The way to healthy living is to shift from quantitative economic growth to quality of life, food, water and air - to shift from craving to contentment and from greed to gratitude

If individuals start to walk on the path of spirit and feel a sense of the sacred connectedness, then social, economic and political problems will also begin to get resolved.

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.

The children are being conditioned to think that the purpose of life is to get a good job. You get paid but you don't get satisfaction from your work.

There is at the moment in the world a battle going on between those who are pursuing materialistic paths-globalizers of economic growth and those hell-bent on this 'big is better' idea-on the one hand, and on the other hand those who are dedicated to spiritual renewal, more small-scale development, more human scale, more sustainability, more crafts and arts. Where human beings are not just sold to companies and money and those kinds of things. Where human beings have a sacred path.

Speed is one of the great curses of modern civilization, obsession with speed leads to quantitative approach; we come to believe that more is better. This is very materialistic, we have to realize that it is the quality of life, quality of relationships, quality of food, medicine, education and everything else which matters.

So, at the age of nine, I became a monk, and from then on I was there practicing that kind of nonviolence.