Günter Nitschke

The health of the whole earth is in deep danger. Its biological infrastructure is degrading rapidly. Many indicators on earth suggest that we might have already entered the next and sixth of the earthly cataclysmic disasters over the last 550 million years in which like before most of the earth’s living species will go extinct. In discussions about global warming, environmental pollution and loss of biodiversity on earth, and in efforts to formulate a path for the very survival of all, not only human, living beings on earth, it would only be logical to first of all become aware of the environments closest to ourselves, which are our BODY, our MIND, and our HEART. Questions of wider sustainability for the globe can ultimately only be answered if we listen to the needs and faculties of these closest layers of our human environment first. Our inner and outer environment are intimately interwoven. The more you become aware of or the more you change the inner, the more you will become aware of or the more you will change the outer automatically. Only the sanity of the inner environment will teach us about the sanity of the outer.

Our first Environment
The BODY is our closest and immediate environment, it is nature. It is neither good nor bad. The body contains all the elements of the universe. In addition, it contains the accumulated intelligence of it. All the knowledge one may have acquired in one’s life time with the mind can never match the extraordinary intelligence already accumulated within the body. If we wish to become more aware of the complexities of our outer physical environment, we better become aware of the demands of the immediate environment that we are ourselves, that is, the cells in our bodies, the food we eat, and the shelter we provide for our body. We have to eat and to breath, thus on the molecular level our physical bodies are no monads. They are permeable.

The state of our own bodies is inextricably interconnected with the condition of our larger environment. For instance, if a particular group of people turn from a vegetarian to a meat-eating diet one would need four times the area of land to produce the same amount of calories for those people. Or if you are not aware of the needs of the human body how, for instance, do you expect to make any informed decisions to whether we should use more corn and grains for the production of bio-fuels rather than for the feeding of 1/3rd of humankind whose bodies starve every day. They are also part of the same earth, part of you. How far we are from knowing our bodies is shown by the fact that billions of dollars are spent annually on the pharmacological and technological treatments of obesity, diabetes, cancer and heart diseases, the killer Number One in the USA, whereas a simple change of diet could successfully heal these ‘diseases of affluence’ at a mere fraction of the present medical expenses.

Our present knowledge of and attitude towards our body is largely shaped by our particular Western cultural hypnosis according to which the highest level of physical health and achievement of the body in our culture is seen best manifested in competitive sports like rugby or present disciplines of the Olympic Games. Naturally, in this perspective all true awareness of the body does become perverted.

True understanding, however, of the working of the body which various cultures from various times have transmitted to us, belong to our most basic inputs in order to be able to deal with recent phenomena like global warming and the deterioration of our outer environment. Yoga from India and Qigong from China are not mainly part of a religion but techniques for a direct experience how to act and live in harmony with nature. Awareness of breathing and of nourishment is their common basis. You can live without solid food for days, but you cannot survive without breathing for a couple of minutes. It is significant that in thousands of years of Western civilizations with their emphasis on the mind sadly enough you find no major mention or exploration of the role of breathing in human life and in human awareness. In ancient Indian cosmology even the universe as a whole is breathing. The strongest and most immediate contact we have with the environment is through breathing and the food we eat. Awareness of one’s breathing and of eating pulls one physically into the body and, equally important, psychologically into the now. You can’t breathe or eat in the past or the future. You can’t escape into any dreams when you are in the present.

In addition, wisdom of the body, that is, the wisdom our body has accumulated over millennia, is more important for our daily life and our survival in the long run than the collected wisdom in any of all socalled holy books transmitted to us. Nowhere in any of them is one told that human awakening, or as I prefer to call it „en-heartenment“ (Er-Herzung), can never be gained through the efforts of mind’s rational and emotional oscillations alone, but has to be achieved ultimately through a transformation of all the cells, yes, of the body.

