 The Excellencies and ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here. Good afternoon, Sadhguru. And good afternoon to your Excellencies and distinguished guests and to all the meditators who are watching on the internet right now. I'm so grateful to be here and it's such a privilege really to be here. My name is Maxwell Kennedy and I learned how to meditate from Sadhguru a few years ago. So we're here at the United Nations and there are maybe 40 or 60 ambassadors here in 70 different countries and 7,000 people and we're here to talk about sustainable development. So why did you start with a chant? The chant is an invocation. An invocation means to perform different types of activities, we need to have our energies in different ways. Otherwise, most people have become competent in one way or the other but if you ask them to do something totally different, they will find themselves totally at loss. This is simply because their energies get directed in one way only. An invocation means you kind of make yourself malleable in such a way that for every different type of action, you need your energies in different parts of your system and you're able to graduate that, calibrate that in such a way to perform that specific activity. So when I sit here, what we need to do is different from what I was doing when I was walking down here. So this is just calibration using sounds. If we have to know the meaning, it's talking about how birth is sweetness but death is compassion. So really we may think death is a terrible thing but aren't we glad that someday we will die? Suppose we could not die, that would be terrible, isn't it? Suppose we can't die at all and above all it is talking about yoga in the sense the chant is describing yoga as a way of transcending time. When we say transcending time, right now we have a sense of time only because we are so identified with our physical nature. Suppose we did not have a body, we would not have any sense of time, a body is keeping time, everything that is time is cyclical. But yoga is a dimension which wants to transcend, which helps you to transcend these cycles and make a journey beyond cyclical nature of life, which is the nature of physical existence. Thank you. I had a teacher at Harvard who was a medical doctor and he told me a story that when he was a young doctor he went down to Mississippi and he saw children there in the United States. This is in the mid-1960s who were starving and after that trip he went to Washington, D.C. and he tried to meet a group of senators and he went to one after the other and none of them would talk to him. On Sunday afternoon he got my father's phone number at home. My father is Senator Robert F. Kennedy and my sister, Kerry, who runs the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial, is here right now in my wife, Bickey. He got my dad's number and he called and it was Sunday, my dad's with the children and he said to him, well, all right, why don't you come over and we'll talk. After they spoke my dad went to Mississippi to where this doctor had gone and when he came back he wrote this, he said these words, and there are others. On the back roads of Mississippi where thousands of children slowly starved their lives away, their minds damaged beyond repair by the age of four or five, in the camps of the migrant workers, a half million nomads, virtually unprotected by collective bargaining or social security, minimum wage or workman's compensation, exposed to the capris of fate and the cruelty of their fellow man alike, and on Indian reservations where the unemployment rate is 80% and where suicide is not a philosopher's question but the leading cause of death among young people. So after that trip, my father went back to the Senate and he worked with a group of others and they created the first food stamps program in the United States and that is kind of the development model that I'm used to. So when I look at the sustainable development goals of the United Nations my immediate reaction is to think are the Addis Ababa Accords going to fund this or not? But you have a different approach. Can you talk about yoga in that context? So when we say sustainable development goals we are talking about human well-being. Addressing human well-being as seventeen different issues which concerns poverty, nourishment, health, women's issues, environment, this kind of things. Essentially we're talking about human well-being. How can you transform the world without transforming individual human beings? This is the effort that's going on in the world for a long time. We want to transform the world but we are not aiming at individual human beings. The world is just a word. It is just you and me. If there is no transformation in you and me, if there is no change in the way we perceive, experience and think, feel and act in this world, how can you change the world? So we can pump in money, we can have projects, they will all go up and go down. But only if we transform individual human beings on a large scale only then there will be true transformation. This is why yoga becomes a significant thing. Today the United Nations taking up this international yoga day is a very important step. I would say it's a revolutionary approach because without transforming individual human beings you cannot really transform the world because there is no such thing as in reality. In reality there's just you, me and someone else. If all of us change, the world has changed. If we refuse to change, we will be only talking about it. I've been to any number of international peace conferences and everybody's talking about world peace in one of these conferences where there were seventeen Nobel laureates. I asked them a simple question, is it true that all of you are truly peaceful human beings? Can you put your hand on your heart and say, I am peaceful? They admitted, no, Sadhguru, we don't know how to be peaceful but we want the world peaceful. How is that possible? What you see as the world is just a larger manifestation of who we are. Sadhguru, you can see all around the world in Brazil, in the United States, in LA where I live, people are doing yoga. And when we're doing it, we're… I'm stretching out my body and trying to control my breathing. Can you explain what yoga really is and how that can help attain the SDGs? This fundamental human longing for health, for well-being, for fulfillment of life, when you find a logically correct and scientifically ascertainable way, then we say this is yoga. Yoga means in search, in pursuit of human well-being, we've been doing all kinds of things. We've been looking up for a long time, which has led