January 30th.
Remembering Mahatma Gandhi on his Death Anniversary.
Below is writings of.
Paramahansa Yogananda.
Autobiography of a Yogi.
Nonviolence is the natural outgrowth of the law of forgiveness and love.
“If loss of life becomes necessary in a righteous battle,” Gandhi proclaims, “one should be prepared, like Jesus, to shed his own, not others’, blood.
“Eventually there will be less blood spilt in the world.”
Epics shall someday be written on the Indian satyagrahis who withstood
hate with love,
violence with nonviolence,
who allowed themselves to be mercilessly slaughtered rather than bear arms.
The result on certain historic occasions was that opponents threw down their guns and fled.
Shamed, shaken to their depths by the sight of men who valued the lives of others above their own.
“I would wait, if need be for ages,” Gandhi says,
“rather than seek the freedom of my country through bloody means.”
The Bible warns us:
“All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”
--Paramahansa Yogananda
Autobiography of a Yogi
It is curious how we delude ourselves, fancying that the body can be improved, but that it is impossible to evoke the hidden powers of the soul.
I am engaged in trying to show that if I have any of those powers, I am as frail a mortal as any of us and that I never had anything extraordinary about me nor have I now.
I am a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have enough humility to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.
I own that I have an immovable faith in God and His goodness, and an unconsumable passion for truth and love.
But is that not what every person has latent in him? If we may make new discoveries and inventions in the phenomenal world, must we declare our bankruptcy in the spiritual domain?
Is it impossible to multiply the exceptions so as to make them the rule? Must man always be brute first and man after, if at all?
~ Mahatma Gandhi, "Autobiography of a Yogi"
“Resort to force in the Great War (I) failed to bring tranquillity,”
Franklin D. Roosevelt pointed out.
“Victory and defeat were alike sterile. That lesson the world should have learned.”
“The more weapons of violence, the more misery to mankind,”
Lao-tzu taught.
“The triumph of violence ends in a festival of mourning.”
“I am fighting for nothing less than world peace,” Gandhi has declared.
“If the Indian movement is carried to success on a nonviolent Satyagraha basis, it will give a new meaning to patriotism and, if I may say so in all humility, to life itself.”
Before the West dismisses Gandhi’s programme as one of an impractical dreamer, let it first reflect on a definition of Satyagraha by the Master of Galilee:
“Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:
but I say unto you, That ye resist not evil [with evil]:
but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.”
Gandhi’s epoch has extended, with the beautiful precision of cosmic timing, into a century already desolated and devastated by two World Wars.
A divine handwriting appears on the granite wall of his life:
a warning against the further shedding of blood among brothers.
Paramahansa Yogananda
Autobiography-of-a-Yogi
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