Spirituality in the age of high-end technology and modern life

Following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Questioner: Modern life has created conditions that privilege material over the spiritual. In your view, is it possible to reconcile the best practices of spiritual mind with the hi-tech material and super modern life? If so, then how?

Acharya Prashant: Life has always been hi-tech according to the age you live in. When has life not been hi-tech, you tell me? Even the cave man, when he first used a sharpened piece of stone, was really going hi-tech, and then think of the one who got an axe. The axe was the equivalent of fusion bomb today.

So you say as if technology is something that has happened just today. Given man’s intellect, technology has always been there. And technology is a function of time, 200 years from today, if man survives till then given the climate catastrophe and other things, all the technologies that you have today will be considered of the bullock-cart category.

200 years from today, all of today’s technologies will not merely be obsolete but actually laughable, just as today you look at ENIAC computer of 1940s and wonder of what use it could have been.

But when that computer first came, it was absolutely hi-tech, was it not? We fail to…