Mohandas Gandhi wrote of nonviolence (Ahimsa), "In its negative form, it means not injuring any living being, whether by body or mind. ... In its positive form Ahimsa means the largest love, the greatest charity." Absolute nonviolence is, of course, an ideal, approachable but never wholly attainable. (We cannot survive without eating things that were once alive; we cannot walk without crushing insects or microorganisms.) The boundlessness of such an ideal makes complacency impossible. Since it is never achieved, the quest never ends. One is never "saved" but always on the way.
    What Gandhi hoped to achieve by nonviolence was what he called Truth. Just as scientific truth is unattainable so long as the observer remains biased, so Gandhi believed that spiritual truth is unattainable so long as we remain attached to selfish interests and desires. Only devotion to the ideal of absolute nonviolence ¾ absolute selflessness ¾ enables us to see the world without the binders and filters of the self ¾ to see things in their Truth.
    Gandhi regarded his life as a series of "experiments with truth," which took the form of limiting desires and living as simply as possible. So, for example, he was a vegetarian, subsisting largely on fruit and nuts, a diet not harmful to animals or even to living plants.
    In economics, Gandhi advocated stability, as opposed to growth. The Earth, he said, produces enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed. But he was no lover of poverty, except for the voluntary poverty of the exceptional truth-seeker. On the contrary, much of his work in India was devoted to the alleviation of involuntary poverty and its attendant sense of futility, through programs of economic self-reliance. But he warned of the dangers of unchecked acquisitiveness, both to the individual spirit and to the environment. "I hold," said Gandhi in 1916,