What progress, oh human being?

I found another gem from Pandit Usharbudh Arya’s Mantra & Meditation:

When you create a spaceship, the metal and machinery converted into the spaceship has made progress through the touch of human intelligence. When you can flash a light on or off, the light has made progress through the touch of your ingenuity. But what progress, human being, have you made in the past five thousand years? If you were left standing alone in a desert or a mountain cave without any material props, without anything external to depend on or project onto, if you stood absolutely naked in solitude and silence, what could you do with your six-foot frame? In what way are you an improvement on what the man five thousand years could do? Are your senses under greater control? Can you divert, through the application of your wisdom, the attention of an opponent from an attitude of conflict and turn his mind from war to peace? Can you control your anger today more than the man of five thousand years ago? Can you pull yourself out of a depression without paying another human fifty dollars an hour? Can you slow down your breath and thus prolong your life span? Can you improve your digestive function internally, or permit greater absorption of life-giving oxygen into your system? Can you, at will, from within your body, produce antidotes to poisons and pollutions administered to you by your own product, civilization? And finally, can you know and dwell in your ever-pure, ever-wise and ever-free nature without being agitated by external inducements?

These are the things that yogis can do. Their path leads to true progress of humankind, but yours leads to the progress of houses, ships, trains, and other forms of metal and rock. These are necessary for our physical comfort, but they are not necessarily comforting for the mind, as the ever-increasing incidence of mental disturbance in modern civilization attests to.