- by Dr. S.V. Rao, M.D., Gandhi Medical College, Bhopal, From YogaMag June 1977
The neo-industrial age, also called the age of anxiety, is introducing newer forms of stress into the everyday life of common man. His life is full of subtle psychological plagues- worries, value conflicts.
Loneliness, disillusionment and doubts as to whether he can weave a successful course through the complex maze of freeways and blind alleys that make up modern existence.
Tremendous growth of knowledge, coupled with scientific and technological discoveries, has provided the opportunities for a higher life, health, happiness and leisure. But our distressed generation is obscurely aware that the present crisis is a spiritual one. What we need is a healing of the discord between the outward resources of power, which are assuming frightful proportions, and the inward resources of spirit, which seem to be steadily declining. To redeem and recreate our civilisation, we need a recovery of spiritual awareness, a new transforming contact with the inner springs of life, a sense of values. Despite the extraordinary achievements of affluent countries in art and science, intellectual and political life, hundreds of thousands of young people flee from reality by opting for drug-induced lassitude. Millions of parents retreat into video stupors or alcoholic haze. Legions of elderly folk vegetate and die in loneliness. The flight from family and occupational responsibility has become an exodus. Masses tame their raging anxieties with a score of tranquillisers and psychic pacifiers. Affluent nations, whether they know it or not, are passing through a stage of acute stress. All developing countries wedded to industrial progress are passing through similar phases differing only in degree. Man today is not standing on an enviable pedestal as a builder of a civilisation; he is lying low as a victim of a civilisation which is growing at an unbelievably rapid pace beyond his comprehension.
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