The Link #25 - Editorial

Looking down on the land from the airplane during a recent flight, I could not help noticing the tremendous impact that we human beings are having on the planet. The whole earth is now the object of our use and cultivation. Landing in the cities and towns, I am overwhelmed by the enterprising and milling multitudes and the innumerable commercial establishments bursting with every conceivable product. But behind the inviting prospects of consumer bliss and its immediate rewards (a visit to the bookstore, the museum or the café), there lurks the feeling of an artificial and ultimately impoverished reality attendant on an essentially materialistic civilization. What seems clear is that all this amazing display of human ingenuity is the result of the brain’s capacity for thought. It is thought that, in its drive for survival, has generated the current world with its undeniable achievements. But, riddled as it is with greed, aggression and duality, the power of thought is proving ever more destructive at all levels of relationship. So self-knowing, which K defined as the true work of man, was never more urgent than now, as it entails the dissolution of the core illusions behind our fragmented thinking and thereby the survival and integrity of life itself.

In this issue of The Link we bring together a number of strands in this urgent movement to wholeness. The artificial life of the city and the teeming life of the primal forest are poetically contrasted. The understanding of nature and the ultimately indivisible bond between mind and matter are explored. A reminiscence of David Bohm’s first meeting with K brings back the exalted flavour of those earlier days of intense inquiry into the totality of being. The role of the psychotherapist in relation to the patient and their shared humanity is approached from a non-dualistic angle. The educational section centres on learning, which is examined in the context of the teacher-student relationship, the direct contact with K’s teachings and the very process of learning itself. A presentation on the opening of the Hyderabad Study Centre offers some pointers as to what is involved in setting up such an institution and a review of an introductory work on K for a philosophical series approaches, among other things, the question of the possible inclusion of K’s work in the university.

Perhaps at no other time in history has the intrinsic limitation of thought been made so evident. The great ideological and theological systems have collapsed and the little me in which mankind has taken refuge is but another form of the same residual consciousness. The unsustainable quality of our socioeconomic structures does not augur well for the future and war is accepted as the inevitable outcome of the increasing competition for dwindling natural resources and political dominance. Peace and order cannot come from the prevailing cult of self-interest and neither can they come from the New Age therapeutic bazaar. Thought has indeed come to the end of its tether and the unknown is ever more insistent in its gathering emptiness. Choiceless awareness is the application of that unknowingness to the relational field of everyday existence. Such a state of sensitive learning is the necessary ground of creative freedom.