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Śrī Īśopaniṣad
called ignorance. The more a man forgets this fact of life, the more he is in darkness; and in view of this, a Godless civilization directed toward the so-called advancement of education is more dangerous than a civilization in which the mass of people are less advanced.
There are different classes of men, called  karmis ,  jñānins  and  yogis . The  karmis  are those who are engaged in the activities of sense gratification. Almost 99.9 per cent of the people in modern civilization are engaged in the activities of sense gratification under the flags of various activities such as industrialism, economic development, altruism, political consciousness, and so on. But all these activities are more or less based on the satisfaction of the senses, without any reference to the sort of God consciousness described in the first  mantra  of Śrī Īśopaniṣad.
In the language of the  Bhagavad-gītā , people who are engaged in gross sense gratification are  mūḍhas —in darkness like the ass, the symbol of stupidity. People who are simply engaged in the pursuit of sense gratification, without any real profit in life, are in the estimation of Śrī Īśopaniṣad worshiping  avidyā . And those who play the role of helping this sort of civilization in the name of educational advancement are doing more harm than those who are on the platform of gross sense gratification. The advancement of learning by the Godless people is as dangerous as a valuable jewel on the hood of a cobra. The cobra decorated with such a valuable jewel is quite as dangerous as one which is not so decorated.
Again, the advancement of educational activities by a Godless people is, according to the  Hari-bhakti-sudhodaya , a decoration for a dead body. In India as in many other countries, some people follow the custom of leading a procession with a decorated dead body for the pleasure of the lamenting relatives. In the same sense, modern civilization is a patchwork of activities meant to cover the perpetual miseries of material existence. Such activities are targetted toward sense gratification, but