Five Paragons of Peace - Excerpts from the Book

[Guest guest]

Sat Nam. Some time ago, Yogi Bhajan told me to write his biography.

You may be receiving monthly installments, as I send them out each month.

 

As an outgrown of that project, I have with Guru's grace, taken some

time to meditate on the context and significance of Yogiji's life and

work in the big picture, the dawning of the Aquarian Age. This has

taken the form of a book called " Five Paragons of Peace: Magic and

Magnificence in the Guru's Way " - just published last month.

 

As a way of acquainting you with this humble work, I am sharing a

couple of excerpts below, and plan to share more of it in the coming

days.

 

For more information on Five Paragons of Peace, you may visit -

http://www.gurufathasingh.com/book.php

 

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1 -

 

“100 CHRISTS††" THE SACRIFICES OF GURU-KA-BAGH AND JAITO

 

The struggle for India's independence continued to play itself out in

significant local confrontations between entrenched authorities and

ordinary Sikh men and women dedicated to the cause of renewal and

reform.

 

Guru-ka-Bagh, literally “the Guru’s garden,†was one such focal point.

Located twenty kilometers from Amritsar, it consisted of a historic

Gurdwara and an adjacent wood lot, which provided fuel for the

community kitchen. The manager of the property was a notorious priest

named Sundar Das, who early in 1921 had come to an understanding that

he would improve himself and work under an SGPC-appointed committee.

 

The next year, Sundar Das disavowed the agreement and charged the Sikh

congregation with trespassing on the wood lot, which he claimed to

have kept as his own private property. Before pressing his claim, the

manager had been assured by the local government and police that they

would support his claim. The stage was set for a classic battle of wills.

 

On August 9, 1922, five Sikhs gathering firewood were charged with

trespassing. The next day, they were sentenced to six months rigorous

imprisonment. In response, the Gurdwara reformers decided to send out

a group of five Akalis each day to chop wood at Guru-ka-Bagh and court

arrest if prevented from doing so.

 

Realizing arrests would not deter the Sikhs, the police began a new

tactic of mercilessly beating the volunteers into unconsciousness and

leaving their senseless bodies wherever they might fall. With each

passing day, contingents set off in ever-larger numbers for

Guru-ka-Bagh. Soon, the groups setting out each day were numbering

more than one hundred members.

 

Each day, a new contingent would assemble at the Akal Takhat to pray

and take a pledge of silent suffering. The road to Guru-ka-Bagh

became lined with men and women, some giving their prayers, some

offering drinking water, others silently showing their support.

Somewhere along the way, their path would be blocked by numbers of

police, who would order them to disperse. Whether the Akalis chose at

this point to sit chanting hymns or to remain standing impassively

with their hands folded, the police would start viciously assaulting

them with brass-bound sticks, rifle butts and jack-boots.

 

Though many of the volunteers had served in the World War and well

knew how to defend themselves, they kept, each one, to their promise

of neither uttering a sound nor raising a hand to defend themselves.

This continued until, inevitably, every one of the men lay prostrate,

near death or seriously hurt on the ground.

 

The SGPC issued a call to all communities to come witness the

spiritual struggle at Guru-ka-Bagh first-hand. This appeal was

designed to prevent the government distorting or denying the daily

reality there. Papers sent reporters. Independence-minded

politicians came. Doctors and other volunteers arrived to tend the

wounded.

 

The police continued their ruthless policy of intimidation. The

offices of the SGPC and its political wing, the Akali Dal, were raided

and closed. Key members were arrested. The Englishman in charge of

the police moved through the villages surrounding Guru-ka-Bagh, on a

horse accompanied by one or two others, searching for black-turbaned

Akali sympathizers. Anyone they found was cane-beaten by the infamous

Mr. Beatty.

 

Medicines and other supplies intended for victims were intercepted on

their way to Guru-ka-Bagh. Ambulances were not permitted to take the

usual route to Amritsar, but forced to detour across furrowed farm

fields. Already grievous injuries were made worse by the tortuous

bumps and twists of the journey.

 

One witness, the Reverend Charles Freer Andrews, had come to India as

a missionary. What he saw of the Akalis being so miserably treated

moved him to declare that he had seen “hundreds of Christs being

crucified†at Guru-ka-Bagh. In a detailed report that he sent to the

press, he continued,

 

“There has been something far greater in this event than a mere

dispute about land and property. It has gone far beyond the technical

questions of legal possession and distraint. A new heroism, learnt

through suffering, has arisen in the land. A new lesson in moral

warfare has been taught to the world.â€

 

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2 -

 

THE PRICE OF ORNAMENTAL CULTURE

 

Susan Faludi’s inspiration to write her first book came from a

widely-cited national marriage study. The Harvard and Yale study,

which made headlines and spawned numerous articles and programs in the

popular media, proclaimed that women who postponed marriage and

education in favor of education and careers would have difficulty

finding husbands.

 

Faludi, then 27, said, “I hadn’t been worrying about finding a

husband, but suddenly I felt morose and grouchy.â€

Susan Faludi checked the methodology behind the study and found it to

be flawed. When she and other journalists wrote articles about her

discovery, however, the story was largely ignored by the national

media. Faludi began to suspect an arcane anti-feminist backlash in

American popular culture, and launched into her five-year project

documenting Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.

