Satish Kumar

This gives us more time to attend the inner need.

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.

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.

I grew with it, and I used to go to see the monks, who had no possessions, even more extreme than my mother.

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.

I was pursuing the inner path at the expense of the rest of my being and the rest of the world.

Quality and perfection are achieved with time. You do not create a perfect painting or a perfect poem by hurrying. Time is always coming.

We are dependent on each other. Therefore replenishing the soil replenishing society and being part of one continuum thats the new story.

With slight risk of exaggeration you could say that he walked almost every mile of the Indian land.

Kennedy had been assassinated a month or so before. So we walked to the grave of John Kennedy and ended our walking symbolically at the Arlington National Cemetery.

I and a friend of mine called Mannon talked together, and we both decided to walk this journey.

If you can kill animals, the same attitude can kill human beings. The mentality is the same which exploits nature and which creates wars.

We then came to the Soviet Union. One day we were walking and carrying our banner and distributing a few leaflets in Russian to people, and we met two women on the road.

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.

That was my childhood. I grew up with the monks, studying Sanskrit and meditating for hours in the morning and hours in the evening, and going once a day to beg for food.

Monks will have three begging bowls for their food: one for water, one for liquid food, one for dry food.

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