A generation of excess
‘TECHNOLOGY WILL BE A MASSIVE DISASTER FOR HUMANITY IF PEOPLE DON’T LEARN WHERE TO STOP’
IN TODAY’S world, we have made a habit of doing everything in excess.
Whatever we do, we overdo it. For instance, we don’t know where to stop even with simple processes like eating. If we find something that is good for us, we get into this foolishness that more of it should be even better for us.
It is common knowledge in science that even the oxygen that you breathe will give you trouble if too much goes into you. But today, the modern world has to constantly be educated about not doing things in excess. We have become a generation of excess.
One day, it so happened that Shankaran Pillai’s only son went to Africa as an IT professional. There, he went exploring and happened to meet a witch doctor. His friend had told him that this witch doctor could do many miraculous things, so he wanted to get something that would benefit his old parents back home in India. He knew that his old father Shankaran Pillai was always aspiring to be youthful. So he asked the witch doctor, “Do you have something that will bring back youth; that will take years off my parents’ lives? Is there something?” The witch doctor said “yes,” and gave him a few pills and said, “Ask your father to take one of these and many years of his life will be taken off from him.” So the son sent these pills to India. Six months later, after his project got over, he came back to India.
When he walked into his house, he found a young man, in the prime of his youth with a small infant in his hands. “Where are my parents?” he asked. A young Shankaran Pillai said, “I’m your father. The pill you sent, I took it and it made me young. It took years off my life.”
“But where is mother?” the son asked.
Shankaran Pillai pointed at the little infant in his hands and said, “She took three.”
This is what has happened. We are taking anything that we start to the point of destruction. We are making all the wonderful things that the physical sciences have offered us into instruments of destruction, pain and suffering for humanity. We pursued all the external sciences and technologies because we believed that they would bring human wellbeing. They have brought much comfort.
Never before have human beings been so physically comfortable. In spite of that, we cannot say that human beings are well, because they have not become any more peaceful, joyful, loving or blissful than those people who were here a million years ago. We are still going through the same suffering and struggle both within and outside of ourselves.
We need to understand that external science and technology come at a tremendous price. Everything that you do – whether you manufacture a safety pin or a great machine – you have to dig it out of the planet. If we don’t know where to stop, this science and technology is definitely going to be a massive disaster for humanity; and we are getting there at express speed. Whatever you give to immature human beings is dangerous. As the instruments that they handle become more powerful and capable, they become more dangerous. It is not the science or the technology that is dangerous. It is human stupidity which has always been a dangerous thing on the planet.
Ranked among the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and a New York Times bestselling author Sadhguru has been conferred the Padma Vibhushan by the government of India in 2017, the highest annual civilian award, accorded for exceptional and distinguished service.