What is important here, your experience of your body has to be first-hand, not taught by religions, the reason being that all the teachings of the world’s socalled high religions once upon a time were, but no longer are land-based (or earth-, water- or air-based). “They have been” – as Derrick Jensen uniquely elaborates it in his book endgame (endgame in his case referring to the last phases of human industrial civilization which is ruining our whole planet) “transposed over space, which means by definition they are disconnected from the land, and thus they value, by definition, abstraction over particularity of place. Religion is supposed to teach us how to live which, if we are to live sustainably, must also mean that it teaches us how to live at a certain place.” It seems odd, that the biggest spread of Islam, which started as a desert religion in the Arabian regions, is by now found in Indonesia with a monsoon climate and subtropical biodiversity. An Arab of the 7th century had probably never experienced a monsoon climate or in a rain forest. How can an originally desert religion be relevant in an Indonesian climate or sense of place?

It also slowly has to dawn upon us that the human body is neither separate or nor superior to the rest of the living beings in nature; equally, nature’s creatures are not the property of the human being created to serve his needs, without any rights of their own, as suggested in the original Judeo-Christian genesis. So far, all civilizations with their many variations over time have ultimately been – as Derrick Jensen elaborates – based on violence, if we define with him violence as acts of physical or psychological harm against other living beings. And as humankind found out the hard way, natural resources are also not free of charge, as huge global corporations seem to assume. The day humankind will be presented the bill for its rape and destruction of nature comes closer every day.

Our Second Environment
The MIND or thought with all its modern technological extensions opens a completely different and much wider playing field to us as human beings from that which we experience with our bodies And mind assembles in its memory part many more toxins, garbage and pollution of a more subtle kind than our bodies have do. Admittedly, our mind and memory is required for us to survive in the world, but seems to be a completely inadequate tool to answer existential questions. We might as well accept that as mind is not an adequate enough instrument to clarify the most important questions about life, it is equally not the right instrument to free us from the problems mind has created for us in our cultural and natural environment.

The human mind nowadays resembles a reservoir of learning and commandments, which pull us from one place to the next, from one desire to the next and prevent us from ever being in the moment. Our constant distractions increase as cultures develop. Modern man’s attention span is nowadays often less than fractions of seconds. To use an analogy, by now our minds look internally like what our major downtown areas look like externally, like madhouses, cluttered with advertizing from toothpaste to ever newer gadgets and images of fashionable personalities. UG Krishnamurti goes so far as to state that “everything that is born out of thought is destructive”, and that – and here he joins Derrick Jensen stating in his endgame, that the artifact of human industrial and consumption-based civilization is built on violence, “on the idea of killing and being killed”.

Our mind is the collective reservoir of all of the hypnoses from cultures as a whole and from specific individual upbringing. And here I include especially religious and political hypnoses. Humans even often prefer taking their very lives rather than giving up their religion. Several Christian "democracies" are still involved in religious wars in the Middle East at this very moment. We live through these hypnoses like in a nightmare. Surely one fine day the modern Era of the American or even the more recent Chinese Dream will be termed the Eras of the American or Chinese Sleep. You have to be asleep to be dreaming, with closed or open eyes. New methods will have to be developed to dehypnotize ourself from our basic cultural conditioning or the normally perceived consensus reality as taught at our present educational institutions. Much work to dehypnotize human beings has been done in modern times in what is now summarized under the name of New Age Therapies from the 1970's on. The latter part of this essay will be devoted to those therapies.

Among the methods of dehypnotization of old the traditional Zen meditation has probably triggered states of stopping or silencing the mind in many a human life, of cleaning the madhouse man is living in. The trouble the effectiveness of the Zen Meditation started when Zen became institutionalized and was made part and parcel of an easily salable mental substitute, called religion. Meditation can never be part of any organized religion. It transcends all figments of the mind. Mind has its utilitarian faculties for our comfort and survival but it is completely inadequate to save us from the environmental disasters of our own making.

