Truth-force, what is it? Truth is the expressed porousness and the vulnerability of soul, in the same way that soul is the humble courage, non-exploitative perception, reverence and gratitude of love, increasing through applied appreciation. The essence of openness and vulnerability of soul is most beautifully expressed as the passion and pathos of empathetic connectivity and dialogue, and the righteousness of honoring relationships extending horizontally and vertically, relating to both the circle of life and the sphere of creation.
Force as a dynamic of truth is an application of power, not as military or economic might to humiliate, intimidate, oppress, exploit and destroy. Not as the bullying and pressuring of corruption-masking politics, and not as the techniques of terror.
Rather force, dynamically combined with truth as soul-love is the power of acts of beauty, as intuitively doing what is right in the furtherance of biotic and social justice, in the empowering of the integrity of individuals and the maturity in integrity of individual and collective responsibility and freedom.
This is the weapon of mass awakening for peace through the nonviolent warrior and it is what Gandhi, Mahatmaji, called Satyagraha, Truth- or Soul-Force.
Throughout the 20th Century, with its two world wars and genocidal violence, and now steadily into the 21st Century, with our serial and perpetual wars and planetary devastation, ordinary decency has been increasingly overwhelmed and drawn ever deeper and more hopelessly into the maelstrom of history. We cannot survive and be human without decency and behind every cause of resistance and opposition always there has been and remains the tenacity of decency. This is a truth today as it was for generations before us who did not awaken early enough to prevent the call to arms that consumed millions in their youth, and laid waste much natural goodness of the Earth.
History need not repeat itself. Those who are ready for change and possessed of both the courage and the humility of decency know that we are at a turning point. Those who are ready for direct nonviolent social action, like that of international women opposing sexual harassment and sex crimes, and the American student movement against further tragedies from gun violence in schools, will find a vital and sustaining discipline in the power of Satyagraha. To do so, however, those who would successfully wield Truth-force must take themselves deep into belief in the truths they struggle for. Never, forgetting, in the external assault and internal uncertainties of travail, that each cause rests upon the common ground of human recognition and touchstone of decency.
Our lives are at risk—everyone who thinks about world reality knows this. Not only our lives individually and collectively but life itself. With the accelerated advances of exploitative technologies and the ominous potential of genocide to mushroom into omnicide, all that lives conditionally exists in the danger zone of cataclysm and extinction. Of course, the augment can and will be made that whoever lives must die, or as it is crudely, even cynically, expressed, “Nobody gets out of here alive.” This also the thinking person confrontationally reflections on.
Children however do not live in the inevitability of death, unless they are forced to do so by those who have themselves forgotten how it is to be a child. Children live to discover life and beyond that, as youth, to discover love. Mothers, if they are true to mothering, do not give birth to offer their babies as sacrifices to the politics of crocodilian betrayal, and armed and organized violence. Unfortunately, there are others, and they are predominately men, who appear to be callous and may have numbed themselves to the decency of life as a universal presence worthy of affirming. Inasmuch as such individuals are also those who hold both political and economic power and seek to dictate the terms of existence to the vast majority of the world’s population, they are most in need of the dialogic confrontation that only truth-force can bring into the human condition for the necessary shift in power; a shift to assure safety for those who understand where the world is, and to prepare a future to uplift life for those who are growing and newly endowed by nature with the health and spontaneity of affirmation.
Satyagraha is the force of truth, truth by way of the integrity of soul, that stands into conflicted reality, in opposition to denial, as an active articulation of “yes” to life.
David Sparenberg is a world citizen, environmental & peace advocate & activist, actor, poet-playwright, storyteller, teacher and author.
