spiritual development keeps pace with material development is a
truly progressive world where people are bound to live in peace
and happiness. When the material side of the world progresses
at the expense of the spiritual side, people’s hearts are forever
ablaze, so the world experiences strife, oppression, exploitation,
and corruption on a grand scale. Such progress is equivalent to
the advance of the fires of hell. If you want to know what the
advancing fires of hell are like, you need only look at a world
devoid of spiritual development; a world that is constantly pol-
luted by the heart’s filthy excretions. When the heart is neglected,
people’s behavior becomes perverse, immoral, irritating, and quite
offensive. So much so that nothing of pleasure or praiseworthiness
can be found in a world ruled by impropriety.
Understanding this, wise, intelligent people emphasize spir-
itual development over all other kinds of development – which are
all merely creations of the heart anyway. Once the heart has been
well developed, its overriding influence then cleanses all aspects
of a person’s behavior. The world thus enjoys peace and happi-
ness following the lead of intelligent people who have developed
themselves spiritually, and therefore, strive to govern society with
reason, according to the principles of Dhamma.
We should be very wary of admiring or trusting the intel-
ligence of people who lack spiritual development even if they’re
so clever that they can explore the sun, the moon, and the stars.
Such achievements are not all that significant; especially if the
intelligence in question is of the kind that is unmindful of its
own misdoing and exudes poisonous elements that cause trouble
in society. Applied indiscriminately, this ‘clever’ knowledge may
well lead to behavior rivaling that of common animals that ruth-
jacob rumans
(Jacob Rumans)
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