Meditations on Climate Change

During my recent conference on Inner Dimensions of Climate Change, organized by The Global Peace Initiatives of Women, I had the wonderful opportunity to spend time with Sraddhalu Ranade from the Aurobindo Ashram. He is a scientist, educationist and scholar. 

In my frequent travels across the country, once in a blue moon, I come across few super-awesome souls whose presence draws you magnetically, whose words of wisdom come out with such a clarity that it opens up a fount of creative energy from within.

It was an ineffable experience interacting with him as he shared his wonderful insights on a plethora of topics ranging from Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Evolution, Climate Change, Food Crisis and lots more. Here is the edited transcript of his inaugural address to the  delegates.

In the theme that we have set ourselves for exploration, Inner Dimensions of Climate Change, we are looking at a large perspective. So many issues are involved. It is useful to not get carried away by the details of the issue, but rather go down into the essence of the conflict and then find the solution. And the essence is not in the form of the problem, but in its deeper psychological roots. You cannot solve the problem unless you have addressed its root cause, which is not in its form. When we enter the domain of the psychological causes, we also turn inward. We realize that there is something in the way we think, the way we feel, which impacts the experiences that we have, subjectively; but also  impacts the outcome of our efforts, objectively.

 And when we begin to see a kind of resonance from the inner to the outer, where our inner state is reflected in the outer form, an unfoldment of things manifests, and outer conditions are reflected in the way it affects our inner state. And then we realize that, sometimes, when we put out an energy which comes from a source of chaos and disharmony, it provokes chaos and disharmony outside, and we live in the middle of that growing chaos and disharmony, which provokes greater chaos and disharmony, and then we throw out more, take in more, we throw out more, and very quickly, before we realize  it, we have gone into the brink of a catastrophe of such huge proportion that it seems the survival of humanity itself is in question. If we go on as we are today, without doubt, we will not survive. Because we are destroying ourselves, and as we destroy those things from which we live and to which we flow, the whole vicious cycle is aggrandizing more and more.

When we see nature with those grains that have been taught by the human intellect to kill themselves, popularly known as the suicide gene, we are sowing into nature, energy of suicide and self-destruction and that energy returns to us eventually. And the mind which creates and throws it out is perverted. And this perversion returns to the society and corrupts within. And there is a whole cycle going on. You can feel it in the pain and suffering in your heart and mind. You see, perhaps, in the pain and suffering of animals and trees around. But if you have been taught by that very same perversion to remain insular and insensitive, when you see that pain, you don't even notice it . Unfortunately large parts of humanity  have been pushed into this kind of insularity and all of this, comes from one source: the state of our mind, the way we look at universe and ourselves. Our thoughts, feelings and actions have emerged from them.

If you look back at the last ten thousand years, there was sustained development; economic,  technological and scientific. It was cyclical, perhaps, but nowhere on earth did we destroy nature around us as we have destroyed nature over the last two hundred years.  For ten thousand years we had sustained social development which proves that it is possible. The perversion in the last two hundred years has grown so rapidly and wherever it has touched, it has wiped clean entire culture and forests, destroying down to the barren land.  We have pushed poison into the well of Earth in which water has seeped in for millions of years. This will not just impact our lives, but for the next ten thousand years. All those generations who will be born defective by the  poison we put in, will look back and say "What were they doing? Have they gone mad?" Perhaps, this culture of the world has gone mad.

<To be continued>