Our third Environment
The HEART is the layer of our being where we already are and have always been in subtle touch with everything, where we are as big as the universe, if not bigger; the heart allows for our direct and inbuilt sense of unity with nature as a whole to come into play. Experiencing the heart one is directly reaffirmed that one is so much more than one’s body and one’s mind. One realizes that the mind, that is, our memory and thoughts, produce all our problems in life, whereas the heart has the answer. Here a concrete test: facing a real life problem just sit still, close your eyes and ask your heart. The answer will be immediate and dead on, before it is censored by the mind. Such is the magic of the heart.

With heart I do not mean just simple feelings; those are ultimately also just thoughts. We become aware of them against the framework of our learning and the censorship of the mind. And with the heart I also do not refer just to love, as taught practically by all religions, since this love implies separateness, as if we have to bring together by an act of will what has been one already all the time. The love referred to here is not addressed to someone outside of ourselves in particular, but is the state of being of oneself, yes, the only state of being there truly is. What is meant here by heart, is the heart center in the center of the breast in the center of the breast pulsating with a sense of unity of all creation, past, present and future. Occasionally, it is also referred to as an experience of the Inner Sky; one experiences the whole universe in one’s own heart place. It is so empty that the whole universe fits into it. I would like to emphasize that if the experience of the heart center was possible to one’s master then it must be possible to his disciple, too. When it happened to me I knew it can happen to everyone on earth. One has to understand if one tree is taken for holy then all trees must be holy, if one rock is considered holy, then obviousdly all rocks must be holy.

Since Western cultures have mostly emphasized the development of our rational mind for millenia, it takes an enormous conscious effort for us to relearn to listen to the heart and to heal ourselves in order to be able to survive as human beings on this globe. For instance, by now everyone of us has aquired immense scientific knowledge about the ecological intricacies and interrelated biodiversity of any simple lake or river within our landscapes. But this mere scientific knowledge could not prevent that by now, in 2010, close to all natural lakes and rivers on earth are utterly polluted or often already dead. All our acquired of ecology does not and will not prevent parents taking their kids along to a fishing tour as weekend fun because they themselves are not aware that fish express death pain when they waggle hanging on an angle. Yes, as recently scientists inform us, also fish feel pain especially with a metal hook through their lips or deep in their throats. All efforts at the International Aichi Conference COP10 in 2010 or its predecessors on saving what still can be saved of the earth’s biodiversity will definitely be in vain, if adults go on teaching their children to catch or kill animals for fun.

Only a re-learned sense of unity with nature can bring about a knowledge to recognize that lakes and rivers, and also all their inhabitants are integral parts of our own being. Our rights to life on earth are intimately connected to the rights of animals. Any epidemic arising in the mechanized and overcrowded cagess of animals merely raised to be killed for the market is ultimately an act of nature’s self-defense and does at least relieve animals of their pain endured over their lives in these animal versions of Auschwitzes. Animals can’t protest since, as Confucius said, Heaven is silent, meaning that nature is silent even if it gets raped over and over again by the human being.

Even the most scientific head knowledge of those interrelationships in nature will hardly – as human history of the last 50 years teaches us – bring about a major shift in our attitudes towards nature, attitudes which were ingrained by our respective cultural hypnoses. To give a concrete example: I heard that recently a group of Westeners looked at a film on the traditional killing of dolphins by a group of Japanese villagers; not surprizing, some persons in the audience were even moved to tears by the sight of this gruesome slaughter. After the film, however, everyone joined a discussion in a sushi restaurant. Naturally, the shop didn’t offer dolphin but ordinary tuna fish for sushi. Yes, we have to eat but only a personal experience of one’s heart center will make you see, feel and realize that all fish or other living creatures are part of you yourself and of your own environment. Whatever we eat, ultimately we always will be eating ourselves in this global fiest going on in the universe. I don’t want to be misunderstood, vegetarianism or kosher alone is not the answer. Only our belief in our separateness from and in our superiority to nature is the real cause of our wholesale exploitation and destruction of this beautiful planet.

En-heartenment must be rediscovered in ourselves. Many paths to open the heart center have been developed by man over the last 4000 years. They have to be dug out of the morast of various institutional religions and have to be made available afresh to the modern human being.

