Every time I hear this, particularly when I’m in United States – I still can’t come to terms with it – people calling earth as dirt. Dirt is trash, isn’t it? Yes or no? Even in America dirt is trash? No? Something that you don’t want. But soil, here we call it thai-manna, mother earth. And, when I hear this word dirt – I’ve heard it a thousand times, but still, something cringes in me.
Once you make the source of your life a commodity, your father, mother, children, wife, husband, become commodities, is not far away. It’s a natural consequence. You don’t have to do it, anyway it’ll happen. If you make the raw material dirt, the product is bound to be dirt, isn’t it?
In this [Indian] culture, we don’t see anything as a commodity
The most foolish thing that we have done in the name of science is, we have reduced everything in the universe into a commodity. In this culture, we don’t see anything as a commodity. We see everything as ingredients of life. So this is why, food comes [bow down], water comes [bow down], air [bow down], the sky [bow down], the sun [bow down], the moon [bow down], a stone [bow down], a tree [bow down], anything [bow down]. Because it’s not something that you can use and throw. You cannot use and throw anything in this existence. It passes through you. It is you for a certain period of time, after that it becomes something else.
Soil is older than you, wiser than you, far more intelligent than you, far more capable than you, a far bigger process than you are as a person
You’re only a relay runner, you’re not the runner on the planet. Everything goes through you. The air that you’re breathing right now, the very body that you carry right now, it has been millions of bodies in the past. It has been an insect, an animal, a snake, a cow, a monkey, a human being. I’m not talking about evolutionary process, I’m talking about the soil going through every form of life. So this is not a commodity. This is older than you, wiser than you, far more intelligent than you, far more capable than you, a far bigger process than you are as a person.
