Gandhi's topics - tribe.net

Dalai Lama

subir — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:59:23 GMT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7302654.stm

History in the making...

posted in Gandhi - 1 reply

How to end violence against women and children:

subir — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 21:02:40 GMT

 Work for full equality between men and women in society and in personal relationships.
 Examine the ways we legitimize male violence.
 Understand that what it means to “be a man” is defined by society.
 Start on the playground.
 Unplug boys and girls from violent media.
 Promote good sport etiquette. Hire coaches committed to nonviolence.
 Do not use “like a girl” or “like a women” as a put-down.
 Encourage athletic activities that involve cooperation, fun, physical health and camaraderie.
 Teach children how to settle conflicts peacefully.
 Recognize that verbal and emotional cruelty is also violence.
 Understand that love does not involve control or ownership.
 Remember: anger is a feeling; violence is an action.
 Do not express feelings with fists.
 Teach boys and girls effective, respectful ways to express frustration, sadness and anger.
 We are all role models. Be nurturing, loving and caring.
 Do not belittle, humiliate or hit children.
 Know that fathers who are active in their children’s lives make good dads.
 Advocate for anti-violence laws and enforcement.
 Recognize that the availability of guns increases lethal violence.
 Ask local and elected officials to take action.
 Teach your daughter that respect is just a minimum. Teach your sons the same.
 Teach boys and girls to communicate clearly in relationships and that “no” really does mean “no”.
 Question rape myths.
 Recognize that alcohol and drugs feed violence.
 Never excuse behavior by saying “boys will be boys”.
 Confront homophobia – it pushes men into being tough.
 Do not use “gay” as a put-down.
 Recognize that individual violence is supported by social systems based on power and control.
 Understand war’s effect on women and children and men. Resist glorifying violence.
 Create new stories, myths and heroes.
 Praise gentle boys.
 Encourage children to trust their instincts; believe victims and children.
 Support the work of shelters in your community.

posted in Gandhi - 3 replies

India Is Colonising Itself, By Arundhati Roy & Shoma Chaudhuri

subir — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 21:58:23 GMT

26 March, 2007
Tehelka

There is an atmosphere of growing violence across the country. How do you
read the signs? Do you think it will grow more in the days to come? What
are its causes? In what context should all this be read?

You don't have to be a genius to read the signs. We have a growing middle
class, being reared on a diet of radical consumerism and aggressive greed.
Unlike industrializing western countries which had colonies from which to
plunder resources and generate slave labour to feed this process, we have
to colonize ourselves, our own nether parts. We've begun to eat our own
limbs. The greed that is being generated (and marketed as a value
interchangeable with nationalism) can only be sated by grabbing land, water
and resources from the vulnerable. What we're witnessing is the most
successful secessionist struggle ever waged in Independent India. The
secession of the middle and upper classes from the rest of the country.
It's a vertical secession, not a lateral one. They're fighting for the
right to merge with the world's elite somewhere up there in the
stratosphere. They've managed to commandeer the resources , the coal, the
minerals, the bauxite, the water and electricity. Now they want the land to
make more cars, more bombs, more mines - super toys for the new super
citizens of the new superpower. So it's outright war, and people on both
sides are choosing their weapons. The government and the corporations reach
for Structural Adjustment, the World Bank, the ADB, FDI, friendly court
orders, friendly policy makers, help from the 'friendly' corporate media
and a police force that will ram all this down peoples' throats. Those who
want to resist this process have, until now, reached for dharnas,
hunger-strikes, satyagraha, the courts, and what they thought was friendly
media. But now, more and more are reaching for guns. Will the violence
grow? If the 'growth rate' and the sensex are going to be the only
barometres the government uses to measure progress and the well-being of
people, then of course it will. How do I read the signs? It isn't hard to
read sky-writing. What it says up there, in big letters is this: The shit
has hit the fan, folks.

You once remarked that though you may not resort to violence yourself, you
think it has become immoral to condemn it, given the circumstances in the
country. Can you elaborate on this view?

I'd be a liability as a guerilla! I doubt I used the word
'immoral'-morality is an elusive business, as changeable as the weather.
What I feel is this: Non-violent movements have, for decades knocked on the
door of every democratic institution in this country and have been spurned
and humiliated. Look at the Bhopal Gas victims, the Narmada Bachao Andolan.
The NBA for example, had a lot going for it, high profile leadership, media
coverage, more resources than any other mass movement. What went wrong?
People are bound to want to re-think strategy. When Sonia Gandhi begins to
promote Satyagraha at the World Economic Forum in Davos it's time for us to
sit up and think. For example, is mass civil disobedience possible within
the structure of a democratic nation-state? Is it possible in the age of
disinformation and corporate-controlled mass media? Are hunger-strikes
umblically linked to celebrity politics? Would anybody care if the people
of Nangla Machhi or Bhatti mines went on a hunger-strike? Sharmila Irom has
been on a hunger strike for six years. That should be a salutary lesson to
many of us. I've always felt that it's ironic that hunger-strikes are used
as a political weapon in a land where most people go hungry anyway. We are
in a different time and place now. Up against a different, more complex
adversary. We've entered the era of NGOs - or should I say the era of
palthu shers - in which mass action can be a treacherous business. We have
demonstrations which are funded, we have sponsored dharnas and social
forums which posture militantly but never follow up on what they preach. We
have all kinds of 'virtual' resistance. Meetings against SEZs sponsored by
the biggest promoters of SEZs. Awards and grants for environmental activism
and community action given by corporations responsible for devastating
whole ecosystems. Vedanta, a company mining bauxite in the forests of
Orissa wants to start a university. The Tatas have two charitable trusts
that directly and indirectly, fund activists and mass movements across the
country. Could that be why Singur has drawn so much less flak than
Nandigram, and why they have not targeted, boycotted, gheraoed? Of course
the Tatas and Birlas funded Gandhi too - maybe he was our first NGO. But
now we have NGOs who make a lot of noise, write a lot of reports,but who
the sarkar is more than comfortable with. How do we make sense of all this?
The place is crawling with professional diffusers of real political action.
'Virtual resistance' has become something of a liability.

There was a time when mass movements looked to the courts for justice. The
courts have rained down a series of judgments that are so unjust, so
insulting to the poor in the language they use, they take your breath away.
A recent Supreme Court judgment allowing the Vasant Kunj Mall to resume
construction though it didn't have the requisite clearances said in so many
words, that the question of Corporations indulging in malpractice does not
arise! In the era of corporate globalization, corporate land-grab, in the
era of Enron and Monsanto, Halliburton and Bechtel, that's a loaded thing
to say. It exposes the ideological heart of the most powerful institution
in this country. The judiciary along with the corporate press, is now seen
as the lynchpin of the neo-liberal project.

In a climate like this when people feel that they are being worn down,
exhausted by these interminable 'democratic' processes, only to be
humiliated eventually, what are they supposed to do? Of course it isn't as
though the only options are binary - violence versus non-violence. There
are political parties that believe in armed struggle, but only as one part
of their overall political strategy. Political workers in these struggles
have been dealt with brutally, killed, beaten, imprisoned under false
charges. People are fully aware that to take to arms is to call down upon
yourself the myriad forms of violence of the Indian State. The minute armed
struggle becomes a strategy, your whole world shrinks and the colors fade
to black and white. But when people decide to take that step because every
other option has ended in despair-should we condemn them? Does anyone
believe that if the people of Nandigram had held a Dharna and sung songs
the West Bengal Government would have backed down? We are living in times,
when to be ineffective is to support the status quo (which no doubt suits
some of us). And being effective comes at a terrible price. I find it hard
to condemn people who are prepared to pay that price.

You have been traveling a lot on the ground -- can you give us a sense of
the fissures you are seeing on the ground. What are the trouble spots you
have been to? Can you outline a few of the combat lines in these places?

Huge question - what can I say? The military occupation of Kashmir,
neo-facism in Gujarat, civil war in Chhattisgarh, MNCs raping Orissa, the
submergence of hundreds of villages in the Narmada Valley, people living on
the edge of absolute starvation, the devastation of forest land, the Bhopal
victims living to see the West Bengal government re-wooing Union Carbide -
now calling itself Dow Chemicals - in Nandigram. I haven't been recently to
Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharshtra, but we know about the almost hundred
thousand farmers who have killed themselves. We know about the fake
encounters and the terrible repression in Andhra Pradesh. Each of these
places is has its own particular history, economy, ecology. None is
amenable to easy analysis. And yet there is connecting tissue, there are
huge international cultural and economic pressures being brought to bear on
them. How can I not mention the Hindutva project, spreading its poison
sub-cutaneously, waiting to errupt once again. I'd say the biggest
indictment of all is that we are still a country, a culture a society which
continues to nurture and practice the notion of untouchability. While our
economists number-crunch and boast about the growth rate, a million people,
human scavengers - earn their living carrying several kilos of other
peoples' shit on their heads every day. And if they didn't carry shit on
their heads they would starve to death. Some fucking superpower this.

How does one view the recent State and police violence in Bengal?

No different from police and State violence anywhere else - including the
issue of hypocrisy and doublespeak so perfected by all political parties
including the mainstream Left. Are communist bullets different from
capitalist ones? Odd things are happening. It snowed in Saudi Arabia. Owls
are out in broad daylight The Chinese Government tabled a bill sanctioning
the right to private property. I don't know if all of this has to do with
climate change. The Chinese Communists are turning out to be the biggest
capitalists of the 21st century. Why should we expect our own Parliamentary
Left to be any different? Nandigram and Singur are clear signals. It makes
you wonder - is the last stop of every revolution advanced capitalism?
Think about it - the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese
Revolution, the Vietnam War, the Anti- Apartheid struggle, the supposedly
Gandhian Freedom struggle in IndiaŠwhat's the last station they all pull in
at? Is this the end of imagination?

The Maoist attack in Bijapur -- the death of 55 policemen. Are the rebels
only a flip face of the State?