And our Fourth Environment
No-Mind, is our ultimate layer of environment, which rather than an environment, that is, something that surrounds us, should be called an In-vironment, which points to something that is contained in us, yes, that is us; it is the big pool of being which transcends all duality of an experiencer and something experienceable. Nothing can be said about it in language, even though it has always been, is and will be everyone’s ever-present home. UG. Krishmamurti named it the ’natural state’, beautiful, Zen called it ‘your original face’, beautiful, and Buddha called it ‘emptiness”, which turned out to be very misleading. It ultimately led to the foundation of myriad departments of Buddhist philosophy at our universities. Buddhas’s experience cannot be made part of any human philosophy or any religion. Nevertheless, it will stay forever the purpose of all true education to bring human beings back to their ‘natural state’, - with no any romantic undertone -, or to ‘emptiness’, - with no philosophical implications -. Only the experience of emptiness also will finally lay to rest all worries about environmental disasters within or without oneself. In emptiness all possible separatenes between body, mind and heart is dissolved and silenced, and on the other hand, fully vibrant for the first time. But this journey has to start with the body.

My personal preference will always stay to name this state of No-Mind the UG Krishnamurti way, that is, the “natural state”, since it removes this state for ever from any high status and misuse the haughty term “enlightenment” has acquired over time and turns it practically into something which is every human being’s, yes, every beings, birthplace and birthright.

CULTURE AND SUSTAINABILITY
All urban cultures since their beginning are based on persisting violence against the earth and on exploitation of the majority by just a few. Or, as Derrick Jensen summarizes it, “Civilizations originate in conquest abroad and repression at home”. Here, an example from the present: in the present super-power of democracy and justice, the USA, 1 % of the population owns about one quarter of the income made annually by the nation as a whole and probably effectively controls far more.

What is urgently needed today is to recognize and then remove the root causes of our imminent environmental crisis which lie in ourselves rather than take various measures to deal with each new external symptom of it on a day to day basis. More ‘new’ and/or ‘clean’ technology will finally only add to the damage which former technologies have created. You simply can’t lift yourself up by your shoostrings. Thousands of years of human inventiveness and technology has not enabled the human being to create something as simple as a single leaf, even though we are able to destroy life on earth as such perhaps a thousand times. To fight industrial civilization or –using a new term for it – ‘corporism’ as the ultimate culprits of our decreasing environmental quality and biodiversity on earth seems hopeless to me since it is us who are it. Living sustainably means nothing else but living consciously.

But a human being who would be able to deal with those root causes has still to be created. Nothing less will do. How can he be created? And where can one possibly create a fitting setting for such transformation and growth in human consciousness?

A short reading of human history tells us that no culture has ever been or is or ever will be sustainable in whatever its form. Should it be sustained? What really can be sustained in individual human life and what can be retained collectively, in human culture? Survival in nature is based on constant reproduction and change, and that includes the human body. Nature never attempted to build a body that lasts forever. Only one cell in our body seemingly comes close to having eternal life, and that is the sperm and the egg. So why do we wish to build a sustainable culture? Perhaps, we better ponder about what we actually mean by ‘human culture’ first?

Here I am inclined to follow Ken Wilber, a modern American thinker’s intimations that we human beings as children intuitively know who we are; we sense we are part of everything and of everybody around us. But when we become adults and have been made subject to various educational hypnoses we acquire the illusion of being a separate individuals and thus pursue for the rest of our life only a substitute of that original sense of unity, a mental project of our real self only. Collectively, that gives rise to human cultures in history. In return these cultures then demand from us to become something other than we are. And that has been going on for millennia. That must lead to insanity. Why don’t we want to return to our original state, or as UG. calles it, our “natural state”? The reason is simple, because we do not want to pay the ‘small’ price required from us to re-realize our original nature or primal intuition as adults. And that price is that we would have to get rid of our learned false identity, i.e. the sacred cow of our ego. We would have to transcend our ego, our whole socalled personality, our ‘dream’ of ourselves as being separate, - or as U.G. Krishnamurti described it -, of ourselves as ‘Robots Dreaming’. It seems easier for us to build an atom bomb or go beyond the moon rather than to go beyond the dream of our ego. Yes, it is indeed difficult to fight something which doesn’t exists, which is a mere figment of our mind. Therefore, one could compare our ordinary life with something like shadow boxing.

