This critical pillar of Gandhi’s system holds out the vision of a unity-in-diversity order in which unity is recognized and cherished at the ‘heart’ level while diversity is equally cherished on the surface, in differences of race, gender, worldview, and even of status, wealth, and power (one of the criteria that differentiates the spiritually-based system of principled nonviolence from more politically grounded approaches to justice that attempt to reach unity by the leveling of such surface differences). Practically speaking, one achieves heart unity with, or at least towards another when one spontaneously wishes fulfillment and happiness to the other despite, or indeed partly because of, any surface differences. Underlying this state of mind is the belief that there is in fact a solution to all problems that meets the real needs (if not the conditioned wants) of all parties; or in Martin Luther King’s important insight,

“I cannot be what I ought to be unless you are what you ought to be, and you cannot be what you ought to be unless I am what I ought to be.”

In the ‘wheel of nonviolence’ model developed by Michael Nagler, heart unity is the direct antidote to racism, but it is an underlying attitude for all Satyagraha.