How can the rebels be the flip side of the state? Would anybody say that
those who fought against Apartheid - however brutal their methods - were
the flip side of the state? What about those who fought the French in
Algeria? Or those who fought the Nazis? Or those who fought Colonial
Regimes? Or those who are fighting the US occupation of Iraq? Are they the
flip side of the State? This facile new report-driven 'human rights'
discourse, this meaningless condemnation game that we all are forced to
play, makes politicians of us all and leaches the real politics out of
everything. However pristine we would like to be, however hard we polish
our halos, the tragedy is that we have run out of pristine choices. There
is a civil war in Chattisgarh sponsored, created by the Chattisgarh
Government which is publicly pursing the Bush doctrine - if you're not with
us, you are with the terrorists. The lynch pin of this war, apart from the
formal security forces, is the Salwa Judum - a government backed militia of
ordinary people forced to take up arms, forced to become SPOs (Special
Police Officers). The Indian State has tried this in Kashmir, in Manipur,
in Nagaland. Tens of thousands have been killed, hundreds of thousands
tortured, thousands have disappeared. Any Banana Republic would be proud of
this record.. Now the government wants to import these failed strategies
into the heartland. Thousands of Adivasis have been forcibly moved off
their mineral -rich lands into police camps. Hundreds of villages have been
forcibly evacuated. Those lands, rich in iron-ore are being eyed by
corporations like the Tatas and Essar. MOUs have been signed, but no one
knows what they say. Land Acquisition has begun. This kind of thing
happened in countries like Colombia - one of the most devastated countries
in the world. While everybody's eyes are fixed on the spiraling violence
between government backed militias and guerilla squads, multinational
corporations quietly make off with the mineral wealth. That's the little
piece of theatre being scripted for us in Chattisgarh.

Of course it's horrible that 55 policemen were killed. But they're as much
the victims of Government policy as anybody else. For the Government and
the Corporations they're just cannon fodder - there's plenty more where
they came from. Crocodile tears will be shed, prim TV anchors will hector
us for a while and then more supplies of fodder will be arranged. For the
Maoist guerillas the police and SPOs they killed were the armed personnel
of the Indian State, the main, perpetrators of repression, torture,
custodial killings, false encounters. The ones whose professional duties
involve burning villages and raping women. They're not innocent civilians -
if such a thing exists - by any stretch of imagination.

I have no doubt that the Maoists can be agents of terror and coercion too.
I have no doubt they have committed unspeakable atrocities. I have no doubt
they cannot lay claim to undisputed support from local people - but who
can? Still, no guerrilla army can survive without local support. That's a
logistical impossibility. And the support for Maoists is growing, not
diminishing. That says something. People have no choice but to align
themselves on the side of whoever they think is less worse.

But to equate a resistance movement fighting against enormous injustice,
with the Government which enforces that injustice is absurd. The government
has slammed the door in the face of every attempt at non-violent
resistance. When people take to arms, there is going to be all kinds of
violence - revolutionary, lumpen and outright criminal. The government is
responsible for the monstrous situations it creates.

The term Naxals and Maoists and outsiders is being used very loosely these
days. Can you declutter it.

'Outsiders' is a generic accusation used in the early stages of repression
by governments who have begun to believe their own publicity and can't
imagine that people have risen up against them. That's the stage the CPI
(M) is at now in Bengal, though some would say repression in Bengal is not
new, it has only moved into higher gear.. In any case what's an outsider?
Who decides the borders? Are they village boundaries? Tehsil? Block?
District? State? Is narrow regional and ethnic politics the new communist
mantra? About Naxals and Maoists - wellŠ India is about to become a police
state in which everybody who disagrees with what's going on risks being
called a terrorist. Islamic terrorists have to be Islamic - so that's not
good enough to cover most of us. They need a bigger catchment area. So
leaving the definition loose, undefined, is effective strategy, because the
time is not far off when we'll all be called Maoists or Naxalites,
terrorists or terrorist sympathisers and shut down, by people who don't
really know - or care -who Maoists or Naxalites are. In villages of course
that has begun - thousands of people are being held in jails across the
country, loosely charged with being terrorists trying to overthrow the
state. Who are the real Naxalites and Maoists? I'm not an authority on the
subject, but here's a very rudimentary potted history.

The Communist Party of India the CPI was formed in 1925. The CPI (M)
Communist Party Marxist- split from the CPI in 1964 and formed a separate
party. Both of course were parliamentary political parties. In 1967 the CPI
(M) along with a splinter group of the Congress, came to power in West
Bengal. At the time there was massive unrest among starving peasantry in
the countryside. Local leaders of the CPI(M) - Kanu Sanyal and Charu
Mazumdar led a peasant uprising in the district of Naxalbari which is where
the term Naxalites comes from. In 1969 the government fell and the Congress
came back to power under Siddharta Shankar Ray. The naxalite uprising was
mercilessly crushed - Mahashweta Devi has written powerfully about this
time. In 1969 the CPI (ML) - Marxist Leninist split from the CPI (M). A few
years later around 1971, the CPI (ML) devolved into several parties: the
CPI -ML (Liberation) largely centred in Bihar, CPI -ML (New Democracy)
functioning for the most part out of Andhra Pradesh and Bihar, the CPI-ML
(Class Struggle) mainly in Bengal. These parties have been generically
baptized 'Naxalites.' They see themselves as Marxist Leninist, not strictly
speaking Maoist. They believe in elections, mass action and, when,
absolutely pushed to the wall or attacked- armed struggle. The MCC - the
Maoist Communist Centre at the time mostly operating in Bihar was formed in
1968. The PW Peoples War, operational for the most part in Andhra Pradesh
was formed in 1980. Recently, in 2004 the MCC and the PW merged to form the
CPI (Maoist) They believe in outright armed struggle and the overthrowing
of the state. They don't participate in elections. This is the party that
is fighting the guerilla war in Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Chattisgarh and
Jharkhand.

The Indian state and media largely view the Maoists as "internal security"
threat. Is this the way to look at them?

I'm sure the Maoists would be flattered to be viewed in this way.

The Maoists want to bring down the State. Given the autocratic ideology
they take their inspiration from, what alternative would they set up?
Wouldn't their regime be an exploitative autocratic violent one as well?
Isn't their action already exploitative of ordinary people? Do they really
have the support of ordinary people?

I think it's important for us to acknowledge that both Mao and Stalin are
dubious heroes with murderous pasts. Tens of millions of people were killed
under their regimes. Apart from what happened in China and the Soviet
Union, Pol Pot, with the support of the Chinese communist party (while the
West looked away discreetly) wiped out two million people in Cambodia and
brought millions of people to the brink of extinction from disease and
starvation. Can we pretend that China's cultural revolution didn't happen?
Or that that millions of people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were
not victims of labour camps, torture chambers, the network of spies and
informers, the secret police. The history of these regimes is just as dark
as the history of Western Imperialism, except for the fact that they had a
shorter life-span. We cannot condemn the occupation of Iraq, Palestine and
Kashmir while we remain silent about Tibet and Chechnya. I would imagine
that for the Maoists, the Naxalites as well as the mainstream Left, being
honest about the past is important to strengthen peoples' faith in the
future. One hopes the past will not be repeated, but denying that it ever
happened doesn't help inspire confidenceŠ.Nevertheless, in this part of the
world, the Maoists in Nepal have waged a brave and successful struggle
against the monarchy in Nepal. Right now in India the Maoists and the
various Marxist Leninist Groups are leading the fight against immense
injustice in India. They are fighting not just the State, but feudal
landlords and their armed militias. They are the only people who are making
a dent. And I admire that. It may well be that when they come to power they
will as you say, be brutal, unjust and autocratic, even worse than the
present government. Maybe, but I'm not prepared to assume that in advance.
If they are, we'll have to fight them too. And most likely someone like
myself will be the first person they'll string up from the nearest tree -
but right now, it is important to acknowledge that they are bearing the
brunt of being at the forefront of resistance. Many of us are in a position
where we have are beginning to align ourselves on the side of those who we
know have no place for us in their religious or ideological imagination.
It's true that everybody changes radically when they come to power - look
at Mandela's ANC. Corrupt, capitalist, bowing to the IMF, driving the poor
out of their homes - honouring Suharto the killer of hundreds of thousands
of Indonesian communists with South Africa's highest civilian award. Who
would have thought it could happen? But does this mean South Africans
should have backed away from the struggle against apartheid? Or that they
should regret it now? Does it mean Algeria should have remained a French
Colony, that Kashmiris, Iraqis and Palestinians should accept military
occupation? That people whose dignity is being assaulted should give up the
fight because they can't find saints to lead them into battle?

Is there a communication breakdown in our society?

Yes.

posted in Gandhi - 0 replies

NonViolence: The Book

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 17:39:37 GMT

Hey folks,

I just finished up reading Mark Kurlansky's book "Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea". It was an engaging look at nonviolence through history and had a pretty interesting take on so called "good" wars (i'd imagine Kurlansky's view on the revolutionary war and WW2 would ruffle a few feathers if it gets more attention). The book was enlightening and also approached nonviolence from a pragmatic point of view, demonstrating how and when it's been successful and (unfortunately more frequently) where violence has not worked. I definitely recommend it, it was a quick and interesting read.

Pick it up or get it from a library!

posted in Gandhi - 2 replies

practicing nonviolence

pedroveracio — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 05:48:15 GMT

I haven't smacked anyone in weeks and I feel great!

posted in Gandhi - 2 replies

Anyone seen the film "Water"?

compassionnow — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 20:05:49 GMT

Ok, speaking of Gandhi, anyone seen the film Water?

If you haven't, I don't want to give anything away, but lets just say, Gandhi plays a subtle background role in some parts through one of the characters, and, well, I don't want to give any more away for those who haven't seen it except say that I cried really hard --- anyone seen it??

posted in Gandhi - 0 replies

SelfAwareness*~--ThinkingRevolution--;;Listening;;

stevencoolcat — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 01:05:26 GMT

http://sitepalace.com/StevenMannettetje/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/selfawarenessthinkingrevolutionlistening-
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/realize2actualize/

posted in Gandhi - 0 replies

Cost of War

subir — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 18:15:55 GMT

http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182

Even though Congress says that the cost of the war in Iraq to date is 200 Billion, Joseph E. Stiglitz (Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001) says it cost 2000 Billion. The cost has been approximately $9310 per American.

This website keeps a running total of the cost of the War in Iraq and compares the cost of this war to the cost of:

PRE-SCHOOL
KIDS' HEALTH
PUBLIC EDUCATION
COLLEGE SCHOLARSHIPS
PUBLIC HOUSING
WORLD HUNGER
AIDS EPIDEMIC
WORLD IMMUNIZATION

posted in Gandhi - 4 replies

...or was he just trying to get in their pants???

subir — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 18:48:59 GMT

WOMEN

Woman is more fitted than man to make exploration and take bolder action in nonviolence.

There is no occasion for women to consider themselves subordinate or inferior to man.

Woman is the companion of man, gifted with equal mental capacity.

If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man's superior.

If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with women.

Woman, I hold, is the personification of self-sacrifice, but unfortunately today she does not realize what tremendous advantage she has over man.

posted in Gandhi - 12 replies

Gandhi's Economics

kanch_bud — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 01:20:50 GMT

I want to educate myself about Gandhi's economics. Can anyone help with links, assessments, distinctions?