to humanity being divided in the name of religions, caste, creeds in so many different ways. Now in the last fifty years, I would say we are looking out seriously and we are ripping the planet apart. All the environmental degradation that we are talking about is just in pursuit of human well-being. In the last hundred years, definitely we are the most comfortable generation ever. But we cannot say we are well because we are not really well, people are not happy, people are not peaceful, that is not happening because we have not addressed the inner nature. So when it… when you address it in a scientific manner, rather than by belief, by philosophy, by ideologies, you address human well-being in a scientific way, this is yoga. The word yoga literally means union. When we say union, what we're talking about is we're talking about a scientific way of obliterating your… the boundaries of your individuality. When I say a scientific way of obliterating, the boundaries of your individual nature, what this means is, right now as we sit here, this is me, that is you, distinctly clear, but we are breathing the same air. We are… we are a product of the same earth. What you call as myself is just a pop-up on this planet and it'll pop out. But in this little bit of time, we have divided this in such a way that we can't meet. Yoga means you obliterate these individual boundaries, not intellectually, not by belief, not by ideology, but as a living experience. We launched… I mean this was there on the video, we launched a very large-scale environmental project in southern India. The fundamental for this came from this. This happened to me when I was in the university and recently, about eight years ago, when I happened to be in my hometown and after a very long time, one of my English teachers came up to me and said, now I understand why you would not let me teach Robert Frost. I said, ma'am, why would I not let you teach Robert Frost? I like Robert Frost. She said, don't you remember you didn't let me teach Frost? Then I remembered, she came one day, till then we were reading only English poets, she came and introduced the American poet and she said Robert Frost is a great man and then she started off, woods are lovely, dark and deep. I said, stop. I said a man who calls a tree a wood. I don't want to listen to this guy. She said, no, no, this is a very great poet. I said, I don't care how great he is, he calls tree a wood. I don't want to listen to him. Then when we wanted to start this process in southern India, when we found that rivers were going dry and the groundwater was sinking very rapidly, when I decided we will plant 114 million trees in Tamil Nadu, the simple thing that we did was I took thousands of people, made them sit in the trees and we set up a yogic process with which they experienced that what they are breathing out, the trees are inhaling. What the trees are exhaling, they are inhaling and they realized one half of their lungs is hanging out there. Once they realized this, there is no stopping. Even today millions of trees are being planted on a yearly basis, all done by common people. Simply because we brought this yogic experience to them, that they truly realized that one half of their breathing apparatus is actually out there, not here. So bringing this experience into people, that what you think as myself is not within the boundaries of your physical nature, it goes well beyond that. If this becomes a living reality, then fulfilling these goals that United Nations has for the world becomes much more possible than the way it is right now, where we are trying to push in one way, but a whole lot of people are pushing in the opposite direction because they don't even see it as theirs. Thank you, Sadhguru. I wanted to point out this incredible thing about the tree planting project is that Sadhguru insisted that the trees be planted on small plots of land less than half an acre and half of the trees are fruit trees and then half of them can be used for firewood so that the people who live on these lands are benefited from them, they take care of the trees and those trees actually really grow. And one of the things that that's really working on is poverty. And when I look at the world today and I see, especially in the United States, this incredible gap between people who have capital and people who don't. And it's a very disturbing sign to me, the gap between rich and poor. Can you talk a little bit about how yoga would address that in terms of sustainable development? So we must understand this, that we have chosen an economic model, which is all about everybody for himself or herself. There is no larger commitment to humanity as such, because that is market economy. Everybody does according to their own capabilities and skills and grab what they can grab. It's literally a shoot and scoot economy. But we have gone for this simply because the socialistic, communistic ideas have unfortunately failed not necessarily because they're bad, because human beings are not ready for it yet. That is, poor people who had nothing wanted to share, the rich never wanted to share. So it became a joke in the world. If the rich had to… if rich had the consciousness to share, communism would have been a great idea, but the poor want to share, rich don't want to share. So that is the same situation here. And this is the same situation, building up everywhere else in the world. Is this the best way to run the world? No. But do we have a better idea? No. So, because right now we are in that place. So the only thing that we can truly do is that we bring what is this… what we are referring to as yoga, as a living experience. Yoga does not mean twisting your body. Yoga does not mean standing on your head. Yoga does not mean holding your breath. Yoga means in some way you have transcended the limitations of your physical nature. You are beginning to experience life as a larger possibility, not just this physical form that you are. Once this becomes a living experience, sharing and living together will become a common experience everywhere. Does it mean we are going to start communes and everybody will live together? No, we can run businesses in a more inclusive way. We can create a more inclusive economic model. And this need not be done by government policy. This can be done by private individuals because there are companies which are almost as large as nations today. There are companies which budgets, which are bigger than nations. So it is very much possible that business can be run in a more inclusive way. Right now we are thinking only of profit. Our idea of profit is very short-term kind of idea. If