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Category Archives: FREE ADVICE
Free Advice about Life, Universe and Other Stuff from Lawrence R. Spencer
REALITY vs ILLUSION
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BEING YOU
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Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi; 2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948), commonly known as Mahatma Gandhi or Bapu (Father of Nation), was the preeminent leader of Indian nationalism in British-ruled India. Employing non-violent civil disobedience, Gandhi led India to independence and inspired movements for non-violence, civil rights and freedom across the world.
The son of a senior government official, Gandhi was born and raised in a Bania community in coastal Gujarat, and trained in law in London. Assuming leadership of the Indian National Congress in 1921, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns for easing poverty, expanding women’s rights, building religious and ethnic amity, ending untouchability, increasing economic self-reliance, and above all for achieving Swaraj—the independence of India from British domination.
In London he committed himself to truthfulness, temperance, chastity, and vegetarianism. His return to India to work as a lawyer was a failure, so he went to South Africa for a quarter century, where he absorbed ideas from many sources, most of them non-Indian. He was exposed to Jain ideas through his mother who, was in contact with Jain monks. Themes from Jainism that Gandhi absorbed included asceticism; compassion for all forms of life; the importance of vows for self-discipline; vegetarianism; fasting for self-purification; mutual tolerance among people of different creeds; and “syadvad”, the idea that all views of truth are partial.
Gandhi strongly favored the emancipation of women, and he went so far as to say that “the women have come to look upon me as one of themselves.” He opposed purdah, child marriage, untouchability, and the extreme oppression of Hindu widows, up to and including sati. He especially recruited women to participate in the salt tax campaigns and the boycott of foreign products. Gandhi’s success in enlisting women in his campaigns, including the salt tax campaign, anti-untouchability campaign and the peasant movement, gave many women a new self-confidence and dignity in the mainstream of Indian public life.
In his last year, unhappy at the partition of India, Gandhi worked to stop the carnage between Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs that raged in the border area between India and Pakistan. He was assassinated on 30 January 1948.
Gandhi’s philosophy was not theoretical but one of pragmatism, that is, practicing his principles in the moment. Asked to give a message to the people, he would respond, “My life is my message.”
GHOSTS ARE PEOPLE TOO
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Don’t be afraid of ghosts. They’re just a normal person without a body. They might need a friend, just as you may some day.
THE NATIVE PEOPLE
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“What is Life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of the buffalo in the winter time. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the Sunset.” ~ Crowfoot’s last words
SEE ALL EDWARD CURTIS PHOTOS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE OF CENTRAL & WESTERN NORTH AMERICA FROM 1900 A.D.
“Edward Curtis’s brief expedition to the Great Plains in the summer of 1900 was undoubtedly the most profound experience of his life. That summer, Curtis accompanied George Bird Grinnell, his friend and early mentor, on a trip to Montana and witnessed one of the last great enactments of the Sun Dance. As Curtis viewed the Sun Dance—a ceremony that few whites, or natives, would see again for nearly seven decades—his vision for the grand photo-ethnographic undertaking that would become his life’s work crystallized. The small body of images he made on that summer trip, among them The Three Chiefs, Piegan Dandy, and Piegan Encampment, clearly reveal that he had been touched by the magnificence of the Indian nations and the overwhelming depth of their culture. These photographs formed the beginning of the vast, elegant portrait of Native American cultures that Curtis would bring to the world over the next thirty years.
During Curtis’s time, the Indians of the Great Plains lived primarily in North and South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, a territory once traversed by great herds of migrating buffalo. Curtis was strongly attracted to the fiercely independent lifestyle of tribes such as the Lakota, Apsaroke, and Piegan and seemed particularly adept at transforming their dignity and pride into extraordinary photographic images.
Curtis’s photographs of Indian life on the Great Plains comprise perhaps his most popular body of work; for many people, his photographs of the chiefs and warriors, the beadwork, the horses, and the Plains landscape have come to exemplify the American Indian. However, his photographs of the Plains Indians also documented many other aspects of tribal cultural life, including hunting, warfare, vision quests, and religious ceremonies. These images remain an unparalleled vision of the strength and nobility of the Plains Indian peoples who had once held dominion over tens of thousands of square miles.”
SEE ALL EDWARD CURTIS PHOTOS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE OF CENTRAL & WESTERN NORTH AMERICA FROM 1900 A.D.