One was a book I read by Mahatma Gandhi. In it was a passage where he said that religion, the pursuing of the inner journey, should not be separated from the pursuing of the outer and social journey, because we are not isolated beings.

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

If we had adhered to the concept of connectedness, then we would not have created nuclear weapons, huge armies and global warming.

If we remove ourselves from the world, we are pretending that we can follow our own individual enlightenment and let the rest of the world go to hell, so to speak.

It became extremely important that we go and see the four heads of the governments, and the message was delivered, with the tea packets, to all these heads.

You have no skills in your hands. You have no education of understanding the meaning and the purpose and the compassion and the relationship. You have just a profession.

Before the scientific rationalism took hold of our minds and before we became succumbed to a materialistic worldview, the Western philosophy was holistic and relational, and even now there are many scientists in the West seeing things totally interconnected.