THE EXPERIMENT in AHIMSA

Prophets, Scientist, artist, many could channelize their primary and secondary rage to
creative use for themselves and others but none did at the scale and systematically as
Mahatma Gandhi. He did not leave a tome of theory but a model of experimentation
that is available to us, thus placing this dialectical drama between violence and
nonviolence beyond the realm of myth into history. The time is opportune to
understand his process before he passes on to the pantheon; he still is a man with his
fallacies and pitfalls trying to scale the raging tsunamis of emotions with his reason
and benevolence.
He knew that ‘History is a record of discord and not harmony’ and that is what he was
creating –harmony within and without. And he did not talk. He realized that
confrontation between emotional urges and will is waste of energy and the war
between conscious and unconscious can be won only by incessantly modulating the
latter to the tune of will.
He experimented at the micro but expanded to the macro, from an individual to the
cosmic. Traditional yet radical, ascetic yet worldly, political yet saintly, Gandhi
walked many such tightropes in his life simultaneously but his continuous struggle
was in the duel between violence and nonviolence, even his struggle with sexuality
was subsumed in it.

Non-violence as practiced by Gandhi is analysable as a paradigm and scientific rigor

applied to it, observable and comparable to its flipside –violence.
Whether GANDHI was different biologically? The answer is unlikely .He was a
human like us beset with lust, rage and all other potentials for secondary cognitive
emotions like love, hate, selfishness and the opposites –sacrifice, altruism, attachment
etc.
It is amply evident from his biography and we can safely assume that he had a brain
like rest of us (we missed studying the structure!!).
Whether he had an overgrown insula or mirror neuron assembly and a shrunken
amygdala will remain a conjecture. However a different approach might make us
wiser. That his life was all action is evident and is sufficiently detailed in his
biographies and 100 volumes of his writing.
He thought not only in his speech but also in his economical writing. He practiced
nonviolence and altered the basic psychological processes through ‘will’ is an easy
conclusion. He may not have described the process in the modern psychological
terms but a closer fit of his life with psychological constructs reveal that it was a
cognitive –emotional work in movement and that too in the dust and din of real life
.He went deeper than principles and explanations to hit the basic core from where the
tussle and vacillations start in human mind. He was successful in altering himself and
a vast population for a substantial period and affecting the minds that were far
removed in space-time.
This gives a huge hope to those who dream of training the mind for benefit of all.

HOW did he do it?

First and foremost, it was a conscious decision, an act of will to follow this path. The
urge may have been from the unconscious or conditioning (Gandhi had his share of
conditioning both in sense of positives and negatives) but the decision to persist
beyond an act of sporadic nonviolence and truth to seep his life into his chosen way
requires nerves of steel and a capacity to master the unconscious pressure of
conditioning. This is the same will that makes people suffer and sacrifice to attain
their goals. That Gandhi did not only for himself but also for the humanity called for a
greater suffering. It is difficult to empathize with him though he could easily do with
people but that later.
On the transformational night at Pietermaritzburg in South Africa, after being thrown
out on the platform, he had a choice to run away, suffer indignity and survive but
something changed in him almost non linearly –he chose to fight back not violently
but non-violently. Further years in SA brought lot of violence on his body and mind
but he retorted with Satyagraha and the belief in the conscience of the adversary. His
nonviolent positioning was not an altered mental state that was switched on once for
all rather a continuous striving to live in it. He was aware of the aggression within and
the potential to burst open, aware of the hatred that could have taken over in moments
of being a victim, he watched himself. This is where the human mind shines in all its
glory in GANDHI and all others who strive to overcome their weaknesses. Whether
this is a fresh adaptation to a different future is for time to tell but examining the
process is worthwhile but from what lens or no lens.

