Important Comments

MENON AND NEHRU

Things seem to be taking a nasty turn.
But what I find perhaps even more incredible than the leaders' incompetence - Nehru, Menon, and so forth - is that for twenty years there hasn't been a single Indian to see things clearly and speak out - there's been no one in India, no one. For twenty years there have been two idols, Nehru and Gandhi, and then some 400 million stupefied people,[[700 million in 1981. ]] with no one to see things clearly. How is it possible?... No one!
But Nehru had a very good foreign press. They considered him almost a god in Europe and America. And Gandhi! ... Oh, they were.... The whole world is like that, mon petit - they don't understand. They don't understand. Nobody understands.
(silence)
We will see.


(THE MOTHER'S AGENDA NOV 20TH,1962)


If things take a bad turn, soon no one will be able to move; once again we'll be (gesture) shut up in an egg.
When Sri Aurobindo was here, you went to sit in the room he was in, and felt perfectly sheltered from everything - and it was true.
The only danger at the time was Japan, and Japan had officially declared it wouldn't bomb Pondicherry because of Sri Aurobindo. But at least there were still men in their planes, and they could choose not to bomb. But you don't tell a jet plane "Don't crash here"! It crashes wherever it can.


(THE MOTHER'S AGENDA NOV20TH,1962)

More On Gandhis Non Violence

Violence is necessary as long as men are ruled by their ego and its desires. But violence must be used only as a means of defense when you are attacked. The ideal towards which humanity is moving and which we want to realize is a state of luminous understanding in which each person's needs as well as the harmony of the whole are taken into account.
The future will have no need of violence because it will be governed by the Divine Consciousness, in which all things are harmonized and complement each other.
For the moment, we are still in a stage where weapons are necessary. But it should be understood that this is a transitory stage, not a permanent one, and we must strive for the other one.
Peace ... peace and harmony will be a natural outcome of the change of consciousness'....You see, in India there reigns the Gandhian concept of nonviolence which has replaced physical violence with moral violence, but it's far worse!
But if you dare speak against Gandhi, everyone will immediately ... oh!
You don't need to mention his name, you can explain to the children that replacing physical violence with moral violence is no better. Lying down in front of a train to stop it running is a moral violence that can ultimately cause more disorder than physical violence.
There would be a lot to say.... It depends on each case. I myself very much encouraged the practice of fencing because it gives you skill, control over your movements and discipline in violence - I very much encouraged fencing at one time. I learned how to shoot; I used to shoot with a rifle, because it gives you steadiness and skill and a very good eye; and it forces you to remain calm in the midst of danger. All these things are.... I don't see why one should be hopelessly nonviolent, it only makes a spineless character.[367]
Turn it into an art! An art for cultivating calm, skill and self control. There's no need to cry out indignantly as Gandhi would. It's useless, useless, absolutely useless - I am not at all in favor of it! One should master the means of self-defense, and one should cultivate them in order to do so.
Above all, make them understand that moral violence is just as bad as physical violence. It can even be worse, that is, at least physical violence forces you to become strong and control yourself, whereas moral violence is.... You may be like this [apparently quiet] and harbor the worst moral violence in yourself.

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The Mother's remark On Gandhi's Non Violence(Ahimsa)

(After listening to a passage in Satprem's manuscript on nonviolence and Gandhi, Mother makes another brief remark:)
They're really smacking their lips over their ahimsa[[Ahimsa: nonviolence. ]] - it's disgusting!....Today we are finding that the old gods know how to transmigrate. Gandhi himself, seeing all those years of nonviolence culminate in the terrible violence that marked India's partition in 1947, ruefully observed shortly before his death: "The attitude of violence which we have secretly harboured now recoils on us, and makes us fly at each other's throats when the question of distribution of power arises.... Now that the burden of subjection is lifted, all the forces of evil have come to the surface." For neither nonviolence nor violence touch upon the root of Evil.... (THE AGENDA ,SEPTEMBAR22,1962)

Gandhi's Dharma

Gandhi and Indian Mysticism

It is unfortunate that an impartial estimate of the greatness of Mahatma Gandhi, done more than forty years ago by Amal Kiran in his book The Indian Spirit and the World's Future, has not received its due recognition. While an average Indian immediately links up Swaraj with Gandhi, the author of this exegesis wonders if the elements of Indian mysticism in the Mahatma's socio-political approach really draw nourishment from the rich and invigorating traditions of the land. - Editors

THE idealisation of non-violence at all costs serves also to throw into relief the precise meaning of Gandhi's saying: "Politics are to me subservient to religion." If religion primarily signified to him non-violence, then it is doubtful whether he can stand wholly as a representative of what India has historically understood by religion. In the golden age of spirituality, the Vedic times, the arts of war were not taboo. Even in the Ashrams of the Rishis archery was taught - surely not just to hunt animals (though that too would be contrary to non-violence). It was taught essentially in order to fit men for violence in a right cause. The emphasis was always on being right, not on being non- violent. The holiest figures in Indian tradition, Rama and Krishna, were mighty warriors and urged men to ..battle against the enemies of dharma. To explain away their fights as being allegories of inner struggle between man's higher self and his lower is to forget that in part of mankind the lower self is not only dominant but also aggressive against those in whom the higher self is more active and that the inner struggle must necessarily get projected into an epic of physical combat. Even Buddha who among India's spiritual personalities put the greatest premium on non-violence did not enjoin it on all and sundry: he restricted it to the class of monks and, while conjuring humanity to return love for hatred, never discouraged violence in
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defence of a cause that was just. The absolute adherence to ahimsa was derived by Gandhi from Tolstoy: It does not reflect the flexible and many-sided spiritual wisdom of original Hinduism.
There is also another fact which leads us to question whether Gandhi, for all his veneration of the Gita, embodied vitally the soul of the Hindu religion. It was not only Swaraj that he deemed undesirable without unsleeping agitation and activity to demo- lish the barrier between the Untouchables and the rest of our population: Even Hinduism itself, the whole grand structure of spiritual aspiration towards the invisible Divine, was a mockery to Gandhi so long as that barrier was not torn down. One of his often-quoted utterances is that he would far rather that Hin- duism died than that Untouchability lived! Here is an hysterical rushing to extremes by a conscience hypersensitive to social inequalities. Here is deplorable forgetfulness of the truth that, though social reformism is a fine passion, it cannot be the centre and core of man's upward endeavour. The main purpose of true religion is a change of the merely human consciousness into a divine consciousness by a progressive practice of me presence of God. Only when that presence is inwardly realised can social pestilences like Untouchability be radically removed. Till then, sincere efforts must certainly be made to abolish them by means of brotherly social behaviour, but to believe that a sore like Untouchability renders all Hinduism corrupt and futile and that, without the help of the fundamental transformation of conscious- ness that is Yoga, me root and not only one or another outward form of social iniquity can be plucked out is to confuse morality with religion and to prove clearly that one lacks the burning essence of not only the Hindu religion ..SOURCE