Gandhi His Experiments with Truth (A Sequel of an English Rendering of Bapu Katha)

Resuming further : "Life is a continuous flow" — A Poet "I am a small particle of consciousness. I die, time and again, and am reborn time and again."

Bapu— Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi— has left writing his autobiography with the Amritsar Congress (1919). !is autobiography has much less of a biography, and much more of Gandhiji's experiments with Truth. And this has been his main intention also. In the last chapter of his autobiography, Gandhiji writes:

"My experiments are extremely valuable for me. I have always tried to present the truth as I saw it and in the way I saw it.

Bapu used to believe "I don't have any experience of the existence of God, different from Truth. And to lose oneself into that Truth, Ahimsa (non-violence) is the only way. lough my Ahimsa is true, it is immature. !e complete perception of Truth is impossible without complete non-violence."

!us he has, time and again, stressed the inseparable relation of non-violence with Truth. He had made Truth, God, or liberation the sole centre of all his energies. lese three may very well be different as words, but, in his view, the significance of all these is one and the same. Bapu involved himself in politics as a spiritual practice ksadhand) to come upon Truth. In the significance of both his summum bonum' of life and the practice therefor, Gandhiji has offered a wonderful term and weapon Satyagrand. He entered the battle of Indian politics with the same goal. He says, "My worship of Truth has dragged me into politics. One who says 1`Summum bonum' is a Latin expression meaning "the highest good", that religion has nothing to do with politics, does not know what religion is, and I have no hesitation in saying so.

" Truth is one, God in one, and every living being has Its spark in him. Beings— living or material— though they may appear to be different, are related to that One Reality from inside, on account of this conscious reality. Therefore we shall have to say that we have an identity with every sentient being. Talking about it, Bapu says: "Ahimsa (non-violence) is the apex of humanity; and no liberation is possible at any rime, without this humility. This is an experiential truth. I have to traverse this difficult path. So long as man does not, voluntarily, keep himself behind all others, does not become the smallest of all, there is no liberation for him.

" Praying for this humility and with it, entreating for the prayer of the entire world, Bapu has concluded the chapters of his autobiography. In the last chapter, Bapu has talked about the reason for not being in a position to write the subsequent chapters. "My life thereafter became so public that perhaps there was hardly anything which the people did not know. And ever since 1921. I assimilated myself so much with the Congress leaders that I cannot describe a single episode, without discussing my relationship with those leaders. The history of the post-transformation of the Congress (1924, Belgaum Congress) is still in the making (All the later) experiments of mine were executed by the Congress, and so the discussion of the relationships between leaders is indispensable. As a matter of controversy, I cannot do that, at least at present. And, then, my deductions about the experiments currently going on cannot be counted for certain. So, my pen refuses to proceed further."

**Contents and Sample Pages**