Gandhi - the God in Action

Going over the chain of events, this is the source and starting point of all that followed, and it cannot be explained in terms of man's arithmetic. If we concede that there is a Universal Law that runs through and regulates all things, then it follows as night follows day, that thro' everything in Creation runs this living principle. Everything is interlinked with everything else as that as the poet puts it literally,

"You cannot touch a flower

Without troubling a star"

By the same token, the willing spontaneous act of compassion in respect to a helpless, little creature in one case could not be unrelated to all the various sequences that followed ...

Time and again I have pondered in retrospect on the meaning of it all. Were all these coincidences occuring in a row as naratted in the foregoing paras, the result of pure chance ? That would be against the laws of mathematical probability. If not, then is there an intelligence at work behind it ? Was it the manifestation of a universal law that runs through and regulates all things, call it by whatever name you choose ? Without some such living principle ...

"God is not a person", Gandhiji used to tell me. "He is the Law and the Lawgiver rolled into one. he reveals Himself to us through action.". Let me explain. Once during my incaceration with him in the Yeravda Central Prison at te time of the salt satyagraha, when I was shareing with him his cell. Early in the morning one day i was helping him with his morning ablutions by pouring water over his hands. he wa giving he some directions and i was intently looking at his face to carefully follow every word that dropped from his lips.

In the middle of a sentence he abrutly stopped and looked down at the washbasin before him and with a peice of waste paper rescued from drowning a tiny worm that had slipped down the steep wall of the wash basin and was making a vain attempt to wriggle upto safely beyond the rising level of water in the basin.

In his diary that day Gandhiji wrote, " I had darshan of God today.". In one of his personal letters he described the whole incident with the remark," i was speaking to Pyarelal.yarelal was looking up, not down. What made me interrupt my speech and look down at the washbasin in the nick of time to prevent that tiny worm from drowning ? " Simplifying his meaning on another occasion he wrote, "He keeps watching over us while we are asleep.. He gives us strength when all strength seems to have gone. He is that Watchfulness, that Strength."