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Swāmījī's instruction for today was to speak about the environment and what we are doing here in Jhadan. It is about the environment, about our mother, whom we call Earth. It is not so far back—just a few million years ago—when people were living on this planet in heaven. God, who made this planet, prepared everything for the beautiful living of humans. He prepared a beautiful, beautiful home for us. The plants were there to give shade, to give colors and fragrance. The animals were there to make the place more beautiful and more joyful. So, humans were living in a beautiful place called Mother Earth. But over time, they started to get attached to what God had prepared for them. Attachment was coming slowly, slowly, like a fog slowly coming to a valley. We don't even notice that the fog is slowly coming, that the sun is shining a little less. So, through time, attachment developed. As a consequence of that attachment came greed—because if I like it, I want to have more—and the fear of losing it. And, of course, anger to protect it. Slowly, slowly, through time, humans started to develop qualities which were not positive. Cities developed; they became bigger and bigger. More cities were there, and wars took place. So that home, which was for everybody to enjoy and to live a joyful and happy life, was slowly, slowly transformed through time because of the ignorance of the people who lived there, and because of attachment and all that. Attachment brought with it that it became less and less beautiful, with less and less animals, less and less trees, and less and less flowers growing freely in the forest. As time was passing, and the yugas were passing, civilizations were coming, growing, and slowly dying and disappearing. They were coming, growing, dying, and disappearing. Now we are in Kali Yuga, the iron age of this planet. The good thing is that we didn't make the Kali Yuga; Kali Yuga made us. We came to Kali Yuga because time is there, so that we experience life on this planet in Kali Yuga. What does it mean to live in Kali Yuga, in the Iron Age? It is the time when the forests are not plentiful anymore, when the rivers are not clean anymore, when the air is not breathable anymore. Slowly, slowly, the forests were disappearing, and the deserts were appearing. But now one beautiful thing is happening: we are coming from Kali Yuga into the so-called golden age of it. So, things start to change for the better. How? When we want to clean some old room, first we have to put the light in to see what is inside. Then we can decide what to do with what is inside, and how to start the process of cleaning that room and changing it into something better. You see, in this area where we are sitting now, maybe 100 or 150 years back, there were big jungles. Inside there were wild animals. Villagers were afraid to go to the jungle because of not tigers, but cheetahs, panthers, and so on. A lot of life was there. But the population was growing, and people needed more and more land. So they started to burn the jungles and change that land into agricultural land. It took a lot of effort. In the beginning, they had one season per year, meaning after the rain, the rainy season, after the monsoon, they started to plant the crops. So they were very much dependent on the weather, on the monsoon. It is not far back that India opened its main door to international business, to the world. Money started to pour into this beautiful country. And what happened? Standards started to grow. New seeds came, artificial fertilizers came, and some possibility of credit came. So what happened? People started to drill the tubewells, and they started to have double khet, as they call this. So they had two times per year they were seeding, and two times per year they were harvesting. Good for people, but what for nature? You see, thousands and thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years took for the rainy water to slowly, slowly fill underground voids, making huge underground lakes and rivers where the water was stored. That water, we started, or people started to pump up for their agricultural needs. I like to say we are pumping the blood of Mother Earth. We have enough rain. We have just to utilize it. Of course, rain is not there. We are not trees. Trees have that magic power to keep the underground water on the surface and to attract the clouds to drop the rain. No jungle, no forest, no rain. No rain, trees are getting less and less water, less and less chance to survive, and slowly, slowly they are dying. They are replaced by more and more hardy sorts which can survive in drier areas, and so on and so on. So this area, which was jungle, which was forest, becomes a half-desert. It is not a complete desert because there is still some greenery, but the desert, the real desert, I think it's called the Thar Desert, is not far from here. It's very near, a few tens of kilometers, and we are in the desert areas. If the way of life does not change, very soon here we'll have pure sand, pure desert. So what to do? Swāmījī came. Swāmījī