 The most phenomenal thing that's happening on the planet, for playing cricket you need good soil, huh? Definitely tell, I'll make myself available to be, they have to be a part of the project and the movement. Namaskaram, good morning, both the brothers, bravo brothers, ha ha ha, Dwayne and Darren. Wonderful to see you guys. Nice to meet you. Wonderful seeing both of you. This new movement that's going to bring it to the Caribbean, soil movement. So, we would like to get a little more like in depth, whether to get to understand it a bit more, that this new movement that they want us to be a part of, that we also want to educate ourselves more about it, but also be the vessel and carrier for the message as well. To put it in simple terms, what has happened is just this, unfortunately in our so-called scientific approach to things, we are looking at everything as material. Soil is not material, it's like a living organism. In a handful of soil, there are over five to seven billion organisms and just like how our body functions, for example in our body over sixty percent of this body is actually microorganisms, only forty percent is genetically, you know, our parental cells which are within us, but sixty percent is microorganisms. See the food that we eat, actually we cannot digest all by ourselves, we don't have the necessary enzymes and alkalines to digest this completely. Only because of the microbial gut microbes that are there, we digest food. How rich our gut microbes is, that will determine how well we digest things and how well we assimilate the food that we eat. The same is true with all the plants and trees. They cannot take the nutrients from the soil by themselves. They need the help of the microorganisms, there is a very complex, what to say, like a marketplace going on just beneath the soil. The plants are doing photosynthesis, taking carbon from the atmosphere, making it into carbon sugars and trading, very care, very judiciously trading with the microbes and they are also very, very, very, very astute marketing people. They won't give their wares of whatever nutrients they have, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfates and other things they have, unless they get the right amount of carbon sugars, it is a very complex trading mechanism. The moment the plant has nothing to give, they will just cut off all the nutrients. That's how it is beneath the soil, it's a very complex process. But we are treating this like a bunch of chemicals, we think by throwing some nitrogen or phosphorus or urea or ammonia or something like that, everything will be fine. This is the mistake we have done in the last fifty to seventy years time and it is only in this period that this kind of damages happen. And the most phenomenal thing that's happening on the planet, which is also the source of our very life is what we call as photosynthesis. Photosynthesis means a non-stop generation of energy and providing carbon for all life. When I say carbon for all life, all of us are carbon life, we are essentially carbon. You know, that's why either you can become diamond or a coal, a piece of coal, a human being can shine like a diamond or end up like charcoal because carbon… Because anyway we made of carbon. So all life that you know, plants, animals, insects, worms, birds, everything is carbon material. So this carbon exchange is happening at a phenomenal rate and if this has to happen efficiently, what is called as photosynthesis must be on. Right now the problem with the world is either the land is plowed and left open or it is paved in the cities. Paving and ploughing of the sands is the main thing. We cannot avoid paving where people are walking around in cities. Anyway that paving air, paved area is getting larger but still it is not large enough to cause climate change and all that. But the plowed area is nearly seventy percent or seventy-two percent of the world's land has been plowed and left open during seasons when there is no crop. That is the main damage because first twelve to fifteen inches of soil has all the life that sustains everything else. Only twelve to fifteen inches of soil is responsible for eighty-seven percent of the life on this planet including you and me. We all come from just this much of soil. Everything is coming from there. But when you plow with machines and leave it open, the machines are plowing up to twelve inches plus and it's completely destroying everything, leaving it open. The simplest thing that we have to do is bring maximum amount of green cover. Need not necessarily be forest. It can be cover crops, it can be weeds, it can be grasses, it can be anything. But there must be photosynthesis happening everywhere. Only then the soil is continuously getting enriched. Otherwise about twenty-five to thirty years of farming destroys most of the soils. Right now according to UN agencies more than fifty percent of the world's top soil is gone. And we have top soil only for another sixty to eighty crops on the planet which is approximately forty-five to sixty years. Every responsible scientist is saying that by twenty-forty-five we will be producing forty percent less food on the planet and our populations will be nine point two billion. Well, that's not a world you want to live in. Not do we want to leave our children in that world. Because on an average it's estimated twenty-seven thousand species, not organisms, twenty-seven thousand species of microorganisms are becoming extinct every year on an average. At this rate if we go, in thirty to forty years time we will reach a place where if you want to regenerate soil it will take hundred and fifty to two hundred years. But right now we are in a time, at a threshold of time where if we do the right things now in the next fifteen to twenty-five years we can turn back the world's soil in a significant way. That is why the urgency and that is why this movement. As you rightly said the soil is the habitat for billions and zillions of