Global turmoil .......

Often the compassion that is needed to square the equation between the inner self and the outward world is fashioned at times of turmoil. And today we are living in a time of great pain through war, natural disasters, famine, poverty and disease. It seems as if the natural world, that the science of the post Enlightment age was shaping for our benefits, has taken revenge on our actions as resource depletion, global warming and pollution take their toll. Now we are openly beginning to question whether we can survive not just as a postindustrial society but whether our species can survive itself. Many of those debates are covered in melodrama and charged emotion but the fact that we are debating it in a reasoned environment as well indicates the seriousness of our global condition.

And the problems that we face are not ones any longer hidden away in some far off part of the globe. Modern communications has brought them into our households on a daily basis. We are brought face to face with the fact that suffering is an inescapable fact of human life and that it impacts on all of us whatever part of the globe we inhabit.