Relevance

One of Gandhiji’s principles is Satyagraha.   Satya means Truth and agraha means firmness or force.   Racial discrimination in South Africa awakened Gandhiji’s social conscience (Beck p. 2) and   this lead him to coin this word. Satyagraha is also translated as Soul-Force. (Fischer p. 35)   He not only preached the tenets of Satyagraha, but also lived and acted them.   He showed by actual examples how these basic principles could be used to transform the world into a better place.   As Gandhiji wrote, “Satyagraha is the vindication of truth not by infliction of suffering on the opponent but on one’s self.”   This principle reverses the idea of an-eye-for-an-eye policy which, as he says ends in making everybody blind, or blind with fury.   Instead, it returns good for evil until the evildoer tires of evil. (Fischer).   Gandhiji preached this idea over a century ago, but this an-eye-for-an-eye vindication is everywhere in the world today.   Isn’t this policymaking all of us blind in the world today.   Furthermore, he calls it a force which can not only be used by individuals, but by communities – men women and children.   It is not a meeting of violence with violence.   Instead it is a struggle from within in the purest form (non-violence p.34).   When the spirit of Satyagraha becomes pure, then it will become universal, in revolutionizing social ideas, and do away with despotism and the ever growing militarism under which the nations of the west are groaning and are being crushed to death….(p.35-6).   By looking around us today, how applicable is this thought by Gandhiji?   Today we see men against men and nations against nations fighting with great military strength.   This is not the world Gandhiji envisaged.   Satyagraha is the noblest and best education.   This is the education we badly need today for humanity.

The sage Patanjali compiled the Yoga Sutras, a text which describes the inner workings of the mind, and also provides an eight-step (ashtanga) blueprint for controlling...