The cost to stop Climate Devastation

Aum Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya

So, I thought tonight I will speak on the cost to halt, maybe that’s a bit strong, but to halt climate devastation. So, we’ve been seeing in the news, particularly in the last couple of months, I mean everywhere there’s just all these reports of extraordinary levels of heat in the northern hemisphere, devastating fires, massive floods (we’ve been getting our share down here, unparalleled almost) and the damage that’s been done. And everybody’s sort of freaking out and going like, well, it’s happening because of this great change in the climate, and there’s an urgent need to do something about it.

The Vedas, since very ancient times, proposed that man (meaning human) is quite capable of influencing or affecting climate. And in their great wisdom, they said that the ultimate cause of any great climatic devastation was going to be, not because of fossil fuels, but because of the impiousness of people. And that’s just like whoa! That’s a radical idea. Impiousness of people is going to cause a great deal of damage and harm? But—there is an American environmental lawyer and advocate. His name is Gus Speth, and he was formerly the dean of the Yale School of Environmental Studies and Forestry, and he was also an administrator of the United Nations Development Program. So you would think with somebody with such pedigree is going to know a few things, at least you would assume so.

And he somewhat recently wrote the following: He said,

“I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”

What do you think? Far out or what? I mean this is like, okay, this is somebody that’s dedicated to their life to this pursuit. And what people are saying are the problems, he says, are actually not the problems. The problems have to do with people and their value systems and character.

“Selfishness.” I mean, if we look at that word, it means to be self-focused. Do you notice it’s really like the word “selfie” or no? Exactly the same root. The selfie is, by its very nature, an expression of self-centredness. And he’s saying that this is a serious problem that is underlying what is going on with the climate and the environment.

The second thing he says is greed, this endless appetite for more. This is epitomized by scrolling. How about that? [Mimes scrolling] Gimme more, gimme, gimme. There’s got to be something better. There has to be more. I can get a bigger rush. I just need to dig deeper, do more of it, a twist of lemon, a little shot of Tabasco, maybe, spice up our life. The very saying, “Variety is the spice of life,” is founded on this idea.

But we have, over the past 100 years, human society has been completely transformed in a way that we did not see for thousands of years of human existence. There was a conscious effort in the 1920s to alter the world permanently, to make it so—I’ve got a little quote here. There was a famous banker, Paul Mazur, from Lehman Brothers. In about 1922-23, he wrote:

“We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

So, this was the vision that the leaders, the industrial might, the bankers, the politicians who fell into line, all began to aggressively promote. The founding principle was greed.

The greatest economist of that era, Lord Keynes, described that envy and greed are the biggest potential drivers for a growth economy, and therefore they need to be cultivated in people. People need to be greedy for more and envious of what others have, and desire to have that too, and that’s the way we’re going to get a fantastically growing economy that doesn’t go through cyclic booms and busts. Well, that hasn’t worked out very well. We’ve got the booms and busts still. Maybe not as bad as the previous century, but it’s kind of like at what cost? Well, at the cost of everybody becoming greedy. And then you have these environmental scientists saying this is exactly what the problem is, this is why there are climate and ecological issues is because of this cultivation of just endless desire to have more and to consume more.

Up until about 60, 70 years ago, a person that was greedy was looked upon as being someone that you avoid. You shun them. It’s like, “Creepy. Let’s get away from that dude.” Now, it’s the hallmark. It’s really what it’s all about. And we don’t even see that we have this problem.

And then he states the other problem is apathy, selfishness, greed, and apathy. Apathy is just not giving a s-h-i-t, not giv’n it, just being so self-centred. I don’t care what impact my life has on anybody around me. It’s all about me and how I feel right now. This mentality is not natural and normal. It is something that has been learned and acquired. When a person is apathetic then they just, they don’t care, as long as their little interests are taken care of. In Vedic teachings, this is considered very ignorant. It is the influence, a dark influence of ignorance. That’s called tama guna, the quality of ignorance or darkness.

And so if we look at these things, and we look at this person’s statements, it’s actually quite shocking. Or no? I find it terribly shocking and sad that this is the state of things. The problems that we have as a society and as individuals are pretty much—I mean living in this world, yeah there’s going to be lots of challenges and lots of difficulties, that’s normal. But a lot of the unhappiness—I mean, we’re in an era where there is a crisis of happiness, where there is rates of depression that have never been seen before. And it’s just like yeah! I mean before there were famines, where there were problems with lack of rain or diseases, and people didn’t have supermarkets, and if you ran out of food, and then you had to try and get by for another year before you could get a crop in, and as a result, yeah lots of people die. There were massive, been massive wars, massive amounts of suffering and difficulty, but you didn’t have this ocean of depression that permeates the world, in spite of the difficulty.

So, the fundamental problem is a spiritual problem. If your life is fundamentally unhappy, it is due to a spiritual problem. More material experience, and things, that’s not going to change that. Being more greedy, more selfish—No, that’s not going to change that. That’s going to contribute to the problem. And then being so unmotivated that you cannot even—you don’t even want to change your own life. It’s just too much. Just give me another game to play, another TV show, another influencer to follow.

It’s like, oh my God, this whole influencer thing. It’s just like, you’ve got to be joking, that you’re going to follow some absolute idiots who have—are so empty inside and have nothing to actually offer the world, and everybody’s going to be following them every day. And it’s just like, what’s wrong?

So, my encouragement is that we all seek this spiritual solution. The foundation of the spiritual solution is the cultivation of the understanding that I am an eternal spiritual being. I am residing temporarily within this body. This body is not me.My mind and all the desires and all the emotions is not me.  I don’t have to let my body and mind and all the desires and everything be the driver. I need to decide.

Apathy is a symptom of a lack of clear purpose in life. The need to have a higher purpose, to live purposefully, to make decisions, and to engage in activity that produces good outcomes is essential.

People have become so disconnected from this monumentally powerful truth, that there is no free ride. You pay for everything. You have—there is a price for everything. And so, you make choices about how you’re going to live and what you’re going to value, there will be a consequence. If you have chosen well, the consequence is happiness and peacefulness, beauty. If you choose badly, the consequence is unhappiness, depressiveness, lack of fulfillment, lack of purpose.

You each individually have the power to change your lives. All you must do is make these choices. Cultivate a spiritual understanding of who we all are, and this will help us develop a higher sense of purpose and a greater value to the life that we are living. And the foundation, of course, for doing that, is not just cultivating and understanding, but to engage in this process of meditation; this immersion in transcendence clears away the cobwebs and the fog and gives us clarity of vision, but it is also spiritual nutrition. It is food for the soul. It will begin to satisfy this emptiness and these cravings that we have to—it will begin to fill up this empty space. And increasingly it will awaken in us the experience of great happiness and spiritual love.

Okay? Is that all right?  So let me invite you.  I’ll chant the mantra Aum Hari Aum. This spiritual sound Aum is the sound representation of the highest truth of God, of the ultimate spiritual reality, of the absolute truth, however, you want to describe it. Hari means the one who removes the great burden of our heart. And so when we quite prayerfully and meditatively absorb our self in this heartfelt chanting, then we begin to experience the actual—we begin to taste even a small drop of this great ocean of spiritual happiness that is actually available to us.