Prayer is essential in life

Q: Gurudev, what is the importance of yagna? I heard that if we do yagna, then even the rain comes. Why don’t we do a big yagna, and finish all the bad things in the world?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: Have you heard about the butterfly effect? A butterfly, fluttering its wings in Amazons, can affect the clouds in China. It means, every little thing, affects every other little thing in the universe, in the cosmos. So, yagnas are those ancient rituals or practices that have an effect on the environment, on the collective consciousness, and on the individual mind.

To conduct yagnas, specific herbs would be collected on a specific, particular day.
Do you know cosmology is connected to agriculture? Recently, the Vivekanand Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana (VYASA) Research Foundation made an experiment to see theeffect of particular days, and particular times.
` Do you know of Rahu Kaal? In South India, people don’t begin anything new in Rahu Kaal. This is a particular period of one and a half hour each day, at a particular time.
The scientists did a wonderful experiment to assess the impact of vaccinations given to people during Rahu Kaal. They have produced a paper on their findings, which shows that the vaccination given during Rahu Kaal does not make an impact on the body at all.

Similarly with Agnihotra (a ritual performed to purify the atmosphere using fire), they have found how the virus that catches on to trees can be eliminated. Now trees can become healthy, just with Agnihotra, where they put certain herbs in the fire.

So, yagnas are ancient techniques where you use different herbs and create that atmosphere using the five elements, i.e., Water, Earth, Fire, Air and Ether. The thing is, you need to have people who know how to do this correctly.

Do you know, this science was almost dying, that is why we started a school here.
In 1980, when I was touring Germany, and giving lectures in different universities; at the University of Tubingen, some people took me to their manuscript library. They said, ‘Sri Sri, see, there are so many Sanskrit manuscripts here, thousands of them. Do you have some scholars who can decode these things? We are unable to get scholars to decode; we are preserving the manuscripts.’
They have maintained the manuscripts so well in Hamburg University, and in Tubingen they have filmed them.
Then I came to India and held several conferences. The scholars who knew how to read these ancient scriptures, were old, and did not want to travel. They were already in their sixties and seventies, and the youngsters had no idea about the scriptures.
Since a lot of scientific information, about Ayurveda and others was present in these scriptures, I thought we should start a school. That is when we first started the Ved Vignan Maha Vidhya Peeth here, to bring scholars together and give them modern education as well.
The scholars need to know English, and they need to know the ancient text as well, only then they can translate.

What I am saying here is that, this knowledge is present in every generation. If you speak about black matter, dark matter and dark energy, these ideas were present in the ancient texts as well. Unfortunately, there is nobody who can go, read, and get some clues from it.

Here, we have Dr. Hari and his wife Hema, who have been doing a lot of research. Many of you think that Ganges is a natural river. They have made many scientific evolutions to say that it is a man-made river, which flows all the way, throughout India.

So, yagnas are one such technique that is there to nullify the negative, and create positive ions in the atmosphere. Again, that needs a little revival, like Ayurveda is getting revived. In the same way, that will also happen.

http://www.artofliving.org/in-en/what-sri-sri-said-today