The Link #26 - Editorial Note

It would seem that in the world at large there is not much order or sanity. Whole nations and groups of people of different cultures, ideologies and beliefs are ready to kill one another at the least provocation. The old tribal mentality continues to breed havoc in the world and the powerful continue to lord it over the weak. The invention of enemies seems to have become a necessary adjunct of economic and industrial progress and war has come to be accepted as a necessary evil. Faced with such evidence and with the increasing decay of ethical standards in the normal transactions of daily life, one cannot help but feel that today’s society is underpinned by greed and violence. This quality of covetous and aggressive energy is being cultivated everywhere as the very key to success. In the absence of any deeply held humanistic values, the mass of mankind seems to have reverted to the old sexual, territorial and hierarchical drives of its animal background, using ideologies and beliefs as a necessary veneer of respectability. One has the feeling that this madness could be stopped and a world of peace and plenty for all be created overnight. But we evidently don’t intend it and the world is becoming an increasingly dangerous place in spite of all our knowledge of the scientific facts and their consequences.

The evidence now at our disposal does not augur well for the future. Whether we look at the exponential rise in world population, the ecological problem, the universal cultural decay, or the political and religious conflagrations currently brewing all over the place, we may easily find ourselves feeling that our individual actions will be mere drops in the ocean, and the thought that all the oceans are in that drop may be small comfort in view of the mounting threat to global survival.

This global survival demands a radical change in our relationship with nature, with each other and with ourselves. The pieces in this issue explore various approaches to this change, including the needful protection of the environment, the question of the materiality and transformation of consciousness and an inquiry into the structure of confusion. The education section deals with the general question of insights in education and also addresses the teaching of specific subjects in the overall context of learning. A report by Raman of his visits to the Ukraine, Turkey and Azerbaijan offers a touching glimpse of the activities around K’s teachings in these countries.

There is no escaping the fact that the individual, as the representative of mankind, is at the centre of the whole problem. The crisis out there comes from within. This perception is in itself liberating inasmuch as it devolves full responsibility to each of us and reveals the psyche as the holographic mirror of society. It is through insight into this microcosm that the wider world can be transformed. And this transformation hinges on the quality of timeless or undivided perception we bring to bear on all aspects of life. It is this wholeness that might put an end to the rising wave of destruction and violence in the world.