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Golden
Age 
Environmental
Protection
Master’s
Words |
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Master’s Words Animals are our brothers and sisters, and it’s very important that we know how to live with them harmoniously and respectfully because they’re there for a reason. You can see that certain birds and animals carry out special jobs in the world. Some, like vultures, even clean up garbage. Of course, they make a mess of it, too! But their job has something to do with the whole environment, the balance of our planetary ecosystem. They help balance nature to keep the atmosphere good and clean. Everything has something to do. For example, trees are here to give oxygen to the planet. Without trees, we’d die. Really, we would. We’d die without trees because we’d have no more oxygen, and there would be less water because there’d be no trees to attract the water and retain the moisture when it’s there. So all things on this planet, including us, are inter-related and are helping each other to make our life here comfortable and livable. If
we don’t know that, then we’re killing ourselves. Every time
we kill a tree or kill an animal, we’re killing a little part
of ourselves. If we have to cut trees, we should replant more.
For example, plant three more. But even that takes time; the
tree has to grow up. So, if you intend to cut trees, you should
plant others beforehand. Because it takes a long time for a
tree to be able to produce good air and absorb the bad air for
us. Bigger, older trees have a greater ability to do this than
younger trees, even though they may appear to be the same size.
Just like when we’re older, we have more abilities and more
knowledge about things, including spiritual wisdom. Our growth
is similar. From
“Honoring All Life Maintains Nature’s Balance”
Q: If you think we’re entering the Golden Age, is the world going to be better? M: Yes. Don’t you feel the world is getting better already? Q: The problem is car exhaust; they need to invent more solutions because I don’t like exhaust. M: That’s right. It’s terrible. When I see car exhaust and inhale it, it makes me feel very bad, too. Every time I have to go into the city for some reason and I get stuck in traffic, the way you do every day, I feel very sorry for you, very sorry. But you see, the world isn’t made up only of us, it’s also made up of a big body of bureaucracy and laws and all kinds of red tape in all kinds of businesses and profit-crazed organizations. Sometimes people invent good things, but they aren’t released immediately because of the different ways of the business world. Our world would have already been much better if the people had accepted many of the inventions of a hundred years ago, not just now. But people are sometimes jealous of each other, even among the great people, scientists, businessmen or entrepreneurs. They become jealous of each other and make problems. Sometimes they destroy an invention in the bud; sometimes they destroy the inventor; sometimes they cover it up; sometimes they distort it and so on. So our world is less than it should be. Yes, the automobile is bad: you’re right. Maybe you should start something. You could write a slogan for the street: “Stop all this smoke; invent something new!” Meanwhile, what should we do? We have a lot of environmental protection groups such as Green Peace and various other “greens.” There are a lot of greens in different countries. But people have to be taught from childhood about the responsibilities we should take upon ourselves. Most people still aren’t educated in this direction, or in any direction. They go to school all right, but they don’t learn this kind of common sense. The important things aren’t taught in school, and that’s a problem. People say, “OK, look! We cut down trees because we need them. Now that we’ve cut down one tree, we’ll plant two more trees.” But the cutting down of so many trees has made for lethal weather; there’s murderous weather now in the U.S. Many people died this summer because of the heat. But they still haven’t heeded the warnings yet; they still cut down the trees and do all kinds of harmful things to the environment such as the chemicals and so on. You can’t stop them all, at least not all at once. It might sound good to plant two trees each time you cut down one tree, but the one tree you just cut down took a hundred years to grow. And the two trees you want to plant will take a hundred more years to be able to balance the good air that the old tree was capable of producing. If the Amazon forest is cut down, even if another forest is planted again, we’ll have to wait a few hundred years for the trees to grow to such a capacity that they can produce oxygen and neutralize the toxins in the air the way the Amazon trees do. It’s not like you can cut down any tree and plant it, and it will be the same. The size may be the same, but the capacity isn’t the same. For example, except for a few geniuses, we all grow wiser with age. Our size stays the same, our face looks the same, but our wisdom isn’t the same and our experience isn’t the same. Similarly, trees need time to be able to neutralize the toxins in the air and produce the balance that we need to survive. So, apart from our spiritual endeavors, we can’t do much. We can’t stop all these greedy industrial business people from cutting down trees and amassing riches for themselves at the cost of ourselves and our children. They think they’re doing good business and that they’re providing a lot of work for other people, but at the same time they’re doing a lot of damage. And it’s much more long-term for this planet because of the waste from cutting down these enormous trees, which are the life-savers of this planet. If we keep cutting like this, our planet might become like Mars very soon. Mars is all dust and gas and toxins and pollution so you might not be able to live. What do you think Mars was? Maybe Mars was like us before until we finished it off. Never
mind: We’ll do the best we can and hope the world will learn.
