MOHAN MALA -A rosary of Gandhiji's messages Mohandas was Gandhiji's first name.That is how the word Mohan is taken. Mala means a garland or a rosary used for repeating a mantra or the name of God. Here,we bring you powerful and practical messages given by Mahatma Gandhiji in the course of his life. For each day of the year, there is one message.At the end of each, the source (book) from which it is taken and then the date (wherever available) on which Gandhiji gave the message are mentioned. Read them, follow them and share them with your family and friends. Like Gandhiji, all his words are True and Eternal...... JANUARY 1 There is an indefinable mysterious Power that pervades everything. I feel it, though I do not see it. It is this unseen Power, which makes itself felt and yet defies all proof, because it is so unlike all that I perceive through my senses. It transcends the senses. But it is possible to reason out the existence of God to a limited extent, JANUARY 2 I do dimly perceive that whilst every?thing around me is ever-changing,ever-dying, there is underlying all that change a Living Power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves, and re-creates. That informing Power or Spirit is God. And since nothing else I see merely through the senses can or will persist, He alone is. JANUARY 3 And is this Power benevolent or male?volent? I see it is purely benevolent. For I can see that in the midst of death life persists, in the midst of untruth, truth per?sists, in the midst of darkness light persists. Hence I gather that God is Life, Truth, Light. He is Love, He is the Supreme Good. JANUARY 4 I cannot account for the existence of evil by any rational method. To want to do so is to be co-equal with God. I am, therefore, humble enough to recognize evil as such; and I call God long-suffering and patient precisely because He permits evil in the world. JANUARY 5 I know that He has no evil in Him and yet if there is evil, He is the author of it and yet untouched by it. I know too that I shall never know God if I do not wrestle with and against evil even at the cost of life itself. JANUARY 6 We do not know all the laws of God nor their working. Knowledge of the tallest Scientist or the greatest spiritualist is like a particle of dust. If God is not a personal being for me like my earthly father, He is infinitely more. He rules in the tiniest detail of my life. I believe literally that not a leaf moves but by His will. Every breath I take depends upon His sufferance. JANUARY 7 He and His Law are one. The Law is God. Anything attributed to Him is not a mere attribute. He is the attribute, He is Truth, Love and Law and a million other things that human ingenuity can name. JANUARY 8 Perfection is the attribute of the Al­mighty, and yet what a great democrat He is! What an amount of wrong and humbug He suffers on our part! He even suffers insignificant creatures of His to question His very existence, though He is in every atom about us, around us and within us. But, He has reserved to Himself the right of becoming manifest to whom­soever He chooses. He is a Being without hands and feet and other organs, yet He can see him to whom lie chooses to reveal Himself, JANUARY 9 To me God is Truth and Love; God is ethics and morality; God is fearlessness. God is the source of Light and Life and yet He is above and beyond all these. God is conscience. He is even the atheism of the atheist. For, in His boundless love God permits the atheist to live. JANUARY 10 He is the searcher of hearts. He trans­cends speech and reason. He knows us and our hearts better than we do ourselves. He does not take us at our word, for He knows that we often do not mean it, some know­ingly and others unknowingly. JANUARY 11 He is a personal God to those who need His personal presence. He is embodied to those who need His touch. He is the purest essence. He simply is to those who have faith. He is all things to all men. He is in us and yet above and beyond us. JANUARY 12 He cannot cease to be because hideous immoralities or inhuman brutalities are committed in His name, He is long-suffer­ing. He is patient but He is also terrible. He is the most exacting personage in the world and the world to come. He metes out the same measure to us that we mete out to our neighbours - men and brutes. With Him ignorance is no excuse. And with all, He is ever forgiving for He always gives us the chance to repent. JANUARY 13 He is the greatest democrat the world knows, for He leaves us unfettered to make our own choice between evil and good. He is the greatest tyrant ever known, for He often dashes the cup from our lips and under the cover of free-will leaves us a margin so wholly inadequate as to provide only mirth for Himself at our expense. Therefore it is that Hinduism calls it all His sport - lila, or calls it all an illusion - maya. JANUARY 14 God is not outside this earthly case of ours. Therefore, exterior proof is not of much avail, if any at all. We must never try to perceive Him through the senses, because He is beyond them. We can feel Him, if we will but withdraw