A bit of foray into neuroscience should clarify –the tentative models of brain and
behaviour recognize critical periods of brain growth directed by genetics but in
response to environmental challenges and comfort. Neural plasticity, synaptic growth
and pruning determine the connectivity patterns in brain, a drama at cellular level that
writes the story of and adult in childhood. Though plasticity is subject to modification
in adulthood yet the core remains. Behaviourally translated it may be called
conditioning of the mind. Detractors of ‘will’ may scoff and say Gandhi was
conditioned to be nonviolent but he had his share of fallacies and falls too. We all
suffer emotional tsunamis but to grow out of this panoply of emotions requires
remembering and acknowledging the impulses but also conscious intent to tame,
sublimate, channelize not in some phasic, meditative silence but in each living
moment because history is witness to many a rope walker falling to this vicious cycle
of suppression-repression and subsequent breaking of boundaries of control.
The integration of emotion with reason in a reciprocal modulatory manner is a slow
process for a long lasting change. And the brain does respond as did with Gandhi in
50 years of incessant
He turned mirror neurons to Gandhi neurons …probably a strong inhibitory cortex
controlling limbic system, which included the frame of the other in self …not
unconsciously but in full awareness.
In other words –EMPATHY…
GANDHI was known for this sense of identification he could induce in people be it
the poor of India or the clergy, each community felt that he was theirs and that too in
India but why only India the working class in Britain or the Blacks all felt the same
even the two police constables who moved with him in RTC 1931.
Even after decades peace revolutionary find him within himself. This was part natural
but part trained .His belief in ALL is One may have been derived from childhood
religious influence but Gandhi expanded his consciousness in an INCLUSIONARY
process that made him see the connections between all that exists, he strived to
develop an eye that could see each human being without differentiating .Not that it
had not been tried before but none the way Gandhi did it. His compassion was not
developed in a jungle or cave and not in academic theory but right in the grind o lie,
between people, the way Krishna taught Arjuna not in a cool chamber but in the heat
of war.
In the flow of life he demonstrated what LOVE could achieve, interchange the word
to empathy and respect if you wish so. Whether it was an act towards environment
care or his writing style or care of immediate space and people over long-term issues
or giving importance to people over the absoluteness of truth (the only
uncompromising principle was NONVIOLENCE).
He changed ‘GOD IS TRUTH’ to ‘Truth is God’ because former appeared divisive
and exclusionary. Small incidents in his life had big message-
-His allowing meat to coexist with his food in a guest’s house.
-Allowing Maulana Azad to smoke in front of him.
-his obsessions with not wasting pencils and paper or even the neem twig he used for
brushing teeth.

Compare with other self styled ascetics who are enraged if their rules and routines are
challenged GANDHI could easily accommodate without compromising himself. This
art of staying within and yet connected to outside made him malice free.
“I can have a room with windows and lot of air but refuse to be swept away by the
wind”
MALICE free he was because he had dropped out of any competition or race to
material success.in fact he abandoned the material success he had and never pined for
all that rest of us live for, not even bothering about the next meal, such was the faith.
Aparigraha (dispossession) killed the greed in him and he expanded to make the
world his family.
When you don’t need you do not steal (Asteya)
When you don’t steal you do not lie and when lie is gone truth shines and the need to
power vanishes and the deep hidden need for personal immortality does not press
anymore. One is free then to attain an impersonal immortality.
This freedom and autonomy of thought Gandhi worked for, for himself and for all,
individual and group alike, and as the divisions in mind fell arose FEARLESSNESS.
Fearlessness not to gain or destroy but to forgive, love and sacrifice the self before
others.
If all this sounds as some religious-mystical fairy-tale, wait!!
Even these processes are a product of mind and are as valid as violence and hatred.
GANDHI practiced forgiveness all through even while being hurt, physically or
verbally (on multiple occasions in South Africa where he was beaten to death, where
he walked to a potential killer to present himself, and verbally all his life by
detractors), till he bowed in the final act before being shot. His only concern was that
at the moment of being hit or shot hatred should not raise its head in his mind. That he
was free of hatred in brain is impossible with same brain dynamics. The way he
countered this strong omnipresent hatred that burns us was simple yet tough to apply-
while most want to eliminate or overpower adversary he tried to appeal to his
conscience and remove the hatred in the adversaries heart (than be it Smuts or Jinnah,
Hindu Mahasabha or Muslim league).
Satyagraha was a science of this process.
One had to risk his/her life though. This jump between clinging to life and facing
death was a step that GANDHI had taken early in life. He recognized almost in
cognitive behavioural mode that fixations and bonding to people and matter is the
source of subsequent violence. The need to live, as he told one client in SA – “why is
it so important to live that you have to commit a crime”, makes us retaliate in an
attempt to survive and that is a biological instinct. Moving against the instinct is not
only difficult but inconvenient too and that sure was Mahatma Gandhi. It requires the
most important cognitive process—
COURAGE – courage to lose the SELF. Because if self is decimated the world
becomes one and fear is gone in the larger perspective. It is when we cling we fear.
GANDHI adopted the bravest strategy possibly learned from Christ though GANDHI
almost was in battle like Prophet Mohammed did.
SERVICE – to all and especially to the poor and marginalized was a continuous
action he was involved in. The subsequent feeling is the greatest source of non
violence because once the self is surrendered voluntarily to the other’s needs and the
other is recognized as an extension of self, whom are you going to be violent against.
Being non violent, non aggressive, poor and self sacrificing, non greedy and non
coveting in all acts of life consciously, as far as is humanely possible is a suffering
that can break most of us. The impossibility of this is the risk Gandhi faces now, the
risk of being turned into a GOD.
This impossibility, inconvenience makes him appear a failure in political arena.
Because politicians and populace followed him in this swim against nature till it saved
and served them from British aggression but once that was removed the inner
suppressed violence introjected as evident in partition. The preceding 20 years were
indeed an attempt to change albeit superficially. GANDHI knew it. He within himself
struggled with the cousin of violence, sexuality till the end of his life and knew the
suffering so he kept creating situations with the potential of violence yet controlling
people and directing them to nonviolence in a greatest experiment of constructive
mass therapy. Provoked he certainly not only to strengthen the freedom movement but
also to change the British heart through demonstrating the resolve of India towards
Nonviolence.
He knew that the poor masses of India (and not the few handful British educated
population) may indulge in an impulsive violence but do not have the resources to
survive the retaliation by state. This made him take back the civil movement after
Chauri Chaura violence in 1922. He waited and trained the country through
constructive programme himself setting an example of being in jail till he provoked
again, this time to show the biggest experiment in Nonviolence successfully and
pulling out the nail from the British Empire’s wall painting. It was The Salt March .In
an innovatively designed movement with something as innocuous as salt GANDHI
not only drew the world’s attention but also left them anticipating about what model
of India would emerge after freedom. They hoped that GANDHI’s country would
give them a peaceful model we did it only partially. India had turned nonviolent for at
least two decades we still are largely Nonviolent but the legacy has grown worldwide.
But the biggest war that GANDHI fought was an Inner Jihad, that with his sexuality.
He had a married life with children but for him sex remained a guilt -ridden issue.
Probably the traumatic event of his father’s death while he was with is wife triggered
it or possibly his religious conditioning but it took him a lifetime. He became celibate
at the age of 37 but he never shied away from women, on the contrary he shared life
with women at all levels except sexually, and that too not in a hidden way but under
the eyes of scrutinizing eyes. None could find a fault or a hidden agenda. There was a
hidden agenda though.
Whether erroneously or may be physiologically correctly he linked sexuality to
violence, the very act of male sexuality is an aggression, many have believed it but
GANDHI went on to counter it.
Gandhi in a subtle process was evoking the feminine within him not only mentally but
almost entering into a women’s world. That is why women felt safe and attached to
him. He did all the daily chores allotted to women and all the kindness too that
women are capable of in care of immediate environment. His attempts at Nonviolence
no doubt stemmed from this process of which he was acutely aware. He got
conditioned from his mother and maid but the woman who taught him was his wife
Kasturba. He himself knew this. She set him an example of tolerance that Gandhi
imbibed not by sermons but both evolved in the dialectical tension they lived in till
their 50s.Ba never complained about the self controlling Gandhi losing his temper,
she remained firm, yet non aggressive .She probably knew that these micro-
experiments and Gandhi’s failure at home front are the buttress on which he would
erect the solid castle of NV, because for Gandhi even guilt was a conscious
experience.

