The movement from aham to Brahma opens the doors to human unity, but the circle of transformation cannot stop at humanity alone. Man is not separate from the earth; he is its voice and its experiment.
The same consciousness that dreams through forests, flows through rivers, and burns in stars, has risen in him to self-awareness. To reclaim dharma, therefore, is to rediscover our role not only as individuals in society, but as custodians of the earth and participants in the cosmic yajna.
The Vedic rishis did not see the earth as inert matter. They called her Prithvi Mata: the conscious Mother who bears, nurtures, and sustains all beings.
The Rigveda invokes not just Agni and Indra, but also the rivers, the winds, the mountains, as divine presences: Devas, shining powers of existence. To live in dharma was to live in right relation not only with other humans but with all beings, visible and invisible.
Today, this ancient vision has become an urgent necessity. Humanity has grown powerful enough to alter the climate, poison the oceans, and destabilise the delicate balances of life.
But what we call “ecological crisis” is not merely material. It is a spiritual crisis: the forgetting of the earth’s sacredness, the amnesia of dharma.
In my own inner journey, I saw how the body is not separate from the elements of nature. The body’s annamaya kosha is sustained by earth and water, its pranamaya sheath by air, its fire by the inner Agni, its mind by the luminous ether.
When the body was purified through sattvic diet and balanced through asana, I realised I was not merely “getting healthy.”
I was rediscovering the body as earth, the breath as air, the circulation as rivers, the nerves as lightning. To transform oneself is to re-align with the very rhythms of nature.
This insight, when extended, reveals the deeper meaning of dharma. Dharma is not a human code imposed upon the earth. Dharma is the law of balance that already sustains the earth, which man must attune himself to. The ecological crisis, then, is not a punishment from outside. It is the karmic recoil of living against dharma.
Sri Aurobindo spoke of the supramental transformation not as an escape from the world but as the divinisation of life. This implies not only a new humanity but a new earth-consciousness. The supramental being will live not by exploitation but by participation, participation in the harmony of the cosmos, where every act is an offering to the yajna of existence.
This is why the Vedic symbol of yajna is so profound. In the yajna, the fire is kindled, the oblations offered, the gods invoked, and the cosmic order renewed.
The same is true for our collective future. Humanity must re-learn the yajna of living, not as consumption but as offering, not as domination but as stewardship, not as waste but as transformation.
Dharma, then, is not static morality. It is the dynamic law of balance that aligns man with the earth and the cosmos.
It is the recognition that the forests are not exploitable resources but organs of the planetary body, that animals are not commodities but companions in evolution, that the elements are not raw material but conscious presences.