Excerpts from the Books that I read - II

Cultural microevolutionary factors can in some cases create macroevolutionary forces. For instance, the cultural preferences of influential leaders (e.g., wanting to enrich themselves and their friends) sometimes put powerful macroevolutionary constraints on a society. One example is the change in the transportation and settlement patterns that occurred in the United States in the decades before and after World War II. The most dramatic instance was the removal of the interurban rail network in Los Angeles County and its later replacement with freeways, a move promoted by automobile manufacturers and oil and rubber companies. This change was soon emulated in cities around the country, reinforced by housing developers who built suburban subdivisions connected to city centers by freeways. This process has produced the leapfrog developments we see today around most large American cities. Suburban sprawl, with its wastefulness of both energy and productive land, virtually forces people to own cars and spend hours weekly driving to and from workplaces and to shop for food and other necessities, whatever their individual proclivities. The suburban lifestyle is a microevolutionary cultural influence, originating the decisions by a relatively small number of politicians and businessmen, that became macroevolutionary because the cultural trend is unleashed greatly altered the physical (external) options of millions of Americans as well as of future generations. The spread of suburbia, for example, limited people’s movement patterns and opportunities for social contact and helped, through increasing greenhouse gas emissions from automobile use, to alter the climate, which puts external constraints of many human activities. ~ Page 160 (The Dominant Animal)

The atomistic attitude of Westerners extend to their understanding of the nature of social institutions. In their survey of the values of middle managers, Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars asked whether their respondents thought of a company as a system to organize tasks or as an organism coordinating people working together. About 75 percent of Americans chose the first definition, more than 50 percent of Canadians, Australians, British, Dutch, and Swedes chose that definition, and about a third of Japanese and Singaporese chose it. Germans, French, and Italians as a group were intermediate between the Asian and the people of British and northern European culture. Thus for the Westerners, especially the Americans and the other people of primarily northern European culture, a company is an atomistic, modular place where people perform their distinctive functions. For the Easterners, and to a lesser extent the eastern and southern Europeans, a company is an organism where the social relations are an integral part of what holds things together. ~ Excerpt: Page 84 (The Geography of Thought by Richard E. Nisbett)

As humans, we do not naturally see ourselves as a product of continual change. Most of us think we are direct descendants in a lineage of ancestors who were also human. That’s why we feel a connection with the prehistoric artists of the Niaux caves. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Niaux However, thirteen thousand years is just a blink of the eye in evolutionary terms. If we go back far enough, we find that life was literally much simpler. I can know this on an intellectual level, but I cannot easily accept that all living organism have evolved from the same origin. I simply cannot see how I am related to the furry green mold growing on the cheese in my fridge. The full implications of evolution are rarely considered because we cannot conceive what it really means. Our physical resemblance to chimpanzees may make it easier for us to understand that we share around 98 per cent of our genetic makeup. Much harder to accept is that we alo share 50 percent of our genetic makeup with a banana. I amy feel that some of my fellow humans have the intelligence of a banana, but to fully accept that all life is related by the same basic genetic building blocks is beyond belief., no matter how simple or complicated an organism can be, all life forms share about one thousand genes. As I write, I am contemplating the bananas in the fruit bowl in front of me, which for some strange reason suddenly seem less appetizing. Why do we misunderstand natural selection, and why does creationism do so well in a Christian fundamentalist environment? The answer is that our minds are naturally inclined to a creationist view. After all, creationism was created by the human mind, whereas evolution by natural selection is a fact that was discovered. Without the Book of Genesis, there would have been some other creation story. The Incas, the Egyptians, and the Aztecs all had exotic creation myts, and that probably goes for all extinct civilizations. Every culture has a creation story because humans are naturally inclined to understand the world in terms of patterns, purpose, and causality. Everything about evolution runs counter to how our natural mind design makes sense of life on an earth made up of different animals and plants. We are not naturally inclined to a theory that is nonpurposeful, nondirected, and yet capable of all the extreme diversity of life forms. To top it all, we are then expected to believe that we are related to bananas. Page 60-61