lives. And I think as I… as I told my brother sometime ago that God is not making any more lives. So it's important that as human beings we take stock of what is happening right now and try to make that drastic change as quickly as possible. With a simple policy change in all the nations, we are attempting a policy change in hundred and ninety-two nations across the world. See right now everybody is talking about what can I do, what can I do? Let us say you have ten acres or a hundred acres of land, you take care of it very well. But there is no guarantee the next generation will do the same thing, they may ruin it. There are no laws. There are no laws to say you have to protect the soil, you have to maintain the soil at a certain level of aliveness. So there is no guarantee. So policy change is very important because it should be enshrined in every country's policy that this is the way to manage your soil. Because soil is not our property. It is a legacy that's come to us from previous generations and we have to pass it on as a living soil for the next generation. Otherwise if you remove all the organic content, the world will be full of sand, there will be no soil. This is how deserts have happened. Right now for example Saudi Arabia means you think it's a total desert. But they are saying ten thousand years ago it was a rainforest. Can you believe that? It was a rainforest ten thousand years ago and things happened and it's become a desert. See to convert a desert into so you know agricultural land, they are spending billions of dollars to turn this into agricultural lands and they are doing it in the certain scale. But that is happening in one country where there is you know an enormous amount of money to be invested. But none of the other countries can ever think of investing that kind of money on small pieces of land to make it agriculturally productive. But the existing lands that we have which is approximately about fifty-one million square kilometers which we are using for agriculture across the world, this land if you raise the organic content from its present level to three to six percent, with half the land you can produce the food that you are already producing. The food that you need for the world, you can produce it with twenty-five million acres of land but we are using fifty-one million acres simply because soils have depleted and we are just trying to grow crops with salts, throwing chemicals and salts. So you said within forty-five to fifty-fifty-five years, right? Yes. Left with soil, that's the average that the thing is left. So what do you think will happen next if we don't save? See, the United Nations agencies like FAO and others are predicting by twenty-thirty-five, twenty-forty, they are predicting worldwide civil wars. Civil wars could be happening in various countries across the world because forty-percent less food means fights will start within the country. For example, in the last forty years or so, forty or forty-two years, there have been thirty wars in Africa. Out of these twenty-seven wars were to take charge of fertile lands. I want you to look at the Google map of Africa. How it was ten years ago, how it is today, you will see the brown patch has spread from both south and north, it is encroaching into the central Africa. Africa means you thought is always green but most people's image of Africa is from the Tarzan movies of the eighties, you know, everywhere jungles, jungles, jungles, there is nothing like that. Most countries are becoming deserts. Do you believe that if you said that in next forty-fourty, forty-fifty years that nothing is being done? I was looking at the documentary and not sure if it's accurate or what, but they said it's going to have like a major blast out in the world. See the thing is we are always looking at cold statistics and making predictions. I don't… I'm not somebody who looks at it that way, but you and me as human beings, if we stand up now, such a situation need not come. Very easily in twelve to fifteen years' time, we can turn this around. We have a large-scale sample here in southern India. You must visit and see this sometime when you have the time. We have a movement called Cauvery Calling. We initially started a rally for reverse project with which we changed the policy. Change of policy was very important. Now on-ground in one river basin, which is eighty-three thousand square kilometers and five-point-two million farmers in this one river basin, here we are working. We have transformed now hundred-and-twenty-five thousand farmers into a different kind of agriculture, which is a tree-based agriculture. In five to seven years, their incomes have gone up anywhere between three hundred to eight hundred percent, three to eight times, and the soil quality has improved significantly. And water tables have come up, and the nutritious… nutrition quality in the food has greatly enhanced. See, why I'm talking about nutrition is, for example, in United States, I'm saying United States because that is one place where these things are being measured. In most other places, it's not measured. What kind of fruits and vegetables you ate in nineteen-twenty, about hundred years ago? Today, only ten percent of the nourishment is there in the same vegetables and fruits. If you ate one orange in nineteen-twenty, what you got? Today you have to eat eight oranges to get the same thing. Have you ever eaten eight oranges for breakfast, I'm asking. So why you think it's a further… you have to eat like almost triple. Not triple eight times. Yeah. There is no… there is no eight in cricket, only six, that's a problem. I saw a photo of you with the pants. Oh really? Play it, play it, play it, play it, I actually played more field hockey than cricket. So I was into the field hockey. But we… nobody in India who doesn't play cricket. Everybody is a cricketer. So seeing that you're a big cricket fan, who would have been your all-time cricket favorite player? All-time cricket