The Conception of Spiritual Life in Mahatma Gandhi and Hindi Saints (Only 1 Quantity Available - An Old and Rare Book)

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I am much beholden to my late respected friend, the Hon'ble Shri G. V. Mavlankar, President of the Gujarat Vidya Sabha, and my friend and former stu-dent Shri. Rasiklal Parikh, Director of the B.J. Institute, for having given me an opportunity of placing before the public my ideas on the Spiritual Realisation in Mahatma Gandhi and Hindi saints. When in response to the invitation of the Institute I gave three lectures on (1) "The Spiritual Task before New India", and (2) "How all humanity could be made one", in the first week of August 1947, at Ahmedabad, I had pro-mised that I would later develop these ideas by incor-porating them in a fuller treatment. As Ahmedabad was the principal centre of the life-work of Mahatma Gandhi, I thought there could be no better way of developing the subject than by first giving an account of the conception of the spiritual life in Mahatma Gandhi, who was a luminary of the first magnitude, not merely for Ahmedabad, but for the whole of India and the world, the one aim of whose life was to bring all humanity together under a banner, which we might style 'One God, One World, One Religion.' 2. Accordingly, the first part of this book has been devoted to the conception of spiritual life in Mahatma Gandhi under the three consecutive heads: (1) The Charkha and its seven historical conceptions, (2) the philosophical and spiritual influence on the life of Mahatma Gandhi, and (3) the different stages of the development of spiritual life in Mahatma Gandhi. This last part may, in fact, be regarded as the spiritual autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, supplementing his own early autobiography, "My Experiments with Truth", containing as it does his very own words on the subject. 3. It is well known what passion Mahatma Gandhi had for Hindi saints and Hindi literature. I had already given some idea of Hindi Mysticism in my three lec tures at Ahmedabad in 1947. An opportunity came later on for me in March 1952 at Delhi, to develop this subject into a full-blown treatment of the teach-ings of Hindi saints under the headings the Origin, the Growth and the Culmination of their spiritual experience. The first two of these lectures were deli-vered at the Constitution Club, New Delhi, under the presidentship respectively of Mr. Chandrashekhar Ayyar, Justice of the Supreme Court at New Delhi, and the Hon'ble Mr. R. R. Diwakar, then Minister for Broad-casting and Information in the Government of India; and the last at the Rashtrapati-Bhavana under the aus-pices of Dr. Rajendra Prasad, President of the Union. 4. The third part of this book is devoted to the development of mystical experience in Kabir, the Apostle of spiritual unity, not merely among the Hindus and the Muslims, but among members of all religious communities of the world. Had Kabir lived today, he would have been the first person to preach such a gospel of universal spiritual unity. An oppor-tunity was provided for the present writer in 1950 to give a discourse on Kabir at Allahabad on the First Kabir Jayanti Day initiated by the All India Radio.