My family calls me Pancho and you might think that I don't know you, but I'd like you to know that I love you all...

All Wednesdays at the Mehta kindness Temple are beautiful and inspiring. Last night wasn't the exception. After feeling the passage for the second time, some clear ideas came to mind, but some siblings in the circle, before me, invoked first Tolstoy, then Thoreau, then a farm. It was impossible for me to not feel/think about Gandhi and the Tolstoy Farm. These are the three points that I shared with you:

1. A Tolstoy Farm Story: Food and Unity.
2. The Hardest Thing: conceiving without imagination.
3. Vinoba's Aspirations.


1. A Tolstoy Farm Story: Food and Unity.
Gandhi's follower and friend Kallenbach handed over his farm of 1100 acres in South Africa for Satyagrahi families to stay over there without any rent on May 1910. Later this farm was known as the Tolstoy Farm. Hindus, Muslims, Parsees, and Christians belonging to Gujurat, Tamilnadu, Andhra and Northern India lived in this farm. As everyone was free to take food of his or her own choice (vegetarian and non vegetarian), there was the need of two kitchens. Side by side, there was need of two types of cooking staff. Some vegetarians asked to "morally" impose the nonviolent diet, yet Gandhi honored choice and respect (as nonviolent means) and said something like: let's have two kitchens.

Gandhi's deep love and the solid unified policy of taking food together, influenced Muslims and Christians so much that in a few months (if not weeks!) they all preferred taking vegetarian food in a single group. Now, there was only one kitchen there and that too totally vegetarian. An extraordinary example of non prejudice, trust and love. Not only that, for different castes  and communities living and working unitedly, taking their meals together, it is a unique example of the Soul Force.

Here is another example of Gandhi's wisdom regarding food and unity:

Later in India, around 1917, the situation/experiment of the two kitchens was repeated with the Champaran peasants. But this time it took weeks (for sure) to move from two kitchens to one.

That was the Mahatma's work, that was Gandhiji's Plan of Life: to practice the Science of Nonviolence. To honor diversity at the surface level and unity at the heart level.

2. The Hardest Thing: conceiving without imagination.
Nothing is harder than conceiving what has not yet being imagined.

Once we are capable of imagining our highest ideals of harmony, love and unity, we can move to comprehend them, to conceive them, to practice them, and finally to master them.

For a "plan of life" we need imagination. Then the comprehension of the principles of life. Then the art of applying them in life. And finally, the personification of those principles and the master of that art.

This is the whole Science of Life. The Total Revolution of the Human Spirit.

3. Vinoba's Aspirations.

Vinoba shares his Universal Love with us:

This sky where we live

is no place to lose our wings

so love, love, love!

May all become compassionate, courageous and wise.