Politico-Spiritual Rendezvous
If spirituality is inner science, politics is external discipline.
We need both.
The well-known English poet Rudyard Kipling once said, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. This maxim has been proved untrue as far as the West and the East equation is concerned, but in respect of the equation of spirituality and politics, this undoubtedly holds true.
The fact is that spirituality and politics are both full-fledged disciplines, both need total involvement. So, each can become involved in the other’s discipline only at the cost of the erosion of his own. The spiritual person will lose his dedication in the realm of politics, while the politician will lose his political interest if he involves himself in spiritual matters.
But the fact remains that both the disciplines are needed to build a better society. If spirituality is inner science, politics is external discipline. We need both. How to combine both spheres? The answer lies in a single word, that is, complementarity. Each must complement the other, while maintaining its own identity. If we make an in-depth study of this subject, we will find that spirituality is inner beauty without having external shakti (power), while politics is external shakti having little inner beauty. Both are in need of each other. So the best solution is to adopt the sharing formula. The spiritual person must serve as a counsellor to the politician, and politician must serve as a booster to the spiritual person. This policy of sharing will prove beneficial to both.
A spiritual person is a self-centred person according to his nature, the politician can help him by taking him out of his individual cell, so that he may acquire more experience of human life. The same is true of the politician. Politicians are, by nature, over-ambitious and this sometimes leads them to disaster. It is at this juncture that a spiritual person can give them practical advice which will enable them to curb this over-ambitious side of their nature, thus making them more realistic.
In our ancient tradition, dharma gurus were advisers to the kings and kings were their supporters. In our present society, in terms of number, we have enough spiritual persons and we have politicians in abundance as well. But, we are not able to benefit from the two because of a lack of sharing process between them.
We need to develop a dual system of education–formal and informal. Formal education can produce educated politicians, and that is good for our society, but we also need all members of society to be spiritualized. This goal cannot be achieved through formal education. We shall have to evolve an informal type of education whose teachers are spiritual gurus, and also ruhani murshid. These gurus and murshids can teach our present day generation through interaction, discourses and the dissemination of literature.
In my experience, informal and formal education are both independent disciplines: any attempt at amalgamation cannot yield any positive result. Each discipline can try to be helpful to the other, without interfering with the other’s systems. In a partial sense, I can say we need spiritualized politicians and politicized spiritual persons. Both are important: each can support the other, but only on the condition that they strictly refrain from interference.
Spiritual persons have much to share with others, and the same can be said of the politicians. But in our present society, few of them carry out this task. The reason is that people generally adopt a complaining attitude towards others and if they try to share with others, they don’t know the difference between sharing and interference. If any of them want to share with the others, they must avoid complaining and must refrain from interference. Without following this course, no one can prove to be a useful member of society.
