There is a popular view in our culture, that all our problems will be solved when every individual will be presented with the most adequate information that he requires, given his particular situation and circumstances.
This appears to be a reasonable opinion to hold. And thus people are dispatching the supposed appropriate information right and left, expecting it on one hand - to be accessible, and on the other - to be accessed by the right person at the right time. As most of us know, it happens in fact very often that the right information does not reach the right person in the right place, at the right time, but instead a lot of people find themselves consuming repeatedly and compulsively information that is useless, if not outright toxic to them.
We will focus here on two types of information the people require in order to solve the issues of our current day and age. The first one is intellectual knowledge like the one I am displaying here through this very text right now. The collective mind of humankind is more than saturated with this type of information, through various texts, videos, books and all the other means of relaying intellectual knowledge. Anything that can be put into words and symbols, all the products of planning and thinking are part of this.
The second type of information, is information about our own physical and emotional experience which can only be generated by one's perception of his own state, by being aware of one's own thoughts, emotions, physical sensations and immediate surroundings. This information is obtained exclusively through the practice of observation, through pure perception and not through thinking.
Historically speaking, there was a clear difference between West and East in the philosophical and religious landscape, in terms of these two ways of acquiring knowledge. An illustration of this difference can be seen in the core differences between Christianity and Buddhism. While in Christianity one is required to believe specific doctrines and stories, in Buddhism one is required to sit, meditate and observe the nature of any doctrines and any stories as objects of the mind.
Nowadays, there is a great unbalance
[mastery over oneself vs mastery over exterior nature.]
The main cultural practice that produces this effect is school. School is a space where the youngest and most receptive minds are trained in certain ways. For the most recent centuries, children were trained by being rewarded for displaying acquired intellectual knowledge and punished if they failed to acquire it. Thus, the young humans understood at the earliest age that these things are what their parents, their mentors (the teachers) and society at large expects from them.
After school, mastery of specific fields of intellectual knowledge continues to be rewarded at the workplace with money, social status and with acceptance within the group. But if someone is an accomplished meditator it is not likely that he will be met by the state or by the business community with offers of high paying jobs. At least not yet.
Moreover, experiential internal knowledge is impossible to replicate and it is impossible to be transmitted the same way intellectual knowledge is replicated and spread; everyone must get it for themselves and find their own path to it.
The last reason, and maybe the most important, is that it is difficult for people to understand the usefulness of dealing with the darkest emotions and darkest internal states, the extreme experiences that terrify them. Surely, learning philosophy or quantum mechanics is not at everyone's grasp and it's extremely complicated, but to face the painful experiences that lay in subconscious mind, or to learn to tolerate the symptoms of a panic attack without reacting to them, is very hard, though not a complicated process. There is some kind of a bias that makes people be more willing to explore the outer world than the inner world.