you really want to run your company, if you are thinking in terms of your company prospering in the next 100, 200, 500 years continuously, then it's very important that you make your customer your partner, that you make everybody else in the society your partner. Whatever you're manufacturing or whatever you're selling or whatever the business sees, whether you're selling a safety pin or a computer or a spacecraft, essentially the business is about human well-being. If this is... this comes into the consciousness of every business person, if this comes into the consciousness of building every business, that essentially this is about human well-being. We do it in so many ways, but fundamentally it's about that. If this awareness and consciousness is instilled in the businesses on the planet, then you can find the capitalistic way of living need not mean disparity, can mean well-being to everybody. Sir, Guru, I read the other day that for every dollar in government investment in developing countries that there's seven dollars now in private investment. So how do we use yoga to yolk in the private corporations that are looking just at their bottom line to end up really having development that's fair and just? In the last twenty years, I have largely focused on the business leaders because there was a time a few hundred years ago where the most influential leadership on the planet was religious leadership. Later on, when the military machines built up in a big way, the military leaders dominated the world. In the last hundred years, democratically elected leaders have become the most dominant force. In the next fifteen to twenty-five years, you will see the business leaders will be the most important or influential leadership on the planet. The good thing about business is that a businessman is willing to make a deal if the deal is good, no matter who you are. I'm saying the old prejudice of I cannot make a deal with somebody is going away and they're willing to make a deal. Now, anything is sustainable only if it is beneficial to both the parties. Nothing can be sustained either in the marketplace or in marriage unless it's beneficial to both the parties. Only when it's truly beneficial to both the parties, this can be sustained. This is slowly sinking into the business leadership. I have seen in the last twenty years, prominent business leaders, their way of thinking is very, very different than what it was. My essential work has been to move individual leaders from their personal ambitions to a larger vision because a larger vision means than the business is sustainable for a long period of time. If it's just your personal ambition, the world will work against you. If you have a larger vision, the world will work with you. This is the big difference. So this is something that is slowly sinking in. You will see if you see annual meetings of major businesses, what they're talking, if you look at the economic forum, if you look at various economic, you know, assemblies on the planet, you will see they're all beginning to talk about a larger vision, how to make a difference rather than how to make a profit. This has become the language of the business these days. It still has to manifest in a big way, but at least the language has changed from profit to making a difference. Thank you. Sadhguru, when you look at societies all across the world, there's a huge gap between what's available to women and what's available to men. The Sustainable Development Goals address this. What's the role of gender equality in yoga? See, yoga means transcending your physical nature on one level. If you transcend your physical nature, where is the question of being a male or a female? You being a male or a female is relevant only in a few spaces in your life, in bathrooms and bedrooms. Rest of the places, I don't see why you should recognize somebody as a man or a woman. Why are we identifying people with reproductive organs? If you must use a body part, at least use the brain. I think a small gender difference that is there between us to fulfill a certain aspect of our life is being stretched too far. I think this is from another period where it was not possible for a woman to participate because of variety of physical situations in the world. And that is largely leveled today in most parts of the world and it's rapidly changing everywhere, I would say. I think a more active effort is needed at least by law in most nations. It is hundred percent equal. By practice there is still discrepancies which has to be worked at. I feel it's a generational thing. Once the older generation moves out, the younger generation is not looking at it that way anymore. At least I see that in all the Asian countries, it is only people beyond sixty years of age who think in this mode the younger people are not thinking that way anymore. So, Guru, I'm just going to ask you one more question because I want to save time for the audience who've been waiting to talk to you. And can you tell about how you conceived the world in thirty years? What I see is for the first time, for the very first time in the history of humanity, human intellect is sparking like never before. More people on the planet today can think for themselves than ever before in the history of this human existence. So once human intellect begins to spark like this, unless something is logically correct and scientifically verifiable, it will fail in future. You may be willing to listen to a few things, but your children are not going to listen to anything that does not make sense to them. It does not matter from what authority it comes from. Or in other words, we are moving into a era where authority cannot be the truth. Truth will be the only authority in future. We are getting there because everybody is beginning to ask questions and people are not afraid to ask questions anymore, so this is bound to happen. Once this happens, human aspiration for well-being has to have a logically correct and scientifically ascertainable methodology and it's of tremendous importance that today the International Yoga Day has been declared in the last one year. It was mooted by the Prime Minister, but it was almost like the world was waiting for it. As they mentioned, 177 countries never before in the history of United Nations, all of them agreed upon one thing as they agreed upon yoga. It looked like they were waiting for it. Yes, the world has been waiting for a scientific and a logically correct solution for human well-being. The aspiration for human well-being will not stop. Unless we provide a proper scientifically structured methodology, then people in terms of well-being