There comes a time when an individual becomes irresistible and his action becomes all-pervasive in its effect. This comes when he reduces himself to a zero.
— Gandhi
"Very few of us see life as it really is. Most of us see things only as we are, looking at others through our own likes and dislikes, prejudices and prepossessions, desires, interests, and fears. It is this separatist outlook that fragments life for us — person against person, community against community, nation against nation. In order to see life as it is, one undivided whole, we have to shed all attachment to personal profit, power, pleasure, or prestige. Otherwise we cannot help looking at life through our individual conditioning, and we will see the world not as it is, but as conditioned by our desires.
"Through many years of such conditioning, trying again and again to satisfy the desire for personal satisfaction, we have come to believe that this is our real personality. In reality it is a mask which we have merely forgotten how to take off. Beneath the mask is all the glory of our real self: complete fearlessness, unconditioned love, and abiding joy. When Gandhi succeeded in taking off this mask and 'making himself a zero' through many years of living for others rather than himself, he found that what he had eliminated from his personality was only his separateness, his selfishness, his fear. What remained was the love and fearlessness that had been hidden there all the time."
