On a silent and beautiful morning, with the sun rising and the birds singing the graph is very harmonious. Then suddenly, the scientists bring a woodcutter with the intention to cut a tree. And immediately – the man has not started cutting it, he has not expressed his thought even that he is going to cut it – the graph starts wavering, loses harmony, shows fear, anxiety, tension; the tree has lost its joyous ecstatic interiority.

It seems that the tree is capable of reading the mind of the man, because he has not said anything. And if the same woodcutter is brought to the side of the tree without any intention to cut it, the graph goes on harmoniously, there is no change. The tree is not worried; the man is not dangerous, he is not going to harm it.

Not only that, but when a woodcutter comes with the intention of cutting a tree, a certain tree, other trees surrounding it all start showing anxiety, fear, anguish; their graphs start losing the harmonious beauty. They are not going to be cut, but one of their friends, one of their neighbors, a colleague for years, is going to be unnecessarily killed.

It was in the East with Mahavira, that the first insight came into the world that trees are living beings, and they should be treated in the same way. Vegetarianism is just a by-product of that intuition. But it remained a philosophical hypothesis.

Then another Indian man, Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose, scientifically proved that trees are living beings. He was given a Nobel prize for his great exploration and opened a new door for future explorers. But since then fifty years, or more than fifty years have passed; nobody has gone beyond Jagdish Chandra Bose.

But recently, many scientists around the world – in the Soviet Union, outside the Soviet Union – have gone far beyond Jagdish Chandra Bose and his discoveries. The trees are not only alive; they are also conscious in their own way.

Man should not think that he is the only conscious and intelligent animal in the world, and he should not think that his is the only type of consciousness that exists. The researchers show that animals have a different kind of consciousness and a different kind of sensitivity.

A few birds…particularly bees have been found to have a certain language, and trees have been found immensely sensitive. When the gardener comes to water and to nourish them, the graph on the cardiogram attached to them starts dancing in joy, shows some ecstatic welcome. Perhaps soon we may be able to discover that they have their own kind of language that we don’t understand.

But Prince Charles talking to the trees in England will not be acceptable. He is being condemned as a little crazy. Actually, according to me, and according to all the scientific research too, what he is doing is absolutely sane – more sane than your ordinary people are.

I had an old gardener who won every year a competition in the city because he used to bring roses so big that people could not believe it. He was a poor man and his secret was that he treated trees not as trees, but as his own children. He would talk to them, he would inform them before-hand, “I am going for a competition; don’t let me down. You have to produce the biggest flower possible.”