will move towards chemicals. This is a deep, a grave concern in the world. The number of people moving towards alcohol and drugs in the last twenty-five years must be maybe five hundred to thousand percent more than what it was twenty-five years ago. This is mainly because in pursuit of human well-being, there are no logically correct answers to their questions. That is the reason why human beings are seeking these kind of solutions. Unless we provide this, this is a natural progression. As we see in the next thirty years to fifty years, there will be a big movement towards a scientific process for human well-being. And this is the right time to be here at this forum and this yoga becoming a worldwide thing. We must understand yoga is not an Indian thing. If you want to call yoga Indian, then you must call gravity European, okay? Because, yes, it originated from that place because India is one place where for a few millennia, we had uninterrupted time to look deep inwards and to look at the human mechanism in at most profoundness as to how this functions. What is the ultimate possibility within this human mechanism? This has taken a few millennia to understand and arrive at this possibility. And yoga, I want this message to go. The science of yoga is not just about health, it's not just about fitness. It is an ultimate solution for every aspect of human existence. There is different types of yogas. Yoga can be taught in different dimensions. The ultimate possibility of raising beyond our physical nature. The ultimate possibility of knowing life in its fullest way. The word yoga means union. The word yoga means one who has experienced this union. We need not one, two, five yogis. We need millions of them who have a sense of union with the rest of the universe, particularly those who hold responsible positions in the world. They must come to this experience because leadership essentially means you have the privilege of touching other people's lives. What you think, what you feel and what you do, every single thought, emotion and action either makes or breaks people's lives, that's what leadership means. When you are given such a privilege, it's very, very important that you are in a state of yoga, that you experience life around you as yourself. So if any of us feel the work that we are doing is important, the first and foremost thing is we must work upon ourselves. It gives me deep honor and pleasure to first give the floor to Undersecretary General Ambassador Vijay Nambiar, who will also be delivering a message on behalf of the Secretary General, Mr. Ban Ki-moon. I shall just be delivering the message of the Secretary General on tomorrow's International Day of Yoga. Yoga is an ancient physical, mental and spiritual practice that originated in India and is now practiced in various forms around the world. The word yoga derives from Sanskrit and means to join or to unite, symbolizing the union of body and consciousness. Yoga balances body and soul, physical health and mental well-being. It promotes harmony among people and between ourselves and the natural world. Recognizing its universal appeal, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 21st June as the International Day of Yoga. This year's observance of the International Day of Yoga highlights the important role healthy living plays in the realization of the sustainable development goals adopted last year by all 193 United Nations member states. As exercise, yoga has multiple benefits. Physical inactivity is linked with a number of non-communicable diseases such as cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases which are among the leading causes of illness and death worldwide. By improving fitness, teaching us how to breathe correctly and working to diminish stress, yoga can help to cultivate healthier lifestyles. Practicing yoga can also help raise awareness of our role as consumers of the planet's resources and as individuals with a duty to respect and live in peace with our neighbors. All these elements are essential to building a sustainable future of dignity and opportunity for all. On the International Day of Yoga tomorrow, I urge everyone to embrace healthier choices and lifestyles and to commit to unity with our fellow human beings regardless of ethnicity, faith, age, gender identity or sexual orientation. Let us celebrate this day and every day as members of one human family sharing one common precious home. Thank you. May I now give the floor to the Permanent Representative of Bangladesh. We deeply appreciate the Indian Government's initiative to have the International Day of Yoga. We have learnt a lot from the yoga masters, especially the perspective as to how yoga can contribute in the attainment of global peace, sustainable future and in turn the realization of the SDGs. What I understand, without peace of mind and harmony in the body, how can we think we can change the world? First, we have to change our own world by which what I mean is how we live, breathe, eat, think and aspire. If we are not fit for the purpose of contributing to sustainable peace in the world, we will remain as bystanders and not as active agents of change. I can share my own personal story with my colleagues and others present here. I had been suffering from a very bad bout of sciatica problem for the last two months. At times the pain was debilitating. I have gone through serious pain medication followed by physical therapy and acupuncture. In fact, I am just coming here from my sixth session of acupuncture treatment. I realized that I suffered this problem because of accumulated lifestyle related problems which included long hours of sitting, standing, stress from the work and also from the family for the constant change of places of postings, etc. During the last eight weeks of my ordeal, I reflected on my life and future course of action. I read a lot and searched the internet for answers and I finally came to the conclusion that yoga is the answer to my situation. Although I did some yoga in my college days, my biggest mistake was that I discontinued that. Perhaps if I continued, I would have never faced my present predicament. Now the Bujangasana or Cobra position which is also known as McKenzie something is critical for the health of my spine. There are many other ascents or positions which can help me get my strength back as I feel little better and able to practice those. The ascents will not only help gain my physical strength, but it will contribute to my mental strength through the meditational aspects of yoga. I thought I will share my most recent experience so that others like me in similar lifestyle situations