You have seen people whom you… who are historically known as great beings. This is all that happened to them. They were living with a limited identification, suddenly for some reason, some event broke their identities, and suddenly they identified with a larger process that was happening around, and they did things that they themselves could not imagine.
For example Mahatma Gandhi. He got qualified as a lawyer. I remember what he wrote when he when he went out to fight his first case in the court in India. He says, I stood up to argue my case, and my heart sank into my boots. Does it sound like Mahatma Gandhi?
The man [Mahatma Gandhi] just moved millions of people. Just one incident suddenly his old identities broke
The man just moved millions of people. Just one incident suddenly his old identities broke. He went to South Africa to make a living. And he was doing okay as a lawyer, and one day he bought a first class ticket in a train and got in, and he traveled some distance. In the next station somewhere another, a white South African got in, and he didn’t like a brown skinned man sitting in a first class. So, he called the ticket collector. So, they threw him out of the train, his luggage and everything. They just threw him out, and he fell off the platform and he just sat there for a hours. Why did this happen to me? I bought a first class ticket, why am I thrown out of a train?
Suddenly he identified with a much larger problem that existed and he became a colossus. Just broke that little identification and moved into a much larger identity. Probably there has never been another man on this planet, who moved as many people as Mahatma Gandhi moved, with such simple ways, never before another conquering force on the planet has been made to vacate the land where they had taken roots without firing bullets at them or killing them, or anything like this.
Probably there has never been another man on this planet, who moved as many people as Mahatma Gandhi moved
See, shooting other soldiers who are carrying guns is one thing, throwing bombs outside of them is another thing. But just going there standing on the street and willing to be beaten down on the heads, with cracked skulls you fall down. One line of people fall down, the next line of people come, and give their skulls to be broken again. It’s a completely different kind of strength. It’s not easy. It takes a very deep inner strength for a person to do that. And that’s what he managed to do. And all that happened to him was, from a small identity of himself and his family and wanting to make a living, his identity just exploded. Identifying the larger problem of the people that was there at that time.
