link for the above image: https://happytogetherblog.org/2021/11/19/let-your-values-guide-you-to-happiness/

People’s interest in moral pursuits in the modern world has been declining. The Indian leader Nehru once pointed out that humanity is missing an essential element. According to Nehru, this spiritual element curbed modern man’s scientific authority. Every day it becomes more and more evident that science is incapable of putting human life in order. Values organize life. That is, ours, the nations, and perhaps all of humanity. Really, what do you think is the highest value of the Western world today?

Today, values in the Western world tend to sustain life more and less to govern it. Yesterday I asked some passers-by in the center of Athens what they wanted most and what they thought they answered me. Some answered “happiness,” and others “strength.” But these are objects of desire, not supreme values. Today, the culture of machines and activity is the first culture without a supreme value for most people.

All the highest values were created in times that sought in some way to oppose the transitory to the permanent. To ascend the ephemeral. This was also the ultimate meaning of religion. Having been diagnosed early enough, the human being contains a strange burning of duration precisely because it sees itself dominated by the flow. In contrast, this has as its constituent principle the obsession with itself; the religions sought to find some points of support in the inner world (imaginary world ) of humans. They found them one way or another. From that moment, the flow acquired meaning because it either had a goal (Christianity) or was declared a fantasy, a delusion (Buddhism). The great religions believed that only an orientation outside of Time could be redeemed from Time. And this is because Time’s main characteristic is not to catalyze but to refute. For the consciousness of man, the fleeting is called imaginary. And recognition of the imaginary as the only unquestionable truth (value) would mean man’s self-abnegation. Remove all values. From the moment you consider your existence a shadow honor, you will have said a great speech, but also, you’re last.

Today, the highest values are formed by the culture of the machine with its mind, not with the soul. With the soul, only one can conceive the stress of flow. It transforms into other situations to make it unrecognizable, transforms it into vanity, cheap ambition, prosaic visionary, egotism, fanaticism for fanaticism’s sake, bigotry, narcissistic nihilism, cruelty, and cynicism. All these existed before, always, but as human defects. The originality now is that they became substitutes for the missing value. So man wanted to free himself from God and enslaved himself to Time. This is the drama of our time.