We Who are Capable of Love: An Eye for the Goodness in Each Human Being
 The past few days I have been meditating on a passage from Chapter 12 of the Bhagavad Gita, the book Gandhi called "his mother." Here's the verse:
That one I love who is incapable of ill-will
and returns love for hatred.
Living beyond the reach of I and mine,
pleasure and pain, full of mercy,
contented, self-controlled, firm in faith,
with all their heart and all their mind given to me,
with such as these, I am in love.
Could it be that these words are meant to describe "that one I love" inside us all? That person capable of so much good? When we keep our eyes on that person in everyone, including ourselves, the world takes on a different quality when something goes wrong: "There you go again" is replaced with "Hmm, that's so unlike the real you. Let's work it out."
The truth that each one of us is deeply good, even if that goodness is covered by other conditioning, gives me hope. It thrills me to no end to think that the words in the verse above had sunk deeply into Gandhi's consciousness and guided his actions. Keeping his eyes on that person, even in his opponents, was his secret—and the idea behind Satyagraha.
May we too fall in love with that person in all of us,
Stephanie Van Hook, Executive Director
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