The Kingdom of God Is Within You
Category: Books
The Kingdom of God Is Within You Details
Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, along with many others, have referred to the influence that this work, written by Leo Tolstoy, has had on their psyche, and subsequent permanent change in their state of mind. The selected excerpt, from this much larger writing, reveal Tolstoy's philosophy regarding the literal interpretation of Christ's teachings and his fundamental ideas on nonviolent resistance.
Reviews
A few years ago while I was in the process of reading War & Peace (it took me about as long to read it as it did for him to write it) I discovered a book by Tolstoy that I believe deeply informed his writing and offers the reader with the discernment that is necessary to more fully understand what he was trying to accomplish within his fiction. Tolstoy brings the sermon on the mount into a new light of understanding as far as the human mind can grasp it and rejects the teachings of human institutions that contradict it as the inner workings of the forces of darkness that seek to obscure the truth and bring men to into eternal perdition. "To injure another because he has injured us, even with the aim of overcoming evil, is doubling the harm for him and for oneself; it is begetting, or at least setting free and inciting, that evil spirit which we should wish to drive out. Satan can never be driven out by Satan. Error can never be corrected by error, and evil cannot be vanquished by evil. True non-resistance is the only real resistance to evil. It is crushing the serpent's head. It destroys and in the end extirpates the evil feeling." The Kingdom of God Is Within You takes a literal look at the teachings of Christ and what is involved with the process of transforming our hearts and minds to undertake it.