ourselves from the senses. The divine music is incessantly going on within ourselves, but the loud senses drown the delicate music, which is unlike and infinitely superior to anything we can perceive or hear with our senses. JANUARY 15 God is the hardest taskmaster I have known on this earth, and He tries you through and through. And when you find that your faith is failing or your body is failing you, and you are sinking, He comes to your assistance somehow or other and proves to you that you must not lose your faith and that He is always at your beck and call, but on His terms, not on your terms, So I have found. I cannot really recall a single instance when, at the eleventh hour, He has forsaken me. JANUARY 16 The divine guidance often comes when the horizon is the blackest. JANUARY 17 God helps when one feels oneself humbler than the very dust under one's feet. Only to the weak and helpless is divine succour vouchsafed. JANUARY 18 Mankind is notoriously too dense to read the signs that God sends from time to time. We require drums to be beaten into Our ears, before we would wake from our trance and hear the warning and see that to lose oneself in all is the only way to find oneself. JANUARY 19 If you would ask Him to help you, you would go to Him in all your nakedness, approach Him without reservations, also without fear or doubts as to how He can help a fallen being like you. He who has helped millions who have approached Him, is He going to desert you? JANUARY 20 Man's ultimate aim in life is the realization of God, and all his activities,social, political, religious; have to be guided by the ultimate aim of the vision of God. The immediate service of all human beings becomes a neces­sary part of the endeavour, simply because the only way to find God is to see Him in His creation and be one with it. This can only be done by service of all. I am a part and parcel of the whole and I cannot find Him apart from the rest of humanity. JANUARY 21 God is a very hard taskmaster. He is never satisfied with fireworks display. His Mills, although they grind surely and inces­santly grind excruciatingly slow and He is never satisfied with hasty forfeitures of life. It is a sacrifice of the purest that He demands, and so you and I have prayerfully to plod on, live out the life so long as it is vouchsafed to us to live it. JANUARY 22 God keeps an accurate record of all things good and bad. There is no better accountant on earth, JANUARY 23 If God were a capricious person instead of being the changeless, unchangeable living law, He would in sheer indignation wipe out those who in the name of religion deny Him and His Law. JANUARY 24 God tries His votaries through and through, but never beyond endurance. He gives them strength enough to go through the ordeal He prescribes for them. JANUARY 25 God to be God must rule the heart and transform it. He must express Himself in every smallest act of His votary. This can only be done through a definite realiza­tion more real than the five senses can ever produce. JANUARY 26 Where there is realization outside the senses it is infallible. It is proved not by extraneous evidence but in the transformed conduct and character of those who have felt the real presence of God within. Such testimony is to be found in the experiences of an unbroken line of prophets and sages in all countries and climes. To reject this evidence is to deny oneself. JANUARY 27 But it is impossible for us to realize perfect Truth so long as we are imprisoned in this mortal frame. We can only visualize it in our imagination. We cannot, through the instrumentality of this ephemeral body, see face-to-face Truth, which is eternal. That is why in the last resort we must depend on faith. JANUARY 28 No one can attain perfection while he is in the body for the simple reason that the ideal state is impossible so long as one has not completely overcome his ego, and ego cannot be wholly got rid of so long as one is tied down by the shackles of the flesh. JANUARY 29 Our existence as embodied beings is purely momentary; what are a hundred years in eternity? But if we shatter the chains of egotism, and melt into the ocean of humanity, we share its dignity. To feel that we are something is to set up a barrier between God and ourselves; to cease feeling that we are something is to become one with God. JANUARY 30 A drop in the ocean partakes of the greatness of its parent, although it is un-conscious of it. But it is dried up as soon as it enters upon an existence independent of thc ocean, We do not exaggerate when we say that life is a bubble. JANUARY 31 As soon as we become one with the ocean in the shape of God, there is no more rest for us, nor indeed do we need rest any longer. Our very sleep is action. For we sleep with the thought of God in our hearts. This restlessness constitutes true rest. This never-Ceasing agitation holds the key to peace ineffable. This supreme state of total surrender is difficult to describe,but not beyond the bounds of human experience. It has been attained by many dedicated souls, and may be attained by ourselves as well.