came to Europe to bring the blessings and the knowledge, the knowledge of the Indian saints, of Indian ṛṣis and munis, to the West. You see, you know very well that in the West, people are very thinkable, meaning they are somehow still living with nature. Because, over time, people went further and further away from nature. They started to change nature as per their need and as per their size. So we humans try to change whatever God made for us, for our need now in this moment. And we know that this need and these ideas are changing all the time. There is one city I was at one year back, or two years back; I was there just to go and see because it's called a miracle, an engineering miracle. I think you know about which city I'm talking: Dubai. Dubai, the city where 20% of all building cranes in the world were working at the time. The city where flats and houses are sold a few times and bought a few times before they are even built. Naturally, as an engineer, for me it was very interesting to go to see what that is. What is that city where, on the land, they are able to make sea lakes with salty water, and in the sea, they are able to make islands of sand? What I saw was disaster. The city is so far from nature that it has no chance to survive. We are going to huge cities, which they call malls. We were a few friends, and we were coming out with a headache. We tried to go to that, or we went to that Burj Dubai, one of the costliest hotels in the world, for a cup of coffee. It cost us 100 euros for one cup of coffee. It's huge money, but it was so empty that when we were allowed to go out, we were so happy, like we were released from jail, because it was empty—sitting on the table and drinking this and that, anything, empty. A city which is so big and so huge, and all these buildings made of glass, steel, and plastic, are empty. You don't see people on the roads, but you see cars, buses, trains, all air-conditioned, and from there people go into air-conditioned offices and air-conditioned houses. So, surely, for me, Dubai is not the way to the future. But yes, I found the way to the future, and this is here, in this ashram, in Jadan. When Swāmījī came to Jadan 25 years back, he said, "Here we will build an ashram." We looked at the land: a thorny bush called Aṅgrejī Babul in India, no trees, just a few bushes. We were thinking, how is this possible? You see, the Gurudev is choosing—they say the master, the guru, chooses the worst possible place to build an ashram. Carefully, carefully choosing. Why? So that we disciples have more time to grow up through the hard work in that āśram. Āśram means school. So we are in an educational center. That's why the name of our ashram is Śrī Viśvadīp Gurukul Swāmī Mahiśvarānanda Āśram Education and Research Center. What we are researching and what we are educating: we are educating our mind and we are researching the way towards enlightenment, towards self-realization. No trees, no water, once per year rain, sometimes more, sometimes less. It took us two years to cut all this poisonous bush. We heard some Mahārājas, meaning some kings, were planting it, or actually he bought the seeds from Australia, and they were throwing the seeds from the air. Out of the seeds, the poisonous bush was growing up. Two years, and then we started slowly, slowly to plant. We planted more than 100,000 trees—much more, because many died. The environment was not very supportive, let us say. Huge heat and hot winds in the April-May months, and then a few drops of rain, which we called monsoon, because in Rajasthan the monsoon is not very, how to say, rich. Just a few hours of rain per day will already bring a kind of flood. And, of course, cold winters. But with Gurujī's blessings, under his guidance, we were insistent, we were persistent. Day by day, we planted the trees and watered them. At the same time, we were thinking: what to do so that we don't need to pump water from the underground resources, but that we can catch the rain? Because rain, rainy water is the best. It's far, far the best water. A lot of energy is there. It's pure. There are no minerals. It's not hard water; it's soft water, so it's the best for the plants. We know very well, those who are living here: when we water the trees or plants, gardens, the plants are surviving, somehow they are surviving. But when once the rain falls, the rain comes, they are blossoming; everything blossoms. Because in that rainy water, there is prāṇa, there is a lot of prāṇa, life energy. So Gurujī decided to make the ashram, to divide the ashram into fields. We made a kind of raster. We divided the ashram into fields, and between the fields we built kind of small dams, or let's say small nasib dams. On that, we planted the trees. Why? There were two reasons. One reason was that the earth here is very shallow. It is clayey earth, which means a lot of clay is inside. Secondly, it is very thin, can be a few centimeters thick, and maximum we found somewhere 10, maybe 15 centimeters in some places. In that shallow, clayey earth, which when it's dry is hard like a rock, and when it's soft, you