Personal Reflections in the Month of Gandhi Jayanti

The month of October got a good start with Gandhi Jayanti on October 2nd. I'm especially moved this year by the celebration of Mahatma Gandhi's birthday.  Mahatma Gandhi promoted "ahimsa" - non-violence. He led a Satyagraha movement. 

Satyāgraha (Sanskrit: सत्याग्रह; satya: "truth", āgraha: "insistence" or "holding firmly to"), or "holding firmly to truth",^[1] or "truth force", is a particular form of nonviolent resistance or civil resistance. Someone who practises satyagraha is a satyagrahi.

In January, I posted about the Ukraine war.  These days, I am posting about the October 7th 2023 attack in Israel.  In shock and with great sorrow I watch  the news from the comfort of my home.  In this age of telecommunications, graphic images appear instantaneously for us to see in real-time - something that could not have happened in WWII when my parents were imprisoned in German concentration camps.  But does this new technology help us in any way? Does it instead lull us to sleep, saddened, but ineffective? Gandhi understood the challenges of new technologies when he spun and wove, using a "charka" - a hand-operated spinning wheel when the great automated spinning and weaving factories were transforming the culture of India and the world.  He understood the power plays of the mighty and protested with the Dandi Salt March symbolically extracting salt from the ocean.

In the process of aging, I reflect more and more on Gandhi, who was one of the heroes of my youth.  As time marches on, I remember more and more of my youth, while I forget where I have put my glasses or car keys on a daily basis. It's well known that a senior's long term memory gets better than short term memory. This is a personal reflection - I am doing some personal life review about how Mahatma Gandhi became an important influence in my life. 

Gandhiji came into my awareness initially in the 1960s during the civil rights movement in the USA, when Martin Luther King Jr. led a movement emulating Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent principles of civil disobedience against injustice. Living in Canada, we were not untouched by what was happening south of the border.  I also had a regular correspondence with a friend studying in Berkley California, a hot spot of civil rights action in those days - especially in protest against the Vietnam War.

In my first year of college, my English professor introduced me to two core Indian texts - the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads and the Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa  Yogananda. Something about this literature resonated with me, as if I had uncovered long forgotten knowledge.  It awoke in me a desire to "return" to my India, though I had never been there and was born into a family which had no association with that country or its culture.

My parents were keen that I should be a well-informed person about the wider world.  But my fascination with India was completely unexpected.  Determined at a young age to return there, I made an overland expedition to India in 1965-66.  The India-Pakistan war at that time did not deter me, though it frightened my family.  In India, I sought out the :"khadi" shops, searched for books by Gandhi.  

"Khadi" is homespun cotton cloth.  While my first sari was made of factory woven cloth, when I settled later in India during the 1970s, I chose a khadi sari which was quite impractical.  Living simply in the rural area around Haridwar by the Ganges river, I washed my clothes by hand, Indian style. Khadi was heavy, took longer to dry, and did not wrap elegantly or comfortably.  But I wore it with pride, as if somehow it connected me with the spirit of my hero - Gandhiji.

Wistfully, I wonder what has happened to that spirit.  Perhaps this reflection on choosing khadi may seem quite petty in the face of the violence of our times and the devastating humanitarian crises that ensue. But it actually points to a need to return to the principle of simplicity,  non-violence, and a spirit of collective co-operation, rather than a war-like mindset.  

Isaiah 2:4

"He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore."

War : My Sorrow Awakened

In the Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 1, we read of the Sorrow of Arjuna as he faces a war.  In my first reflection on the sorrow of Arjuna, I looked at the text philosophically, as a way of describing humanity's dilemmas facing the challenges of ordinary living in peace time.  But now, I reflect on its application literally to a time of war.

I had always resonated with Arjuna's sorrow, but now, more than ever before, as I watch what is unfolding in Ukraine, that scripture from aeons ago seems to speak not only to the present, but reawakens the sorrow within me for generations past of my own family.

I am a child of survivors of the Shoah.  Some 77 years ago, my parents were liberated by Russian soldiers from German concentration camps.  After trying to resettle in their homes in Poland, they eventually made their way to the American zone of Germany where United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration  (UNRRA) had set up Displaced Persons (DP) camps.  I was born there.  

Images of refugees fleeing, of roads backed up with traffic to get out of the city/country, brought back memories of my mother's stories of flight from the Nazis. This is all very personal to me, not just an interest in geopolitical history.  Sadly, such images are also within the memories of so many others across the globe.

In reflecting on how I came to a spiritual path that centered around the Bhagavad Gita, it is largely because the teachings were set in the context of a war.  It was a familiar topic. My parents did not shirk from talking about their experiences in the war. I grew up in a community who had survived the most dreadful inhumanities. From my earliest childhood days, I yearned to know how such suffering came to be and whether there was a remedy for suffering or a way of preventing it.

Naively, in my youth, I had thought that Gandhi's ahimsa, which brought down colonial rule over India brought light  to such darkness.   Perhaps so - in a momentous release bringing political self-rule. But it too was followed by horrors in the unfolding of partition. Since the Holocaust in Europe of the 1930s & 40s, genocides and other holocausts have arisen worldwide within my own brief lifetime, too numerous to mention here.

As destiny would have it, life brought me to contemplate the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita over and over again,  learning to apply its principles within my personal life and sphere of influence,  however small that might be.  Today, I engage with people of all nationalities and faiths in the most sacred way to untangle the web of sorrow in their own lives through psychotherapy. The battlefield is both external and internal.  Each one is called to face their own memories, inter-generational traumas, personal challenges and dilemmas and become the hero and heroine of his/her own story, as Arjuna was called to do.

Be kind.

Everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

Phyllos