(she's a) universal emptiness

“Life’s appearance as “meaningless” stems basically from man’s materialistic concept of himself. If his innermost nature were merely biological, complete fulfillment of his appetites and the acquiring of wealth would satisfy his longing for happiness. Since they do not, an atmosphere of hopelessness is enveloping our generation, especially our youth. In an affluent society where all material ways out of such frustration have been found wanting, drugs, perversions, and the thrills of crime are now being used as desperate means of escape from the intolerable boredom. Well- meaning efforts on the part of the authorities to stem the tidal wave of juvenile delinquency and drug-addiction will therefore bring scant results, until the following simple truth has been fully accepted by parents and teachers: Happiness, love, and compassion are spiritual faculties that during centuries of neglect and misunderstanding have withered and grown weak. Unless they are nursed back to health, man will despair of life and eventually throw it away in a mass suicide by nuclear destruction. But how can we care for what we no longer comprehend? Modern science, admirable in its achievements on a material plane, has proven ineffectual in the understanding of intangible values. This limitation, while freely admitted by the small number of truly creative scientists, seems to elude the average intellectual. And the failure to recognize this limitation adds to the delusion that natural science in its present form can be the judge of religious or spiritual truth. Making modern man’s plight even more serious is the fact that his materialistic delusion of himself not only deprives him of wisdom and happiness, but acts also as a pattern in whose dreary image he tends to reshape his nature. Consequently more and more personalities emerge who think and act virtually like robots. They know no happiness and have no perception of objective morality. We have grown wise in the analysis of the material world, have expanded the scope of our perception to outer space and to the world beneath the atom. But objective inner experience has faded almost entirely away, and it has left us groping in the dark for the true image of ourselves.”