Evil, Non-resistance to; Government, Resistance to; National characteristics, East Indian
As soon as men live entirely in accord with the law of love natural to
their hearts and now revealed to them, which excludes all resistance
by violence, and therefore hold aloof from all participation in
violence--as soon as this happens, not only will hundreds be unable to
enslave millions, but not even millions will be able to enslave a single
individual. Do not resist the evil-doer and take no part in doing so,
either in the violent deeds of the administration, in the law courts,
the collection of taxes, or above all in soldiering, and no one in the
world will be able to enslave you.
VI
_O ye who sit in bondage and continually seek and pant for freedom, seek
only for love. Love is peace in itself and peace which gives complete
satisfaction. I am the key that opens the portal to the rarely
discovered land where contentment alone is found._ KRISHNA.
What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is
like what happens to every individual when he passes from childhood to
adolescence and from youth to manhood. He loses what had hitherto guided
his life and lives without direction, not having found a new standard
suitable to his age, and so he invents all sorts of occupations, cares,
distractions, and stupefactions to divert his attention from the misery
and senselessness of his life. Such a condition may last a long time.
When an individual passes from one period of life to another a time
comes when he cannot go on in senseless activity and excitement as
before, but has to understand that although he has outgrown what before
used to direct him, this does not mean that he must live without any
reasonable guidance, but rather that he must formulate for himself an
understanding of life corresponding to his age, and having elucidated
it must be guided by it. And in the same way a similar time must come in
the growth and development of humanity. I believe that such a time has
now arrived--not in the sense that it has come in the year 1908, but
that the inherent contradiction of human life has now reached an extreme
degree of tension: on the one side there is the consciousness of the
beneficence of the law of love, and on the other the existing order of
life which has for centuries occasioned an empty, anxious, restless, and
troubled mode of life, conflicting as it does with the law of love and
built on the use of violence. This contradiction must be faced, and
the solution will evidently not be favourable to the outlived law of
violence, but to the truth which has dwelt in the hearts of men from
remote antiquity: the truth that the law of love is in accord with the
nature of man.
But men can only recognize this truth to its full extent when they
have completely freed themselves from all religious and scientific
superstitions and from all the consequent misrepresentations and
sophistical distortions by which its recognition has been hindered for
centuries.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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