Babies

Picture a baby with a loaded gun in its hands.

Bright-eyed but naive, it stares and sticks its finger down the barrel, fiddles curiously with any switches and moving parts, finds and fumbles with the mechanism, and, in no time, exercises its compulsion to pull the trigger.

Without hesitation, it does the unthinkable.

That's us, the human race. What we have in our hands, in the form of scientific knowledge and technological capacity, is almost entirely a danger to us because of our lack of commensurate wisdom to handle it.

We are causing all sorts of carnage because spiritually we are mere infants. We have an inkling that we are clueless but we are not even awake enough to see that waking up is our priority.

To shift metaphors, the telephone has stirred us, we are speaking to a paramount client, insisting aggressively that we are compos mentis, yet we are stumbling around in a slumbering stupor!

We are a walking world war, destroying the ecology, and eating ourselves from the inside through diseased consciousness.

We hear a click, wake up and watch ourselves put the phone down, then realise that we have just done something serious while deeply in a dream.

A shuddering sobriety shoots through us because we can't remember who we spoke to, what we said, and what our bodies did in our absence.

We must grow inwards to the same degree, at least, that we grow outwards. At the moment, our interiority is alien to us and our exterior is running our lives.

We have the engineering capacity to build marvellous machinery, but the car is in control. There is a newborn behind the wheel.

The head is ruling the heart instead of the right way round.

Consciousness needs to lead science and business.