At least his effort is not absolutely useless. It may be harmful, but it is not useless. Because the one-dimensional man is blind, he goes on searching, seeking, but does not know what the ultimate purpose of all his seeking and searching is. Hence even a man like Albert Einstein ends up finding atomic energy.
He was not a man who was violent or destructive. He was a man of peace. But if you are blind and you go on searching in directions without knowing where you are going, you are bound to end up in areas which are not healthy, which are not life-affirmative, which may even be dangerous to human beings. And that’s what Albert Einstein’s whole life’s effort has proved: Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the ultimate conclusion of his discoveries.
Science is a blind search. It has no sense of direction; it does not know the meaning, the significance of human life. It does not understand that man is not only matter. That horizontal, straight line can never discover anything more than matter; hence science has become confined to a materialist conception of the world.
It is one of the most dangerous conceptions, because a man like Karl Marx – a great genius a giant as far as intellectuality is concerned – ended up with materialism. He concluded that man is nothing more than a by-product of matter, an epiphenomenon. The moment the body dies, nothing remains, everything dies. There is no difference between a man and a machine. A machine has no soul, neither does man have a soul.
The ultimate result was that his follower, Joseph Stalin, killed thirty million Russians after the revolution without any difficulty. If man is only a machine, there is no question of compassion and love, and there is no question of violence either. If you destroy a bicycle you will not feel any prick in your conscience. You have not killed anybody, you have not murdered anybody. A bicycle has no consciousness, no life; it is already dead. How can you murder a dead thing?
Because of Karl Marx’s materialist communism, Joseph Stalin was able to kill thirty million people from his own land without any trouble, without feeling any disturbance in his mind about what he was doing for a single night. He tortured more men than any other man in the whole of history. It was possible for Adolf Hitler to destroy six million Jews in Germany and altogether nearabout forty million people in the Second World War. A materialist conception about man is going to be destructive because it is coming out of a blind search.
Mind can also be used as a ladder going downward. That’s how the psychologist uses it: from consciousness to sub-consciousness, from sub-consciousness to unconsciousness, from unconsciousness to collective unconsciousness…they have only reached so far as yet. One rung of the ladder has still to be reached. They will certainly reach it: they are groping towards it and that will be the final conclusion of all our psychological in-depth research.