will lose your shoes inside because it will simply stick and will not come out, and you will have to pull them out, if you find, of course, the shoes. And down is rock, so the roots cannot penetrate into the rock. So we made those small dams so that the trees had a better grip, so that the roots had a better grip. And, of course, at the same time, that earth was keeping the moisture. That was one reason. The second reason was that with the barriers of the trees surrounding every field, we protected the earth from the hot winds, which were drying the earth and blowing the very fine soil away. And, of course, also preventing that fine soil is not washed away by the rainwater when rain comes. It gave results. In a few years, let us say 20-plus years—which is nothing compared to how time is going on, so 20 years is just nothing—the trees are growing by themselves, so we do not need to plant trees anymore. But of course, we are planting the so-called autochthonous trees, those which have their home in this part of the world. We are not importing trees from other parts of India or from abroad. We are checking first which trees are growing. And believe me, the trees growing in this part of the world, in Rajasthan, are very, very good trees. They are so rich in everything. Neem is one of the most healthy trees in the world. Then we have the pīpal, the holy tree. Then we have the bīr, again, a great, great tree. The cedar, and so on and so on. There are many, many. All these trees give not only shade, protection, and a home for animals, but they also give food to us, to people living here. There are so many good foods we can get from the trees. Eating them, we can eat them, and they are very, very healthy. Why is it important that we eat healthy food? Because we humans become so clever that we destroy everything that comes into our hands. What happened with us humans, I cannot understand. We had beautiful rivers. What have we done? We build factories near the rivers, we use chemicals, artificial fertilizers, and all this is washed into the rivers. Poisons with which we treat different materials are washed into the rivers. So the rivers become poisonous. The animals, the fishes, are dying; they are not there anymore. Oceans: we are emptying oceans. How far will we do that? Oceans: without the oceans there is no life. Without the rivers, what would we drink? The poisoning food: we are poisoning our own food. When we eat bread, we are most probably not aware that in the bread there are many, many, many different kinds of poisons. About 20 different kinds of poisons we put in the bread, and then we eat that bread happily, not knowing that we are poisoning ourselves. The result is visible everywhere. When I came to India 25 years back, in 1991, I was so surprised because the people living in this area were so healthy. In winter, we are walking in jackets, thick socks, boots, and they were wearing the same dress as in summer. Just they had a thin shawl over it, and we were freezing, and they were not. Seeing what they were eating: just a few chapatis and a little bit of vegetable all day, what they were bringing by themselves, and they were healthy and happy. They were coming to work singing, and they were going from work singing. They were happy. And then development came. Development? What happened? There are not enough hospitals here in India to treat all the people searching for their help. They are not, and they are building them every day—hundreds, hundreds... thousands of hospitals per year are built in India, and there are two left. So, what is development? Is a bigger ticket wallet or a bigger bank account development? I'm not sure. Maybe it could be, if that money which is there, installed, would be used in a good way. The majority of us are using it in the best possible way we know. But of course, we know that just a small part of what exists in the world is given to the majority of us, and the bigger part is somewhere lost for us, for the world. So, the world is going in a very funny direction. The species, the animals: what is the difference between humans and animals? Yes, there is a huge difference in the level of consciousness. We have much higher consciousness than animals. But there is consciousness too, so there are living beings as we are. As per yoga, we were living as animals, we were living as plants, we were living as a rock, because there is a conscience. So who gives us the right to destroy those living beings, those souls, those ātmās who are coming into the world of animals and the world of plants, who give us life? We got a very nice world, and we are destroying that world, and that is not right. So here in the ashram, Gurudev Viśwa Gurujī is giving the world and all of us an example of how we can turn the boat from destruction towards construction, how to rebuild even those areas, those places of the world which are already heavily damaged. We divided the ashram into these fields. What happened? When the rain comes, the water enters the ashram through the entrances—openings through which rainwater can enter; we lack factors. It is on