by Swami Jyotirmayananda 

In a world that is in constant pursuit of material prosperity, people are tending to become hedonistic and losing their spiritual moorings. This is leading to a moral vacuum in public life, with its attendant baneful effects. How to stem the tide of rot?

The path that the world has until now traversed in pursuit of technological mastery has imperiled peace and environment and failed to provide prosperity and equality for all people of the world. Hosts of problems are cropping up, bringing in its train a lot of tension, anxiety, worries and frustration. Beset with problems-psychological, social, economic, ethnic, political and environmental, which apparently defy solution, people are becoming beasts of burden. They are ill at ease.

Can anybody help and rescue those who are constantly being buffeted by these problems? Can they themselves solve their problems by dint of their self-effort? Or can their governments or social organizations -- the United Nations -- find a permanent solution for all the ills of human life?

The answer is emphatically negative. At best, they can find some temporary remedies which can act as just palliative. In any case, it is certain that none of them can create in all people of the world a total awareness for higher and enduring values, the inculcation of which alone can regenerate human life and reform the character. No amount of state authority can bring an essential change in human nature. Neither science nor politics can give man perfect peace and happiness. The ills of life cannot be cured by political, social or other mechanical remedies which human beings are constantly attempting and which have always failed.

Nevertheless, there is an abiding solution for all the human problems. The world will change when the human beings who constitute it, change from within. The "inner man" is to be set right first and the externals will take care of themselves. So, the solution of the problems is not by external means, though these also have to be used, but essentially by an inner change, a transformation of consciousness and nature. Unless man's psyche changes, society cannot be deeply and permanently changed. After all our society is an exact replica of ourselves. The various social, political and economic problems in the world are only the outward symptoms of an inner psychological malaise. So it is spiritual awareness alone that generates the real peace and happiness, love and unity in the world.

Although modern science and technology has placed enormous power at the disposal of man, to use this power in the right directions it is necessary that man's mind should be cultured. Excess of knowledge and power, without holiness, can easily make human beings devils. We must progress materially and spiritually side by side. Material prosperity should not be at the expense of spiritual advancement. They must go hand-in-hand. Then we have an integral evolution. Then and then alone that we can expect to have a socially more useful and individually peaceful and also spiritually enlightened life.

The tree cannot flourish without strong roots and the world cannot be truly joyous without its roots in the spiritual life at its best. -- Swami Radhanandaji