What I admire most about him is that he spent close to three decades in prison and kept his humanity intact. Rather than emerging with anger and calls for retribution, he instead insisted that the African National Congress, now the ruling party, should only take a defensive position. Then he used the moral high ground to force the apartheid regime out of power. Eventually, he would encourage his fellow black South Africans to see their former tormentors as their “partners.”
It is clear that
Mandela had a deep and profound sense of the nondual.
There's no other basis on which he could practice such
incredible compassion for his tormentors; he must have
recognized the simple truth that they and his people were
all one.
On a
less serious note, I hope you like this offering from
the irreverent but deeply funny e-card site,someecards.com, which places Mandela's
passing in a useful context for some of us:
From
Issue #4964 edited by Gloria earlier this past summer,
comes the following excerpt of a story told by Bill
Clinton about meeting Nelson Mandela. After asking
Mandela about how he had managed to assuage the feelings
of hatred he must have felt towards his jailers, Clinton
described how he put a young Chelsea in front of the TV
to watch Mandela's release from prison in 1990, telling
her it was the most important thing she might ever
witness in her lifetime. He then asked Mandela:
And I said, "I watched you walk down that dirt road to freedom." I said,"Now, when you were walking down there, and you realized how long you hadbeen in their prison, didn't you hate them then? Didn't you feel somehatred?" He said, "Yes, I did a little bit." He said, "I felt that." And hesaid, "Frankly, I was kind of afraid, too, because I hadn't been free in solong."But he said, "As I felt the anger rising up, I thought to myself, 'They havealready had you for 27 years. And if you keep hating them, they'll have youagain.' And I said, 'I want to be free. And so I let it go. I let it go."
The
full story can be read in that issue here:
This
next tiny tidbit comes from Issue #4366 edited by Mark
Otter in 2011. It is what Mandela answered in response
to the question of why he doesn't resent his tormentors:
Resentment is like a glass of poison that a man drinks; then he sits down and waits for his enemy to die.
That
issue is one I believe I've quoted from before,
because it contains a wealth of insights on the topic
of forgiveness that I've always been moved by:
From
Issue #1862 edited by Gloria back in 2004 comes this
story from Elizabeth Lesser about Mandela's quality of
Obuntubotho:
When Bishop Desmond Tutu introduced Nelson Mandela at his inauguration as the new president of south Africa, he described him as being a man who had Obuntubotho. Obuntubotho, he said, is the essence of being human. You know when it is there and when it is absent. It speaks about humanness, gentleness, putting yourself out on behalf of others, being vulnerable. It embraces compassion, and toughness. It recognizes my humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.
-- Elizabeth Lesser
Numerous
other great insights and tidbits are contained in that
issue as well:
I'll
close today's issue with an excerpt that goes back even
earlier, to 2001, from Issue #626 edited by Jerry. In
response to a seeker's question about why such terrible
things occur in the world that result in the suffering
of innocent children, Dakini responded (in part):
I feel both awful and honored to have to be the one to suggest to you that you consider that indeed everything does NOT have a purpose. Would you be willing to consider that the only meaning anything in this life has is the meaning (you individually and/or we humans collectively) 'make up' about it? That's what humans do -- we are meaning-making machines.
Dakini continues by stating
that life is in fact empty and meaningless, which,
lest that sound hopeless and nihilistic, actually
reveals a deeper truth about the world that frees us
immensely:
Once one deeply and profoundly understands the empty or spacious nature of mind and phenomena, this liberates one to be truly present to What's Happening -- not caught in the unconscious projection of meaning or story onto that person, situation or event.
So this experience/understanding of the empty nature of existence completely frees one to create consciously, unbound by the limited little 'stories' and interpretations (meaning and purpose, as you call them).
Truly this understanding gives access to great possibility and creative vision and manifestation. And the nonattachment and 'not taking things personally' that is necessary to create compassionately in a way that benefits many beings. The kind of courage and vision that, say, a Martin Luther King, Jr. or Gandhi or Nelson Mandela manifested.
I've long thought that a
solution to every single "problem" in the world can be
actualized with a nondual approach, but this business
of "not taking things personally" is probably the
Golden Rule of applying that insight to problems in
our life. I can't think of too many conflicts --
especially the interpersonal and relationship ones --
that don't just dissolve when you stop taking your own
stake in the matter so seriously.
Even better is to accept that
there's no "self" to take a stake in anything in the
first place!
That entire exchange with
Dakini along with a few other interesting dialogues
can be read at the issue page here:
Dustin