Sustainability: Is Consciousness the Key?

In this excerpt, yogi, mystic, and visionary, Sadhguru and American actor and environmentalist, Ed Begley, Jr. discuss the human role of sustainability, a vision for recycling, and transforming agricultural systems.

Yogi, mystic and visionary, Sadhguru is a spiritual master with a difference. An arresting blend of profundity and pragmatism, his life and work serves as a reminder that yoga is a contemporary science, vitally relevant to our times.

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Transcript

David Brouwer was a smart man.

He said,

Capitalism is a great idea,

We ought to try it.

By that he meant recognize the value of trees standing,

Of oceans thriving,

Of the many things that we rely on,

The web of life that supports us all.

That has value too and should be figured into the… any economic model.

I think in all this the biggest problem is this idea in human mind that every other life is here to serve us.

That idea needs to go.

This is a religious idea which has gotten into everybody's heads.

I've lived in jungles.

I see reptiles,

Ants,

Grasshoppers,

Bees,

Elephants,

They have a full-fledged life of their own,

Complete life of their own.

And how come we think we are the only life that's worthwhile here?

This is a wrong idea that's gone into human head.

Every other life is here to serve us.

This needs to go.

For our own well-being we can't lose those species.

It's like how many rivets can you lose from an airplane before it ceases to fly.

For our own well-being,

For our own survival,

We need that web of life to live.

If we lose the bees,

The pollinators,

We know that that… what that will do to our food supply.

We've seen what the loss of trees has done around the world.

We need all those many species,

They keep us all aloft,

They keep us all thriving.

Some of the studies… Some of the studies show that if all the worms disappear right now,

All life on the planet will disappear in eighteen months' time.

If all the insects disappear,

In three-and-a-half to four years' time,

All life will disappear.

But if all of us disappear,

The planet will flourish.

So we must know what is the significance of our life with theirs.

All this should be figured into economic models as you wisely did with the rally for rivers.

You went and involved the economic agencies and what have you.

Because when you look at the cost of this home,

For instance,

People normally look at the cost of the home as labor and materials.

That's the cost.

What's the cost of running the home?

The cost of running this home over its long life,

It's built out of steel,

Will be a fraction of what it would be with a normal home.

So the cost of the home,

To look at just the cost of labor and materials,

That's like looking at an iceberg,

Just a piece above the water line.

The piece below the water line is huge.

That's the cost of running the home and there's an economic case to be made for that I think.

Yes,

It should be.

Right now,

The way we are running our homes,

Our commercial establishment,

Our cities,

In my opinion,

Tell me if I'm wrong.

I think it's seventy percent just waste.

With thirty percent,

We could do pretty well.

How about if we try?

Just maybe we have to walk a little more,

We have to do a few more things and we would be much healthier and fitter by doing those things.

We don't have to simply walk on the treadmill,

We could walk on the street.

If people came from another planet,

Could you explain that to them,

Where you get in your car and you drive to the gym and when you get to the gym,

You get in a bicycle.

Could you be able to explain that to somebody?

It's nothing if not amusing.

What vision can you see for what could happen on this continent that is somehow similar to what happened with the rally for rivers?

Is there a vision that you have for what could happen here?

See in comparison if you want to see between India and North America,

Because you said the continent,

Right?

Not the country.

Okay.

The population and land ratio is extremely good here.

So here,

I think right now the most important thing that America should do is,

I was today morning also speaking to someone about this.

See,

For whatever reasons,

America has kind of found a leadership position in the world,

Not just as political and military power.

See today if you go to most parts of the world,

At least in the urban world,

Everywhere,

In India,

In China,

In any part of Asia or Africa,

If you look at people,

You stand on a main street and look at people below their knees,

They're all wearing blue denims,

Fifty percent of the people at least.

So if America wears blue-colored clothes,

Everybody is wearing blue-colored clothes.

If you put a hole in your trousers,

Everybody's putting a hole in the trousers,

Not worn down,

They're putting a hole.

Even a kindergarten child knows this machine runs on oxygen and expels carbon dioxide,

But if you pump carbon dioxide into your bottle and say this is the real thing,

The whole damn world is drinking it,

Okay?

So there is a leadership position.

It doesn't matter what you do,

You do the right thing or the wrong thing,

Somewhere the world is following.

So you must do the right thing now.

This is your responsibility because you have a leadership position.

If you do the right things,

The world will do the same things.

Very easily it can be done.

So one reason I'm spending a certain amount of time in America is,

Right now in America everybody is drinking alcohol,

Whole world is trying to drink alcohol.

See for example in India twenty-five years ago,

Not even six to seven percent of the people consumed alcohol.

Today nearly sixty percent of the people are consuming alcohol in a matter of twenty-five years because they think it is modern,

It is fashionable,

If they don't drink they're left out of life.