Does it work? Is it working? How has it been implemented?
What are the downsides and benefits of it?
How might it apply to non-Indian contexts and economies?

Rgds and Thanks,

Paul Bard

posted in Gandhi - 0 replies

Merry Christmas!

subir — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 01:14:03 GMT

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. -- Albert Einstein

posted in Gandhi - 0 replies

Gandhi's Birthday

pedroveracio — Sat, 02 Oct 2004 21:09:37 GMT

It's kind of an empty thing, creating a tribe dedicated to Gandhi on his birthday. But hopefully it just being here will act as just one more reminder in our lives that the seemingly impossible can be attained. That the good fight matters. That when the cause is just, people can come out of the woodwork and make things truly happen.

Anyone coming across this, I recommend seeing www.humantranslation.org

The first fundraiser is tonight, but this will be an ongoing thing.

Hopefully, in some small way, even this little forum can do something, no matter how small. To paraphrase Gandhi, It's not what we achieve, it's how we behave that truly matters.

It's your life to live. Hopefully I'll see you at the door =)

posted in Gandhi - 8 replies

Burma, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi

pedroveracio — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 19:41:19 GMT

eh I'm like, TOTALLY TIRED of GANDHI
he's OLD NEWS

okie. got something current. B-U-R-M-A

negotiated independence from the British in the late 40's
now, complete totalitarian regime.
nonviolent protests in 1988 resulted in the military killing 3,000 in the crowd. two years later they held elections and Aung San Suu Kyi was elected to the post of Prime Minister. (she's a self-described disciple of Gandhi btw)

The military simply put her under house arrest and moved on.

u2's song "walk on"

they call George Orwell "The Prophet" there.
because, say the wrong thing, you end up in jail.
tortured.
that and the permanent war thing. and spies being everywhere.

so...
anyway-
here's what I've been reading. go to da library- save money

"Finding Orwell In Burma" --Emma Larkin.
scary solid book. highly recommend.

"Letters from Burma"
Aung San Suu Kyi

"The Trouser People"
eh- not sure if I recommend it. Guy writer. not as empathic as the others. But great descriptions of the child soldiers fighting in the jungles in the resistance

"The Lady"
Barbara Victor

Journalist- top notch. She talks about walking down the street and she hears someone cry out to her, "Tell the world about us! Save us!"
she turns
and no one meets her eye.

posted in Gandhi - 0 replies

Suggested Book?

JanetTheGreat — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 17:37:51 GMT

Hey-- I'm new to this tribe.
I saw a book at my yoga studio on the life of Gandhi.
Before I buy it I want to know if you would recommend one particular book over others. Thanks!

posted in Gandhi - 2 replies

Pai

subir — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 16:00:48 GMT

To all my friends.

Pai as we now it is gone.
Town is now deserted because of the amount of mud and the sudden lack of guesthouses and bars still standing.
What happened???
We don't know for sure, but we have had the worst flooding in 30 years... Rumours about broken dams.
Mudslides from the mountain came down by the wednesdaymarket, destroying everything in its way. The house that John and Dan shared with Jae was hit and filled with mud. They are all ok, but has lost everything.
The wednesdaymarket is trashed, houses missing and broken road.
Unfortunatley the mud then swept over Lucky Blaskows. I have lost my bar.
At the same time as this happened, our own river took on desastrous proportions and washed away everything on the other side of the river; Drifters, Goodview, Familyhut and our beloved Riverview, flooding Mellow Yellow, Goodlife and everything on their street.
Ps Bungalows lost 22 out of 30 huts and every record about guests was washed away in the stream.

My house survived only because of the hill it is built on. Some of my neighbours wewe not as fortunate.
Opened my window saturday morning and saw a river stretching from hill to hill. The ones of you who have been to my house know that that's not right. Where did my beautiful ricepaddys go???
Started digging out places last sunday. 20 people digging out three feet of mud from Shisha, and we have been at it ever since.
Feel so tired.
Also feel proud though. Have organised a large team that goes from one place to the next.
Yesterday I found a small familyhouse in Nam Ho. The familys in the villages do not get any help from the military, so we started digging.
Managed to go back today with my entire crew, and what would have been an impossible job for them was done in five hours.

The newspaper only wrights what the goverment allows them to wright. according to them only 13 deaths and a few cases of missing people has been reported in the hole north(Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai, Mae Hong Son, Soppong, Pai and every village inbetween), but there is no way that that can be true. No way. We are talking hundreds...

Sorry if this email seems a bit scatty, but I feel so tired. Info can be found on Google/Pai Thailand, or from me on number +6671924680

Please call us, we are all ok, but we need some support!

Lots of love

Elin, John and Dan

posted in Gandhi - 1 reply

Thought for the day !

Sat, 06 Aug 2005 12:03:46 GMT

Ghandi ji said " I may be dispicable, but when truth speaks thru me I am invincible"

Not a bad thought to consider eh what? And if there is misspelling just put it down to my indescribable ignorance!

posted in Gandhi - 1 reply

BUT.....

nandaG — Fri, 13 May 2005 05:24:55 GMT

Could you folks finish this line for me.

I am on the Gandhi tribe but......

posted in Gandhi - 8 replies

summer reading? how are ya? who are ya?

pedroveracio — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 19:39:13 GMT

essentially I'm wondering who all of you folks are and if you have suggestions for general reading, books, movies, DIY or anything remotely on topic. What has inspired you? Or what's good to kick back with?

anyhow-
Pedro. part time graphic designer. prada-wearing tom waits wannabe with a tomato garden.

The Good Earth - Pearl S Buck
War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges
The Sea Wolf - Jack London
anything Solzhenitsyn

Invisible Children
Born in the Brothels (kid photographers in Calcutta)

What I WANT to read but I'm poor and waiting for it to come out into softcover-
Blink - Malcolm Gladwell
http://www.gladwell.com/

if you have time- check his articles. Online he's posted all of his New Yorker contributions. Good schtuff.

pedro

posted in Gandhi - 7 replies

Principles of Nonviolence Applied to the Struggle for Gay Rights

subir — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 04:31:24 GMT

http://www.outsmartmagazine.com/issue/i12-00/gandhi.html

posted in Gandhi - 0 replies

Tree Hugg'in Gandhi...

subir — Fri, 20 May 2005 21:31:00 GMT

Gandhi on Nature

There is an orderliness in the universe, there is an unalterable law governing everything and every being that exists or lives. It is no blind law; for no blind law can govern the conduct of living beings.

I need no inspiration other than Nature's. She has never failed me yet. She mystifies me, bewilders me, sends me into ecstasies. Besides God's handiwork, does not man's fade into insignificance?

To me art in order to be truly great must, like the beauty of Nature, be universal in its appeal. It must be simple in its presentation and direct in its expression, like the language of Nature.

Have I not gazed at the marvellous mystery of the starry vault, hardly ever tiring of the great panorama?

Birth and death are not two different states, but they are different aspects of the same state. There is as little reason to deplore the one as there is to be pleased over the other.

posted in Gandhi - 2 replies

be touched, encouraged, and inspired...

155monkeyfist — Wed, 18 May 2005 17:32:15 GMT

leap...

soar...

explore...

and dreams of unseen things...

"A Knock at the Duir..." a flash film*

http://www.duirwaighgallery.com/inspiration_duirwaighfilms.php?section=84#

enjoy~

^____________^

posted in Gandhi - 3 replies

Smile

subir — Thu, 12 May 2005 17:33:04 GMT

Cheerfulness consists principally in the attitude of the mind, and is conditioned only incidentally by outside factors. Your happiness need not die, stricken by poverty, sickness or sorrow. Realize that enough hidden strength lies within you to overcome all obstacles and temptations. Bring forth that indomitable power and energy by being cheerful at all times in spite of circumstances. Only when you lose your mental balance are you vulnerable to suffering. If you are burned by the fire of difficulties, apply the salve of cheerfulness until your inner balance and peace are restored.

Paramahansa Yogananda

(A brown dude who hung out with Gandhi)

posted in Gandhi - 4 replies

you feelin' it?

155monkeyfist — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 05:59:20 GMT

Think Globally and Act Globally
By Martin LeFevre

One of the side effects of globalization is a reaction that is really a flip side to it: localism. Many well-intentioned people, in the North and South, take an attitude of ‘local solutions to local problems.’ However the entire strategy of emphasizing local control hasn’t worked, and needs to be radically reconsidered.

I define corporate globalization as complicity between transnational companies, governments, and international banks and institutions, giving rise to the most extensive, ruthless, selfish, and self-destructive empire in history. The empire extends far beyond America, though the military might and economic engine of the “sole remaining superpower” makes this the epicenter of rapacious globalization.

This is obvious and has been known by many people for a couple of decades. At the economic and political level at least, the diagnosis for the modern version of the age-old pattern of exploitation and enslavement of powerless people (if by much subtler and sneakier means) is pretty clear. The problem arises with the prescription, which has been codified by the catchy phrase, “think globally and act locally.”

If one thinks about it, “think globally and act locally” is not just simplistic; it’s an unworkable contradiction, both psychologically and practically. Given that “as one thinks in one’s heart, so one is,” if a one truly thinks globally, then one also acts globally in one’s locality.

The idea of acting locally while thinking globally perpetuates the notion that people in developing and developed countries can ignore or sidestep globalization and focus on their own communities. Indeed, the myth of local control, which has attained the status of dogma in some quarters, actually weakens the ability of subjugated populations to understand and cope with rapacious globalization. It undermines people’s capacity to see, understand, and address the big picture. It can also reinforce provincialism, the universal human tendency to view the world in terms of ‘my people.’

Philosophically and functionally in the global village, there is no ‘them;’ there is only us. Therefore an emphasis on locality, rather than the totality of humanity, reflects and reinforces the root cause of the human crisis, which is the emotionally held orientation of ‘us vs. them.’

The Tsunami that ushered in the New Year, killing, injuring, and displacing so many people from so many countries, provides the most heart wrenching case in point. In the wealthy countries of the West, the relief effort has allowed many comfortable, self-indulgent people to expiate their guilt and convince themselves they really do care about globalization’s underclass. It’s no coincidence that the king of counterfeit caring, Bill Clinton, has been appointed the UN envoy for Tsunami reconstruction. His buddy-buddy act with Bush the First while touring Tsunami sites attests to the non-choice that the Democratic and Republican parties of the Empire present for the America people, as well as the desperate straits of our image abroad.

In the “global South” (itself an unhelpful dichotomy in a global society), where millions of people live in extreme poverty, local efforts to aid Tsunami victims have produced an understandable resentment. For example, a widely held sentiment in sub-Saharan Africa is that it’s like “feeding your neighbor’s children while your own are starving.”

