…………. I wish to congratulate the organizers of this celebration for having done a really excellent job. You know, we have very adverse circumstances in South India at the moment and the main one is water - water problem. They have already told you that they are buying almost 500,000 litres of water everyday at this campus. God provides and we waste. When God has been providing in plenty, we have become very wasteful indeed. And we don't know when to stop wasting, and what to do about resource conservation until it is almost too late.

I think as far as I can remember, at least for 15 years, I have been telling people that we have two hands, and when we brush our teeth the left hand should be used to control the tap. But everybody you'll see, the tap is flowing merrily, and they are brushing their teeth. For every, say, 100 ml of water that you need, you use probably five litres. And now we are talking of water-harvesting. So we have to learn how to use Nature's resources efficiently, which means, minimum usage, maximum utilisation. It is like any other power conservation -- minimum input, maximum output. So, as was announced on the first day of the celebration, you were requested not to wash clothes during the celebration, not to bathe more than once, etc. etc.

This is an example of how we have to restrain ourselves in using anything that we have to use, whether it is water, whether it is money, whether it is food, even food, you know. There is an old yogic statement that any one of us can exist on one fifth of what we consume today. It doesn't matter whom. Whether we are a pahalwan, big hefty fellow, weighing 300 pounds, or a small slim fellow weighing 40 kilos, it doesn't matter. Because if you go to this idea of atomic science, there is a way of consuming less and less and giving more and more energy output. I mean, everybody knows that if you eat too much, you become sluggish, your body becomes incapable of movement. When you sleep you snore, and of course the mind cannot be active at all. If you look at the colossal amount of food that we waste, as a nation and as a global waste, it is not surprising that there are so many poor people; because with what we waste we could feed three times the population of this earth.

So today, conservation means restraint. We have to restrain ourselves to take in exactly what we need, what is good for us and what will optimize our physical activity, our sleep, our mental activity and, without doubt, even our meditation.
I have heard Babuji say so often that, when people were snoring, they asked, "What shall we do?"
He said, "Eat two rotis less."
He linked snoring directly to eating. When we need two rotis, we eat five. If the aaloo is good, we eat a sixth one with all the aaloo we can consume also. If you like something, you eat double what you should eat. If you don't like something, what you should have eaten is wasted. So, you see, all round, we are wasters of every department of consumption.

It is said of the USA that they have one fourth of the world's population and they use 160 times the energy that they should use (140 is it?). I mean, colossal consumption: and in today's wonderful civilization, the more you consume, the more civilized you are supposed to be - hand tissues, face tissues, not to mention other tissues. Jungles cut down by the millions of acres every year, water resources drying up, food resources going down the drain. I mean, it is too much to list all this. Everyone knows what is happening.

I know when I used to go round with Babuji Maharaj after Basant Panchami in Shahjahanpur, there used to be big mounds of rotis thrown away. People in their avarice, in their greed, used to take four rotis, eat one and throw away the rest. Jhoota, it is dirty because somebody has already put his hand on it, nobody else can eat it.
Babuji used to literally feel so sad that he used to say, "I don't mind if they eat 20 rotis, but for heaven's sake, don't waste."

I am not wanting to talk of wasting of food and water, that is not my intention. I'm using these as examples of the need to restrain ourselves in every aspect of our behaviour, our activities - social, personal, communal, so that we can maximize our physical, mental and meditational activities. Self-restraint is the order of the day. Discipline must be in self-restraint. When we talk of discipline in a general way, people think of it as an obnoxious thing, especially the people of the occidental culture for whom freedom has come to mean something not unlike licence. They must be able to do what they want, when they want and as they want. That is not freedom. That is licence. You cannot say a terrorist is free because he can kill whom he likes, he is free. We are all terrorists in different ways. We terrorise food, we terrorise water, we terrorise electricity in the sense that for every unit of legitimate usage, we waste 49 units.
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Don't you think what I am saying is true? And every one of us is a possible cause of such a situation. Unless we are able to deal with ourselves, discipline ourselves through self-restraint, starting from the smallest of human possibilities. Sleep no more than you need to, eat no more than you need to, use no more water than you need to, and these "need to's" must be goals established by yourself for yourself. Your mother cannot tell you, you need five rotis, why are you eating three? Mothers are spoilers of children.
"Have one more beta!" or, "Aloo paratha is so good, take one more", "Halwa is good", "Jalebi is good", and we get into this habit of obedience of the maternal order and ruin our life for ever.
Poor eating, bad eating becomes our a habit. Ek aur roti lele and we call this hospitality. Of course the people must be hospitable and say please eat one more because you may be shy and you don't eat what you need. But it doesn't mean that you would have immediately grabbed two rotis.
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So you see, unless we are able to discipline ourselves through self-restraint, we are going to suffer very badly, because society is created of all of us. There is no such thing as society. Society is all of us put together, and the more of us who are able to restrain ourselves can teach them how to do the self-restraining activities.
"Start with yourselves."
"Charity begins at home."
"Waste not, want not."
It is too easy to say, "Oh, but Chari, I use very little water in my house, but the others are wasting".
You will not want, because where they need 120 litres a day, you will manage on 15. You are certainly benefited by disciplining yourself. So this idea of self restraint as discipline, real discipline.

Source:Excerpts from a talk given by P. Rajagopalachari in Tiruppur on July 25th 2001, Constant Remembrance magazine, Shri Ram Chandra Mission USA

Q: How careful are you with resources like money, food, water, clothing etc? Do you appreciate what you are given?

Q: When it comes to food, what do you think of Maxim Eight: "Be happy to eat in constant Divine thought, whatever you get, with due regard for honest and pious earnings" ?
Are you happy to eat whatever you are given?
What do you think Babuji meant by having regard for honest and pious earnings?

Q: Can you come up with five things you can change in your behaviour that will help conserve your resources? Try to put these into practice in your life this week. Once you have mastered these five, think of five more, and so on.

Discuss with a friend how you will work together to take more care of your resources. Perhaps you could suggest this to your teacher at school for a class project.

O, Master!
Thou art the real goal of human life.
We are yet but slaves of wishes
Putting bar to our advancement,
Thou art the only God and power
To bring us up to that stage.