And the drugs are also coming in equal proportions.

If America meditates,

The world will meditate.

When are you guys going to do it,

That's all I'm asking.

So ecologically also America needs to do the right things.

Right now one of the biggest concerns is the plastics.

See people are thinking plastic is some kind of an evil.

No,

Plastic is a fantastic material.

It's one of the best things we have produced in all these years of whatever we have done because you can reuse this a thousand times if you wish.

Only problem is right now plastics are of different grades,

All kinds of things,

Everybody is doing their own thing and you cannot recycle them together.

If you recycle them together it becomes downgraded and it just goes waste and then you don't know what to do with it.

If you fix a certain grade of plastic as a compulsory usage,

Nobody in America can use any other plastic than properly recyclable plastic,

Whether you take a Coke bottle or you take a vegetable crate or you take some other package,

Everything is same grade plastic.

If you do it by law,

It's going to cost you a little bit.

But if you do that,

Then everything can be recycled effortlessly.

It is the sorting out which is the biggest problem,

You understand?

You cannot sort it.

It's too complex,

Everybody throws everything,

How to sort it?

A simple thing I'm telling you,

One of the biggest challenges for recycling the pet bottles,

You are… in the world we are using nearly half a trillion pet bottles are produced.

This is nearly one million pet bottles per minute we are producing,

Okay?

The pet means what you're using now for water,

Coca-Cola,

Everything is in that… Participants – Pollyethylene terephthalate.

Sadhguru – Huh?

Participants – Pollyethylene terephthalate.

Sadhguru – Yeah,

It's… yes.

So now,

If everything is one single grade,

Very easily we'll recycle.

This bottle recycling in India is nearly hundred percent.

Sixty-five percent in organized sector,

Fifteen percent in unorganized sector,

Ten percent of the bottles are simply being reused in homes.

Very little is lost because we have manpower to pick it.

But now one of the biggest challenges is the paper label that's on it,

They are not willing to change that.

You just have to print your Coca-Cola directly on the thing.

You cannot separate the paper and the plastic,

This is not allowing us to recycle,

You understand?

In India,

They hire people,

Women and children sitting there and ripping off the papers.

With that paper,

You cannot recycle.

If the paper goes into the recycle,

The plastic gets downgraded.

So like this,

There are very simple problems.

It's just because we don't care it's not happened,

Not because there's no technology,

Not because it's economically impossible for us to do.

We've not cared enough to pay attention to these things.

This is a simple thing,

If all of you here,

If you push for this in your governments,

That America uses only one grade of plastic.

There are six grades of recyclable plastic,

Hundred percent recyclable plastics,

Only one you use.

Believe me,

If this becomes the law everywhere in the world,

One big problem is gone.

Right now they're saying by 2050,

The amount of plastic in the oceans in weight will be equal to the amount of fish in the ocean.

Can you beat that?

What's… what's wrong with us?

It's not a simple problem.

I'll tell you,

The Wellingary Hills,

Our backyard,

Where we are,

Our India center,

Our backyard is 10,

000 square miles of rainforest.

There are elephants,

Tigers and all kinds of wildlife.

There is one pilgrim place where people climb up and go down.

There's only once a year,

Two months,

Lots of pilgrims nearly,

A million pilgrims go.

So they were just throwing plastic all over the place.

Some elephants died,

Lot of deer died.

Then we decided we will stop all the pilgrims at the base of the mountain and give them a cloth bag,

Take away all their plastic bags and give a cloth bag.

A few businesses came and supported us with,

You know,

Whatever they printed their complimentary bags and they gave.

And we went up the mountain with about 6,

000 volunteers and we brought back eighteen tons of plastic,

Just in the form of covers,

Okay?

Just the covers.

These covers float around and unknowingly the animals just eat it and it gets stuck in their esophagus and they die because of this.

So this we stopped by just putting a cloth bag.

What does it cost us?

Nothing,

Okay?

It costs us really nothing.

Just a few handful of small businesses come together and sponsor these bags and it's a done thing.

And this bag is reusable,

They can use it twenty-five times.

It's a cloth bag.

So these are all simple solutions.

It's not some great technology is needed.

Just attention is needed.

Human attention is missing.

What would you say is the best way that we can approach transforming our agricultural system?

See,

There are ways of looking at it as to what is ideal thing to do or what is the small corrections we can do so that we are in a little better place.

These are two ways to look at it.

Because if we talk about the ideal,

People will anyway give it up.

They are not going to make all those changes in their life.

Well,

Ed is growing everything that he needs,

I believe.

To some extent,

Not everybody can do that.

Somebody is living on the twentieth floor.

So one thing is the usage of pesticide and this… I call them freaked out seeds.

Not normal seeds,

They're freaked.

