The Link #24 - Editorial

This morning, as I looked out on the garden through the kitchen window, I was surprised to see the yellow flowers of a tree that normally only blossoms in spring. It was a startling reminder of global warming and its implications. Existence is a unified whole in which all the parts are organically interdependent and this untimely blooming is no stranger to human consciousness but most likely a direct outcome of its unseasonable actions. All reality is movement and momentous changes are already upon us. Our own involvement in their precipitation brings home the fundamental need for change in our social and psychological structures.

The need for radical change throws into question every scheme that we have ever devised or might invent. The whole question of change is now centred on the inner aspect of man as the source of the current crisis. Psychologically we are knowledge and knowledge is dead. No wonder then that in our actions we spread so much death and destruction. Total change needs a truly creative breakthrough.

The articles in this issue of The Link explore a variety of aspects involved in this quest for order and insight, such as the nature of K’s meditation and its existential grounding and uncertainty, whether consciousness is strictly material, what is meant by nurturing certain qualities in education and what are the challenges for students graduating from a K school. Other pieces explore the metamorphosis of mind when immersed in primal nature and the implications for inward change unfolded in a series of dialogues between K and Buddhist monks. Two international reports convey the flavour of the activities in a K school in India and the very human story of the involvement with K’s teachings in a land as deeply ravaged by war as Vietnam.

Education is one of the more practical avenues of engagement with society open to those interested in K’s teachings. The recent creation of a K Education Committee in Europe is a response to the widespread awareness of the prevailing crisis in this field. If the teachings hold the potential for transforming human consciousness and bringing about a new culture and a peaceful world, then their implementation in education is a matter of dire urgency. Just as in classical times Pericles could state that Athens was an education to all Hellas, so we can say that K’s teachings are an education to mankind. So it is hoped that such initiatives will find a creative echo in all those concerned with bringing about the essential intent of K’s holistic education, namely the flowering of wholeness in freedom.