The point is well taken, but it reflects a reaction of localism. Children belong to humanity, not to their parents or a particular people, so every well fed adult who self-centeredly accepts the status quo is actually feeding their own children while allowing their neighbor’s children to starve.

The great divide in this world is not between localities, or even geographic regions. It’s between those who don’t have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, and have the time to reflect on these things; and those who must worry about where their next meal is coming from, and don’t have the time to reflect on anything. In short, it matters much less where one lives than whether one has enough to live on, and cares about humanity.

Contrary to another cliché, charity does not begin at home; it begins with the love of humanity. Identifying with a particular people and “acting locally” made sense when people lived in distinct cultures, separated by geographic barriers. The barriers no longer exist, except in people’s heads and hearts.

When enough people begin to feel globally and act globally, both in the intercontinental village and in their own localities (which are increasingly the same thing), then starvation, neglect, and war will finally become things of humankind’s sorrowful past

posted in Gandhi - 26 replies

Intro

nandaG — Sun, 08 May 2005 17:43:34 GMT

a few words from LA.
I moved to Los angeles about 6 months ago to work as a Landscape Architect. Firstly I searched for an apt within a 5 mile radius, so that I would'nt have to buy a car. I get around on my bike(and bus). Secondly, I buy things when I really need them, not when I think I may need them sometime in the future

although I must admit I dont hold back on expenses for 'experiences'!!!!
experiences as in 'not objects'.

I read 'my experiments with truth' bout 10 yrs ago. changed my prespective of life!!! after reading the book I relalized the aptness of Einstein's statement -'generations to come...'

glad to be here
Nanda
BTW, it is not easy to swim against the tide!!!! hope I don't cave in.

posted in Gandhi - 5 replies

Marla Ruzicka -Angel of divine compassion ..

caverly — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 05:38:03 GMT

{Eulogy for Marla who cared for civilain casulties in Iraq and was a loving miracle for them, by Kevin Danner ,}

"The magic of Marla's life was she knew what unconditional love was. She did not have prejudice about love. She did not love because of peoples physical package, or their language, their culture, their customs, their behavior, she loved everyone. She understood what BIG LOVE is, real love, spiritual love that the great teachers like Christ, like Mahatma Ghandi, like Martin Luther King tried so hard and sacrificed their lives to teach us.". . .

Marla had no "them", it was all about "us" -- that was the magic
of her love. "She understood that God is not a noun, it's a verb. She didn't talk a lot about it; she didn't have a lot of religious rhetoric, she acted it - "By their deeds ye shall know them", and by her deeds she changed the course of history. "

my spirit has been deeply touched learning of Marla's loving presence {and playful, partying, connecting; on-the-path always}.
if you would like to be inspired by knowing her better i refer you to two tribes that have experiences of Marla's kind Miracles :
http://marlaRuzicka.tribe.net http://friendsworld.tribe.net

posted in Gandhi - 0 replies

Marla Ruzicka - a 'Gandhi ' spirit of today .. {A Tribe forum}

caverly — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 07:53:54 GMT

friends , we are deeply touched by our awarenesses of Gandhi's spirit. i am deeply inspired by Marla's compassionate spirit
and love {the young woman in Iraq who championed the well-being of civilian war casulties}.
if you would like to be more aware of her , please visit
marlaRuzicka.tribe.net , and share your response , if you please.
namaste.

posted in Gandhi - 0 replies

Nonviolence.

Fri, 22 Oct 2004 11:44:59 GMT

Hey Gandhi Tribe members!

I am struggling with the question of violence versus nonviolence and I have some questions.
Is there no situation in which violence is justifiable?

What if someone is trying to kill you and you can't run? Should you defend yourself?

And, if you were part of the U.S. government at the time of World War II, what would you have done about the concentration camps?

Thanks.

posted in Gandhi - 23 replies

Can ordinary Joe/Jane be Gandhi?

subir — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 17:05:35 GMT

Destiny, Awoken or happened to be at the wrong (right?) place at the wrong (right?) time?

Can average Joe/Jane be Gandhi?

If so, how and what be the required ingredients for the primordial bath of such an enlightenment (if it is indeed that)? Or…would anybody really want such a role?

Let's open up the can of worms.

Peace.

posted in Gandhi - 21 replies

Quote

subir — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 22:19:10 GMT

"There is no way to Peace, Peace is the way"

-Gandhi-

posted in Gandhi - 18 replies

why i believe in God

155monkeyfist — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 18:32:06 GMT

get comfy and a bottle of your fav beverage for this reading isnt for the faint of hearts... enjoy my brothas and sistas*

Why I Believe in God
By Cornelius Van Til

You have noticed, haven't you, that in recent times certain scientists like Dr. James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington, as well as some outstanding philosophers like Dr. C.E.M. Joad, have had a good deal to say about religion and God? Scientists Jeans and Eddington are ready to admit that there may be something to the claims of men who say they have had an experience of God, while Philosopher Joad says that the "obtrusiveness of evil" has virtually compelled him to look into the argument for God's existence afresh. Much like modernist theologian Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr who talks about original sin, Philosopher Joad speaks about evil as being ineradicable from the human mind.

Then, too, you have on occasion asked yourself whether death ends all. You have recalled, perhaps, how Socrates the great Greek philosopher, struggled with that problem the day before he drank the hemlock cup. Is there anything at all, you ask yourself, to the idea of a judgment after death? Am I quite sure, you say, that there is not? How do I know that there is no God?

In short, as a person of intelligence, having a sense of responsibility, you have from time to time asked yourself some questions about the foundation of your thought and action. You have looked into, or at least been concerned about, what the philosophers call your theory of reality. So when I suggest that you spend a Sunday afternoon with me discussing my reasons for believing in God, I have the feeling that you are basically interested in what I am proposing for discussion.

To make our conversation more interesting, let's start by comparing notes on our past. That will fit in well with our plan, for the debate concerning heredity and environment is prominent in our day. Perhaps you think that the only real reason I have for believing in God is the fact that I was taught to do so in my early days. Of course I don't think that is really so. I don't deny that I was taught to believe in God when I was a child, but I do affirm that since I have grown up I have heard a pretty full statement of the argument against belief in God. And it is after having heard that argument that I am more than ever ready to believe in God. Now, in fact, I feel that the whole of history and civilization would be unintelligible to me if it were not for my belief in God. So true is this, that I propose to argue that unless God is back of everything, you cannot find meaning in anything. I cannot even argue for belief in Him, without already having taken Him for granted. And similarly I contend that you cannot argue against belief in Him unless you also first take Him for granted. Arguing about God's existence, I hold, is like arguing about air. You may affirm that air exists, and I that it does not. But as we debate the point, we are both breathing air all the time. Or to use another illustration, God is like the emplacement on which must stand the very guns that are supposed to shoot Him out of existence. However if, after hearing my story briefly, you still think it is all a matter of heredity and environment, I shall not disagree too violently. My whole point will be that there is perfect harmony between my belief as a child and my belief as a man, simply because God is Himself the environment by which my early life was directed and my later life made intelligible to myself.

The Accident of Birth

We are frequently told that much in our life depends on "the accident of birth". In ancient time some men were said to spring full-grown from the foreheads of the gods. That, at any rate, is not true today. Yet I understand the next best thing happened to you. You were born, I am told, in Washington, D.C., under the shadow of the White House. Well, I was born in a little thatched roof house with a cow barn attached, in Holland. You wore "silver slippers" and I wore wooden shoes.

Is this really important for our purpose? Not particularly, but it is important that neither of us was born in Guadalcanal or Timbuktu. Both of us, I mean, were born in the midst and under the influence of "Christian civilization." We shall limit our discussion, then, to the "God of Christianity." I believe, while you do not believe or are not sure that you do believe, in this particular kind of God. That will give point to our discussion. For surely there is no sense in talking about the existence of God, without knowing what kind of God it is who may or may not exist.

So much then we have gained. We at least know in general what sort of God we are going to make the subject for our conversation. If now we can come to a similar preliminary agreement as to the standard or test by which to prove or disprove God's existence, we can proceed. You, of course, do not expect me to bring God into the room here so that you may see Him. If I were able to do that, He would not be the God of Christianity. All that you expect me to do is to make it reasonable for you to believe in God. And I should like to respond quickly by saying that that is just what I am trying to do. But a moment's thought makes me hesitate. If you really do not believe in God, then you naturally do not believe that you are his creature. I, on the other hand, who do believe in God also believe, naturally, that it is reasonable for God's creature to believe in God. So I can only undertake to show that, even if it does not appear reasonable to you, it is reasonable for you, to believe in God.

I see you are getting excited. You feel a little like a man who is about to undergo a major operation. You realize that if you are to change your belief about God, you will also have to change your belief about yourself. And you are not quite ready for that. Well, you may leave if you desire. I certainly do not wish to be impolite. I only thought that as an intelligent person you would be willing to hear the "other side" of the question. And after all I am not asking you to agree with what I say. We have not really agreed on what we mean by God more than in a general and formal way. So also we need not at this point agree on the standard or test in more than a general or formal way. You might follow my argument, just for argument's sake.

Childhood

To go on, then, I can recall playing as a child in a sandbox built into a corner of the hay-barn. From the hay-barn I would go through the cow-barn to the house. Built into the hay- barn too, but with doors opening into the cow-barn, was a bed for the working-man. How badly I wanted permission to sleep in that bed for a night! Permission was finally given. Freud was still utterly unknown to me, but I had heard about ghosts and "forerunners of death." That night I heard the cows jingle their chains. I knew there were cows and that they did a lot of jingling with their chains, but after a while I was not quite certain that it was only the cows that made all the noises I heard. Wasn't there someone walking down the aisle back of the cows, and wasn't he approaching my bed? Already I had been taught to say my evening prayers. Some of the words of that prayer were to this effect: "Lord, convert me, that I may be converted." Unmindful of the paradox, I prayed that prayer that night as I had never prayed before.

I do not recall speaking either to my father or mother about my distress. They would have been unable to provide the modern remedy. Psychology did not come to their library table -- not even The Ladies Home Journal! Yet I know what they would have said. Of course there were no ghosts, and certainly I should not be afraid anyway, since with body and soul I belonged to my Savior who died for me on the Cross and rose again that His people might be saved from hell and go to heaven! I should pray earnestly and often that the Holy Spirit might give me a new heart so that I might truly love God instead of sin and myself.