You take out the freaked out seeds and bring… reduce the usage of pesticide and fertilizer.

If not getting rid of it,

At least let there be a law,

In ten years' time you can use only fifty percent,

In twenty years' time you can use only twenty percent.

This must happen.

If you don't do this now,

The worst thing that you're doing is you're taking away the insect population.

If you take away the insect population,

Believe me,

There is nothing you can do on this planet.

It's… it's… they're not small.

They're small in size,

But their role on making of this planet is very,

Very big.

So we've been spraying insecticides from airplanes.

The most criminal thing we have done is this – from airplanes we've just sprayed large scale,

Killing everything.

This is chemical warfare.

This is not agriculture.

All this comes from that fundamental idea which I mentioned earlier,

That we think we are the only life.

Everything else is subservient to us.

We can just mass murder everything and somehow have a con for ourselves.

It's very corny.

Now,

The important thing is,

This is not going to happen out of people's awareness.

I don't believe that.

There must be laws.

Clearly we must set for… From today in five years' time,

Twenty-five percent of the insecticide that you're using per hectare must go down.

In ten years' time,

I'm just saying off the cuff,

The numbers can be arrived at for different crops.

But for different crops at different levels,

We must say it must go down like this and aim at thirty to forty years' time,

There should be no pesticide,

No fertilizer.

Everybody must produce the necessary organic material to grow a crop.

If you don't do this now,

We may not all die,

But we will suffer immensely due to variety of problems in our systems,

Physiological and psychological problems.

Just see the number of problems we're going through.

See,

You take United States as an example,

Considered to be the most affluent country on the planet.

Why does an individual human being seek affluence or a society seeks affluence?

On the first level,

It is a choice of nourishment.

I can eat what I want.

When a man is poor,

He seeks affluence because choice of nourishment.

Once that is taken care of,

It's a choice of lifestyles.

So a society which has an enormous choice of nourishment and lifestyle,

Spends three trillion dollars on its healthcare for three hundred million people.

This is a crime against humanity because to be healthy,

You need chemicals.

To be peaceful,

You need chemicals.

To be joyful,

You need chemicals.

For everything,

You need chemicals.

So if this is not cut down,

Forget about the people who own the back street drugs they're doing,

But what about the mainstream?

Today the pharmaceutical industry in the world is larger than food industry.

Can you beat it?

We take consuming more medicine than food.

What's wrong with us?

In this sixty percent of the consumption,

I believe is in United States.

The wealthiest nation on the planet is not healthy because they don't know what to eat.

Everything they eat,

They've poisoned it themselves.

Somewhere one little farm organic here,

Organic there,

No by law it should be so.

The time is over for that.

We're thinking people will do it consciously and it will happen.

It has to be enforced.

If it's not enforced,

Now it's going to be late because the amount of human suffering we're causing with this is too much.

It's not going to pass like this.

Reviews

Truth is only truth.

Thank you for this essential teaching. We are, as you say, committing crimes against humanity in the drive toward affluence. While humour made it all the more accessible, you challenge all of us to take it very, very seriously. I look forward to the time when a government overrides whatever signature on whatever document or trade agreement that promotes the destruction of the insect or animal population on a mass scale for profit.

Brilliant, motivational. Thought provoking

Share.. share.. share. 🙂🤗🙏

Sadhguru spoke about the key issues that I have been giving voice to for a long time; too many greedy humans consuming all resources as if we are the only living organisms that matter, plastic, pesticides and I'll add herbacides. So amazing to hear this! He has the ability to get this word out in a non threatening way. Excellent!

Very profound talk, with Sadguru in his very best. Really got more insight into some of the issues of our days, mixed with the right sustainable approach we all need to adopt. Thank you for sharing <3

Insightful as always

Well said. I wish everyone thought the way he does. We need to take better care of our planet

It is not awareness that helps... it is the action... please eat healthy and encourage others to do the same ❤️ this is an amazing talk that I think anyone can benefit from

Beautiful 🙏 could not agree more.. Eat to LIVE, don't live to EAT. Nourish your mind with veggies and fruits... Reaffirm your wholesome goodness by appreciating all beings.. Go veg 💫🍄😘

I will share this great information with my friends and family. Thank you so much!

I wish our law makers would listen to this and apply his principals.

I will follow you to the end with all do respect I have learned so much love from you and very greatfull namaste 🙏

Spread the word ~ we need to spread awareness and start making much needed changes as a whole ~

Interesting conversation 🌿🌾 thank you

This is so true, how I would love to proclaim from the hilltops! Depressing, one reason I don't want children, to bring them into a life of suffering! :-(

It is sad that the U.S. doesn't take hold of helping the earth and the people. But as an individual we can do our part!

A powerful message. ♥️🙏