Human happiness, true prosperity and joyful living can only emerge from a life of elegant simplicity, embedded in the arts and crafts.
We have to shift our attitude of ownership of nature to relationship with nature. The moment you change from ownership to relationship, you create a sense of the sacred.
At the moment, for example, maybe ten percent of money in the world is related to goods and services. Ninety percent of money is just moving around the world, chasing money. So, money has become the ruler. And we have become the servant.
Earth is a living entity. And if it’s a living organism, then we have to have a reverence for all life. Food should be local, organic rather than grown with chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides.
Economy without ecology means managing the human nature relationship without knowing the delicate balance between humankind and the natural world.
We are not slaves of the market. Our human life has a greater meaning than making money, making profit, and working for the market or for multinational corporations.
Lead me from death to life, from falsehood to truth; Lead me from despair to hope, from fear to trust; Lead me from hate to love, from war to peace; Let peace fill our heart, our world, our universe.
Multinational corporations and a market economy have transformed human beings into instruments of making money. Human beings should be the end. And money should be the means to an end.
What we call ‘economic growth’ is in fact a growth in waste and a decline in the health of natural habitat.
How much I can learn from a tree! The tree is my church, the tree is my temple, the tree is my mantra, the tree is my poem and my prayer.
In addition to world conflicts, the most challenging problem we face today is hunger, deprivation and social injustice. Because we’re ruled by separate self-interest, we go on accumulating personal wealth, ignoring the well being of the others.
Without the land, the rivers, the oceans, the forests, the sunshine, the minerals and thousands of natural resources we would have no economy whatsoever.
If we go on using the Earth uncaringly and without replenishing it, then we are just greedy consumers.
Of course, we all need to have basic necessities met, such as good health care, good food, good education and good housing. But what is good? Having too much is bad, as having too little is also bad.
The road to climate stability is straight and the solutions simple, and yet scientists, economists, industrialists and politicians are busy making them complicated.
One was a book I read by Mahatma Gandhi. In it was a passage where he said that religion, the pursuing of the inner journey, should not be separated from the pursuing of the outer and social journey, because we are not isolated beings.
If we remove ourselves from the world, we are pretending that we can follow our own individual enlightenment and let the rest of the world go to hell, so to speak.
Happiness is possible only when we are kind to others and contented within.
We human beings are spiritual beings. We have soul. We have spirit. We have mind. We have consciousness. We want fulfillment, we want happiness, we want satisfaction, we want joy. We want imagination. We want art, culture, music.
It became extremely important that we go and see the four heads of the governments, and the message was delivered, with the tea packets, to all these heads.