a very slight slope, so the water slowly, slowly travels on the surface. We made openings, or let's say entrances, to those fields. When the water enters the field, fills the water, then flows over the overflow to the next field, and next, and next, and next, and so on, until it comes to the lake which we built. It is kind of a pond, a huge pond, which is called Svāmī Madhvānand Sarovar. Sarovar means lake, and Svāmī Madhvānand, we know this as our holy Gurujī. Let us call it for short Gurujī's lake. Gurujī's lake was built over three seasons. It took, let us say, about 2002-2003, and we blasted that rock, and we were digging and digging and... made a beautiful lake which is sealed with different layers. First, we leveled the soil, then we put it to the side. We put the plasters, concrete, and on the floor we put just the sand, or let's say, better to say, the clay, which is tight so water cannot penetrate through it. Then we put on that film—it's called low-density polymer film of 1,000 microns, which means one millimeter. Again, we protected that film with new layers of cement and stone. So somehow we got a sealed lake in which we collect water for our ashram needs: watering the trees, watering the gardens, for our sanitary water which we need for living, and for drinking water. And, of course, it remains also that we can help the villages around with our water, which is clean. It is soft water because this is rainwater which flows on the surface. When the season is rich, so we have a lot of rain, the surplus of water flows through the outlet of this big lake, Gurujī's lake, into the next lake. It is called Mānasarovar. So next, the lake, which collects a huge amount of water—about 200,000 cubic meters of water—is made only to refill underground water. So we removed the black soil, meaning clay, till the rock, so when the water reaches the rock, of course, it is easier and quicker for it to penetrate into the deeper layers of the soil. We found the results. The results are there: the water in the surrounding areas becomes more sweet. The water table, which was slowly, slowly dropping up to a hundred meters in depth, reached this year one meter below the surface level. In this year, meaning now we are in November, we have the underground water about one meter below the level of the earth, and this is a huge, huge improvement. Huge. It is such great data. It's amazing. Can you imagine trees, and you have the underground water 100 meters deep? There is no tree which has such deep roots, so what would happen? Slowly, all these trees we planted would die. But through the efforts—and I may say, or I must say, it's very important—through the blessings of all our paramparā and Gurudev, the water table went up. And this is great. What happened as a result of that? We have our Swāmī Nirañjan Purī here. He is the botanist and biologist, and he loves birds and animals, as all of us do. So he's observing how many birds are coming and how many other animals are coming. This ashram is slowly, slowly becoming a jungle, a small diamond, a small diamond in this area. Believe me, people very soon will start to come and see how the trees are affecting the life of those living there. When it's very hot, we just go to walk through our alleys of trees, and we immediately see that the air is less hot and is more humid. It's nicer to walk there than to be in other parts of the ashram. So the animals start to come. I think we have 60 different kinds of birds already coming to the ashram. Can you imagine? This small, small spot of the earth, which is so small, 60 different kinds of birds came here and are living here. And other animals: rabbits, there are so many—I will not name them. There are many, many, many. And you see, what we found is that the bees are coming. Of course, we are not always happy because we have to work. Construction work is going on, and when bees come on that slab where we are working above, and sometimes they are not happy with us, so we learn how it is. Good to run, so we are running, and these are also running or flying behind us and giving us their śivāts. But that's a part of life. So hundreds of hives: bees are making hundreds of hives every year here. Of course, they're coming, going, coming, going, because bees are moving. But what we found is that many are dying. Many are dying. We were researching why. Why are they dying? We are doing no harm to them. We found that the neighbors are using a different kind of herbicide, the... They call the medicine the "why" medicine. So, medicine for whom? This is poisonous. Those poisons, those herbicides which are used, are killing the bees. Research is made that without bees there would be no life on this planet, because bees are a major source of moving, or let's say moving the pollen so that trees and plants can grow. I really hope that the government of India, the government of Rajasthan, and officials or officers of this district, Pālī, will pay attention to what is going on here. It's not just some foreigners living here and studying yoga who are residing here. No, we are giving an example of how it's