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Jain Meditation
meeting took place in 1998, in Houston over the 4th of July. There were over seven hundred boys and girls. They made the commitment that they will practice nonviolence; that they will represent a reverence for life; and that they will conduct themselves ethically and morally in life and in business. There are MBAS, MDs, and lawyers who have all started the movement. So in these years, the dream that I had has become a reality.
L.M.: Back when you were in India, you had this dream to come to America.
s.C.: Yes, yes, I thought the Western world has a great material capacity. It is able to reach the moon. But they are also fighting, and having violence in their society. If they don't have reverence for life, they will use guns to kill their own neighbors, their own people. I had a dream to talk to people in the United Nations. Though I did not have this vast dream all at once, how it would come out. It turns out to be a very big dream now-beyond my first dream.
L.M.: You must be doing the right kind of dreaming, as Jainism is doing so well here. Now what is the good life? And how does this practice of ahimsa, along with the Jain emphasis on vegetarianism-how does this contribute to better living environmentally, socially, and for the individual?
S.C.: Once you begin to live a life with integration, that life itself is a good life. It is not that something good is different. When you are harmonious in your behavior and with your belief, that is a good life. Your behavior and belief are have reverence for life. First, you have to have reverence for yourself. I will not do something that puts me down in my own eyes. When I am alone, I should not feel down about myself that I say: My God, what a messy man I am. Rather, I feel that I am clean- -so one has to feel good with oneself. If something is wrong with us, we do not have to identify with that. We have to talk with ourself: "That it is a condition, it is not me. I am pure consciousness, I am divine, I am evolving." The philosophy of evolution states that we started from lower than ameoba; and now we have become a human being. So in each life, by burning karma—and through suffering and through service-we are evolving. We were in tree life, and in animal life, but we have evolved. Though some residue of animal life we still have. Sometimes, we are like a dog, we bark; sometimes we are like a fox, we are very cunning; and, sometimes we are like the cobra, we become angry. So we have some residue of that.
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