NOT TO MOVE FORWARD, to stay where we are, to regress, in other words to rely on what we have, is very tempting, for what we have, we know; we can hold onto it, feel secure in it. We fear, and consequently avoid, taking a step into the unknown, the uncertain; for, indeed, while the step may not appear risky to us after we have taken it, before we

the industrial age has indeed failed to fulfill its Great Promise, and ever growing numbers of people are becoming aware that: Unrestricted satisfaction of all desires is not conducive to well-being, nor is it the way to happiness or even to maximum pleasure.

Insight separated from practice remains ineffective.

It is interesting to note that in the development of many languages the construction “it is to me” is followed later on by the construction “I have,” but as Emile Benveniste has pointed out, the evolution does not occur in the reverse direction.2 This fact suggests that the word for to have develops in connection with the development of private

religion” as I use it here does not refer to a system that has necessarily to do with a concept of God or with idols or even to a system perceived as religion, but to any group-shared system of thought and action that offers the individual a frame of orientation and an object of devotion.

Tennyson, as we see him in his poem, may be compared to the Western scientist who seeks the truth by means of dismembering life.

Lacking the capacity to act by the command of instincts while possessing the capacity for self-awareness, reason, and imagination—new qualities that go beyond the capacity for instrumental thinking of even the cleverest primates—the human species needed a frame of orientation and an object of devotion in order to survive.

twentieth-century capitalism is based on maximal consumption of the goods and services produced as well as on routinized teamwork.

The dream of being independent masters of our lives ended when we began awakening to the fact that we have all become cogs in the bureaucratic machine, with our thoughts, feelings, and tastes manipulated by government and industry and the mass communications that they control. Economic progress has remained restricted to the rich nations, and the