A bird is singing in a tree. Where is the sound of the bird? In the tympanic membrane? Along the auditory nerves or behind my ears in the brain itself? Internal or external? Actually, the sound is neither in the bird nor in me, but rather in the total relationship. When there is total relationship, at the instant the division between the internal and external is not there. When there is sound it does not take time to hear the sound. There is just sound. When one sees anything, there is no time. here by “seeing” I do not mean just sensory input, although it certainly includes that. I am talking about the total relationship. Does the response that comes with direct relationship take time? Time only enters when thought looks back at it. The seeing and the response are not separate. Only thought is trying to understand, which includes trying to recognize, separates perception from action. Newness can never be recognized. Only the old, the known, is recognizable. The seeing of challenge, which by its nature is new, and the response to it are not divided. They are one. Thought, which after the fact wants to explain the response, creates time by putting the explanation in casual terms. That is, it makes the challenge the cause, and the response the effect. When thought is analyzing totally mechanical events, it can be creative in explaining the sequences, but only in mechanistic terms. Seeing totally, which never occurs in time, has its own movement, which is in that moment choiceless. Of course the moment that comes from clarity can span a period of time. What I’m saying is that the awareness initiates that momentum. ~ Page 125

My mother once told me that the most precious Christmas gift she ever received came to her around 1920, when she received an orange, and only an orange, for Christmas, a gift from her mother, who took in washing and sewing for them to survive. This was before refrigerated trucks and trains, so for an orange to even survive the trip north was a small miracle. It was the first orange she had ever seen, and she knew that her magical gift came through great sacrifice by her mother. I think this every year when I watch ordinary people pummeling each other to get into a Wal-Mart or Costco at six A.M. on Black Friday, the onset of the celebration of the purported Prince of Peace, the onset of a materialistic frenzy that mocks his life and teaching. ~ Page 109(Why Good People Do Bad things by James Hollis PhD)

Skepticism, says Hume (David), ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume ) is true; but in practice we can’t help disbelieving it. The real truth is something that our human nature simply cannot take on board. Skepticism is true; yet the whole way we live, and we can’t help living this way – is premised on the falsehood of skepticism. So for Hume the solution to our intellectual dilemmas is that there is ‘no’ rational solution. But fortunately, this doesn’t matter, because, as Hume famously puts it, ‘reason alone can never be motive to any action of the will’. Since human reason is causally inert, it will make no difference to our behaviour and practice even if we do work out that philosophical skepticism is true as a matter of theory. ~ Page 294 (Inescapable Self)

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. Gettysburg Address by Lincoln

"You came to me out of a world which I do not know and do not understand. Sooner or later, I know that you would be recaptured by it, Why should I wish to detain you? Have I not learned how to live alone? Have I not found in my own solitude the strength to endure all things--even the buffeting of snarling winds and the rage of destructive lightnings? Where did I get this power endurance from? I drew it forth out of my own heart, where at first it lay asleep. Now I fear none and nothing--not even death, which cannot be far away. I have learned to depend on no help, except my own. That, my friend, is my answer to you. Be self reliant. Wheresoever you go, remain a hermit inwardly. Then your world can never weaken you. Do not leave your stillness here after you find it. Take it back with you into that distant life whose agitation rarely reaches me, hold to it as your most treasured possession, and then, unafraid, you may let all storms blow past you. Remember always that you derive your being from heaven. My own peace I give to you" ~Dr.Paul Brunton (excerpt: Hermit in the Himalayas)

urdhva-mulam adhah-sakham ashvattham prahur avyayam chandamsi yasya parnani yas tam veda sa veda-vit Here the material world is described as a tree whose roots are upwards and branches are below. We have experience of a tree whose roots are upward: if one stands on the bank of a river or any reservoir of water, he can see that the trees reflected in the water are upside down. The branches go downward and the roots upward. Similarly, this material world is a reflection of the spiritual world. The material world is but a shadow of reality. In the shadow there is no reality or substantiality, but from the shadow we can understand that there are substance and reality. In the desert there is no water, but the mirage suggests that there is such a thing as water. In the material world there is no water, there is no happiness, but the real water of actual happiness is there in the spiritual world.

One road there is, signposted in this wise: Being was never born and never dies; Foursquare, unmoved, no end it will allow It never was, not will be, all is now, One and continuous. How could it be born Or whence could it be grown? Unbeing? No – That mayn’t be said or thought; we cannot go So far ev’n deny it is. What need, Early or late, could Being from Unbeing seed? Thus it must altogether be or not Nor to Unbeing will belief allot An offspiring other than itself…… ~ Parmenides To think a thing’s to think it is, no less. Apart from Being, whate’er we may express, Thought does not reach. Naught is or will be Beyond Being’s bounds, since Destiny’s decree Fetters it whole and still. All things are names Which the credulity of mortals frames – Birth and destruction, being all or none, Changes of place, and colours come and gone. ~ Parmenides