Share whatever information you can with whomever you know, at
least physically. Don’t cut down too many trees, killing yourself
and your children and your grandchildren. Even if you have a
lot of money now, you can’t buy their lives back later, when
they get skin cancer and become sick or you’re sick or the heat
kills all of us and so on. So you should share whatever you
know. From
“Support Environmental Protection and Rescue Our Planet”
Q: Thank you, Master Ching Hai, for sharing your wisdom with us. I have a question about the escalating world population and its accompanying problem of further environmental abuse and the greater demand for food. Would you like to comment on the escalating world population? Is it world karma? Or is this going to create a certain kind of karma in the future? M: It’s not that we are overpopulated, really. We are just not spread out evenly. People are just condensed in certain areas of the world and do not want to move to another area. That is all. We have many vast areas of wilderness that have not been used, many virgin islands, many vast plateaus that are only green with forests and there’s nothing there. People just like to concentrate in New York, for example, because there’s more fun here.(Laughter) Yes, because if a government is able to create jobs and industry and employment of different kinds in different places, people will go there also to work. They just get condensed in certain places because it’s easier to find employment there, or safety. If the safety, security and employment opportunities presented themselves in those other different places, people would go there also. They would go for security, for their livelihood. That’s very natural. So, it’s not that we should fear overpopulation. We should be more organized to give the people of the world more benefits of employment opportunities, housing and security. Then everywhere will be the same. We will never be overpopulated. And about your question concerning food, you should know better. Because in America, we have so much information concerning how to preserve the world. The vegetarian diet is one of the best ways to preserve the world’s resources, and to feed the whole population of the earth. Because we waste a lot of vegetarian food, energy, electricity, and medicine to raise animals. Whereas it could feed other people directly. And many countries of the third world nations sell their protein-enriched vegetarian food for cheaper prices. But that is not a help to the other world nations’ populations. If we spread out all the food evenly the vegetarian diet will help this, not only for ourselves, not only for the animals, but for the whole world. One of the research magazines has already said that if we eat vegetarian, the world will not be hungry anymore. And also we have to organize. I know a person who can make rice bran into nutritious food and milk, even. And we talked last time about that. He said he spends about three hundred thousand dollars and he can feed six hundred thousand people in Ceylon-the poor, the undernourished, the mothers, and all that. It was fantastic! It’s because of the way we do it in many parts of the world; it’s that we waste the natural resources, and not that we don’t have enough. God wouldn’t put us here to starve. Actually, we starve ourselves. So we have to rethink, reorganize, and that needs the blessing of many countries’ governments. They have to bless us with their absolute honesty, cleanliness and dignity, and the will to serve people instead of serving themselves. If we have this blessing from all the countries’ governments, we’ll have no problem. We have to have good leadership, good economic organization and ruling talents, and honest governments. But that can come about more rapidly when most of these people or all of these people become spiritual. Then they will know the discipline; they will know the precepts; they will know how to be honest and clean; they will know how to use their wisdom. They can think of many things to do and reorganize our lives. Q: That seems to be very difficult because as I see it, much of the environmental abuse today has to do with a growing population’s demand for more living space, for homes, for living the way we in the 20th century know and want to live. Look at the jungles in Brazil, the environmental abuse there, the destruction of the forests there, the rain forests. The land is being defoliated and that results in floods. And these are not unrelated to the problem of overpopulation. M: Yes, everything is related to each other, of course, in this world. And the only solution is to solve it from the root, not the branches. And the root is spiritual stability. Understand? (Applause) So all we have to do is to try to spread the spiritual message, what we know, and keep to the spiritual discipline. That’s what people don’t have. It’s OK to plug yourself into an electric machine and have some lights and some buzzing music and get samadhi. But if you don’t have moral discipline, then you only use the power for bad things sometimes, and you can’t control it. That’s why, in this group, we teach people the precepts first. Precepts are important. We have to know where we go and maneuver our power. If we have power without love, without compassion, without proper understanding of the moral value, then it’s no use. It becomes black magic. That’s where black magic comes from. So, it’s easy to get enlightenment, but it’s hard to keep it. In our path, if you are not truly disciplined and morally equipped, the master will take away some of your power so that you cannot abuse it and do bad things to the society. That’s the difference. Master has control of the master power. I
am very happy with all of your intelligent questions, very intelligent.
People do these things because they are not wise enough, like
abusing the land that you have mentioned, or doing something
just because of their lack of wisdom. So the root is wisdom,
spiritual practice, getting enlightened. From
“A Radical Solution”
Q: If Allah, Buddha or Jesus were alive today, would they be Greenies? A Greenie is someone who is environmentally conscious. M: Partially, perhaps, yes. We should protect the Earth's greenery as much as possible for our own benefit. But we should not become nature worshippers, whereby every tree is worth more than a human being. Trees are for human beings. So in case we need them, we should preserve them as much as our space, time and the population allow. In that case, probably Jesus,
and Allah, whoever, would vote for that. I am also a nature
preserver myself, and all our practitioners are not allowed
to cut trees unnecessarily. But if necessary, we cut them-in
order to build in that space some better institution for other
people. So we cannot always preserve nature without concern
for human comfort. We had better see to the situation: where
we should preserve and when, and how much. From
“Be a Moderate Environmental Preserver”  |
We are Stepping Into the Golden Age Start with Nirvana and End up on Earth Reaching a New Era of Universal Consciousness Journey Through the Universal Network The Communication Method in the Higher World Practicing Makes the World More Civilized The Different Working Systems in the Universe Over-Population is not the Main Cause of Starvation! |
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