C9 Office...Self and Relationships
Listening to your “Self”:
…his burning passion for self-realization. I saw later that this last was the only thing for which he lived.
The term 'religion' I am using in its broadest sense, meaning thereby self-realization or knowledge of Self.
I had long since taught myself to follow the inner voice. I delighted in submitting to it. To act against it would be difficult and painful to me.
For me the reasoned course of action is held in check subject to the sanction of the inner voice.
Relationships:
As your friend and servant, I should occasionally have to say hard things to you. Heaven only knows whether I should then retain your affection.
I never insist that all people should accept my experience as the sole guide.
I should always have been wasting time on him. He had the power to keep me in the dark and to mislead me.
I feel and I have felt during the whole of my public life that what we need, what any nation needs, is nothing else and nothing less than character building.
C10 Office…Mind, God and Attachment
The Big Book says that the principal problem of the alcoholic “lies in his mind rather than in his body”.
Mind
The world will tell us that the senses cannot be controlled. We should reply they certainly can be.
Involuntary thought is an affectation of the mind, and curbing of thought, therefore, means curbing of the mind which is even more difficult to curb than the wind. Nevertheless the existence of God within makes even control of the mind possible.
When the mind is conquered, what power has lust?
It is indeed a subtle enemy, but once the senses, the mind and the reason are under the control of the subtlemost Self, lust is extinguished.
Knowledge is obscured by the enemy of the wise man, in the form of lust, the insatiable fire.
God
The man who really lives a life of contemplation will outwardly seem a man of the world. His mind may be absorbed in God all hours of the day, but he will move in the world like other men.
Seeing God means realization of the fact that God abides in one's heart.
I have faith and knowledge, too, that a Power exists beyond reasoning. This suffices for me. I am unable to clarify this any further as I know nothing more in the matter.
In Al-Anon we call this “Detaching with Love”.
Attachment
Attachment begets craving and craving begets wrath. Wrath breeds stupefaction, stupefaction leads to loss of memory, loss of memory ruins the reason, and the ruin of reason spells utter destruction.
If things do not bind us, if we are not attached to things even when they are easily available, that, according to me, is a greater test of our attachment than mere withdrawal to a lonely forest.
C11 Office…General Comments I
Gandhi had four sons. Three of them turned out well, the fourth was a drug addict/alcoholic prostitute who hated him after age 16 because Gandhi would not allow him to leave India to go to England and become a lawyer as he had done.
Education
A man's real teacher is himself.
Under ideal conditions, true education could be imparted only by the parents.
My ideal was never to entrust children to common place teachers. Their literary qualification was not so essential as their moral fiber.
Gandhi grew up a strict Hindu but attended a temple where the holy Scriptures of both the Muslims and the Hindus were studied for their universal truths. He was eventually murdered, by a Hindu, who believed that Gandhi was conceding too much to the Muslims during the Independence of India.
Religion
In the time of the Prophet Mohammed, prayer, fasting and keeping awake at night were considered essential for subduing the senses.To the Prophet, fasting brought happiness, for it was an occasion when he could live constantly in the presence of God.
Jesus did likewise. He lived in solitude, fasted for 40 days and subjected his body to the utmost mortification. Those who followed him taught the same thing. There has been a tradition of fasting and prayer in Europe right to the present day.
And then came Luther in Germany. He said that the others had misinterpreted the text, and their lives were all deception. The Protestants believed that there was nothing but hypocrisy in the Catholic practices, and so they destroyed the practice of fasting, a most potent means of realizing God.
It is possible to draw any number of ideas from the Bible, the Vedas, the Koran and other scriptures. I have come across persons who justified even murder on the authority of these works.
In matters of religion beliefs differ, and each one's is supreme for himself. If all had the same beliefs about all matters of religion there would be only one religion in the world.
My message to the Christians would be to cultivate humility instead of arrogating to themselves the exclusive possession of absolute truth.
Probably the most useful thing, to addicts, that Gandhi ever said was ”God is Truth”. If that is true, then a 12 stepper can let go of all the inherent problems of believing in a religion and the perplexities of the wars, catastrophes, famines and plagues.
Truth
Truth is love and love is truth.
Truth is the substance of all morality.
I saw that a man of truth must also be a man of care.
My life was certainly more truthful and my soul knew no bounds.
But all my life through, the very insistence on truth has taught me to appreciate the beauty of compromise
Truth cannot exist without love.
Where there is love there is life.
Realization of truth through self-gratification, appears a contradiction in terms.
Not many people can talk directly and authoritatively about evil, but he could.
Evil
This suggests that evil cannot by itself flourish in this world. It can do so only if it is allied with some good.
Evil endures only because of the support it receives from good people, and cannot survive if that support is withdrawn.
Gandhi was sometimes accused being ambitious, but that’s not true.
Humility
Service without humility is selfishness and egotism.
Only he who has a spirit of extreme humility can be said to have a resolute intellect.