How do I know that this is the sort of thing they would have told me? Well, that was the sort of thing they spoke about from time to time. Or rather, that was the sort of thing that constituted the atmosphere of our daily life. Ours was not in any sense a pietistic family. There were not any great emotional outbursts on any occasion that I recall. There was much ado about making hay in the summer and about caring for the cows and sheep in the winter, but round about it all there was a deep conditioning atmosphere. Though there were no tropical showers of revivals, the relative humidity was always very high. At every meal the whole family was present. There was a closing as well as an opening prayer, and a chapter of the Bible was read each time. The Bible was read through from Genesis to Revelation. At breakfast or at dinner, as the case might be, we would hear of the New Testament, or of "the children of Gad after their families, of Zephon and Haggi and Shuni and Ozni, of Eri and Areli." I do not claim that I always fully understood the meaning of it all. Yet of the total effect there can be no doubt. The Bible became for me, in all its parts, in every syllable, the very Word of God. I learned that I must believe the Scripture story, and that "faith" was a gift of God. What had happened in the past, and particularly what had happened in the past in Palestine, was of the greatest moment to me. In short, I was brought up in what Dr. Joad would call "topographical and temporal parochialism." I was "conditioned" in the most thorough fashion. I could not help believing in God -- in the God of Christianity -- in the God of the whole Bible!

Living next to the Library of Congress, you were not so restricted. Your parents were very much enlightened in their religious views. They read to you from some Bible of the World instead of from the Bible of Palestine. No, indeed, you correct me, they did no such thing. They did not want to trouble you about religious matters in your early days. They sought to cultivate the "open mind" in their children.

Shall we say then that in my early life I was conditioned to believe in God, while you were left free to develop your own judgment as you pleased? But that will hardly do. You know as well as I that every child is conditioned by its environment. You were as thoroughly conditioned not to believe in God as I was to believe in God. So let us not call each other names. If you want to say that belief was poured down my throat, I shall retort by saying that unbelief was poured down your throat. That will get us set for our argument.

Early Schooling

To the argument we must now shortly come. Just another word, however, about my schooling. That will bring all the factors into the picture.

I was not quite five when somebody -- fortunately I cannot recall who -- took me to school. On the first day I was vaccinated and it hurt. I can still feel it. I had already been to church. I recall that definitely because I would sometimes wear my nicely polished leather shoes. A formula was read over me at my baptism which solemnly asserted that I had been conceived and born in sin, the idea being that my parents, like all men, had inherited sin from Adam, the first man and the representative of the human race. The formula further asserted that though thus conditioned by inescapable sin I was, as a child of the Covenant, redeemed in Christ. And at the ceremony my parents solemnly promised that as soon as I should be able to understand they would instruct me in all these matters by all the means at their disposal.

It was in pursuance of this vow that they sent me to a Christian grade school. In it I learned that my being saved from sin and my belonging to God made a difference for all that I knew or did. I saw the power of God in nature and His providence in the course of history. That gave the proper setting for my salvation, which I had in Christ. In short, the whole wide world that gradually opened up for me through my schooling was regarded as operating in its every aspect under the direction of the all-powerful and all-wise God whose child I was through Christ. I was to learn to think God's thoughts after him in every field of endeavor.

Naturally there were fights on the "campus" of the school and I was engaged in some -- though not in all -- of them. Wooden shoes were wonderful weapons of war. Yet we were strictly forbidden to use them, even for defensive purposes. There were always lectures both by teachers and by parents on sin and evil in connection with our martial exploits. This was especially the case when a regiment of us went out to do battle with the pupils of the public school. The children of the public school did not like us. They had an extensive vocabulary of vituperation. Who did we think we were anyway? We were goody goodies -- too good to go to the public school! "There! take that and like it!" We replied in kind. Meanwhile our sense of distinction grew by leaps and wounds. We were told in the evening that we must learn to bear with patience the ridicule of the "world." Had not the world hated the church, since Cain's time?

How different your early schooling was! You went to a "neutral" school. As your parents had done at home, so your teachers now did at school. They taught you to be "open-minded." God was not brought into connection with your study of nature or history. You were trained without bias all along the line.

Of course, you know better now. You realize that all that was purely imaginary. To be "without bias" is only to have a particular kind of bias. The idea of "neutrality" is simply a colorless suit that covers a negative attitude toward God. At least it ought to be plain that he who is not for the God of Christianity is against Him. You see, the world belongs to Him, and that you are His creature, and as such are to own up to that fact by honoring Him whether you eat or drink or do anything else. God says that you live, as it were, on His estate. And His estate has large ownership signs placed everywhere, so that he who goes by even at seventy miles an hour cannot but read them. Every fact in this world, the God of the Bible claims, has His stamp indelibly engraved upon it. How then could you be neutral with respect to such a God? Do you walk about leisurely on a Fourth of July in Washington wondering whether the Lincoln Memorial belongs to anyone? Do you look at "Old Glory" waving from a high flagpole and wonder whether she stands for anything? Does she require anything of you, born an American citizen as you are? You would deserve to suffer the fate of the "man without a country" if as an American you were neutral to America. Well, in a much deeper sense you deserve to live forever without God if you do not own and glorify Him as your Creator. You dare not manipulate God's world and least of all yourself as His image-bearer, for you own final purposes. When Eve became neutral as between God and the Devil, weighing the contentions of each as though they were inherently on the face of them of equal value, she was in reality already on the side of the devil!

There you go again getting excited once more. Sit down and calm yourself. You are open-minded and neutral are you not? And you have learned to think that any hypothesis has, as a theory of life, an equal right to be heard with any other, have you not? After all I am only asking you to see what is involved in the Christian conception of God. If the God of Christianity exists, the evidence for His existence is abundant and plain so that it is both unscientific and sinful not to believe in Him. When Dr. Joad, for example says: "The evidence for God is far from plain," on the ground that if it were plain everybody would believe in Him, he is begging the question. If the God of Christianity does exist, the evidence for Him must be plain. And the reason, therefore, why "everybody" does not believe in Him must be that "everybody" is blinded by sin. Everybody wears colored glasses. You have heard the story of the valley of the blind. A young man who was out hunting fell over a precipice into the valley of the blind. There was no escape. The blind men did not understand him when he spoke of seeing the sun and the colors of the rainbow, but a fine young lady did understand him when he spoke the language of love. The father of the girl would not consent to the marriage of his daughter to a lunatic who spoke so often of things that did not exist. But the great psychologists of the blind men's university offered to cure him of his lunacy by sewing up his eyelids. Then, they assured him, he would be normal like "everybody" else. But the simple seer went on protesting that he did see the sun.

So, as we have our tea, I propose not only to operate on your heart so as to change your will, but also on your eyes so as to change your outlook. But wait a minute. No, I do not propose to operate at all. I myself cannot do anything of the sort. I am just mildly suggesting that you are perhaps dead, and perhaps blind, leaving you to think the matter over for yourself. If an operation is to be performed it must be performed by God Himself.

Later Schooling

Meanwhile let us finish our story. At ten I came to this country and after some years decided to study for the ministry. This involved preliminary training at a Christian preparatory school and college. All my teachers were pledged to teach their subjects from the Christian point of view. Imagine teaching not only religion but algebra from the Christian point of view! But it was done. We were told that all facts in all their relations, numerical as well as others, are what they are because of God's all comprehensive plan with respect to them. Thus the very definitions of things would not merely be incomplete but basically wrong if God were left out of the picture. Were we not informed about the views of others? Did we not hear about evolution and about Immanuel Kant, the great modern philosopher who had conclusively shown that all the arguments for the existence of God were invalid? Oh, yes, we heard about all these things, but there were refutations given and these refutations seemed adequate to meet the case.

In the Seminaries I attended, namely Calvin, and Princeton before its reorganization along semi-modernist lines in 1929, the situation was much the same. So for instance Dr. Robert Dick Wilson used to tell us, and, as far as we could understand the languages, show us from the documents, that the "higher critics" had done nothing that should rightfully damage our child-like faith in the Old Testament as the Word of God. Similarly Dr. J. Gresham Machen and others made good their claim that New Testament Christianity is intellectually defensible and that the Bible is right in its claims. You may judge of their arguments by reading them for yourself. In short, I heard the story of historic Christianity and the doctrine of God on which it is built over and over from every angle by those who believed it and were best able to interpret its meaning.

The telling of this story has helped, I trust, to make the basic question simple and plain. You know pretty clearly now what sort of God it is of which I am speaking to you. If my God exists it was He who was back of my parents and teachers. It was He who conditioned all that conditioned me in my early life. But then it was He also who conditioned everything that conditioned you in your early life. God, the God of Christianity, is the All-Conditioner!

As the All-Conditioner, God is the All-Conscious One. A God Who is to control all things must control them "by the counsel of His will." If He did not do this, He would himself be conditioned. So then I hold that my belief in Him and your disbelief in Him are alike meaningless except for Him.

Objections Raised

By this time you are probably wondering whether I have really ever heard the objections which are raised against belief in such a God. Well, I think I have. I heard them from my teachers who sought to answer them. I also heard them from teachers who believed they could not be answered. While a student at Princeton Seminary I attended summer courses in the Chicago Divinity School. Naturally I heard the modern or liberal view of Scripture set forth fully there. And after graduation from the Seminary I spent two years at Princeton University for graduate work in philosophy. There the theories of modern philosophy were both expounded and defended by very able men. In short I was presented with as full a statement of the reasons for disbelief as I had been with the reasons for belief. I heard both sides fully from those who believed what they taught.

You have compelled me to say this by the look on your face. Your very gestures suggest that you cannot understand how any one acquainted with the facts and arguments presented by modern science and philosophy can believe in a God who really created the world, who really directs all things in the world by a plan to the ends He has in view for them. Well, I am only one of many who hold to the old faith in full view of what is said by modern science, modern philosophy, and modern Biblical criticism.

Obviously I cannot enter into a discussion of all the facts and all the reasons urged against belief in God. There are those who have made the Old Testament, as there are those who have made the New Testament, their life-long study. It is their works you must read for a detailed refutation of points of Biblical criticism. Others have specialized in physics and biology. To them I must refer you for a discussion of the many points connected with such matters as evolution. But there is something that underlies all these discussions. And it is with that something that I now wish to deal.

You may think I have exposed myself terribly. Instead of talking about God as something vague and indefinite, after the fashion of the modernist, the Barthians, and the mystic, a god so empty of content and remote from experience as to make no demands upon men, I have loaded down the idea of God with "antiquated" science and "contradictory" logic. It seems as though I have heaped insult upon injury by presenting the most objectionable sort of God I could find. It ought to be very easy for you to prick my bubble. I see you are ready to read over my head bushels of facts taken from the standard college texts on physics, biology, anthropology, and psychology, or to crush me with your sixty-ton tanks taken from Kant's famous book, The Critique of Pure Reason. But I have been under these hot showers now a good many times. Before you take the trouble to open the faucet again there is a preliminary point I want to bring up. I have already referred to it when we were discussing the matter of test or standard.

