Yoga is the best form of environmentalism

HH Radhanath Swami speaks on Yoga and Ecology. Transcript below:


It brings to mind a story that took place some years ago. I was sitting in the New Delhi airport at the gate waiting for my flight, minding my own business. I had just given many lectures and sometimes being at an airport you get to rest a little bit as you don't have to talk to people so much. But, just then somebody approached me and said that mister for the federal government of India for environment and forestry was sitting nearby and she wanted to speak to me.




I said I will be happy to speak to her. So, she sat in a nice little plastic seat beside me
and after some very gracious and cordial interactions, the voice raised and she said what are you Yogis and Swamis doing for the environment. The rivers are polluted, the air is polluted, the earth is polluted, the oceans are polluted, its poisoning with toxins the whole human civilization. Animals are becoming extinct due to the way we are exploiting mother nature. And you are sitting in your ashrams and in your  holy place chanting you mantras, meditation and doing yoga asanas. What are you doing for the environment?



I was thinking, I really don't need this.  But I had to say something. I shared my thoughts. If there is a disease in the blood of a person's body, it may have the symptoms of boils. It is important to treat the boils ...  but at the same time, we should address treating the root cause of the problem. Otherwise, you keep curing one boil after another boil after another, but to keep growing again and again and again unless we address the disease in the blood.

What is the root cause of the pollution within in the world? It is pollution in the ecology of the human  heart. People's hearts are polluted by toxic greed and egotism. Greed intoxicates.  The more it gets, the more it needs. It hardens the heart. Justifies cruelty. Induces envy. It divides families. Provokes wars. And greed blinds us about our real self-interest. Unless we address that problem, everything we do is cosmetic. Whatever change we make in the outward world only has sustainability to the degree that these changes are paralleled within our hearts.

Yoga is the science of cleansing the heart and tasting the  joy of living in harmony with God, with other living beings, with nature. I said to this minister that I can assure you that even if you clean every river and every ocean and every grain of ground in the whole sky, if it's not paralleled with the cleaning the values in the human heart, all this pollution will all come back again and again and again. When she heard this, she was very happy and said yes, we should work together.