Spiritual Starvation
It is thanks to modern civilization that man has been deprived of God and his soul left to starve. It is this spiritual starvation that has driven some young people in Japan to say: ‘Our culture is a merchant culture, and a merchant culture does not fully cater to man’s needs.’ The phenomenon of the hippy culture is also an expression of modern man’s hunger for true faith in God.
The case of a hippy youth, seen walking down the streets of Delhi, illustrates this point. He was dressed in simple eastern clothes. He wore beads around his neck, rings on his fingers, and bracelets on his wrists. In his hands he held a tambourine. He was from Canada. ‘There I had my own house,’ he said, ‘my own car, a good wife, a suitable job... Here I have no house. I sleep wherever I feel sleepy, even if it happens to be on the pavement. I have no car, no job. My wife has left me.’
‘But why did you leave all these comforts in Canada and come to India to rough it on the road?’ someone asked him.
‘There I was comfortable physically, here I am comfortable spiritually,’ he answered thoughtfully.
Modern civilization has provided man with countless material benefits. But these things have brought comfort to only (one half) of his being; they afford no comfort or satisfaction to the rest other half. Modern man’s loss of inner peace—the result of this contradiction in technological civilization—finds expression in hippyism, boredom, unrest and frustration.
The late Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), the renowned Swiss psychologist, made a correct analysis of this modern spiritual malaise when he wrote: “Over the last twenty years people all over the globe have consulted me about their psychological problems. All of my patients who were in the latter stage of their lives, that is, over the age of thirty-five were, in the last analysis, suffering from one thing alone: lack of religious belief. One can truthfully say that each one of them was suffering from a lack of the very thing that present day religions have provided their adherents with, throughout the ages. These people could only be cured by a renewal of their faith in God.”