The point is this. Not believing in God, we have seen , you do not think yourself to be God's creature. And not believing in God you do not think the universe has been created by God. That is to say, you think of yourself and the world as just being there. Now if you actually are God's creature, then your present attitude is very unfair to Him. In that case it is even an insult to Him. And having insulted God, His displeasure rests upon you. God and you are not on "speaking terms." And you have very good reasons for trying to prove that He does not exist. If He does exist, He will punish you for your disregard of Him. You are therefore wearing colored glasses. And this determines everything you say about the facts and reasons for not believing in Him. You have had your picnics and hunting parties there without asking His permission. You have taken the grapes of God's vineyard without paying Him any rent and you have insulted His representatives who asked you for it.

I must make an apology to you at this point. We who believe in God have not always made this position plain. Often enough we have talked with you about facts and sound reasons as though we agreed with you on what these really are. In our arguments for the existence of God we have frequently assumed that you and we together have an area of knowledge on which we agree. But we really do not grant that you see any fact in any dimension of life truly. We really think you have colored glasses on your nose when you talk about chickens and cows, as well as when you talk about the life hereafter. We should have told you this more plainly than we did. But we were really a little ashamed of what would appear to you as a very odd or extreme position. We were so anxious not to offend you that we offended our own God. But we dare no longer present our God to you as smaller or less exacting than He really is. He wants to be presented as the All-Conditioner, as the emplacement on which even those who deny Him must stand.

Now in presenting all your facts and reasons to me, you have assumed that such a God does not exist. You have taken for granted that you need no emplacement of any sort outside of yourself. You have assumed the autonomy of your own experience. Consequently you are unable -- that is, unwilling -- to accept as a fact any fact that would challenge your self-sufficiency. And you are bound to call that contradictory which does not fit into the reach of your intellectual powers. You remember what old Procrustes did. If his visitors were too long, he cut off a few slices at each end; if they were too short, he used the curtain stretcher on them. It is that sort of thing I feel that you have done with every fact of human experience. And I am asking you to be critical of this your own most basic assumption. Will you not go into the basement of your own experience to see what has been gathering there while you were busy here and there with the surface inspection of life? You may be greatly surprised at what you find there.

To make my meaning clearer, I shall illustrate what I have said by pointing out how modern philosophers and scientists handle the facts and doctrines of Christianity.

Basic to all the facts and doctrines of Christianity and therefore involved in the belief in God, is the creation doctrine. Now modern philosophers and scientists as a whole claim that to hold such a doctrine or to believe in such a fact is to deny our own experience. They mean this not merely in the sense that no one was there to see it done, but in the more basic sense that it is logically impossible. They assert that it would break the fundamental laws of logic.

The current argument against the creation doctrine derives from Kant. It may fitly be expressed in the words of a more recent philosopher, James Ward: "If we attempt to conceive of God apart from the world, there is nothing to lead us on to creation" (Realm of Ends , p. 397). That is to say, if God is to be connected to the universe at all, he must be subject to its conditions. Here is the old creation doctrine. It says that God has caused the world to come into existence. But what do we mean by the word "cause"? In our experience, it is that which is logically correlative to the word "effect". If you have an effect you must have a cause and if you have a cause you must have an effect. If God caused the world, it must therefore have been because God couldn't help producing an effect. And so the effect may really be said to be the cause of the cause. Our experience can therefore allow for no God other than one that is dependent upon the world as much as the world is dependent upon Him.

The God of Christianity cannot meet these requirements of the autonomous man. He claims to be all-sufficient. He claims to have created the world, not from necessity but from His free will. He claims not to have changed in Himself when He created the world. His existence must therefore be said to be impossible and the creation doctrine must be said to be an absurdity.

The doctrine of providence is also said to be at variance with experience. This is but natural. One who rejects creation must logically also reject providence. If all things are controlled by God's providence, we are told, there can be nothing new and history is but a puppet dance.

You see then that I might present to you great numbers of facts to prove the existence of God. I might say that every effect needs a cause. I might point to the wonderful structure of the eye as evidence of God's purpose in nature. I might call in the story of mankind through the past to show that it has been directed and controlled by God. All these evidences would leave you unaffected. You would simply say that however else we may explain reality, we cannot bring in God. Cause and purpose, you keep repeating, are words that we human beings use with respect to things around us because they seem to act as we ourselves act, but that is as far as we can go.

And when the evidence for Christianity proper is presented to you the procedure is the same. If I point out to you that the prophecies of Scripture have been fulfilled, you will simply reply that it quite naturally appears that way to me and to others, but that in reality it is not possible for any mind to predict the future from the past. If it were, all would again be fixed and history would be without newness and freedom.

Then if I point to the many miracles, the story is once more the same. To illustrate this point I quote from the late Dr. William Adams Brown, an outstanding modernist theologian. "Take any of the miracles of the past," says Brown, "The virgin birth, the raising of Lazarus, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Suppose that you can prove that these events happened just as they are claimed to have happened. What have you accomplished? You have shown that our previous view of the limits of the possible needs to be enlarged; that our former generalizations were too narrow and need revision; that problems cluster about the origin of life and its renewal of which we had hitherto been unaware. But the one thing which you have not shown, which indeed you cannot show, is that a miracle has happened; for that is to confess that these problems are inherently insoluble, which cannot be determined until all possible tests have been made" (God at Work, New York, 1933, p. 169). You see with what confidence Brown uses this weapon of logical impossibility against the idea of a miracle. Many of the older critics of Scripture challenged the evidence for miracle at this point or at that. They made as it were a slow, piece-meal land invasion of the island of Christianity. Brown, on the other hand, settles the matter at once by a host of stukas from the sky. Any pill boxes that he cannot destroy immediately, he will mop up later. He wants to get rapid control of the whole field first. And this he does by directly applying the law of non-contradiction. Only that is possible, says Brown, in effect, which I can show to be logically related according to my laws of logic. So then if miracles want to have scientific standing, that is be recognized as genuine facts, they must sue for admittance at the port of entry to the mainland of scientific endeavor. And admission will be given as soon as they submit to the little process of generalization which deprives them of their uniqueness. Miracles must take out naturalization papers if they wish to vote in the republic of science and have any influence there.

Take now the four points I have mentioned -- creation, providence, prophecy, and miracle. Together they represent the whole of Christian theism. Together they include what is involved in the idea of God and what He has done round about and for us. Many times over and in many ways the evidence for all these has been presented. But you have an always available and effective answer at hand. It is impossible! It is impossible! You act like a postmaster who has received a great many letters addressed in foreign languages. He says he will deliver them as soon as they are addressed in the King's English by the people who sent them. Till then they must wait in the dead letter department. Basic to all the objections the average philosopher and scientist raises against the evidence for the existence of God is the assertion or the assumption that to accept such evidence would be to break the rules of logic.

I see you are yawning. Let us stop to eat supper now. For there is one more point in this connection that I must make. You have no doubt at some time in your life been to a dentist. A dentist drills a little deeper and then a little deeper and at last comes to the nerve of the matter.

Now before I drill into the nerve of the matter, I must again make apologies. The fact that so many people are placed before a full exposition of the evidence for God's existence and yet do not believe in Him has greatly discouraged us. We have therefore adopted measures of despair. Anxious to win your good will, we have again compromised our God. Noting the fact that men do not see, we have conceded that what they ought to see is hard to see. In our great concern to win men we have allowed that the evidence for God's existence is only probably compelling. And from that fatal confession we have gone one step further down to the point where we have admitted or virtually admitted that it is not really compelling at all. And so we fall back upon testimony instead of argument. After all, we say, God is not found at the end of an argument; He is found in our hearts. So we simply testify to men that once we were dead, and now we are alive, that once we were blind and that now we see, and give up all intellectual argument.

Do you suppose that our God approves of this attitude of His followers? I do not think so. The God who claims to have made all facts and to have placed His stamp upon them will not grant that there is really some excuse for those who refuse to see. Besides, such a procedure is self-defeating. If someone in your home town of Washington denied that there was any such thing as a United States Government would you take him some distance down the Potomac and testify to him that there is? So your experience and testimony of regeneration would be meaningless except for the objective truth of the objective facts that are presupposed by it. A testimony that is not an argument is not a testimony either, just as an argument that is not a testimony is not even an argument.

Waiving all this for the moment, let us see what the modern psychologist of religion, who stands on the same foundation with the philosopher, will do to our testimony. He makes a distinction between the raw datum and its cause, giving me the raw datum and keeping for himself the explanation of the cause. Professor James H. Leuba, a great psychologist of Bryn Mawr, has a procedure that is typical. He says, "The reality of any given datum -- of an immediate experience in the sense in which the term is used here, may not be impugned: When I feel cold or warm, sad or gay, discouraged or confident, I am cold, sad, discouraged, etc., and every argument which might be advanced to prove to me that I am not cold is, in the nature of the case, preposterous; an immediate experience may not be controverted; it cannot be wrong." All this seems on the surface to be very encouraging. The immigrant is hopeful of a ready and speedy admittance. However, Ellis Island must still be passed. "But if the raw data of experience are not subject to criticism, the causes ascribed to them are. If I say that my feeling of cold is due to an open window, or my state of exultation to a drug, or my renewed courage to God, my affirmation goes beyond my immediate experience; I have ascribed a cause to it, and that cause may be the right or the wrong one." (God or Man, New York, 1933, p. 243.) And thus the immigrant must wait at Ellis Island a million years. That is to say, I as a believer in God through Christ, assert that I am born again through the Holy Spirit. The Psychologist says that is a raw datum of experience and as such incontrovertible. We do not, he says, deny it. But it means nothing to us. If you want it to mean something to us you must ascribe a cause to your experience. We shall then examine the cause. Was your experience caused by opium or God? You say by God. Well, that is impossible since as philosophers we have shown that it is logically contradictory to believe in God. You may come back at any time when you have changed your mind about the cause of your regeneration. We shall be glad to have you and welcome you as a citizen of our realm, if only you take out your naturalization papers!

We seem now to have come to a pretty pass. We agreed at the outset to tell each other the whole truth. If I have offended you it has been because I dare not, even in the interest of winning you, offend my God. And if I have not offended you I have not spoken of my God. For what you have really done in your handling of the evidence for belief in God, is to set yourself up as God. You have made the reach of your intellect, the standard of what is possible or not possible. You have thereby virtually determined that you intend never to meet a fact that points to God. Facts, to be facts at all -- facts, that is, with decent scientific and philosophic standing -- must have your stamp instead of that of God upon them as their virtual creator.