can also learn and prevent the situation that I am in. Let's do yoga every day and not just one day in the year. Thank you. May I now offer the floor to the distinguished permanent representative of Georgia. Excellency. I was thinking about asking questions, but in fact it's not as much as asking questions but how what you told us echoes in all of us. And it really does, it really does because what we take from here from all this wonderful conversation that we just had is how complex things are indeed very simple if we indeed try to. As a person who is really honored and humbled to be here as a representative of my country who was one of the 177 who co-sponsored Yoga International Day, I'm also a practitioner or rather a very bad student to the school that I'm attending. That school is called Yoga in Daily Life which is in the United States in many parts of Eastern Europe particularly but headquartered in Rajasthan in Kattu led by Vishwa Guru Sri Swami Maheshwaranandaji. And what I learned from my personal experience because after all the oneness is sharing his personal experiences also is what Patanjali said that it's about having your mind free of disturbances and if we indeed attain to be free of disturbances we find peace with our mind that can really transcend and somehow start this chain reaction of peacefulness and oneness that we all long for particularly in this organization. I'm glad that we have so many colleagues by now or calling from Bangladesh, my good friend who sits next to me is also avid yoga practitioner and many and it is indeed probably high time what you just mentioned when Prime Minister of India said that we needed International Day of Yoga it came indeed on a right time and I'm glad that I was here on the right moment and right time. Thank you for your presence here, thank you for your blessing and indeed if we try to I think we can really attain that we are without disturbance and we find this oneness and unity and we take those 17 goals one by one and I really hope to and I'm looking forward to that day where we will no longer have this beautiful poster behind you because we will have that completed because SDGs in a way to me is somehow manifestation of our common failure too that we have to talk about SDGs but it's good that we are starting to talk about it and we are making it happen hopefully and I believe in that yoga will create that oneness that will permeate our work in this organization in this chamber and other ways. Thank you very much. I now offer the floor to the distinguished permanent representative of Liechtenstein. Excellency you have the floor. I came from the probably most non-spiritual angle possible to yoga I was essentially dragged against my will 17 years ago by a then girlfriend into yoga class and you know I viewed myself as this big soccer player encyclist and all these other things and thought really this is not for me and to my credit I had to say already after the class well there is something there and that is something that is worth exploring I've been doing yoga ever since and if there's one thing that I believe I will be doing until the end of my life it is yoga because everyone can do it every person of every age of every state of health really yoga is for everyone which is I think one of its wonderful qualities the other thing is even if you come from that non-spiritual place that I came from you realize over time that something happens with you and that there is for me today no other way of connecting with myself with my mind, with my body the way I can in yoga sometimes I find out when I do yoga that before I did it I didn't know how I was that day and the moment I do it I do feel how I am and I'm able to connect to myself and that's also I think really the precondition for being able to connect with others in looking at the theme and in thinking about this for me the connection is very simple the SDG agenda tells us we know what the problems are we know what the solutions are we have to simply change our ways to get there and then we can do this together and I think this is where yoga can make a huge contribution if you think it's not for you try it one time and I think it will be for many of you actually I think it is for everybody and one of my small moments of happiness in life today is to take a person to yoga because that just makes you happy and this is why I'm offering a class tomorrow morning to some of you in the room and you're gonna come say it with many others and I really look forward to that thank you so much now I have the honor to recognize another yoga master we have with us in fact Yogmata Kaiko Aikawa has joined us for this event all the way from Japan distinguished guests your excellencies ladies and gentlemen spiritually I come from a tradition and lineage that from the time immemorial I have kept and shared with humanity the teachings of yoga yoga is a science that especially with meditation facilitates the harmony of the body the emotions in the mind when these elements are in harmony the individual becomes calm and peaceful in his heart if the individual is calm and peaceful in his heart this permeates in the community and thus in the world just from my own experience that by learning these practices it is possible for everyone to awaken your own energies and achieve peace, love and harmony I deeply believe that if we as individuals feel peace and harmony in ourselves that this will lead to love and peace being spread throughout the world I thank you very much for enabling me to be present today thank you Yogamata for that message of love may I now offer the floor to the distinguished permanent representative of Nepal I come from Nepal from the eastern hills of Nepal a place in an environment which is extremely conducive for yoga and I also come from a family and community practicing yoga but then I'm always worried about this question of accessibility it has to do with the commercialization of yoga today the commercialization and hundreds and thousands of different types of yoga getting into the heads of young minds and different ages of people mostly also in terms of fashion in the forms of fashion what would be your wise guidance to us to deal with the perhaps unnecessary over commercialization of yoga whatever becomes reasonably popular there will be enterprise around that you shouldn't be surprised when you step out on the Times Square people will be selling yoga t-shirts and yoga whatever whatever we shouldn't be distracted or disturbed by these things this is a part of a social thing it happens at the same time the core of yoga is not disturbed in any way on the surface there are small