The Eternal Quest: SOP - 3

The Eternal Quest

🔻🔺13

The content of this post is directly from the work of The Lucis Trust.

www.lucistrust.org

This Study can be found here:

https://www.lucistrust.org/content/download/30683/386752/file/SOP_3.pdf

Service of The Plan

Study Three: Department of Education

Keynotes

Enlightenment is the major goal of education.

Two major ideas should be taught to the children of every country. They are: the value of the individual and the fact of the one humanity.

Our clear concept of the unity of mankind on this very globe – this fundamental idea – is only vaguely or not at all grasped by millions of merely “national” people throughout the world.... This idea of the Unity of Mankind is setting its task to us today perhaps more than ever. Prof. Ruth Gaevernitz, The Contemporary Review

The keynote of the new education is essentially right interpretation of life, past and present, and its relation to the future of mankind.

World Citizenship as an expression of both goodwill and understanding should be the goal of the enlightened everywhere and the hallmark of the spiritual man, and in these three, you have right relations established between education, religion and politics.

The idea of mankind has never before contained so much richness, variety, power and promise – as well as problems and dangers. To deal effectively with this greater whole will require new perspectives.... The shift in perspective produces similar changes in ... all branches of human endeavor.... This challenge requires that we think of our world in new terms, that we re-examine attitudes and associations, that we see interdependence as a pre-requisite to survival. Gerhard Hirschfeld, Exec. Director – Council for the Study of Mankind (1963)

The idea of mankind as a viable entity is obviously and necessarily very vague at the present time. Its value, despite its vagueness, is that it provides a new perspective ... it catches and reflects what is taking place in our empirical world. So deeply embedded are we in our old perspective ... that it is exceedingly difficult to shift from it. Many present day scholars will never make the shift even though respect for the reality of the newly emerging world requires the shift. Prof. Herbert Blumer, Univ. of California (1963)

Someday, all of us will spend our lives in our own school, the world. And education – in the sense of learning to love, to grow, to change – can become not the woeful preparation for some job that makes us less than we could be, but the very essence, the joyful whole of existence itself. Marshall McLuhan and G.B. Leonard, The Future of Education, LOOK, 2/21/67

The establishment of the Science of Right Relations is the next immediate step in the mental unfoldment of the race. It is the major activity of the new education.

Work To Be Done

It may be helpful for the student to organize his or her thoughts around certain key questions.

1. What faculty must educators develop in themselves to “gauge rightly the centre of the focus” of an individual's attention and “to note where the consciousness is primarily centered”? How is this faculty developed?

2. How can creative educational techniques be developed which will reveal the true self as the soul (on its own plane) and provide an effective alignment method whereby the soul can be brought into communication with the lower self to work out its purpose?

3. How can educational methods of today be changed in emphasis from “making a living” to “making a life”; and broadened out to include global relationships and responsibilities?