When you come to the spiritual needs, the emotional needs, the needs of our inner life, then politics and business and technology are completely impotent. They are completely unable to meet and address the needs of human beings.

"Pursuit of happiness" implies that we're running after happiness and happiness is running away from us. It also implies that happiness is somewhere out there, in material goods, which we have to pursue, whereas I believe that it is an illusion happiness is not out there, it is within us.

At the moment, for example, maybe ten percent of money in the world is related to goods and services. Ninety percent of money is just moving around the world, chasing money. So, money has become the ruler. And we have become the servant.

Wars and conflicts begin in the mind, then they are expressed in words and then executed through physical action, so personal transformation is intricately connected with the social and political transformation.

The scientific world, the materialistic world, the world of commerce, the world of business, the world of individualism, the world of capitalism, world of communism - all these worlds are the old story now. Where we think we exploit nature, we exploit people. Market rules, profit rules, money rules. We work for name, fame, power, money, profit. That's the old story.

When you come to the spiritual needs, the emotional needs, the needs of our inner life, then politics and business and technology are completely impotent. They are completely unable to meet and address the needs of human beings.

If we had kept the vision of interconnectedness, we would not have created the kind of environmental crisis facing the world today.