And the goal of humanity is?

If the ultimate goal is power then modern man has come of age. However, if the ultimate goal is meaning of existence, then man has already descended into a new infancy.

At times it is as if our normal consciousness were a state of partly suspended animation. Our perceptivity limited, our categories one-sided.

Things that matter most are of no relevance to many of us. Pedestrian categories will not lead us to the summit; to attain understanding for realness of God we have to rise to a higher level of thinking and experience.

This is an age in which even our common sense is tainted with commercialism and expediency. To recover sensitivity to the divine, we must develop in uncommon sense, rebel against seemingly relevant, against conventional validity, to unthink many thoughts, to abandon many habits, to sacrifice many pretensions.—Abraham Joshua Heschel in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays, 294

<idle musing>
It never ceases to amaze me that he wrote these essays before 1970. If they were true then—and they were—how much truer they are now!

Commercialism and capitalism has invaded every corner of our lives! It has become our god. And it is a merciless god. We sacrifice our children, our elders, our marriages, even ourselves to its merciless demands. And even then we feel inadequate. We have indeed decended into a new infancy—and we don't even know it. How sad.
</idle musing>