favorite, I think it's Vivian Richards. Vivian Richards? Yes. I mean, it's not just about the runs and score. The way it was done, the ease and a certain mastery over what was being done was fearless kind of playing, you know? I think I've looked one of the videos when one of your sessions with this young boy asks you a question, the difference between when your mind telling you something or when your heart telling you something. And that was very interesting, the way I would answer it. Because you always hear people say, okay, do it from my heart or my heart tell me this. But you said the only thing your heart do is go boo boo boo, that's it. Loved up is all it does. What they're trying to say, should I decide something with, you know, with thought process or with emotions, that's what they're asking. So there are some aspects of life which you decide on the basis of your emotion. There are some aspects of life that you must decide with a clarity of thought. There is no, this thing that you everything has to be by thought. If you do everything by thought, you will succeed to some level after that your life will be so dry, useless kind of life you will live. But if you become all emotional, you make you could be one big mess. So both are needed. It's like should I use my, when you're playing cricket, should I use my hands or my legs? Tell me. Interesting, interesting. Okay, so I want to ask a personal question, right? Obviously being a cricketer, you get a particular feeling of greatness and superior when, for example, you score a test hundred or you score one day hundred or whatever the case may be. The feeling you get after you score that particular hundred for the next day you're going to back, how can you replicate that sort of feeling initially when you know go into the wicket to start your innings? That level of confidence and so forth. I'm sorry, I may say something which is contradictory to many things you would have heard. See, you should not feel good because you hit hundred. You should not feel good because you won the match. Well, those things are there, little bit of celebration and stuff is there. But the real good feeling for a cricketer should be about how you hit the ball, okay? When you hit the ball really well, there is a good feeling and that's all you must bank on. If you keep on having that good feeling, somebody else will count the score. Why are you counting the score? There are other people. Hello? You must just hit the ball, you know, like somebody was asking me, in India as you know, one big emotion is always this thing, India-Pakistan matches like a, you know, another level of excitement and emotion. So, somebody comes and asks me, «Sadhguru, how to beat Pakistan? I said, don't beat Pakistan. Why do you want beat Pakistan? Beating Pakistan is not the business of India's cricket team. India's cricket team should only bother about how to hit the damn ball. Don't try to beat Pakistan or Pakistanis, that's not the way to play the game. You just hit the ball. If you hit the ball well, you will beat everybody, all right? But beating everybody is not the business of cricket. The business of cricket is hitting the ball well. So, the greatest feeling for you should be always about striking the ball well. If you have that, somebody will count, somebody will declare who won. That's not your business. Your business is you hitting the ball really well. That's all. And people love you and admire you for that. It's very easy to write hundred. One zero zero is hundred, you know? Nobody is admiring you for hundred. Unfortunately, people may think so. But the real pleasure of the game and the accomplishment of the game is how well can you hit the ball? So, when you asked who is your favorite player, I said Vivian Richards. Maybe Vivian Richards has not scored as many runs as somebody else. Many other people have bigger records. I'm talking about how the ball was struck. That's all the game is. I'm just looking at it from a mental perspective. Sometimes you want that level of confidence, even when you're not doing well. This is the level of confidence you feel after you get the hundred. That's what I'm asking. No, I'm saying it should not be that way, I'm saying. It should not be that way, because hundred is just a number. See, there was a time, as you know, there was a time if you... if a team reaches hundred in thirty overs, that was considered very good. For the first time I remember, Sanat Jaya Surya hit hundred in twenty overs. That was a miracle. Now they're hitting it in eight overs, all right? Ten overs. So I'm saying don't set such standards. Hundred is a great number, no. Hundred is not a great number, six is not a great number. The big thing about cricket is you're hitting the ball so well. And that's all that matters. In the given conditions, in any given condition you're hitting the ball well. In certain conditions, fifty runs may be very big deal. In another condition, two hundred runs may not be so big. Isn't it so? So don't go by the number. Your whole thing should be about how to strike the ball in the best possible way. And you must have the greatest feeling from that. Once your confidence and your way of how you feel is dependent on how you strike the ball, that's all your focus will be and that's all it should be. Scoreboard is not your business. There are people employed to do that job. Thank you. So you guys... See, you know for playing cricket you need good soil, very good soil, huh? Yes, very important. Otherwise, you know what all the track will do for you. Yeah, definitely looking forward to you visiting our shores. It's good that you come into the Caribbean and by extension Trinidad and Tobago which is our home. Definitely I'll make myself available to be... to be a part of the project and the movement and also to meet you in person. Thank you very much, Dwayne. Thank you, Dwayne. All the best for you. Thank you, sir. Thank you. My best wishes and blessings to both of you. Namaskaram.