distortions here and there I would say for the larger public to start with like this year when in about four months ago when I came to know that over 9000 children below 18 years of age committed suicide in India and over 1,700 below 13 years of age committed suicide it... I just thought if our children start committing suicide we are doing something fundamentally wrong a child is a fresh life a child is an exuberant life a child should be a bundle of joy but instead of that they are deciding to take their own life which is deeply disturbing this is not a statement about the child who took his life but this is a statement about all of us what are we doing with our societies so off the cuff I said let's touch 10,000 schools but today with the cooperation of various state governments we are touching nearly 30,000 schools over 20 million children why I am saying this why this has become possible is because we are offering what is called as upayoga upayoga means pre-yoga or sub-yoga why this effort towards upayoga is if you offer yoga however innocuous the practice may look to start with it has a spiritual dimension to it transmitting spiritual dimension to an unconscious population who are not ready for it and without a certain level of expertise in the teachers could be responsible over a period of time so we are teaching upayoga which has mainly physiological and psychological benefits and here you can't do anything wrong it's on the video all the teacher has to do is make corrections and make sure people are not doing it wrong I think it's a good way to spread yoga in the world is through upayoga upayoga the word upayoga in Indian languages today has acquired the meaning of being useful but actually originates from this that it's a pre-yoga or sub-yoga or a start-up start-up yoga it is and it's best to start that way with large populations because when you start of an unconscious spiritual process for people many of them may not be ready for it even if it's a good thing even if good thing happens to you when you're not ready for it things may not work very well so upayoga is a very distinct way and a safe way to take yoga to the world large scale after this happens once they feel the benefits once they experience what difference it makes they will naturally seek yoga in a more serious manner and yoga should come into their lives this could solve the concern that you expressed but at the same time somebody is doing something funny in the name of yoga it doesn't concern me because those things will always happen but it's good that even commercial establishments are talking yoga this means it's really on I will now call upon Mr. Herman Bravo who is the president of the yoga club right here at the UN Mr. Bravo you have the floor yoga is more than an instrument of personal transformation yoga has as many of the speakers have mentioned particularly Satguru a social dimension all that because the word yoga as Tao remember us yoga means union between the body and the mind union between us and other human beings union between human beings and nature and it is because of that interdependence and that interconnection that we are able to solve many of the problems we have many problems but we have to be optimistic because the solution is by changing ourselves many of these strategies organized by the UN they have a political meaning they have the access to technologies and they have the will at the political level but all that is not going to work unless we go at the individual level yoga means personal transformation and because of that the international day of yoga should be a wonderful opportunity to remind all of us that every day in our life should be a yoga day namaste welcome to the floor to who is the executive director of the office of the World Health Organization here at the United Nations you have the floor it's a great pleasure and an honor to attend this celebration today and indeed this is a very unusual event for the United Nations because it is deeply reflective and it's not composed of a prepared speeches that people deliver in a more formal way it actually moves all of us here to think deeply of what is being said what is being done what is being conveyed by you here and how we can individually and collectively respond to this call of the international yoga day I have spent five years of my life in India before coming here in New York and of course for me it's something very special to be here today at this day and it's special because I you mentioned Sadhguru that we cannot call or compare and say that yoga is Indian but it comes from India and indeed it is India's gift to the humankind to all over the world and it is very special because of that and I could see the impact of yoga practice on communities in India so it makes a different difference and this is why this is such a great gift of civilization the whole country in India every quarter of it breathes essence of yoga and it is the civilization calm of yoga that has moved me when I was there we are dealing with health issues it is no news now that yoga is very good for health but we also know now that health is no longer stand alone one of the sustainable development goals it is actually determinant for any other goal to be achieved therefore yoga has a very different meaning and different indeed interconnecting nature because it does help people to feel better live better, breathe better act better, unite better come into interconnectedness which is indeed essential for sustaining our planet and connects planet to people so therefore of course we know today proven through many clinical trials that yoga helps in many conditions mental health conditions depression, heart conditions many other conditions joined and so on so this is not new but there has been traditional resistance to integrate yoga practice and other perhaps traditional medicine practices which are of course available worldwide but known also in India to integrate them to the allopathic medicine and this resistance is slowly being overcome we as WHO are trying to put our our support into this process recently this year in May in fact India has signed and I would say landmark agreement with the World Health Organization to promote traditional medicine yoga included and to ensure quality and safety of these traditional practices but more so to integrate these practices into our health services primary health care and all other services that we know so it is now deeply understood that as all of human beings need some or another kind of health services be it vaccination if they are very healthy or any other more serious services they also need to practice yoga