Letter on farewells and new beginnings

As impressive as the technical and economic progress of the last century may have been, the price that had to be paid for it is high. The faster, higher, more has marginalized the right, the true, the human in many dimensions of our existence.

Is our life "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, without meaning", as Shakespeare writes in "Macbeth"?

No, it must be possible to create a counter-model to the primacy of technocratic efficiency and cold pseudo-rationality. A counter-model at the intellectual height of our time; not an esoteric warming room where you have to hand in your head at the checkroom.

This thought was at the beginning of my vision of Waldzell. What Hermann Hesse dreamed of as a literary, romantic vision, I wanted to turn into reality: A place where the best minds from science, art and spirituality inspire each other to make the world - and therefore themselves - a little better. Perhaps even to think the unthinkable, how we can shape this planet in a new, more human, more spiritual way.

Four Waldzell meetings have shown that the spirit of the times does not necessarily blow in one direction only, that there is more courage for spirituality, for idealistic commitment, for intellectual experimentation than I would have dared to dream of.

This fourth meeting, which was also attended by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, was the most beautiful and at the same time the last one that I helped to organize.

Strengthened and inspired by the many good Waldzell talks, it is time for me to move on and start where new things can not only be thought of, but also implemented. And that's best done at the very beginning.

Where we learn to understand the world. I want to narrow the gap between what children around the world are learning every day at school today and what they actually need for the future. The aim of this new project is to reinvent the school of tomorrow with the best minds in the world. This also means that I want to carry on the spirit of Waldzell, because the fictional country of Castalya in the novel "The Glass Bead Game" is famous above all for its special schools.

I would like to thank the many friends who have helped Gundula and me to make Waldzell what it is today in four years. Gundula has agreed to continue to run Waldzell on her own. I wish Gundula a lot of strength for this and ask everyone to support her.

"Well then, heart, take your leave and be well."

Andreas Salcher