Almost all scholars who studied these two heroes of the twentieth century know the historical facts of their lives. They think that Gandhi's supreme ideal was the political liberation of India and that Schweitzer was enthusiastic about philanthropy toward an impoverished population in a remote area of Africa.
However, Gandhi and Schweitzer aimed at their own self-realization, which Jesus calls the “only necessary thing” when he said: “That the Lord our God, is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The second is this: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”, which implies the self-realization and liberation of man.
Gandhi freed himself through the liberation of the Indians from the British tyranny.
Schweitzer freed himself through charity toward the Africans.
Gandhi spent 20 years in South Africa; he went to that continent with his ego enslaved by money and the desire for fame - and from there returned freed from his human ego by the power of his divine Self. He embarked to South Africa to become a millionaire - and returned with almost nothing, his humble robes of renunciation, stripped of ego and Christified. When the famous Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, who knew Doctor Karamchand Gandhi, seeing him spiritualized, exclaimed: “Behold a great soul in beggar's robes!” Since then, the name “Mahatma” (great soul) has become popular in India and worldwide.
The liberation of India, which occurred almost half a century later, was only a corollary, a normal overflow of Gandhi's liberation. And he gave so little importance to the political liberation of his homeland that he did not even witness the proclamation of his country's National Independence, which took place at midnight on August 14-15, 1947, while Gandhi was far away from the Capital on the other side of India.
Gandhi's supreme ideal was his self-liberation, or self-realization, which was manifested in the political scenario, by the attempt to restore the harmony of his people, of peaceful coexistence among different religions, of the Declaration of Independence of India, and in having avoided a bloody war between Pakistanis and Indians.
The analogous thing happened with Schweitzer. After graduating in philosophy, theology and music, after being ordained Minister of the Gospel and to be celebrated as a great writer, preacher and musician, Schweitzer decided to study medicine and surgery. He left Europe, who regarded him as a great scholar and demanded to the jungles of equatorial Africa. The local population was poor and illiterate, where no one knew him and understood his genius, greatness, philosophy, and music.
And in this humble environment of total misunderstanding, Schweitzer lived for 52 years. If it was partly out of compassion for the suffering of its people, it was more out of love for “the only necessary thing”, that is, of his self-realization. In Europe, he was admired for his intelligence, but he wanted to be forgotten by the world to be fulfilled in God. If the world exalted him in the last years of his life, it was not his fault; this happened to him in his absence.
Gandhi and Schweitzer are the typical representatives of the evolving new human race. Neither of them aimed at anything other than “the only necessary thing.”
The inexperienced will label this attitude as selfishness because they do not comprehend that self-realization is the most radical dispossession of the ego. Self-realization is the fulfilment of the supreme and ultimate destiny of human existence.
When Ramana Maharshi was asked by an English scientist how to do good to humankind, 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 this realization 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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