Radiant Bliss
1. Recently ten of us became acquainted with Japanese-American Mayumi Oda in the Writing Our Own History class. Here autobiography had just been published, Sarasvati’s Gift. As an artist Oda had a breakthrough when she…
Tag: Mohandas Gandhi
The Urgent Necessities When You’re Stuck in One Place
I understand that I can have visitors twice a month—the second and fourth Sunday. However, I understand that everybody—white and colored—can have visitors this coming Sunday. I hope you can find some way to come…
Arise with a Brave Heart: Six Translations of the Gita, 2:3
It does not become you to yield to this weakness. Arise with a brave heart and destroy the enemy. —trans. Eknath Easwaran Don’t yield to impotence! It is unnatural in you! Banish this petty weakness…
Exchange
“But how come those Palestinians can’t be like Dr. King?” Well then… “So, Rabin, did he make it even through a third of Gandhi’s Collected Works? And did Shimon Peres invite Gene Sharp to give…
“Renounce and Enjoy”
Mohandas Gandhi used the Bhagavad Gita as his go-to source for dealing with life’s daily problems and issues. A short book of 700 verses, the Gita grounded and inspired Gandhi throughout his life. Like other …
Gita/Gandhi
Not agitated By grief nor hankering after pleasure, They livs free from lust and fear and anger. Fettered no more by selfish attachments, They are not elated by good fortune Nor depressed by bad. Such…
Long Live Gandhiji
Dear Carla, Tanya and I are working our way through Gandhi’s Essential Writings (in the Oxford World’s Classics). We read ten sections a week (there are 237 sections in the book). Here are the passages…
An American Satyagrahi
Brooke Adams sent me this message: Thought of you when I saw this cause you taught me what it meant. Mohandas Gandhi: “A satyagrahi bids good-bye to fear. She is therefore never afraid of trusting…
Dear Isabel (Letter/1)
Saturday 20 June 2015 Dear Isabel What an honor to receive your letter. It could be published AS IS on a blog. You could give it as A TED Talk. (18 minutes!)
Finkelstein’s Pessimism and Optimism
Philosopher Paul Ricoeur identified Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche as three masters of suspicion in the modern West. Over the last three decades, Norman Finkelstein has shown himself to be a contemporary maven of suspicion when…