Only such transcendence of our substitute identity will bring knowledge of oneself and simultaneously knowledge of the quality of both our cultural and natural environment, replacing our usual dream-consensus about it. The best way to start this process of transcendence obviously is from where you are, namely from your own body, your mind, and your heart, your immediate environments, as I called them before. Once you fully faced your own emptiness then there is no more need to fill yourself any longer with any cultural substitutes. Only with this awareness will you come to know what your culture really is and whether it can, whether it should or could possibly be sustained.

In this endeavor, however, something close to a completely new process of learning from our usual rational scientific and technological one is required. While we, the observer, remain mostly untouched and separate in any scientific investigation or experiment, going inwards, that is, exploring our body, our mind and heart, however, not only we ourselves but also simultanously our initially envisaged goals will change with time. For instance, if you learn how to nourish your human body in a healthy way, this new healthy body will then become the new base from which to develop sound and sane, local or global policies where to grow what food and how to distribute and to eat it. Before you have acquired such concrete awareness of yourself, any scientific policies for sustainability will ultimately stay as environmentally and economically exploitative as our civilizations are and have always been by their very nature. As a case in point, if the research of the American author Jonathan Safran Foer presented in his book “Eating Animals” is to be trusted then there is simply no good way to nourish six billion people on this earth with 50 billion existing animals, assuming that the average American alone with its present eating habits consumes 21,000 animals during his life-time. You cannot hope to stop killing animals in order preserve some theoretical goal of optimal biodiversity on earth simply by external, politically motivated international laws. There is only one way: you have to start by making the individual again aware of the true quality of his own closest environments, his body, his mind and his heart.

Or to give another example of the insanity of present civilizations, in this case the USA, how can you expect any positive change in present policies to procure renewable energy methods and stopping global warming and worldwide environmental deterioration, if the US spends 1 billion dollars per day on its own defense budget, and if mankind approves of this policy by awarding its president the Peace Nobel Prize for 2010. War and the production of war machinery are the largest polluters and destructive mechanisms on earth. Not simply bias against the US, but lack of information made me exclude other nations which take part in the lucrative business of weapons of mass destruction such as Russia, Germany and Israel.

CULTURAL HYPNOSIS
The state of man’s ordinary “waking” consciousness is really to a very great extent a state of hypnosis, or a dream-state. Close your eyes and you are immediately in your private cinema, i. e. you see a film which you constantly produce yourself and which is always running subliminally behind your open eyes when you are supposedly awake. Thus, individually everyone lives very much in a world of his own creation, and equally whole nations or cultural regions are subject to and blinded by their own age-old general cultural dreams, or often, nightmares, too.

There two kinds of cultural hypnoses, namely group hypnoses, usually called culture or civilization, and individual hypnoses, referred to as individual neuroses or paranoias. It is these hypnoses which ultimately lead to a worldview like that of a dream: reality and fiction are unseparably mixed.

According to ancient awakened persons and according to present research in neuroscience one seems to receive the strongest individual and group hypnoses very early in life, mostly before puberty, that is before the age of 10 - 14. Somehow with sexual maturity the work of biology seems to be basically finished. From then on nature can reproduce itself physically. After this point in most cases also the growth of human intelligence , - not to be confused with the human brain - , seems to be finished. This all world religions have intuitively known and used, since up to this point their “work”, or their particular hypnosis, is done. Ask an eighty year old human a spiritual question and you will in most cases receive an answer, which was given to him from his or her mother or from his or her first religious education in primary school. Here a concrete example: Look at an expression of the apex of Western culture in form of a renaissance painting in the Sixteenth Chapel by Michelangelo, entitled “Last Judgement”, showing a bearded God flying on high among angels in the clouds and sinners being tortured in a subterranean hell. Obviously, Michelangelo and the papal world around him, that is, the intelligentia of those times, were stuck in a naive hierarchical worldview taught to them in early childhood.

