July 30, 2003
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

9:41pm. -Sitting in Sarah's apartment, where Meg has moved temporarily, I'm reading Chop Wood, Carry Water - A guide to finding spiritual fulfillment in everyday life, by Rick Fields and the editors of New Age Journal:

"An open mind is a necessary prerequisite to learning. To receive a cup of tea we must hold an empty cup. However great our knowledge, there is still an infinite amount more to be learned. "In this world," as Margaret Mead says, "no one can complete an education."

"There is no end to education," agrees Krishnamurti. "It is not that you read a book, pass an examination and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning."

Our school system encourages the idea that learning has a beginning (grade school), a middle (high school), and an end (college or graduate school). Most people who step out of this progression find themselves locked out of our educational system-and, they might think, of learning itself-forever. "This now-or-never pressure," writes Theodore Roszack," is one of the worst tyrannies of the system; it denies us the freedom to experiment, to fail, to turn back, to begin again-if necessary, to start a second career, to launch a new life."

For the person on a spiritual path, there is always more to learn. The journey is not finished or completed, it is endlessly deepened and broadened. We do not, for example, "learn" compassion, humility, or wisdom-or any of the other factors that make up a spiritual life-but we do continually deepen and broaden them as we live our lives.

"Even the Buddha," goes the age old saying, "is still working on himself."

"Modern education is competitive, nationalistic and separative. It has trained the child to regard material values as of major importance, to believe that his nation is also of major importance and superior to other nations and peoples. The general level of world information is high but usually biased, influenced by national prejudices, serving to make us citizens of our nation but not of the world." - Albert Einstein