the world and the world of God, are compatible. This man realized in his life the great synthesis of spirit and matter, of fire and water, and what was possible once in India is possible always and everywhere.
The world has not yet comprehended the true greatness of Gandhi, and what we see today, remains the policy of moral wreck, of the governments ruled by a minority whose power remains only for their private interests, leading to most nations - since mediocrity has no boundaries - to the inequalities of social conditions; the contrasts between immense wealth and the poorest and vile human condition, in the policy of contempt for those who work the most, and who have no right to express themselves, and when they think have, face the whip of “democracy” protected by a police state that does not measure consequences in brutally annihilating those who try to reverse the Dantesque picture created by the misery of reason.
In fact, Gandhi aimed at his self-realization, the “only necessary thing”: “That the Lord our God is one. And you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength”. And the second necessary thing is this: “That you must love your neighbour as yourself”, which implies this self-realization and liberation of man. But Gandhi, that genuine Christian from India, was not considered a Christian by the churches of the West, not only because of his achievements at the intimate, social, and of his people's level, but perhaps because he claimed to accept Jesus and his Gospel, but did not accept the Christianity professed by the clergy.
The Sermon on the Mount made a deep impression on Gandhi, similar to the Bhagavad Gita, in particular, when Jesus said: “Do not resist the one who is evil. If someone injures you on the right cheek, offer the other one as well. And, if someone wants to steal your tunic, let him also take the cloak”, which enchanted him to the point of comparing these sayings to the poet Shamal Bhatt who in one of the verses writes: “When someone asks you for a glass of water, also offer him a good plate of food”, which for Gandhi, this kind of renunciation was the highest form of religion.
Gandhi spent 20 years in Africa; he went to that continent with the tyrannical ego enslaved by money and the desire for fame - and he returned free from his ego by the power of his divine Self. He embarked for South Africa to return a millionaire - and came back with almost nothing, in humble robes of renunciation, stripped of ego and Christified. When the famous Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore, who knew Doctor Karamchand Gandhi, saw the spiritualized Gandhi, he exclaimed: “Here is a great soul in the clothes of a beggar!” Since then, the nickname “Mahatma” (great soul) has become popular in India and worldwide.
India's liberation, which took place almost half a century later, was only a corollary, a normal overflow, of Gandhi's individual liberation. And he gave so little importance to the political liberation of his homeland, that he did not even witness the proclamation of National Independence of his country, which took place at midnight on August 14-15, 1947, while Gandhi was away from the Capital, on the other side of India, liberating himself through the liberation of the Indians.
Gandhi's supreme ideal was his self-liberation, or self-realization, which manifested itself on the political scene, by trying to restore the harmony of his people, of peaceful coexistence between different religions, in the declaration of Independence of India and for having avoided a bloody war between Pakistanis and Indians.
When he said that: “The truth is hard as a diamond and delicate as a peach blossom”, he had the intuition of the Universe and man as being the Truth (hardness of the diamond) revealed as Beauty (the delicacy of a peach blossom).
Gandhi was one of the few typical representatives of the new evolving human race, for he had no another aim than “the only thing necessary”; a man who managed, through the plenitude of love, to neutralize the hatred of many and did not even allow his companions to entertain hostile thoughts against the English, to prevent them from practising hostile acts, as thinking evil is the prelude to doing evil.
Those inexperienced in divine mystique, non-spiritual men, will dismiss this attitude as selfish, because they do not comprehend that self-realization is the most radical ego-denial. Self-realization is the fulfilment of the supreme and the unique destiny of human existence.
When Ramana Maharshi was asked by an English spiritualist how to do good to humanity, the great seer of Arunachala replied: “The only way to do good is to be good.” To be good means to be fulfilled in God, because that fulfilment in God is the only way to do good to men.
All altruism without self-realization is like many zeros: 000000; but self-realization is the great value 1, which values all zeros: 1000000…
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