because it prevents many illnesses it also gives peace of mind it teaches us how to cope with all those different things that modern life stress puts on human brain and therefore we to stand forward and we want to support promotion and inclusion of yoga into medical practice all over the world we will collaborate with India on that but my question to you would be is there any good secret beyond what you have said how we can bring these different dimensions of health together integrate them in a better way and make sure that yoga is no longer seen as something separate from what we do in health services traditionally thank you very much for being here today when our commitment has to shift to health not to a particular system people are married to a particular system most of the time and they defend that system at any cost no matter what every system in the world has something to contribute but in so being committed to health we are committed to those systems because of this there has been a lot of dislocation in how health can come about so in southern India in the rural part of Tamil Nadu we brought this about these five dimensions alapathy siddha ayurveda, yunani and yoga together practice along with the naturopathy way of doing things it has done miraculous things to the populations we were the first pilot project ayush project when it started ten years ago now ayush has become a ministry I think yesterday or in the last week they have declared a ayush university which means ayurveda, yoga siddha and all these things put together this we started almost fifteen years ago and today it is an active part what we have done is we have medical vans which go with an alapathy doctor and a siddha doctor plus we have created over one hundred and twelve or thirteen village gardens where we grow herbs over hundred and odd different types of herbs in a common piece of land where people are taught how to make use of it for small things like stomach ache, headache, fever for the children diarrhea, these kind of things all our grandmothers knew how to treat this unfortunately even for these people are going to the doctors today and the way it is being treated with elaborate medication generally in rural India the cost of the medicine if you fall sick for fifteen days it takes a year for you to recover with the economics of the family gets hit for almost a year if fifteen days somebody is down and they visit the doctor and they are treated with medication and treatment that happens kind of economically sets them back quite a bit so we our commitment is to health not to a particular system and right now the government of India is doing serious efforts to integrate this thing and we have been doing this for over fifteen years very effectively I must tell you a simple thing in rural India which can be I was just last one week we created what is called as a wave of health about simple things how health can be created within the family for every family one of the things that was done I won't go into all the details one simple thing with it was every home should have a papaya tree a banana tree a morungu tree and a patch of greens this transformed health situations in such a big way you won't believe such a small initiative such a simple initiative what a difference it has done to people's lives like this small initiative can be brought because considering the economics of those families it's very important we need to come up with solutions that works for them in this yoga practice has a significant role because creating a vibrant healthy vibrant and effervescent effervescent population is very very important to fulfill the sustainable goals if we don't create that kind of population we will be only talking about sustainability it will not happen we need to create this and the goal is the tools of self transformation should not be in the hands of a guru or an organization or some other authority the idea is to bring this into everybody's life like today everybody owns a toothbrush which has created oral health just like that everybody should have some tools for self transformation it is with this kind of commitment that we are going ahead and there is a big support now in the world wherever we go in the remotest parts of Africa that I was there in the last one week it was incredible to see that all of them know about yoga I know this 25 years ago when I went into rural India in a big way they knew what is Coca Cola but they did not know what is yoga but today in the remotest part of Africa people know what is yoga this is transformation in many ways Thank you sir Guruji and now would you like to reflect on this question? I'd like to thank you all there's been so much beauty in this room and so much intelligence that of what the world is all about and what we are all about and what we are going to do about it and I think that it is so absolutely fantastic to sit here and listen to all of the things that I pondered for so many years and wondered about not always finding the answers but today was a revelation and a very special thing to happen to the whole world in this room we have started something that we've needed for a long time it's out in the open now yoga is beautiful but yoga is only beautiful if we use it and we make it part of our lives I want to thank you all I now give the floor to Mr. Rajiv Lalla who has joined us all the way from Texas if you could help us understand the role of a Guru not in the true academic sense where a STEM professor teaches me science and technology but rather coming from humanity and that union among all of us when you say a Sadhguru you're saying an uneducated Guru that's what it means because you don't come to a Sadhguru to know about the scriptures you don't come to Sadhguru to know about rituals because the only thing that I know is I know this piece of life from its origin to its ultimate and this all I know by knowing this by inference you know just about everything because everything is made the same way today there is something called as a constructional theory where they're talking about how the atom and the cosmos are essentially fundamentally same design sophistication and complexity is multiplying so the Amoeba and you and me are made the same way only the complexity has multiplied having said that in what way is a a Guru relevant means you're trying to walk an uncharted terrain every year I trek in the Himalayas in Nepal and Tibet once you go into the mountains that illiterate Sharpa who is there who has not been to school but if he says right you turn right if he says left you turn left you better do that otherwise you won't come back you do that because