Both types of hypnoses¸ individual and group ones, lead to world-views similar to a dream reality, or as Murasaki Shikibu phrased it, to living on “floating bridges of dreams”. Reality and projection are intermixed. One cannot easily get rid of those distorted images of reality by simply rationally analizing those dreams ad absurdum, and thus adding to their complexity, as is often done by modern psychoanalysis; one has to wake up. And de-hypnosis is the method.

One should accept whilst natural growth is automatic and inevitable, growth of awareness in a human being is not automatic but an uphill task. Methods, however, have been developed and tested especially in the traditional Far East, and since a couple of decades also in the West for the purpose of anyone to find out who he is as human, not only as cultural being. In principle, whatsoever has been conditioned can be unconditioned, whosoever has been hypnotized can be dehypnotized.

What about waking up from religious, political or national group hypnoses like Buddhism, Communism, Christianity, Islam, Communism, Democracy? It might come as a surprise but waking up means waking up. If you are de-hypnotized from your private dreams you become automatically de-hypnotized from any hypnotic dreaming as such. So far, no effective techniques have been developed to de-hypnotize large groups or even nations. It has always been individuals within groups who woke up first. And their state of awareness then trickled down into ordinary consciousness of the respective group over time.

PARADIGMSHIFT IN HUMAN EDUCATION
It has become clear that the problems facing mankind in the next decades transcend the powers of the ordinary human mind. The human mind is simply not adequate enough an instrument to save us from our own doing on this planet over the last millennia. Looking at ourselves, what other instrument do we have we can resort to? That is what UG Krishnamurti has been asking himself again and again from as many angles as humanly possible without being able to offer an answer. By now the answer is simple: we have to use existing or invent new methods to transcend the ordinary human mind, in order to take care of ourselves and of nature on earth. All the mystery schools of old and of more recent date have worked in this direction. Less radically speaking, it means that we have to invent a new paradigm of education. We cannot simply wait for awakened human beings to appear by chance or in numbers comparable to cars on a conveyor belt. We have to create them in a consciously devised new setting, since it also seems impossible even for an enlightened master to give his insights directly to someone else.

Since our sytems of education – including university education - have produced the above described situation of an impending global disaster, what seems urgently needed is a new paradigm of higher education which enables the implementation of techniques of de-hypnosis and transcendence of the mind. My proposals here are based on statements in this respect Osho made first in the late 1970’s in Poona. According to his suggestions each university from now on would have to balance its various already existing Faculties of the Sciences of the Outer World with a Faculty of the Sciences of the Inner World. We have to come to realize that it is an integral part of our present cultural hypnosis and educational system, that we are convinced that the only way we can know anything about ourselves und the universe at large is through the science of the outer: science = truth. This proposal here is not meant as an argument against the existing Departments of the Science of the Outer but as a plea to complement them with their interrelated counterpart.

The latter Faculty of the Sciences would have to comprise a Department of De-Hypnosis, where young adults can unburden themselves, leading to experiments in a Department of Meditation, where young students can have a taste of their own being and grow in awareness, that is, where they can experiment to stay aware whether awake, dreaming or in dreamless sleep. All this – it has to be emphasized - has nothing to do with similar endeavours of old or present religions in general, which at some point in history have hijacked those techniques of self-discovery or self-realization to push their own power interests in this world. As I see it now, all present great religions are in the service of death. Their narrative runs something like this: this world is a vale of tears where you have to fight for survival and labour by the sweat of your brow in order to qualify for a better and purer heavenly realm after death, as long as you follow the precepts of these respective religions here on earth. I wonder whether you would dare to misue or pollute this pure realm after death as you do here to earth where after all you are at best a transitory visitor.

