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School
of Life |
| Spiritual Food for the New Millennium | Spiritual Farms | ||||
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CENTER
FOR HARMONY |
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What is the School of Life About ? |
| Every human being is endowed with the potential of making their life a work of art, not only creating a meaningful day-to-day existence but beyond. Free will allows us to make the choice to take the path of knowledge, love, or action that will allow us to experience bliss--the natural state of the soul-- or the path of ignorance, that draws us to obscure our clarity of mind. Our clarity of mind is lost with distractions and submission to addictions that make our life a roller-coaster, taking us deep into long stretches of pain and suffering in exchange for a few moments of excitement that we confuse with happiness. |
| The School of Life aims to provide the tools and resources to make it possible to make life a work of art. Based on millenary teachings combined with contemporary and traditional ones, we offer the opportunity to put into practice those teachings through our different projects, and organized efforts such as Shanti Yoga and Spiritual Food for the New Millennium. |
| The field of action is the community. Community, as defined in Webster’s dictionary, is “1. all persons living in a particular locality. 2. a group having interests or religion in common. 3. joint sharing.” It is this last definition that enshrines the principle of the School of Life, which doesn’t limit itself to a physical space, as in the first definition; it has more to do with the second definition, concerning common interests, as we will see. |
| Community gives the opportunity to learn and practice golden rules like “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Community gives an opportunity to learn about sharing, solidarity, and cooperation; about unconditional love; about those perennial values and virtues that will stay with us throughout eternity. It teaches about the impermanence of the material, all of which will remain behind when we die. It helps us to understand that name, fame, and glory are like the “fool’s gold” that will just make fools of us, when we realize how we have wasted a precious human life, because it had not been rooted in spiritual principles. |
| School of Life therefore fosters ethical and healthy lifestyles, to develop physically, mentally, and spiritually, to awaken the spirit within, and help each one attain, in the present incarnation, that which they came to fulfill. These are the common interests that bring people to work together in what becomes a common goal: to bring the “Kingdom of God” to earth; in other words, to make this planet a place of love, compassion, harmony, respect for the sacredness of life of all sentient beings, and respectful care for the land, the water, the air, and all that they contain. |
| The School of Life therefore facilitates making each individual’s life a work of art, framed not only in the context of a community, which is one of the minor boundaries, but within the world as a whole, for which reason we have chosen to present here Dr. Martin Luther King’s words contained in “The World House”, a Nobel Peace Prize lecture, delivered at the University of Oslo on December 11, 1964, where he concludes that, “This may well be mankind’s last chance to choose between chaos and community.” |
| His objective observation of the condition of the world seems to be an
evaluation of our present state of affairs; change comes very slowly, but
his sacrifice and influence should be kept alive, the same way his words
are. School of Life therefore has chosen to build community, as he says, to
help prevent chaos.
If we look at our logo, we see that there are three concentric circles. The center corresponds to the Shanti Yoga ashram, which is for people who are now physically living in the same location and are committed to a life of study and service. The inner circle corresponds to the School of Life, which is for active members who are also committed to a life of study and service but live in different locations. We consider these two to be the core of the community. The outer circle corresponds to Spiritual Food for the New Millennium with its two segments, the mail order service and the Spiritual Food CSA who have the option of becoming a more integral part of the community. |
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The World House |
| Some years ago a famous novelist died. Among his papers was found a list of suggested plots for future stories, the most prominently underscored being this one: “A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together.” This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a great “world house” in which we have to live together-black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu-a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace. |
| However deeply American Negroes are caught in the struggle to be at last at home in our homeland of the United States, we cannot ignore the larger world house in which we are also dwellers. Equality with whites will not solve the problems of either whites or Negroes if it means equality in a world society stricken by poverty and in a universe doomed to extinction by war. |
| All inhabitants of the globe are now neighbors. This world-wide neighborhood has been brought into being as a result of the modern scientific and technological revolutions. The world of today is vastly different from the world of just one hundred years ago. A century ago Thomas Edison had not yet invented the incandescent lamp to bring light to many dark places of the earth. The Wright brothers had not yet invented that fascinating mechanical bird that would spread its gigantic wings across the skies and soon dwarf distance and place time in the service of man. Einstein had not yet challenged an axiom and the theory of relativity had not yet been posited. |
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