possible to make out of the desert that heaven which we had once on this planet, not so far back. It's possible to make. Nature is very, very merciful. It is forgiving our misdeeds. It is forgiving our stupidity, what we are doing. It is forgiving our greed, and it needs just a little bit, and it will start to recover. This is happening here in Jādanaśāma. We are recovering, or we are showing the people of this area that it is possible to restore the jungle. It's possible to live in harmony with nature, and that harmony will give us a chance to survive. Because humans are part of nature, and without nature, we have no chance to survive. Nature has answers for all our needs. Whatever we are researching, science has come so far in recent years—so far, it's unbelievable. But that science which is made through research beside nature, or let's say how to conquer nature, can be very easily transferred into the science of how to live with nature and how to benefit from all those answers and patterns which are in nature. We don't need to find new medicines. All medicines are in nature. Not only in Ayurveda, the great science of India, but everywhere: every tree, every plant is good for something. We should just allow these trees and plants to live without being poisoned. It is very easy to control pests. We should just think of our monocultures. Is it really necessary that we are growing such huge fields of monocultures, only wheat, kilometers and kilometers far? Or we can mix this wheat with something else and bring some trees nearby, which will protect all plants against any pests. In history, there are many, many examples of how people were able to live in harmony with nature. We are nature, we humans. We are not something that is beyond or beside nature. We are nature, and we are living in nature. We should live with all other living beings. As Francis said, "Brother Sun, Sister Moon, birds, animals, all are our sisters and brothers." They are not something separate from us, and we are not separate from them. But we have to think a little bit. If I go a little bit into another field, you see, if we are talking about spirituality, the West is a desert, and India is—we can call it Kashmir, or Switzerland, or Slovenia if you want, a small country no one knows the name of—meaning rich in nature, rich in water, forests, trees. So Europe is a desert. How? A spiritual desert. And India is rich in spirituality. When we came here to India, we learned about spirituality, about yoga, true yoga. When we were following our master again to this beautiful land, spiritually beautiful land, we came to this Kashmir, as they call Switzerland, Indian Switzerland. When I see this Jadan ashram, which was growing from the desert to a beautiful green island in the middle of this half-desert of Rajasthan, similar things are happening with us. You know how we were when we met Swāmījī. We were desert. Were we? Yes, we were desert. Through the years of hard work of our master and ourselves, we are slowly, slowly planting the seeds of love, understanding, and tolerance. And we are slowly, slowly rooting out the aṅgrejī babul, which means the English tree. Aṅgrejī babul means anger, greed, jealousy from our inner phenomenon. So our land, our ashram, human ashram, is slowly transforming, through the grace of the Master, through his Guru Kṛpā, from a desert into something very, very beautiful. It is very rightly said: we are building an ashram, and the ashram is building us. Through the building, through the efforts to make out of this area in Rajasthan—when we are talking about that, we are talking also about all ashrams around the world—so through those efforts and through the blessings and guidance of Viśwa Gurujī, we are transferring ourselves into that Kashmir, into that Switzerland. How? Spiritually. So from people suffering, stuck in life, in māyā, we are slowly, slowly coming towards self-realization. For that, we have to give all our thanks and admiration to our Master, because without His guidance, without His tremendous efforts—all those who are living closer to the Master, you know what it means to be with Him: the work, hard, hard work. Work so hard that none of us can manage it for a long time. But the Master, for 40 years, living and traveling through the world, giving the knowledge, giving the blessings, and taking our karmas, which we cannot bear, taking them on himself. We say that we are doing seva in this ashram. If there is somebody who is doing seva, meaning service to humanity, yes, it is our master, Viśva Guru Mahāmadhar Śāh Mahiśwanandajī, and we are his disciples. We should be very proud of that. Very, very proud. And his seva to the world and to us is making our inner desert into Kashmir or into Switzerland. With this, I would slowly finish, and let us finish with the greeting of our masters' paramparā: Śijalākpūrījī, Bhagavāne kī jaya. Śrī Devpurījī Bhagavāne Kī Jaya, Śrī Dīp Nārem Bhagavāne Kī Jaya, Dharma Samrāṭ Paramahaṁsa, Hindu Dharma Samrāṭ Svāmī Madhavakrishna Bhagavāne Kī Jaya. Viśva Guru Mahāmaḍāśvar Paramahaṁsa Śrī Svayamayāśānjī Satguru Deva Kī Je.