What is ultimately suggested here is a structural change from present Semi-versities where traditionally only the outer half of our reality is represented to Uni-versities in the future which would embrace and represent both the outer and inner approach to reality in a new universal academic setting. Only such education would catch up with and do justice to our emerging holistic vision of and attitude towards our universe. Direct personal experience is the foundation in the exercises of the Department of Inner.

Mankind does not need more violent social revolutions which have not been able to halt the human march of violence towards self-destruction since the beginning of civilizations. Yes, the here proposed paradigm shift in higher education, like all paradigm shifts before, does look like blasphemy at the start. The other alternative to save ourselves and other life forms on this planet, taking up the main argument contained in the endgame by Derrick Dennis, - an environmental activist and social philosopher -, would be to completely dismantle our existing industrial civilization politically and economically and go back to a non- or pre-industrial more civil society. He stays, however, numb on the question of how to do it, like U.G. Krishnamurti, - a self-proclaimed awakened human being and psychological activist -, stays silent on the question of how to achieve his socalled ‘natural state’.

Only a radical change will save humankind from its present course into ever more violent mutual confrontations and genocide caused by slowly increasing scarcity of resources and slowly increasing number of people on earth, and/or triggered by the consequences of global warming which might very well lead to a global ecological disaster which endangers human life as such.

The question is not only how and whether at all we can stop relying on fossil fuels to supply the energy form our industrial civilizations. The global situation is not at all that desparate. There is more than enough alternative energy available on this globe than the big oil conglomarates want you to know. The sun blesses humankind with more energy within one hour of a day than what it needs for its present sustenance for a whole year. Nature is and has always been that generous. Nothing of that spirit of generosity has dominated the previous or ongoing quarrels of the developed and undeveloped nations at the COP World Conferences so far. I wish to re-emphasize that the problem is not only one of technology and supply or lack of energy but of our very attitude towards our bodies, our mind and heart.

We truly have to initiate a new Manhattan Project in order to completely restructure our human education. My experience, however, is – after having taught for 40 years at Princeton, MIT, UCLA and Kyoto Seika University – that the present basic liberal premises and paedagogical structure of the university as such, and the human potential of the professors therein, is sadly enough in no way capable or conducive to bring about such a new paradigm of higher education. I have never met a single faculty member who would show even the slightest interest in such a radical paradigm shift. All one senses is utmost fear to lose the only thing one believes one has, namely one’s own sacred cow, the ego, one’s social reputation and position.

The most obvious argument against introducing meditation into academia is that it would bring about an end to all socalled creativity of the human mind on which our civilization is built. It has been part of the cultural hypnosis of the traditional Christian and Hindu-Buddhist establishment all over Asia and the West that a meditative person has to become a begger, retreat to a cave or temple, deny himself and the world and only watch his navel. On the contrary, only someone who is awake will be truly creative on this planet and will be able to suggest and implement measures to save this beautiful earth. Someone following a cultural dream will not.

Only an empty mind is the very and only humus on which human creativity grows. And meditation is the best training for it. There is probably no Nobel Prize winner alive who would claim that his or her invention or discovery has been his personal achievement. Since Archimedes all of them have affirmed that these supreme moments of discovery happened when they as separate thinking mechnanisms had been out of the way, when their ego had diappeared. The creative and the meditative moment or gap are the same. Indeed, all of creativity happens out of emptiness. The only way to train a human being for creativity then it is by training him in meditation, and not only for thought.

As a small precursor of such a new approach in an academic setting, MIT in the US, a global witches’ kitchen for super-egos, made it possible for me to run an experimental course in meditation as part of its official academic program. Naturally, I had to slightly camouflage it within MIT’s official curriculum, in order not to draw to much opposition to this new kind of “magic mushroom” on the campus, as Osho had baptized this course. So perhaps, humans can indeed lift themselves up by their own shoestrings after all; perhaps they can change.

Gratitude to Osho, his numerous lectures, publications and personal guidance from 1974 on. As further reading I suggest Derrick Jensen’s endgame, New York, 2005, and U. G. Krishmnamurti’s Thought is your Enemy, Bangalore, 1990.