Q: I’ve just heard that one of the issues at the retreat was the Golden Age. I’m interested because I write music and songs about normal life and also very much feel the need to write songs about how spirituality influences life. And I’d like to know because I can feel it starting in a lot of places.

M: It could be true. If people start to go back more to God, come more to a spiritual awareness and lessen the karma of killing, like following a vegetarian diet and keeping the precepts from the Bible, the Buddhist scriptures or other scriptures, the Golden Age will come soon. In such a society, people don’t fear each other but love and help each other. That’s the Golden Age.

But on the other hand, a Golden Age starts within ourselves anytime we find God, when we find a brotherhood within humankind. For example, our group feels that we’re in the Golden Age. And when the Buddha was alive, His disciples felt they were in the Golden Age. So when the Buddha spoke of the five hundred years after his Nirvana, He was referring to it as the decline of the Golden Age or the decline of the Dharma. But that doesn’t mean it ended right there. It ends according to that time, but then another Dharma Age starts all the time. Every time we have a living Master and a true teaching and we can get in touch with our Golden Age inside, we’re in a Golden Age. You feel it because you have the Golden Age within you.