"I have been enjoying the fact that there are many people in the world who are capable of going deep into themselves. Their only hope is a self-realized being.

"It is too late to do anything to prevent the immense destruction that is going to happen. If we can protect only a few genuine human beings, that will be enough, more than enough. The past of humanity has been absolutely accidental; they have been doing things without knowing their consequences. Now we are suffering the consequences and there is no way to change those consequences.

"For example, the whole ecology around the earth has been destroyed. Life does not exist as separate islands; not a single man is an island. Everything is interwoven. You have heard these two words, dependence and independence. Both are unreal; the reality is interdependence. We are all so interdependent on each other – not only men on other men, not only nations on other nations, but trees and man, animals and trees, birds and the sun, the moon and the oceans…everything is interwoven. And the past humanity has never thought about it, that it is a cosmos. They went on thinking in terms of taking everything separately. It was impossible for people in the past to think that man and trees are connected, that they are interdependent.

"You cannot live without trees, and neither can trees live without you. But it is too late. Hundred-year-old, two-hundred-year-old, even four-thousand-year-old trees have been destroyed and cut to create more newsprint for all kinds of stupid newspapers, without ever giving any consideration to what you are doing. You will not be able to replace them.

"Just in Nepal…unfortunately it is the poorest country in the world. It has nothing except the eternal Himalayas and the deep forest, ancient and old. It has been selling its forest to different countries – that is the only commodity it can sell. In the last thirty years, half of the trees of Nepal have disappeared, and for the coming thirty years, Russia has purchased the rights to the remaining forest. And they are cutting trees not in the old way, with an ax, but by very modern techniques so that in a day thousands of trees simply disappear."