Of course I realize full well that you do not pretend to create redwood trees and elephants. But you do virtually assert that redwood trees and elephants cannot be created by God. You have heard of the man who never wanted to see or be a purple cow. Well, you have virtually determined that you never will see or be a created fact. With Sir Arthur Eddington you say as it were, "What my net can't catch isn't fish."

Nor do I pretend, of course, that once you have been brought face to face with this condition, you can change your attitude. No more than the Ethiopian can change his skin or the leopard his spots can you change your attitude. You have cemented your colored glasses to your face so firmly that you cannot even take them off when you sleep. Freud has not even had a glimpse of the sinfulness of sin as it controls the human heart. Only the great Physician through His blood atonement on the Cross and by the gift of His Spirit can take those colored glasses off and make you see facts as they are, facts as evidence, as inherently compelling evidence, for the existence of God.

It ought to be pretty plain now what sort of God I believe in. It is God, the All-Conditioner. It is the God who created all things, Who by His providence conditioned my youth, making me believe in Him, and who in my later life by His grace still makes me want to believe in Him. It is the God who also controlled your youth and so far has apparently not given you His grace that you might believe in Him.

You may reply to this: "Then what's the use of arguing and reasoning with me?" Well, there is a great deal of use in it. You see, if you are really a creature of God, you are always accessible to Him. When Lazarus was in the tomb he was still accessible to Christ who called him back to life. It is this on which true preachers depend. The prodigal [son] thought he had clean escaped from the father's influence. In reality the father controlled the "far country" to which the prodigal had gone. So it is in reasoning. True reasoning about God is such as stands upon God as upon the emplacement that alone gives meaning to any sort of human argument. And such reasoning, we have a right to expect, will be used of God to break down the one-horse chaise of human autonomy.

But now I see you want to go home. And I do not blame you; the last bus leaves at twelve. I should like to talk again another time. I invite you to come to dinner next Sunday. But I have pricked your bubble, so perhaps you will not come back. And yet perhaps you will. That depends upon the Father's pleasure. Deep down in your heart you know very well that what I have said about you is true. You know there is no unity in your life. You want no God who by His counsel provides for the unity you need. Such a God, you say, would allow for nothing new. So you provide your own unity. But this unity must, by your own definition, not kill that which is wholly new. Therefore it must stand over against the wholly new and never touch it at all. Thus by your logic you talk about possibles and impossibles, but all this talk is in the air. By your own standards it can never have anything to do with reality. Your logic claims to deal with eternal and changeless matters; and your facts are wholly changing things; and "never the twain shall meet." So you have made nonsense of your own experience. With the prodigal you are at the swine-trough, but it may be that, unlike the prodigal, you will refuse to return to the father's house.

On the other hand by my belief in God I do have unity in my experience. Not of course the sort of unity that you want. Not a unity that is the result of my own autonomous determination of what is possible. But a unity that is higher than mine and prior to mine. On the basis of God's counsel I can look for facts and find them without destroying them in advance. On the basis of God's counsel I can be a good physicist, a good biologist, a good psychologist, or a good philosopher. In all these fields I use my powers of logical arrangement in order to see as much order in God's universe as it may be given a creature to see. The unities, or systems that I make are true because [they are] genuine pointers toward the basic or original unity that is found in the counsel of God.

Looking about me I see both order and disorder in every dimension of life. But I look at both of them in the light of the Great Orderer Who is back of them. I need not deny either of them in the interest of optimism or in the interest of pessimism. I see the strong men of biology searching diligently through hill and dale to prove that the creation doctrine is not true with respect to the human body, only to return and admit that the missing link is missing still. I see the strong men of psychology search deep and far into the sub-consciousness, child and animal consciousness, in order to prove that the creation and providence doctrines are not true with respect to the human soul, only to return and admit that the gulf between human and animal intelligence is as great as ever. I see the strong men of logic and scientific methodology search deep into the transcendental for a validity that will not be swept away by the ever-changing tide of the wholly new, only to return and say that they can find no bridge from logic to reality, or from reality to logic. And yet I find all these, though standing on their heads, reporting much that is true. I need only to turn their reports right side up, making God instead of man the center of it all, and I have a marvelous display of the facts as God has intended me to see them.

And if my unity is comprehensive enough to include the efforts of those who reject it, it is large enough even to include that which those who have been set upright by regeneration cannot see. My unity is that of a child who walks with its father through the woods. The child is not afraid because its father knows it all and is capable of handling every situation. So I readily grant that there are some "difficulties" with respect to belief in God and His revelation in nature and Scripture that I cannot solve. In fact there is mystery in every relationship with respect to every fact that faces me, for the reason that all facts have their final explanation in God Whose thoughts are higher than my thoughts, and Whose ways are higher than my ways. And it is exactly that sort of God that I need. Without such a God, without the God of the Bible, the God of authority, the God who is self-contained and therefore incomprehensible to men, there would be no reason in anything. No human being can explain in the sense of seeing through all things, but only he who believes in God has the right to hold that there is an explanation at all.

So you see when I was young I was conditioned on every side; I could not help believing in God. Now that I am older I still cannot help believing in God. I believe in God now because unless I have Him as the All-Conditioner, life is Chaos.

I shall not convert you at the end of my argument. I think the argument is sound. I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else. But since I believe in such a God, a God who has conditioned you as well as me, I know that you can to your own satisfaction, by the help of the biologists, the psychologists, the logicians, and the Bible critics reduce everything I have said this afternoon and evening to the circular meanderings of a hopeless authoritarian. Well, my meanderings have, to be sure, been circular; they have made everything turn on God. So now I shall leave you with Him, and with His mercy.

posted in Gandhi - 0 replies

anyone familiar with this?

155monkeyfist — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 20:13:42 GMT

i been reading some of the articles on this e-zine for about lil over 4 months... and i really like some of the views they stand on...

love to share it with you guys and or maybe... yall know this site already? O.o

but most importantly... hows everyone doing today? ^.^

posted in Gandhi - 5 replies

One of my favorites

waterworld — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 20:20:29 GMT

And it's posted for my children to live by:

Gandhi's Seven Deadly Sins

* Wealth without Work
* Pleasure without Conscience
* Science without Humanity
* Knowledge without Character
* Politics without Principle
* Commerce without Morality
* Worship without Sacrifice

posted in Gandhi - 2 replies

The Movie they made

glazedlife — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 22:25:35 GMT

After joining this tribe, and really not knowing anything about Ghandi... I've become fascinated by the admiration. I want to know more, but I want a quick course. So, just tell me... how accurate is the movie they made in the early 1980's about him?

posted in Gandhi - 5 replies

Brown Eyes vs. Blue Eyes

subir — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 17:34:45 GMT

It's amazing how dividing lines gradually form.

For example Muslims versus Hindus, or even for example where I grew up, where we argue about "Language". (Ironic?)

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/bill101/

posted in Gandhi - 3 replies

Empathy

subir — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 17:36:37 GMT

Hello? (Echo: Hello, hello, hello...)

Been a little dead here...so why not.

It's about children but it looks like something adults can take a few pointers on with each other. Seems to fit into Gandhi-esque ideals.

Any opinions on empathy?

Can't believe it was on MSN...

http://lifestyle.sympatico.msn.ca/Parenting/ContentPosting_CL.aspx?contentid=aecc2ad1e84d482389819a56129406b2&show=False&number=0&showbyline=True&subtitle=&detect=&abc=abc

posted in Gandhi - 0 replies

Terrific book -a spiritual bio of Gandhi

caverly — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 07:26:38 GMT

friends ~ i am new and delighted to see you expressing Gandhi's spirit here :-}
i would like to recommend a book :"Gandhi , the Man" by Eknath Easwaran . Many books have addressed Gandhi from a historical perspective so i believe this book is unique in that it is the story of his development and being as a spiritual being.
And Easwaran's roots and writing-experience are deeply spiritual
so he is able to offer a meaningful and clear portrayal of Gandhi in these terms. i was thrilled to experience Gandhi this intimate way and the photos were very moving with his spirit.
i hope this may be of loving service to you.{you can probably find used copies at Amazon Used books}.

posted in Gandhi - 2 replies

The Heart of an Assasin

subir — Sat, 23 Oct 2004 22:36:08 GMT

http://members.tripod.com/ngodse/defense.htm

posted in Gandhi - 7 replies

Tsunami Pictures

Fern — Fri, 31 Dec 2004 18:31:29 GMT

http://california.tribe.net/tribe/8c87d7d0-8a9e-44dc-ba12-4596e017727c?r=10535

posted in Gandhi - 0 replies

Tsunami HELP!

Fern — Thu, 30 Dec 2004 17:01:19 GMT

I work for a news broadcaster & I am a freelance photojournalist.
Yesterday, I was assigned to the Tsumani's hardest hit areas to take pictures and file stories of the damage and cleanup, aswell as aid operations.

After flying in lastnight we were taken to a camp to rest off the jet lag. When I woke up in the morning I saw things that news broadcasters are not allowed to air and news publishers (paper/internet) are not allowed to publish. Bodies everywhere - children, mothers, old people...children seperated from their parents...people crying over the bodies of dead relatives.

What is supposed to be the happy silly season, turned into a nightmare for many who have not only lost loved ones, but also lost everything they have. Lastnight I saw people wandering around still looking for family members or just looking for a place to sleep.

I am not anybody importent, but I humbly urge Tribe members to pledge their support. Millions is needed feed, house and clothe people from small children to women, men and old aged. There is also a huge need for medical supplies. It doesn't only include giving money but also basic food stuffs, blankets, clothing etc etc

Please contact one of the following organisations below to find out how you can help....

posted in Gandhi - 3 replies

word up

slavekitten — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 21:39:45 GMT

"Let me say at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. "
-Che

it's not ghandi, but i had to lift this from another thread cuz i liked it so much.

posted in Gandhi - 4 replies

A thingy on Patience

subir — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 21:46:09 GMT

...I have a feeling some of us are going to need it. :P

When tilling ground for the cultivation of crops one needs patience to destroy all useless weeds; and to wait, even though the ground appears barren, until the hidden good seeds sprout into plants. It requires still more patience to clear the field of consciousness that is overgrown with weeds of useless attachments to sense pleasures, which are difficult to uproot. Yet when the field of consciousness is cleared, and sown with seeds of good qualities, plants of noble activities sprout forth, yielding abundantly the fruits of real happiness. Above all, have the patience to seek communion with God through deep meditation and to become acquainted with your indestructible soul, hidden within your perishable earthly body.

