The United Nations General Assembly has designated each 2 October, the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi as the Day of Nonviolence. We are well aware that today in the world society there are many areas of armed violence and strong ethnic tensions which may spread. There is a growth of discriminatory ideologies. Many people are resigned to the situation and can be disoriented.
However as Mahatma Gandhi wrote " I do daily perceive that while everything around me is ever changing, ever dying, there is underlying all that change a living power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves, and re-creates. That informing power or spirit is God. I see it as purely benevolent, for I see in the midst of death, life persists. In the midst of untruth, truth persists. In the midst of darkness, light persists. Hence I gather that God is life, God is light, God is love. God is the supreme good."
When Mahatma Gandhi shortly after finishing his legal studies in England, went to South Africa and began working with Indian laborers, victims of discrimination. He looked for a term understandable to a largely English-speaking population to explain his efforts. "Passive resistance" was the most widely used term and had been used by Leo Tolstoy and others. However, Gandhi found the word "passive" misleading.
Thus Gandhi wrote to friends from his legal studies in England. Edward Maitland and Anna Kingsford were leaders of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society. Maitland introduced Gandhi to the writings of the American, Ralph Waldo Trine. Trine was a New Englander, and his parents named him after Emerson. His best known work from which Gandhi took the term for his actions in South Africa is "In Tune with the Infinite: The Fullness of Peace Power and Plenty". (1)
For Trine "Everything is first worked out in the unseen before it is manifested in the seen, in the ideal before it is realized in the real, in the spiritual before it shows forth in the material. The realm of the unseen is the realm of cause. The realm of the seen is the realm of effect. The nature of effect is always determined and conditioned by the nature of its cause."
Thus for Mahatma Gandhi, before a nonviolent action or campaign, there was a long period of spiritual preparation of both himself and his close co-workers. Prayer, fasting, meditation were used in order to focus the force of the soul, to visualize a positive outcome and to develop harmlessness to those opposed.
Thus on this 2 October, we rededicate ourselves to developing a culture of peace and nonviolence.
(1) R.W. Trine. "In Tune With The Infinite" (New York: Whitecombe and Tombs, 1899, 175pp.)
René Wadlow
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