he knows the terrain the same goes for this this is just an inner terrain it's best to walk with somebody who's already walked the path otherwise simple things will become complicated what is next door you will go around the world and come back to it all this complication about for example today if you utter the word meditation people think something very difficult to do to put it simply first of all the word meditation English word meditation does not describe anything in particular if you sit with your eyes closed they're saying you're meditating if you're eyes closed you can do japa, thapa, dharana, dhyana, samadhi, sunya there are any number of things you could do or you might have just mastered the art of sleeping in vertical postures it happens so when we say meditation we must understand it's not an act it is a quality it is like you want flowers in your garden if you want flowers in your garden you don't have to sit there and do flower meditation you don't have to think flowers you have to think soil manure, water, sunlight have nothing to do with flowers but if you do those things flowers will happen because it's a consequence right now because we have gotten into this madness of being a goal-oriented society we are interested in the flower we are not interested in the plant this is the fundamental that the yoga will change within you we understand that you have to handle the process right for a consequence to happen so in yoga there is a saying that if you're goal-oriented your one eye will be on the goal that means you will find your way only with one eye which is an inefficient way of doing things if you use both your eyes to find your way it's much more efficient so why is a guru needed it can be done without it I'm asking you a simple question even to learn ABC the alphabet you needed a teacher but you could have learnt it by yourself maybe you would have taken a lifetime but the teacher thought it to you in a month or two that's a big difference so like somebody was talking to me and they asked what is this guru about I said this is the GPS a living GPS a guru positioning system you know if you want to find your way it's best in uncharted terrain unknown terrain it's best to walk with somebody who's already done the terrain once or many times otherwise simple things will become very complex my pleasure to recognize miss Denise Kotto who is the chair of the International Yoga Day Committee at the United Nations and an executive board member of the United Nations Star of Recreation Council Enlightenment Society Denise, you have the floor the International Day of Yoga Committee at the UN came into existence last year in the summer after the first International Day of Yoga Seachin Moy years ago his vision was to have peace meditations with the staff and he started the yoga club which German is the president of how do you see the UN system meaning the secretarial staff who work here the diplomats from the different countries business and the NGOs civil society who try to implement the SDGs how do you see yoga bringing us all together thank you so much this is being said again and again about peace so we need to look at this when we say peace or mental peace as people are talking about it today even so-called spiritual leaders are talking about peace being the highest goal in one's life but I would like to ask you please look at your life and see if you want to enjoy your dinner tonight even if you are not ecstatic at least you must be peaceful to enjoy your dinner if you want to enjoy the people around you at least you must be peaceful and happy if you want to enjoy your walk on the street you must be peaceful and happy otherwise this is not possible so what is very fundamental to a fundamental requirement in our life unfortunately we are pushing it as an ultimate goal of our life to be peaceful is not the highest thing it is the most basic requirement if a human being cannot even be peaceful there is really nothing that they can do this means that you are not even able to harness your body and mind the way you should to look at it from one perspective all human experience has a chemical basis to it what you call as peace is a certain kind of chemistry what you call as joy is another kind of chemistry blissfulness another ecstasy another agony another kind anxiety fear stress tension whatever you call it every human experience has a chemical basis to it we have not been thought about how to deal with this when I say how to deal with this as a technology if you want to look at this as a machine this is the most sophisticated piece of technology on the planet the question is to deal with this high level of technology have you read even the user's manual that's a question yoga means it is the user's manual of how to conduct this one I would say when you ask this question how to bring all these diverse people together in this organization it's best to start with the simplest process which does not even need a specific allotment of time this is where upa yoga will become useful people can sit in their work spaces and right there they can do it three minutes any time they feel like it it does not need a specific condition it does not need a specific time if they see the benefit which they definitely will in a matter of two weeks time they will see a distinct benefit doing it wherever they are any kind of specific discipline or time or other conditions required for normal the proper yoga to be done I think this would be a good way to integrate them because this predates all religion this is not about you versus me this is why I said this is not Indian because a science cannot be Indian yes it originated from India as Indians we are proud of it but it does not belong to India the very fact that united nations has declared an international yoga day means India has gifted it to the world it does not belong to India anymore we it's not something that we have to possess and identify with the significant aspect of my personal work has been to remove all the frills of culture that yoga had acquired through this millennia of transmission slowly whatever you do in a particular culture it will acquire cultural frills so one thing is to take off all the cultural frills and present it as an absolute science and a technology for well-being this is an important thing in an organization like this where there are people from every nation there are people from every kind of denominations every kind of faith, every kind of beliefs every kind of ideologies it's very very important that yoga is brought as a proper science not as a cultural thing not as an Indian thing it's very important to do that