The world is being poisoned very slowly. The rivers are being polluted, the oceans are being polluted, the lakes are dying. Nature is being destroyed. We are exploiting the earth so much that sooner or later we will not be able to live on it. We are not behaving well with nature.
Our whole approach is wrong, it is destructive. We only take from the earth, and we never give anything back. We only exploit nature. The ecology is broken, the circulation is broken; we are not living in a perfect circle, and nature is a perfect circle: if you take from one hand and you give from another, you don't destroy it. But we are doing it: we only go on taking, and all the resources are being spent. But this poisoning is happening slowly, slowly. You never see it happening because it takes a long time. And then there are politicians who go on gathering more and more weapons -- more atom bombs, more hydrogen bombs, super-hydrogen bombs -- as if man has decided to commit suicide.
The enlightened mystic, Osho, reminds us: “Whole ecology around the earth has been destroyed. Life does not exist as separate islands; not a single man is an island. Everything is interwoven. You have heard these two words, `dependence' and `independence'. Both are unreal; the reality is interdependence. We are all so interdependent on each other -- not only men on other men, not only nations on other nations, but trees and man, animals and trees, birds and the sun, the moon and the oceans... everything is interwoven. And in the past, humanity has never thought that it is a cosmos. They went on thinking in terms of taking everything separately. It was impossible for people in the past to think that man and Nature are connected, that they are interdependent.”
Out of fear comes fight. Out of fight you become a separate individual. Naturally, when you become a separate individual you are in trouble. Then this vast existence you take as the enemy. That is the Western approach: ‘the whole of nature is your enemy’. It needs to be conquered. 'Conquest of nature' -- that's what science has been doing for the past few centuries and it has destroyed all the beauty of life. It has polluted the whole atmosphere. The whole ecology of the earth is disturbed because of such people who have been trying to conquer. It is foolish. It is as if my one hand tries to conquer my whole body -- it is as foolish as that. Man trying to conquer earth, man trying to conquer the sky, man trying to conquer nature is just absurd. And once you try to conquer nature, naturally one day or other you will try to conquer your innermost nature also. That is a corollary to it, a natural corollary to it. First you try to conquer the outer nature, then you start trying to conquer the inner nature, but then you are always in conflict.
In the very effort, man has destroyed ecology, man has destroyed spirituality. Man has destroyed all that is beautiful and now he is on the verge of destroying the whole earth and himself too. This has been the outcome of a certain philosophy of life: the philosophy of conquering.
Somewhere deep down in man there is fear of nature. That fear of nature has created many problems. It has created an ugly civilization, a destructive culture, an anti-nature technology, a science against ecology, a religion which is not in tune with your innermost being. It is time for man to revolt against all this that has happened to humanity in the past.
We watch our physical health and through a set of well-established economic indicators we also worry about the health of our economy. However, by contrast, we hardly care for our spiritual health. We find, in dismay, alienation, violence, exploitation, pollution and many such de-humanizing factors. We urgently need to recognize that Osho has done pioneering work in designing a spiritual index that can show at which rate mankind is making or destroying lives.
The spiritual index is that of Awareness – at all levels of human existence: the material and the spiritual, the sky and the ocean, the body, the thought, and the emotion. Such awareness then can be geared to measuring the social, political, and cultural manifestation of human energy. We in fact need indices of spirituality free from dogma, authority, control, and conquest. Osho’s guidance in these issues is invaluable. By listening to him we can begin to give a new direction for creating what he calls “The New Man”/ “The New World”.
So, the basic challenge is: how to bring about a balanced, harmonious, coherent state of one’s being where both body and mind are healthy; where both mutually contribute to each other’s health and well-being. In other words, the challenge before us is to make our IQ (Intelligence Quotient), our EQ (Emotional Quotient), and our SQ (Spiritual Quotient) in harmony for one to enjoy a life in its fullness and totality.
- Swami Satya Vedant
(Dr. Vasant Joshi)