-Paramahansa Yogananda-

posted in Gandhi - 3 replies

Happy Human Rights Day!

subir — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 17:42:15 GMT

Happy Human Rights Day Everyone!
May you be treated with dignity (for today anyways) and have every chance to be happy in this life.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=1&article_id=10865

http://www.ohchr.org/english/

Maybe they can extend it beyond one day? nah.

posted in Gandhi - 1 reply

20-Year Anniversary of Bhopal

subir — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 00:18:57 GMT

Gandhi rolling in his ashes?

What happened in Bhopal?

Summary

On the night of Dec. 2nd and 3rd, 1984, a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, began leaking 27 tons of the deadly gas methyl isocyanate. None of the six safety systems designed to contain such a leak were operational, allowing the gas to spread throughout the city of Bhopal.[1] Half a million people were exposed to the gas and 20,000 have died to date as a result of their exposure. More than 120,000 people still suffer from ailments caused by the accident and the subsequent pollution at the plant site. These ailments include blindness, extreme difficulty in breathing, and gynecological disorders. The site has never been properly cleaned up and it continues to poison the residents of Bhopal. In 1999, local groundwater and wellwater testing near the site of the accident revealed mercury at levels between 20,000 and 6 million times those expected. Cancer and brain-damage- and birth-defect-causing chemicals were found in the water; trichloroethene, a chemical that has been shown to impair fetal development, was found at levels 50 times higher than EPA safety limits.[2]Testing published in a 2002 report revealed poisons such as 1,3,5 trichlorobenzene, dichloromethane, chloroform, lead and mercury in the breast milk of nursing women.[3] In 2001, Michigan-based chemical corporation Dow Chemical purchased Union Carbide, thereby acquiring its assets and liabilities. However Dow Chemical has steadfastly refused to clean up the site, provide safe drinking water, compensate the victims, or disclose the composition of the gas leak, information that doctors could use to properly treat the victims.

The agony of Bhopal

On 3rd December 1984, poison gas leaked from a Union Carbide factory, killing thousands. How many thousands, no one knows. Carbide says 3,800. Municipal workers who picked up bodies with their own hands, loading them onto trucks for burial in mass graves or to be burned on mass pyres, reckon they shifted at least 15,000 bodies. Survivors, basing their estimates on the number of shrouds sold in the city, conservatively...

www.bhopal.org/whathappened.html

www.bhopal.net/index.php

posted in Gandhi - 2 replies

YOU CAN'T DO THAT ON TELEVISION!!!

subir — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 07:27:01 GMT

The first time I heard about this was on a French radio station and the word fuck was not censored. Odd that a word is considered too graphic in this context...

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/CA613824-B948-4CF8-B17E-B9E55674A925.htm

http://www.canada.com/national/story.html?id=92913763-6824-4acb-8fa4-08dd03d12c38

Just a side note; after speaking tonight with a Mom of a Vietnam veteran, I got the feeling this may be leading to something similar to what the Vietnam veterans had to face upon their return. They felt disillusionment and anger from being let down by the Conservatives and felt like they were the target of Liberal protesters. Many ended up homeless and neglected while American weapons companies made a nice a profit…from both sides.

After viewing what the US “government” is doing in Iraq (to the people who LIVE there), what would a Gandhi or MLK do?

Hunger strike? Organized marches/protests? Boycotting goods?

…or talk about it around the water cooler.

posted in Gandhi - 2 replies

Mohandas or Mahatma???

LizBeth — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 04:50:32 GMT

I've seen that Gandhi is referred to by both of those names (Mohandas or Mahatma) which one is it? Why do they call him different names?

Liz

posted in Gandhi - 8 replies

New movement to co-opt corporations for change

spidey — Sun, 14 Nov 2004 14:41:15 GMT

I have a passion for life - for my life, my kids ’lives, and all of our lives …so I have to share my passion and my vision (that follows) with you …hoping that it might lead you to more hope-filled, joyful and sustainable lives.

First, for perspective, the next paragraph is the important part of world history in a single paragraph. Then, I hope to enlist you in joining the Aikido Activism Movement, a movement that can face today ’s deepest challenges with the most empowered approach to change.

THE IMPORTANT PART OF WORLD HISTORY IN A PARAGRAPH
Humanity has passed from a first great era of primarily physically-mediated conflict to one today of primarily economically-mediated conflict (see for example, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins - http://www.tinyurl.com/4tebc or http://www.tinyurl.com/5t8j9 ) and NOW we can and must advance to an era of primarily reason-mediated conflict. In each of the earlier eras people by and large did the best they could with what they had (as they will today and in the future only now with much better tools for communication which MUST be used for increased understanding, which -- fortunately -- can naturally translate to caring). The problem of capitalism today was less a problem when it was invented as a solution to feudal imperialism (with regular physical conflict). Economic imperialism has yet further removed the suffering from view of the beneficiaries of economic imperialism; but, in order to link with economic subjects, a global network has been built that can actually be used to bring people together -- and while inter-tribal, international, and intercorporate engagements in ages of primarily physically-mediated and primarily economically-mediated conflict have a history of being quite exploitive (if not deadly), engagements in the dawning age of reason can evolve to be much more like a dance, yet still a dance of joy or survival depending on one's viewpoint. The key should be seeing the power of inclusion, which can bring joy and unity -- replacing profit maximization with fruition maximization as a necessity for sustainability/survival and joy in a globalizing era.

My passions have been channeled into writing about a systematic solution to this systemic problem of today: that corporations do both the most good and the most bad, but it is their ability to hide bad things in the complexity of corporate behavior and in the popular but treacherous myth they promulgate -- "greed is good" -- that has led to essentially all major world problems.

Efforts to overpower corporations with grass roots public fervor or death-of-their-excesses by a thousand cuts from non-profits or NGOs appear to be having little effect, so why not turn the tools of corporations (and their economic might) against their regressive practices? This is Aikido Activism, my passion that I hope will become yours in a budding movement that everyone should want to join - and that anyone and everyone with a computer and Internet access is empowered to advance by sharing parts of the puzzle (how Aikido Activism can be applied in their field and applying it), supporting other Aikido Activists, getting the word out electronically, etc.

Change is possible. Find out who some Aikido Activists are who are working for progressive transformation of outworn social traditions –and please share any comments, ideas, connections, at the new wiki-website http://aikidoactivism.xwiki.com/ where there is a growing amount of information begun to be collected and organized online to advance the Aikido Progressive Movement – to understand our past and build a promising opportunity for our future.

Spidey

posted in Gandhi - 0 replies

Nonviolence & The Culture War In America

pedroveracio — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 20:38:54 GMT

A few days ago a friend of mine in France sent an email to all of his contacts in the states. It went as follows:
"What the hell have you done?!!?"

I replied with something silly--but also a reference to the possibilities of fraud.

One of the people on the list didn't appreciate my words. He replied to me and called me everything under the sun. He questioned my patriotism, morality, manhood, sexuality, race--

I took the bait and we had some ugly, ugly exchanges. I will admit to using the words "fascist" and "brainwashed" and "bigot" --I realized it wasn't going anywhere. He was just throwing hate and venom at me and nothing I could have said would have changed his mind... and vice versa.

so it's had me thinking.

I don't think that the current rhetoric out there on the airwaves about "healing" is really going to bring this country back together. If anything, we're on a path where we're going to become more and more polarized.

The Right in this country declared cultural war on the left ten years ago. Now--I don't care what side of this issue you're on. But I can safely assume that if you're part of this tribe, somewhere in you there's a hope--an intention--a part of you that rejects violence and seeks a better path.

Right now this country is divided--violently--right now by words, policy, poverty. Gandhi wasn't just about rejecting physical violence. He also saw verbal & economic violence as something that must be fought.

But per GPB's post earlier... He also stated that sometimes people simply can't be reasoned with. And if you're being attacked--sometimes... sometimes... it's ok to defend yourself. Nonviolence is a higher road, but not always the answer.

So--
TACTICS

What should we do? Both sides. Should we even try to heal? Should we try to establish dialogue? Is this a time for our nation to heal--a chance to find common ground, respect our differences and work towards a common goal?

Or is this a time to fight? And if so... How so? And will we be better off for it?

posted in Gandhi - 8 replies

Fun Quiz!

zenzen — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 01:43:29 GMT

Which world leader are you?

http://similarminds.com/leader.html

posted in Gandhi - 16 replies

A reassuring article for those who feel alone with their vibe

subir — Sat, 09 Oct 2004 05:25:23 GMT

Credit where credit is due.
Bless you San Pedro.

: )

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2003/02/28/notes022803.DTL

posted in Gandhi - 8 replies

loved the movie

grasshopper — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 12:23:01 GMT

it made me cry.

just saw ben kingsley in "house of sand and fog"... also excellent

posted in Gandhi - 1 reply

Vanasprastha

gpb — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 03:29:24 GMT

"I was practising in Johannesburg at tye time of the Zulu "Rebellion" in Natal ... I felt that I must offer my services to the Natal Government. [T]he work set me furiously thinking in the direction of self-control ... It became my conviction that procreation and the conseequent care of children were inconsistent with public service. I had to break up my household at Johannesburg to be able to serve during the "Rebellion." ... During the difficult marches that had then to be performed, the idea flashed upon me that, if I wanted to devote myself to the service of the community ... I must relinquish the desire for children and wealth and live the life of a Vanaprastha--of one retired from household cares."

posted in Gandhi - 8 replies

piety, faith, belief

pedroveracio — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 18:54:19 GMT

Here's one of many many quotes-

"Non-violence requires a double faith, faith in God and also faith in man. "

At nearly every turn of the phrase, Gandhi cites the divine. I have a knee-jerk reaction against that. I see how piety is so easily distorted in our culture--

"It is quite proper to resist and attack a system, but to resist and attack its author is tantamount to resisting and attacking oneself, for we are all tarred with the same brush, and are children of one and the same Creator, and as such the divine powers within us are infinite. To slight a single human being, is to slight those divine powers and thus to harm not only that Being, but with Him, the whole world."

Again--I see and love the essence of what he's saying. And it provides a beautiful counterpoint to the politics of attack--

But I'm having a difficult time with all arguments that are founded on the sacred.

posted in Gandhi - 19 replies

Gandhi and Lawyering

gpb — Sun, 03 Oct 2004 23:35:57 GMT

I found this quote from him. He says it in regard to settling an important case in South Africa:

"My joy was boundless. I had learnt the true practice of law. I had learnt to find out the better side of human nature and to enter men's hearts. I realized that the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder. The lesson was so indelibly burnt into me that a large part of my time during the twenty years of my practice as a lawyer was occupied in bringing about private compromises of hundreds of cases. I lost nothing thereby--not even money, certainly not my soul."

posted in Gandhi - 3 replies