 

In her book, Faludi accounted how women in the United States had been

active since the mid-nineteenth century, pushing for the right to

vote, for equal access to higher education, for jobs, and for marital

and property rights. Suffragettes had even formed their own political

party, picketed the Capitol, chained themselves to the White House

gates, and endured imprisonment and force-feeding, until finally in

1920 they were given the vote.

 

By 1970, many of their original objectives had long been realized. US

women were voting, serving on juries, attending universities, holding

regular jobs, postponing marriage, practicing birth control, and

exercising their legal family and property rights. But they also were

about to enter a fallow period characterized by active resistance and

passive indifference to their rights and claims.

 

American women still earned just 59% of men’s average wages. They

were rarely found in the higher ranks of big business, government or

the justice system. While more women than ever before held jobs and

supported families, sometimes on their own, they were increasingly the

objects of attacks in the media, in their homes, on the streets and in

politics, where “family values†became a code word of the antifeminist

backlash.

 

Through the 70s and 80s, feminists were broadly tarred as the cause of

increasing family breakdowns and male unemployment. In the abortion

debate, they stood accused of disrespect for the essential sanctity of

human life.

 

When the media was not depicting “women’s libbers†as shrill-mouthed

misfits or scheming careerists, it was extolling the virtues of

traditional nesting, and all the attendant accessories, products and

services. Mass media and consumer culture proved to be powerful

instruments of social mollification and constraint.

With the publication of Backlash, Susan Faludi became an instant

celebrity in feminist circles.

 

For years, well-known feminists had written revisionist accounts to

explain the shortcomings of the movement. There was a sense of grave

relief that finally someone had named and described in significant

detail the backlash that for twenty years the women’s movement had

struggled under.

 

A surprising encounter with a male acquaintance lead Faludi to her

next project, to investigate the current status of American

masculinity. At the time, it was a favored topic of newspaper

editors, TV pundits, preachers, advertisers and politicians of every

stripe. Everyone seemed to have an opinion on “the end of American

home life†and the “masculinity crisis.â€

 

The question Pulitzer prize-winning Faludi set out to answer was: “Why

are so many men so disturbed by the prospect of women’s independence?â€

To start her research, she settled in southern California, then in

the throes of massive economic and social dislocation. From there,

she criss-crossed the country in search of significant indicators of

men’s social malaise.

 

Susan Faludi spent a year sitting in at the weekly meetings of a

domestic violence group. She interviewed dozens of laid-off workers,

most them with their lives, their finances and their families in

shambles. She listened to unemployed nineteen-year-olds whose sexual

predations had won them national notoriety. She tried talking with

cadets in a South Carolina military academy who were hazing the

institution’s first female student. She spoke with faithful fans in

Cleveland whose football team was moving to another city where the

owners could make more money. She communicated with actors and porn

stars, militia members and Vietnam veterans, homosexuals and

heterosexuals, obedient sons and prodigal sons, religious

fundamentalists and aspiring “wild men.â€

 

The more Faludi explored the predicament of postwar men, the more she

found in it close parallels to the box 1950s women had found

themselves in: the “disease with no name.†Men, who had traditionally

been valued for their contributions to society, their loyalty, their

team-spiritedness, their ability to sacrifice, had become largely

redundant.

 

Their traditional strengths were no longer valued in what Susan Faludi

termed an “ornamental culture,†a society taken up with

superficiality, selfishness and instantaneous gratification.

Macho media stars, automation, and faceless corporations had

fundamentally changed the rules of social engagement. Community life

had long ago died in most American neighborhoods. Company

spiritedness had suffered a recent demise. It seemed for many men,

alienated and belittled in a fast-paced nuclear society, they would

soon be losing their families.

 

As much as feminists liked to vilify men for their roles in American

culture, where they dominated and objectified women, Faludi began to

recognize that men, too, are controlled and objectified. If woman was

expected to be perpetually submissive and pampered, then man was

relied upon to be the unfailing and powerful breadwinner. The ideal

of male superdominance was as oppressive as women’s ideal of

supermodel glamour.

 

" At century’s end, feminists can no longer say of consumer culture

with such ringing confidence that “what it does to everyone, it does

to women even more.†The commercialized, ornamental “femininity†that

the women’s movement diagnosed now has men by the throat. Men and

women both feel cheated of lives in which they might have contributed

to a social world; men and women both feel pushed into roles that are

about little more than displaying prettiness or prowess in the

marketplace. Women were pushed first, but now their brothers have

joined that same forced march. " (quote from Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The

Betrayal of the American Man, New York, William Morrow and Company

Inc, 1999, p 602)

 

Susan Faludi concludes her meditation saying that blaming “a cabal of

men†has taken feminism about as far as it can go. There is also a

need for men who have considered themselves battered by feminism to

recognize the larger, oppressive role of culture. Ultimately, women

and men share a common humanity and a common desire for “a freer, more

humane world.†Men, Faludi observes, have an important and vital role

in bringing that world to realization.

 

" In the end, though, it will remain a dream without the strength and

courage of men who are today faced with a historic opportunity: to

learn to wage a battle against no enemy, to own a frontier of human

liberty, and to act in the service of a brotherhood that includes us

all. " (Ibid, p 608)

 

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For more information on this work, you may visit -

http://www.gurufathasingh.com/book.php