An Interview With Satish Kumar

In your autobiography, No Destination, you wrote that you ‘have met many people – gurus, teachers, poets, philosophers, and celebrities – but none could compare with my mother in her simple wisdom. She was illiterate, she could not even sign her name, but she was pure and truthful.’ Where did she get such wisdom from?

I would say, from her own childhood. You know, in India when you grow up in a small village your mind is not cluttered with information. In my mother’s time, there was no television, no radio, no newspaper; and so she learnt from her parents, from our Jain teachers, but also from nature, from being on the farm, milking the cows – and also from traditional stories. So, there was a very limited amount of information but the quality was very good, because it came refined and refined again and refined again, by generation after generation.

She also learnt from her own experience, because when you go through difficult times you mature and become more resilient. So, struggles and hardships are not a bad thing in that sense – but in modern times we live such comfortable, easy lives, and that doesn’t make people wise or strong.

You also wrote that the Jain monks detected in you some wisdom linked to a past life. Can you expand on that?

In modern terminology, we would say: ‘There is something in your genes.’ In Sanskrit we call it sanskara, or we say that someone is an ‘old soul’. What does it mean? It means that there is something continuing from previous lives, there is not a complete break.

So, at the age of nine I decided to leave my mother, leave the safety and comfort of my childhood home and take on the life of a monk, where you have to pull out your hair² and walk barefoot and beg for your food and sleep on a thin blanket – all that hardship I was ready to accept to find a way of the spirit. That can’t just come into your head at age nine, and so I would say that there must have been something in me from a previous life.

Your mother was appalled that you wanted to become a monk at that age. Given that you ended up running away from the monastery when you were 18, do you think with hindsight that she was right?

My mother was a very religious person and I broke my vow and to her that was not acceptable.

But from my point of view it’s like John Maynard Keynes saying: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’ When I was nine years old, I believed that by giving up the world and practising spirituality exclusively you can bring an end to the cycle of birth and death; but at the age of 18 I had a new consciousness, that you cannot separate the life of the spirit from your life in the world and the moment you try to you are creating a dualism. Only a few can live in a monastery, and I had come to believe that spirituality should be available and accessible to everybody. So, to be true to myself I gave up the monastic order.

But then, after some years, when I had walked around the world³ and worked for peace and non-violence and spiritual values, my mother realised that although I gave up the robe I did not give up the spirit, and so we had a reconciliation and she blessed me before she died.

You seem to be profoundly open to what is unfolding in the universe, almost to the point of fatalism. You say: ‘My nature is to let things happen rather than make them happen.’ How does that sense of acceptance square with being an activist who wants to change the world?

My activism is not contrived, not planned; it comes as naturally to me as breathing, and I think I am going to serve the world, and the earth, as an activist until the last breath of my life, because it has become part of me. And I am not looking for any achievement, any outcome: what I am doing has its own, intrinsic rightness. I do what I feel is right for me. And that is all it is.

So, I would not call myself a fatalist. I would say that I work on two levels: I act with thought, but I cannot say that whatever I think should happen is going to. Modern science talks of ‘emergence’. Something will emerge, and I will allow it to emerge without trying to contrive it. So, I am a participant in the process rather than the controller of the outcome, because I trust that if the process is right, something good will emerge.

Isn’t that a rather relaxed attitude to have if the various ecological crises that confront us are so serious? Is there a place for urgency in your sense of emergence?

There is urgency in it. If you’re in a theatre and there is a fire, it’s urgent to get everyone out; but still you have to have patience and order – if there is a stampede, it will kill more people than the fire will. So, what I am trying to say is that, yes, we have many urgent problems – climate change, population explosion, the pollution of water and air, the destruction of rainforests – and so I am working every day, day and night – even in my dreams! – and yet the result of my actions is not in my hands, it is in the hands of other people, of politicians, the media… So, urgency also requires patience and humility, and so I am not frustrated or pessimistic. Having faith in emergence is as important as being active.

What bearing does the idea of karma have on all this? If there is a sense that what must be must be…

Karma is like clay. You cannot change clay into wood, and yet it has great potential: you can make from it a big pot, a small pot, a beautiful pot, an ugly pot, a pot for water, a pot for food, a pot for flowers – you can do ten thousand things with it. And you are a participant in the shaping of your life. For example, you were born in England, so your karma made you an Englishman; but you can shape and change and develop and evolve in ten thousand different ways. Karma is given, but what you do with it is still emergent and free.

You have said that the world is not a battleground, which is quite a challenge to the way most of us in the West were brought up to think. Can you say more?

I would say the universe is benevolent. A battleground is an aberration. For me, there is nothing in the world that is bad. The challenge for humanity is to find a balance between what we call ‘bad’ and what we call ‘good’ – and when you find it, all is just right, appropriate.

There is no evil – evil is only in ignorance. We have the potential within us to be in a place of harmony. Harmony is the basic principle of the universe: the sun and the rain are in harmony with the soil, and the soil with the seed. The mother is in harmony with the baby, so she produces milk the moment the baby is born. And so I would say: Focus on the natural state of the universe.

Please continue this interview here: https://highprofiles.info/interview/satish-kumar/