Daily Meditation: Sunday, July 27, 1997

Our contemporaries have given the intellect supremacy over …

07/27/1997

Our contemporaries have given the intellect supremacy over all other faculties, even though they do not really know its true nature. But the intellect in itself has no morality. It searches, it finds, it invents, constructs, combines, without concerning itself with the way in which its inventions will be used. This is how, thanks to their intellectual faculties, scientists have made available to humankind extremely dangerous technologies without asking themselves for what purpose they will be used. Because if the intellect is the father of invention, it is also the father of the use to which inventions are put. When scientists first isolated gases, did they imagine they would one day be used to annihilate millions of people? Only the heart can remedy the harmful effects of the intellect. And if the heart does not reclaim the lost ground from the intellect, humankind will be lost. In the past there have been civilizations far greater than ours, and they have disappeared because they gave supremacy to the intellect over the heart. The intellect always pushes human beings on to the path of selfishness, domination, injustice, and enslavement of beings and nature. And if our humanity continues along this path, if there is nothing to counterbalance the destructive forces which are becoming increasingly manifest, it too will disappear.