"Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. The here and now remembers the past and anticipates the future, which is the very nature of consciousness. So, you actually are conscious on very many levels. You're conscious; like being one with yourself, conscious with being one with your species, consciousness with life, consciousness with the planet, consciousness with the universe. Also, the ecosystem and everything is part of consciousness. So spiritual growth is to let go of the ego and get more in touch with the consciousness. And we're here on Earth to actually follow that path. We're here on Earth to start widening our consciousness and throw it in wider and wider circles to eventually achieve Universal consciousness. And in Universal consciousness, we're all the same, we're all together. And the whole point of life and human beings is that we're heading away from that Universal consciousness so that we can walk our own path and find it again.

In life, there's so much diversity and information, what we could be doing - like our genes. What we actually do with our genes is only a few percent of what kind of information is actually stored. there. And that is all insurance against a changing world, where all of a sudden we need to tap into something. Let's embrace diversity. Different people thinking different things, having different options of how they think, what they need to do for the future, and if they think they're safe and all that. And a lot of those will fail, but I'm not the won who knows which ones.

Humans, they actually start betting their future as a species on the availability of non-renewable resources, so if we shift to actually figuring out how we can live off of renewable resources and be part of the total cycle of life, then I don't see the reason why humans can't be even in massive amounts on the planet. A lot of places all of the world are out of context with nature that is actually happening there. Listen to the song of nature; it's a symphony out there."

- Roel Boumans, ecologist

Mantra: Chop Wood, Carry Water