There is a misguided effort to plan for education in the twenty-first century, as if our dying civilization will last another hundred years. This is an example of whistling past the graveyard. It is unlikely that planetary cultural collapse can be put off past 2013, given the perfect storm of cataclysmic events that is unfolding all around us. We do our children a terrible disservice if we do not prepare them for the death of our current age and the transition to the next one—and to do it with accelerated intensity.

So, the first order of business in educating our youth is to explain to them how and why our global civilization is breaking down, and how to avoid making the same mistakes in the next global culture that they will have to build. Of course, to do that properly, we must have come out of denial ourselves. We must recognize that life will never again be normal, and that time is short indeed before the current calendar time ends and Year Zero of the next era begins. So, any educational endeavor that is not oriented toward the survival of the chaos that will follow the breakdown of our civilization will be worse than useless.

Education must include teaching the means of physical and psychological-spiritual survival; basic building, agricultural, textile, and cooking skills for long-term community life maintenance; basic first-aid training, herbalism, shamanism, and other forms of natural (and supernatural) healing; community building and sustenance, and most important of all, methods of stabilizing consciousness at the highest possible level.

We must teach our youth how to cope with a world that will have no oil, little or no electricity, no mechanized transportation, no internet, telephones, television, or other modern communication devices; no monetary system; and that will be in the midst of radical climate change, social upheaval, food and water shortages, seismic instability, massive health crises, and complete breakdown of law and order. We should teach our youth that there is a strong possibility that the rising international political conflicts will climax with global thermonuclear war.

If we are serious about wanting some of our children to survive, we should act now to create communities in secure areas outside the cities, where we can teach them to cooperate harmoniously; we should develop processes of transformational work to free one another from psychological complexes that could devastate those who suffer from them personally and destroy our communities if not resolved; we need to develop in our youth the skills and maturity to maintain systems of communal functioning that require a combination of cooperative and hierarchical management, and ensure that these structures remain incorruptible and fair to all; and to maintain systems of non-violent conflict resolution and communal bonding so that harmony can be quickly restored when it gets out of balance, and produce lineages of spiritually illumined teachers to function as centers of peace and trust, so that communal harmony remains reliably consistent for long periods of time.

We must teach our youth how to meditate and to keep the mind free of anxiety, and focused on the Absolute, the Supreme Self, as the source of wisdom, life energy, will, love, and serenity. We must learn to develop powerful communal energy fields that will protect us even from clouds of radioactive particles. It can be done if we are united and resonating at high enough levels of coherence, and functioning through our light bodies. This must be the aim of our education.

Finally, we must teach our youth that humans are not the only intelligent beings in the universe, and that our Earth is already the home of beings who have come here from other worlds, and who have established bases not only here but on nearby land masses such as the moon and other planets in our solar system. We may have need of their assistance to restore the viability of our planetary biosphere, so we should learn not to fear such beings, but to invite their help with gracious hospitality and friendship, as we learn to become citizens of the cosmos. Humility, egoless transparency, and divine love will be essential attributes if we are to establish good interplanetary relations.

In order to accomplish all this, and to cleanse our planet to begin a new cycle of divinized culture, we must transcend our current egocentric form of consciousness. This must be the core of our educational project for our own transformation as well as for our youth. Quantum-informed, cosmic consciousness will give rise to new physical and psychic powers. We must become mature enough to use those powers wisely. The neo-shamanic psycho-technologies that will develop in the next era will make our current technologies obsolete. We will develop free, clean energies to power up a new civilization in a short time. But if we do not keep our values at the highest level, there will be another fall into ego-based conflicts. So we must create a sophiocratic culture governed by the wisest and most compassionate, generous, and egolessly loving.

We must strive to model these virtues in our own lives now. Year Zero is right around the corner. Are you ready? Just as they tell you on airplanes to put on your own oxygen mask first, and then help the people around you, in the same way, we must attain egoless Self-realization first, and then we can educate our children to attain the same level of higher consciousness. There is no time to waste. We cannot do this through will power, but only through surrender to the One. Let’s beam up our consciousness to chakra seven, and trust that we are in the hands of the Almighty. The power of divine love will protect us through all that we must face in this time of tribulations.

Once consciousness traverses the plane of the ego, we can easily enter the numinous dimension of the Absolute. Realization of the Absolute is the direct apperception that the whole of the cosmos is the manifestation of the One Self. This is grace, bliss, and supreme liberation.

The ultimate significance of all the seeming catastrophic events that are now unfolding is this: they are leading us inevitably to this most majestic realization of the Transcendental Self. Let us educate our children to be unafraid, and to recognize the wondrous blessing that is hidden within the dark cloud that now enshrouds our world. We have the privilege of ushering in the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

Namaste,

Shunyamurti