Environment & Hinduism
In the Hindu way of life there is no environment; there is only divinity. We have been taught to bow down to anything that sustains and nourishes our life. If you see a water body, a river or a stream or a lake, the first thing you do is, you bow down to the water because who you are just the making of the five elements of earth, fire, water, air and space. So water is seen as the divine, air is seen as the divine, sunlight is seen as the divine, the earth that you walk upon is seen as the divine.
Everyday, whatever you wish to do, the first thing you do is express your reverence to all that is nourishing your life. We are bowing down to an unknown God somewhere, that which nourishes our life. Food, water, air, everything was treated with great care; it was not seen as environment, it was seen as another manifestation of the divine. People who are devout refuse to wear even footwear in India because they feel it is improper to walk upon mother earth with footwear on; that’s their sense of reverence.
So they did not see the world and our surroundings as environment, they never saw it as something that you need to protect, they always saw it as being in the lap of this planet; it is in the lap of all this that you call environment, that you are being nourished. It should be natural for you to be reverential towards that. So this idea of environment, protecting the environment is very, very new. It is because of poverty and a little explosion of population. It is because of the continued state of poverty over the past few centuries.
India was the largest economy just about 230 years ago. It was the richest economy in the world; everybody wanted to go there. That changed because of invasions and whatever else happened. More than two-and-a-half centuries of poverty changed many things. When people are poor, they lose all their sensibilities, their values, everything; that’s what has happened to the country. And the environmental degradation that you see has come from a desperation created out of an explosion of population and poverty, a combination which is deadly and has caused damage in many ways. Taking care of and nurturing and being reverential to all life around us is so much a part of our culture, but unfortunately we have lost that to some extent because of extreme poverty.
— Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, a yogi, is a visionary, humanitarian and a prominent spiritual leader. An author, poet, and
internationally-renowned speaker,
Sadhguru’s wit and piercing logic provoke and widen our perception of life. He can be contacted at www.ishafoundation.org
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