“Independence of my conception means nothing less than the realization of the ‘Kingdom of God’ within you and on this earth.” ~ Gandhi, The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 314

Gandhi was accused of using the word swaraj, which means freedom and/or self-rule, because it had a spiritual significance. He answered, in effect, “guilty as charged.” He was convinced that the satyagraha struggle for the liberation of India was a yajna sacrifice and those who marched with him to the sea in 1930 were pilgrims. On another occasion he said that ahimsa was nothing less than the Kingdom of God. These things were literally true for him, and true to an extent for those who followed him. That is why he never forgot, as he reminds us here, that the struggle was always going on within us while, or before, it played out in the world. He seems to have been in good company, incidentally: when Jesus said the Kingdom of God is within you (ἔντος υμῶν), he used a phrase that (in the Greek, anyway) means both “within you” as individuals and “among you” as a society.

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About Daily Metta

Stephanie Van Hook, the Metta Center’s executive director, launched Daily Metta in 2015 as a way to share Gandhi’s spiritual wisdom and experiments with nonviolence.

Our 2016 Daily Metta continues with Gandhi on weekdays. On weekends, we share videos that complement Michael Nagler’s award-winning book, The Search for a Nonviolent Future: A Promise of Peace for Ourselves, Our Families, and Our World. To help readers engage with the book more deeply, the Metta Center offers a free PDF study guide.

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