As I opened the newspapers today, the headline greeted me – COP21: Paris climate agreement is ‘best chance to save planet’. These were the words of President Barack Obama. 200 countries had taken part in these discussions on controlling climate change and reached a pact to cut emissions. Well what do you know, my first thought was, ‘Wow, even if the deal was not the finest, to have 200 nations standing united behind a worldwide initiative was an incredible step forward.’ There was a feeling of hope that this kind of news brought with it. So it is possible that humankind can put their differences behind them and stand as one committing themselves to a higher goal.

Yet even with this step forward, my next thought was that there is still so much to be done. For starters the world leaders would need to follow through with their commitments over the coming years. 2020 has been chosen as the year when the climate deal would come into being. Until then I guess it will be preparation time; after all it was a mammoth undertaking. However, I could not help thinking if it was too little too late.

This is because when SSRF wrote about our spiritual research behind climate change in 2007, we mentioned that we needed to look at the problem of climate change and global warming holistically. This means we needed to attend to resolving the contributing factors at a physical psychological and spiritual level. ‘Spiritual what?!’, is what most people would say or think. The scientific community may well roll their eyes incredulously and cry, ‘What is your basis?’ I guess I would too, if I were not privy to the knowledge gained through spiritual research.

Let’s take a quick recap as to what the contributing factors to climate change were found to be through SSRF’s spiritual research.

From the above chart it shows that the effect of humans on climate change due to all our CO₂ emissions (point 2A) accounts for just 19% of the reason why today’s generations are being affected by a high degree of severe natural disasters. It is not only global warming, parched Earth and flooding we are talking about that could be attributed to increases in CO₂ emissions. What of the increase in Earthquakes and Volcanoes? Scientists are only vaguely linking them to CO₂ emissions; so why are they also increasing in a big way?

The spiritual research goes on to say that the main reason for the destabilization in the world’s environment be it natural disasters or war is due to the increase in the spiritual impurity in the world. When the personality defects such as greed, anger, selfishness and desire of people rise along with materialism and complete lack of spiritual practice, it directly increases the spiritual impurity on Earth. When leaders of society have personality defects they create a greater amount of sin and in turn spiritual impurity as they direct society in a spiritually incorrect manner. One can say that global warming is like a fever that the world has due to the disease of ‘heightened spiritual impurity in the minds of humans’.

Just as our body fights disease through our immune system and white blood cells, Mother Earth too has a self-cleansing mechanism. When spiritual impurity rises Mother Nature automatically starts to brings about a correction through forces of nature which culminate in natural disasters. As humanity is the main cause of heightened spiritual impurity, the cleansing process through natural disasters starts to target areas on Earth where spiritual impurity exists. I feel sad to say this, but humanity is akin to a virus which is increasing the disease of spiritual impurity on Mother Earth. Egged on by powerful subtle forces of negative energies from the spiritual dimension there is no sign of humanity relenting and reducing their personality defects and spiritual damage to the environment.

Ironically, we humans too due to our personality defects help in this process of destruction. At an individual level we are indiscriminate about how we use precious resources. We are lazy about doing small things like:

• taking public transport vs driving one’s own car,
• making sure lights are turned off if no one is in the room,
• not leaving appliances on when they are not needed,
• proper disposal of organic waste vs plastics,
• eating vegetarian diet vs. a non-vegetarian one,
• not wasting food

When we multiply what we are not doing by 7.2 billion people, it amounts to an awful lot of waste and has a massive impact on the destruction of the environment.

Then there is the alarming increase in conflict, terrorism, skirmishes and wars around the world, which is another medium through which this destruction will come to pass. Now with World War 3 at our doorstep perhaps this event and its aftermath will account for more destruction than the forces of nature. Combined, the Third World War and severe natural disasters will account for a destruction like we have never seen before and all this will happen before 2020, the year the COP21 pact begins.

A grim picture indeed! So is the road to worldwide destruction a fait accompli? Is it a forgone conclusion?

The answer is, it depends.

• If we had to collectively stop this catastrophe, then the world would need to stand as one, yet again as they did in Paris and make sincere efforts to progress spiritually as per universal principles and not some sectarian or myopic viewpoint that involves one religion out to convert another. Given the current mindset of people this is mostly impossible. However, if we continue the way we are going, history will say that our generation created the tipping point for the planet and we were the ones that caused this wide scale destruction and also suffered for it.
• However, if we make sincere efforts to grow spiritually even at an individual level, we gain a greater amount of Divine protection to sustain ourselves physically, mentally and spiritually in the coming bad times. Correct spiritual practice creates spiritual positivity, increases the spiritual level of a person and reduces personality defects. Increasing one’s spiritual level through regular spiritual practice is the need of the hour to be granted a visa into the Divine Kingdom, which is the world after 2023.

Peace and stability on Earth is a natural outcome of where there is spiritual purity. Spiritual purity is the key ingredient for everything being in equilibrium including forces of nature and regular spiritual practice helps us attain it.