The Inspiring Power of Great Souls
A friend just wrote me:
“I have experienced today something special and would like to share it with you. Our oldest son (he is 8 years old) is quite special, he is challenging us very much. … To some extend it can be very difficult with him. Yesterday was again a difficult day: He kept on quarrelling with his brothers, was teasing them all the time and didn’t feel like doing anything. I gave him a book with a short report about Gandhi and told him to copy it on a piece of paper and take it to school the next day.
After reading the content he started asking many profound questions. Today he took the paper to school and it was put on the wall of the classroom. Since then his disposition has totally changed, very strangely. In the evening I looked with him a short passage from the film “Gandhi“: He hardly could breathe because of his concentration: It was a beautiful sight. I will order the autobiography of Gandhi and read it with him every day during summer holidays. I never experienced something similarly with him. His intensity, his affection were nearly frightening. Tonight he nearly didn’t go to bed and wanted to keep on discussing about it.”
The lives of great men and women, especially of initiates like Gandhi, are inspiring examples, which can awake in the soul the aspiration towards the ideals they incarnated. Therefore it is good to read such biographies to give an orientation to the soul.
Statue of Gandhi in a seminar centre near Hyderabad, India, Jan. 2004
