Why do we enjoy being with ‘nature’ (Prakriti)?

Culture hurts. Prakriti (nature) has no culture, no civilisation.

Our culture, our civilisation hurts. The social conditioning that envelops the brain, hurts. Therefore it is a soothing experience to go to a waterfall, or to a jungle, or to hills. Or to enjoy the rains, or to look at the Sky. It just tells us that animals are better off than us.

No animal enjoys it when he somehow just strays into the city. But man really enjoys it if he gets to live in the jungle. Animals sometimes crossover into the city. Don’t they? How do they feel then? “What the hell! Send me back to where I came from.” But man spends a lot of money to somehow get a week to spend in the jungle.

What does that tell you? Our culture and civilisation have gone wrong.

We came from the jungle in the hope of doing better in our villages and cities. But our villages and cities have failed. We still find in many ways, the jungle to be better than our villages and cities. There is nobody who is not sometimes seized by a strong desire to return to the jungle.

Does that not happen?

It is because that which we call ‘our education’, ‘our society’, ‘our systems’, ‘our thought’, ‘our philosophy’, ‘our civilisation’ — all are based on very material grounds. There is no spiritual basis to them. So they have failed to take us to a level of consciousness higher than that of the jungle.

I have often said that animals are in many ways better than human beings.

Man had the potential to either rise above the animal, or fall way below it.

Man has continuously been making the wrong choice.

If you cannot build your cities and your social systems on spiritual foundations, then it is better to stay in the jungle. If your family, your workplace, your institutions do not run on spiritual grounds, then they better not run at all.

Our cities, our culture, they exist to give us what we want. They do not exist to give us Liberation.

Appreciate the difference.

All our development is intended in the direction of giving us more and more of what we want. Right? What we want. It is not intended in the…