Me: Now, you were also against untouchability. Was there some point in your life that influenced your desire to champion the cause of decency, equality and respect for all human beings?
Gandhi: At what point in my life was it not there? Maybe as a child. But I was never attracted to this kind of lifestyle. It is no one’s right to push power on any other human being.
Me: Okay. Now looking back on your long fasts, do you still think they hold value, and if so, why? I think you already gave us to answer to that.
Gandhi: Yes, they hold great value. I do not clearly understand how the modern day person is so unwilling to accept this kind of study of oneself to always be inundated with the environment’s pollution. There are many sayings that suggest the same thing—that you do not know or understand what you possess until it is gone. Why is it, then, that each individual must go through fasting or to live without so they will understand what they were living with? It is very important.
Me: Okay. Now, you were assassinated by a Hindu nationalist who thought that you were too sympathetic to Indian Muslims while you were trying to stop the carnage between the Muslims on one hand and the Sikhs and Hindu on the other. Did you take sides and if so, why?
Gandhi: I would never take sides. I don’t have an interest in taking sides—being either in one place or another would have not fed me any better. It was my ultimate goal to house the idea not to separate. There was a separation due to anger and due to ego when I knew if I could calm the internal disagreement—man’s disagreement with each other—that there would be no need for separation. Often so much action takes place without emotion. It is the mind that powers it. And the mind, if taught wrong, can do so much damage to the heart.
Me: Absolutely. Was there any spiritual reason you had to die such a violent death?
Jamie: He puts on the sweetest smile when he says, “I have no fear of death.”
Gandhi: This is what made my life so easy. I knew truly no pain, no harm could ever be given to me unless I desired it to be so or unless I called it to be so. I know that my death needed to be so loud that it helped people’s compassion come out—
Jamie tears up and has a difficult time channeling him at this point.
Jamie (Sounding choked up): He’s got such a cool vibe. (She clears her throat.) Excuse me. (Nervous giggle) The visual that it comes with is amazing. He shows me being outside. He’s escorted. He has really strong men around him, but he is um, almost so weak that his gait or his walk—it’s labored. I see him being very thin, and he’s bowing. He’s honoring the man who shoots him. He bows to the man, and he remembers hearing the sound of the gun several times, so it had several bullets in it. And he said, “I felt no pain. I fell into death.” The men that were next to him were not holding him any longer. They were trying to assure the situation, but he saw himself going down to the ground. The ground—it was dirt. It wasn’t like a concrete kind of space. It was powdery dirt. And he said he fell into death, and he knew at that moment his life would be would be louder than any other sound on Earth. And it would take that to make people listen to how they felt. For that, he was very grateful. And then he smiles at me again, and he says, “A good ending to a good story.”
Jamie sniffles.
Me (tearing up): Mm.
Jamie and I take a moment to compose ourselves before proceeding to the net question.
Me: How do you feel about India raising you to that level of a messiah?
Jamie (Struggling with pronunciation): M-ma-mahat-Mahatma.
Gandhi: I did not ask for the title. I didn’t need it. What I want is for every man to feel the way that I did when I was living. That was my goal, and it still is.
Me: How did you try to stop the carnage and would you have done anything differently?
Gandhi: I do not have any regrets if this is the word you are asking for. I lived my life in every moment. About stopping the carnage, this was not my job. I am not responsible for what men do to other men. It was only my goal to be the teacher and to be the example. This I feel I have done to my best and highest degree.
Me: Okay. Now, you dedicated your life to discovering truth or “Satya” by learning from your own mistakes and conducting experiments on yourself. You stated that the most important battle was to overcome your demons, fears and insecurities. You summarized your beliefs as, “God is Truth”, but you later changed this to “Truth is God”. Do you still believe this and can you expand?
Gandhi: You’ve done a beautiful job on researching, and yes, I still believe in this from the inside of my body all the way out.
(Long pause)
Jamie: I don’t know what just happened, but he giggled a little bit. It as like this soft (she mimics his chuckle.)
Jamie and I laugh.
Jamie: He’s having a good time.
Me: Well, we aim to please!
(Long pause)
Me: Anything else on that?
Jamie: Yeah, he’s telling me about some of the things he took away in his life so that he could experience what truth is, you know, without the desires in life, without the temptations. So, the, yeah, uh—wow!
(Pause)
Jamie: He had no relations with his wife. He became celibate, is the word. He’s not using that word; he’s using another word, but it’s celibacy.
Me: Okay.
Jamie: —clothing, appearance. It’s why he was more attracted to the—it’s either the base class of the Indian, like the wrap around the lower half of the body and then, you know, the shawl cross the top to keep him warm if necessary.
Gandhi: What other people would see in me as “lack of”—lack of wealth, lack of fashion—
Jamie can’t help but laugh, being the girlie fashion lover that she is.
Gandhi: —lack of choice.
Jamie: He said for him it was really about freedom. Freedom.
Gandhi: A lot of what I see in today’s multi-cultures is that the desire and the want get in the way of the true purpose of the heart. The true purpose of the heart will always lead to truth, which will always lead to God.
(Pause)
Jamie: Ah, he was just kind of off-handedly telling me how he thought technology: TV, commercials, Internet, were all extremely fascinating, but that they are all most often misleading. If you are speaking to someone with an agenda, you are speaking in the wrong way.
Me: Okay.
Jamie: I asked him, I said, ‘Well, we had an agenda, because we wanted to know more about you, so why were you willing to do this today?’
Erik: Good question!
Me: It was a good question! It is a good question.
Jamie: He lets me know that we’re not trying to change his words nor edit his story out.
Gandhi: Curiosity is not an agenda. What you do with the answers you receive—and if it’s self-fulfilling—then it’s an agenda.
Jamie: He’s saying that he can see that we won’t do anything with this. We’ll just post it as is.
Me: Of course.
Jamie (reveling in his words): Curiosity is not an agenda.
Me: Very well put. Now, you believed in celibacy, but it is said that you bought your grandniece to sleep naked in your bed as a spiritual experiment. Is that true, and if so, why?
(Long pause)
Jamie: He’s telling me that it was nothing sexual. What encouraged him to follow through with such an act, which in today’s culture would sound beastly, was to help her see that the body is a body. It is an instrument. It is not to be shied from. It was to show her a level of comfort, not a level of intimacy. He’s talking about it so much as an experience for a lesson. And really the way he talks about it is so playing. There’s no emotional excitement. There’s no weirdness. It’s just bleah. You comb your hair.
Me: Did she need that lesson? Was there something about it that she required that lesson?
Gandhi: Yes.
Jamie: Um, he’s sharing with me about her mother. She was assaulted and that, the way it was told was very disturbing to the child. It was just to show the child that you look at every person as an individual. You don’t look at them as, “If one man is to do this, all men are to do this.” So it was almost to deconstruct the trauma that the child heard and felt within the body.
Me: Assaulted sexually or just physically?
Jamie: Sexually.
Me: Okay. Now, what do you think about those who eat meat from the spiritual standpoint?
Gandhi: Everybody has the right to make their own choices in how they feed themselves, but for me, what I have experienced and what I have felt is that the consumption of meat thickens the energy within the body. It creates more difficulty for the energetic body to move freely.
