Meeting on the V-Star Project and Education Issues : หน้า 139/164

Meeting #20 25 March 2010 - about 9:00 PM There are four of us here today to talk about the V-Star Project because one of the people (Don) wants to institute a similar program into the Lab School at the University of Hawaii. So Don is here, with LP Pasura who will act as our translator, a woman named Ping Ping and me. I have been asked to come along because this all has to do with education, and, as you know, I am all about education. Luang Por walks in, and looks pretty darned serious. I’m not sure I want to be here when he is looking like this. After explaining what the meeting is all about, LP Pasura sits down – well, we all sit down – and wait. He looks more serious than I have ever seen him look except for that look he gave one of the monks when he was meditatively reprimanding him. “The problem of education is historical. We do not, as in the days of JFK, ask what we can do for our country, but we take, take, take what we can get without acting responsibly. Look, for example, at the fall of the Thai government in Ayutthaya. Ayutthaya was the Golden Capital of Siam. But because there were so many independent provinces making up the capital, the Burmese invaded and conquered the city in 1767. The entire Siamese army fled to the south. Eventually, a great hero, King Taaksin, unified the Siamese and in 1775 overthrew the Burmese. But Taaksin did more than that: He really unified the nation, not just for Siam, but also for Cambodia and Laos. He also improved the governments, and rebuilt the physical infrastructure in addition to improving education and art and, in particular, Buddhism. We need, of course, to put moral education into our curriculum and that is what the V-Star project hopes to do. But in order to really understand the history of education throughout the world, we need to understand what the problem is. The conflict throughout the world that we have is simply that we need to look deeply within for the solution to the problem, and looking deeply within will cause many other problems within ourselves because that is where we have to look: within ourselves. And no one wants to look deeply within themselves to solve problems. We want the problems solved for us… we certainly don’t want to work for solutions.