Save Soil: A spiritual movement at heart
Unfortunately, we have lost connection with what nurtures our life and how it is made. We are treating soil as an inert substance. No, it is a living system – the largest living system that we know in this universe. A handful of soil in a tropical country has 5–7 billion organisms.
People describe me as a Yogi. A Yogi means that you have consciously obliterated the boundaries of your individuality. That means you feel what is
happening around you all the time. I have crawled on this planet for 65 years now, so I know my life and everything that affects my life. People will naturally say,
“Okay, everyone has lived on this planet."
“No, they have not lived on this planet; they have lived in their heads” – all psychological stuff. I don't have anything in my head, so I live on this planet. What supports life and what does not support life is always visible.
If I just walk on the land, I know what is happening there – whether it is alive or not. And it has been quite distressing to see what is happening. Land is generally screaming in most parts of the world, but you do not hear it because your own noise is big.
Unfortunately, we have lost connection with what nurtures our life and how it is made. We are treating soil as an inert substance. No, it is a living system – the largest living system that we know in this universe. A handful of soil in a tropical country has 5–7 billion organisms.
Without their activity, we cannot exist. Even in the evolutionary scale of things, it is the activity of these microorganisms which has made us the way we are. We look so different from them, but 60% of our body is microorganisms; only 40% is from our parental genetics. If we are conscious of this, taking care of the soil would have been natural.
But every year, on an average, 27,000 species in the soil habitat are going extinct because people are living a high-heeled life. When I say a high-heeled life, I am not talking about women's fashions; I am talking about how people are doing everything possible to live away from the earth because somewhere, their aspiration has become heaven. They want to live somewhere else – but there is no other place to live.
Without the living systems being active in the soil, this life or any other life on the planet cannot exist. For 87% of the life on the planet, the source is in the first 12–15 inches of the soil – this is a fact. This is something that the Yogic culture has always recognised. Even today in India, because of the Yogic culture, before farmers step on their land, they always bow down to it because they treat soil as their mother.
Soil – A Unifying Force
Today we have found many aspects of our life to differentiate between human beings, to confront and conflict with each other. If people do not understand what the cosmic consciousness which unifies us is, they must at least understand that soil is a unifying force. Soil is the source of our existence. Whatever race, religion, nationality, caste, creed we may have, essentially, we all come from the soil, we live off the soil and when we die, we go back to the soil.
We have to touch base with common factors among all of us. Otherwise with our very intelligence and competence, we will destroy each other in the end. With this in mind, we launched the Conscious Planet – Save Soil movement. As a part of the movement, we are trying to touch 3.5 billion citizens across the world, to impress upon all political parties and governments to take to long-term soil regeneration policies. The most important aspect of this movement is that it is not against anyone. I want to use the movement not only as an ecological process, but also as a conscious process of unifying humanity. Please, let us make it happen.
Ranked amongst the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and a New York Times bestselling author Sadhguru has been conferred the Padma Vibhushan by the Government of India in 2017, the highest annual civilian award, accorded for exceptional and distinguished service.