Birthday of Mahatma Gandhi/International day of Non-Violence 02nd October is the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, a man who needs no introduction anywhere in the world! His successful campaign based on non-violent resistance for India’s independence from British rule has inspired freedom and civil rights movements around the world. In 2007, the UN voted to establish Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday as International Day of Non-Violence.&nbsp; Osho has spoken extensively on Mahatma Gandhi in His discourses. Osho says You can either creative or destructive – these are the only 2 choices. If your energies are not released into creativity, they are bound to become sour, bitter, poisonous. Then they will make you angry, full of hatred and violence. And there are two ways for that violence to be channelised: one is to be violent with others and the other is to be violent with yourself. Buddha is against both types of violence, so am I. But the politician - Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao – is violent with others. Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of nonviolence, is violent upon himself. That's how your saints and mahatmas are created. Politicians are sadists and saints are masochists; both are psychologically ill. Buddha says if you live an authentic life; when you accept both polarities of your being, the love and the hate, in you and in others; then you become authentic. Buddha is not telling you to repress. He is simply saying, become more aware. Repression because that is an unconscious effort; it does not transform you.<div class="raw-html-embed"><div style="width:100%;height:1px;background:#00000036;margin:10px 0;"></div></div>That's the difference between a saint and a sage. A saint follows the path of self-cultivation. He practices non-violence, like Mahatma Gandhi; he practices truth, truthfulness; he practices sincerity, honesty. But these are all practices. And whenever you are practicing non-violence, what are you doing? What is really happening inside you? You must be repressing violence. When you are practicing -- when you HAVE to practice -- truth, what does it mean? It simply means untruth arises in you and you repress it and you go against it, and you say the truth.&nbsp; But the untruth has not disappeared from your being. You can push it downwards into the very basement of your being; you can throw it into the deep darkness of the unconscious. You can become completely oblivious of it. You can forget that it exists, but it exists and it is bound to function from those deep, dark depths of your being in such a subtle way that you will never be aware that you are still in its grip -- in fact, far more so than before because when it was consciously felt you were not so much in its grip. Now the enemy has become hidden. That's my observation of Mahatma Gandhi. He observed, cultivated non-violence; but I have looked deeply into his life and he is one of the most violent men this century has known. But his violence is very polished; his violence is so sophisticated that it looks almost like non-violence. And his violence has such subtle ways that you cannot detect it easily. It comes from the back door; it is never at the front door. You will not find it in his drawing-room; it is not there. It has started living somewhere in the servants' quarters at the back of the house where nobody ever goes, but it goes on pulling his strings from there. For example, if ordinarily you are angry, you are angry with the person who has provoked it. Mahatma Gandhi would be angry with himself, not with the person. He would turn his anger upon himself; he would make it introverted. Now it is very difficult to detect it. He would go on a fast, he would become suicidal, he would start torturing himself. And in a subtle way he would torture the other by torturing himself. In his ashram, if somebody was found drinking tea.... Now tea is so innocent, but it was a sin in Mahatma Gandhi's ashram. These ashrams exist by creating guilt in people; they don't miss any opportunity to create guilt. That is their trade-secret, so no opportunity has to be missed. Even tea is enough; it has to be used. If somebody is found drinking tea, he is a sinner. He is committing a crime -- far more than a crime, because a sin is something far deeper than a crime.&nbsp; And people used to drink tea. They would drink tea in hiding; they had to hide. Just to drink tea they had to be thieves, deceivers, hypocrites! That's what your so-called religions have done to millions of people. Rather than making them spiritual they have simply made them, reduced them to hypocrites. They would pretend that they didn't drink tea, but once in a while they would be found red-handed. And Gandhi was searching, looking; he had agents planted to find out who was going against the rules. And whenever somebody was found he would be called...and Gandhi would go on a fast to punish himself. "What kind of logic is this?" you will ask. It is a very simple logic. In India it has been followed for centuries. The trick is that Gandhi used to say, "I must not yet be a perfect Master, that's why a disciple can deceive me. So, I must purify myself. You could deceive me because I am not yet perfect. If I was perfect nobody could deceive me. How can you imagine deceiving a perfect Master? So, there is some imperfection in me." Look at the humbleness! And he would torture himself; he would go on a fast. Now Gandhi is fasting because you have taken a cup of tea. How will YOU feel? His three days' fast for you, just for a single cup of tea! It will be too heavy on you. If he had hit you on the head it would not have been so heavy. If he had insulted you, punished you, told you to go on a fast for three days, it would have been far simpler -- and far more compassionate. But the old man himself is fasting, torturing himself, and you are condemned by every eye in the ashram. Everybody is looking at you as a great sinner: "It is because of YOU that the Master is suffering. And just for a cup of tea? How low you have fallen!" And the person would go and touch his feet and cry and weep, but Gandhi wouldn't listen. He had to purify himself. This is all violence; I don't call it non-violence. It is violence with a vengeance, but in such a subtle way that it is very difficult to detect. Even Gandhi may not have been aware at all of what he was doing because he was not practicing awareness, he was practicing non-violence. You can go on practicing...then there are a thousand and one things to be practiced. And when will you be able to get out of all that is wrong in your life? It will take an unimaginable time. And then, too, do you think you will be out of it? It is not possible; you will not be out of it. I have never seen anybody arriving at truth by self-cultivation. In fact, the people who go for self-cultivation are not very intelligent people because they have missed the most fundamental insight: that we are not going anywhere, that God is not something to be achieved; God is already the CASE in you. You are pregnant with God; you are made of the stuff called God. Nothing has to be achieved – only a certain awareness, a self-awareness. Source: Listen to complete discourse at mentioned below link. Discourse series: <a href="/ah-this-07">Ah, This!, Chapter #7</a> Chapter title: Take No Notice 9 January 1980 am in Buddha Hall References: Osho has spoken on ‘Gandhi, Non-violence, Politics, India, Independence, Partition, Nationalism, Secularism, Communism’ in His discourses. Some of these can be referred to in the following books/discourses: 1. A Bird on the Wing 2. And the Flowers Showered 3. The Dhammapada: The Way of The Buddha&nbsp; 4. The Art of Dying 5. Be Still and Know 6. Beyond Psychology 7. From Darkness to Light 8. From Death to Deathlessness 9. Come Follow to You Vol.1-2 10. Communism and Zen Fire, Zen Wind 11. The Osho Upanishad 12. The New Dawn 13. The Messiah Vol.1-2 &nbsp;