Excerpted from ‘Meditation Course – The Soldier Saint – Day 1’ on December 11, 1990 in Formello, Italy by the Siri Singh Sahib, Yogi Bhajan

Sometimes we ask the question, “What is the use of meditation?” It’s very simple, to create your own intuition. Devotion is all right and emotions are all right, actions are all right, reactions are all right. If everything is all right, without intuition there is no absolute self. And come to this Earth, not to find the self is the greatest tragedy.

You have come here not to find the wealth, health or the reasons. You have come here to find yourself. Without the experience of the self, you have come and you will go, you will leave with regret. Nothing will go with you, except the joy of the self.

Man understood that he has to learn the self. And for that, man has to have the inner strength. Without inner strength, no devotion is possible, no sacrifice is possible, not even work is possible.

Though we all can read the newspaper, you will find people talking about the newspaper on the telephone. Totally forgetting that telephone costs money, it costs energy. Every drop of the water wasted costs energy, every extra light costs energy. All that energy has to be produced.

One-third of the energy is wasted. Result is we are polluting the planet Earth. Our oceans are polluted, our rivers and lakes are polluted and God bless us, our air is polluted. We have no self-control and the way we are living on this planet, the way we are cutting the forest, the way we are wasting the land, in one hundred years, we will reach our doomsday.

I was in Moscow last year. We were about eight hundred people. Three hundred religious people, three hundred people of the government, senators, congressmen, legislators, political people, there were two hundred scientists all over the world. We gathered in Moscow, we talked five days. Three days scientists kept telling us that if we do not act right now, we will never be in a position to recuperate the Earth. We have reached a point beyond danger. We all understood it.

We came back home, everywhere in America and all over the world there was an Earth Day. One Sunday it was celebrated, newspapers carried the stories and all that. Next day the same habits, same waste of energy, same waste of water, same pollution. Do you understand United States in two hundred years has become a garbage pit, with only 250 million people? It is three hundred miles this way and three hundred miles that way. It’s a lot of land, lot of resources and lot of things there. All gone. It is surprising how much pollution has taken place.

Look at the most beautiful city of Rome, there is not air to breathe. There is a curfew between such and such hour and such and such hour you cannot go to the center of the Rome. Life has become nothing but a smoke.

Blessed God, give us peace, give the planet Earth the chance for peace, give the mankind peace, let Thy grace be in our heart, let us all live in peace, understanding and tranquility. Sat Nam.

Read the full lecture on The Yogi Bhajan Library of Teachings