The future of Non Violence or ‘the science and art’

Man grew to be a social animal and all his experience, emotions, thoughts and ‘self’
does not mean anything out of the context of the relation to society. The brain too
develops on stimulation from environment and people. So each self contains many
selves in deeper recesses. Each mind’s space-time is not only determined by the clock
and calendar but also his memories and maps. Even as the ambitions of computational
biologists and AI researcher move them closer to making a cyborg or machine that
resembles man, the uniqueness of experience still casts an enigma. But what are they
trying to achieve…look at it closely. They are trying to make a machine that is free of
human emotionality and its subsequent uncertainty, something that can be used for
peaceful development and existence be nonviolent essentially though a potential of
violence can be triggered due to wrong programming. It is the human mind that wants
to get rid of its weaknesses. So if a human brain can design such a machine why can’t
it train itself after all the master is the one that programs the slave.
It is a very important moment in evolution where two can exist simultaneously as in
the past Sapiens existed with Neanderthals and Habilis. Do humans wants to
annihilate themselves and leave the robots behind? But for whom, the social
implications are huge. To survive Sapiens have to survive together in a resource
dwindled earth.
The man has to work on himself and not bank on the external creation and the
opportune moment is now because globalization has broken the boundaries and we
share as never before.
Leave Gandhi behind; look at the process of integrating emotion and reducing its
destructive streak that ravages other men and environment too. The reason has to be
trained to acknowledge emotion and vice versa. Can the adult conditioned mind do
so? Yes but the real future is kids and they should be trained scientifically from early
childhood not to indoctrinate nonviolence but to be able to think critically, to be able
to focus on that millisecond gap where rage appears, to step out of their self and learn
that is derived from others.
To expand their consciousness as far as training and temperament allows to survive
and enhance together in a mutually beneficial way then when the Roboticus appears,
sapiens will be able to live in the human way.
Multiple disciplines have to come together without prejudice and examine ways to do
this, to enhance empathy. Gandhi may be one way. The desire to be an intelligent
designer shall be fulfilled by bringing in an evolutionary change in us and then we
may not require a GOD.