A classic village scene
Keeping clean
A kid in anticipation
भारत स्वच करो ~ Keep India clean
A classic road side view
Spare part repository
Spare part repository
riCH(əw)əl
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Anekere Basadi
Anekere
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Bitter gourd - deep fry
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ನಮ್ಮ ಮಂಗಳೂರು ಸ್ವಚ ಮಂಗಳೂರು
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Quarters?
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These general analytical functions of the mind allow to think, feel, and experience the world in an essentially human way. These mental attributes have allowed our species to adopt creatively and successfully o even the most hostile habitats on earth
The functions associated with these operators evolved as standard equipment in every human brain because because of the adaptive powers, in fact, that evolution appears to have provided he human brain with a biological compulsion to use them. Gene and I have referred to this involuntary mental drive as the 'cognitive imperative,' it is the almost irresistible, biologically driven need to make sense of things through the cognitive analysis of reality
Researchers have provided support for the existence of the cognitive imperative by showing that the mind, when confronted with an overwhelming flow of sensory information, reacts with increasing anxiety. The researchers concluded hat this anxiety was caused by the frustration or the mind's insatiable need to sort confusion into order and the difficulty in doing so when overwhelmed by information.
There is a simpler and more compelling way to demonstrate the existence of cognitive imperative; glance around and try not to perceive a cohesive portrait of your world. Simpler still: try not to think. As any novice meditator knows all to well, the kind just isn't made that way.
This grim discovery must have entered the world soon after self-awareness began to glow in some prehistoric human mind. The moment it did, the cognitive imperative would have diven the mind to find resolution. The problem would have engaged the cerebral cortex in the manner of any abstract thought, and, soon, the limbic and autonomic systems would generate an arousal response. the intensity of the anxiety produced by such a response might not be as sharp as the response generated by a more acute concern -- an earthquake, for example, or a tiger about to pounce -- but as long as it persists, the cognitive imperative will continue to bring the analytical power of the mind to bear upon it.
And, most pressingly" How can we live in this baffling uncertain world and not be afraid?
These are confounding questions, but the cognitive imperative cannot let them lie, so it tirelessly pushes the mind to find resolution. For thousands of years in culture around the globe, that resolution has been found in the form of myth. Mythos, in face always being with the apprehension of some metaphysical problem that is resolved in the mythic story through using metaphorical images and themes -- Eve eats the apple; Pandora opens the box. By learning these stories, and passing them on, our questions about suffering, good and evil, and numerous other metaphysical problems suddenly become answerable, knowable.
Essentially, all myths can be reduced to a simple framework. First, they focus upon a crucial existential concern -- the cration of the world, for example, or how the evil came to be. Next, they frame the concern as a pair of apparent irreconcilable opposites -- heroes and monsters, gods and humans, life and death, heaven and hell. Finally, and most important, myths reconcile those opposites, often through the actions of gods or other spiritual powers, in way that relieves our existential concerns.
The creation of complex mythic stories requires the creative, combined interaction of all the cognitive operations, but two of the operators appear to play especially significant roles. The first is the casual operator, which should be no surprise, since myths are essentially about the root causes of things. The casual operator, you'll recall, is the mind's ability to think in terms of abstract causes -- to link that chuffing roar in the distance with the likely presence of a lion, for example, or to trace the pain in your belly to the unfamiliar berries you sampled last night. In the moment-to-moment flow of conscious thinking, we take such casual associations for granted, but the mind would not possess the potential to understand the concept of cause without the analytical powers of the casual operator. Nor would it be able to crate the many stories about creation.
The second cognitive operator crucial to the myth-making mind is the binary operator, which refers to the brain's ability to frame the world in terms of basic polar opposites. Th human bain's ability to reduce the most complicated relationships of space and time to simple pairs of opposites -- above and below, in and out, left and right, before and after, and so on -- gives the mind a powerful method of analyzing external reality.
In other words, the binary operator does not simply observe and identify opposites, but in a very real sense it creates them, and it does so for an evolutionary purpose. In order to negotiate the environment confidently, we need a way to divide space and time into more comprehensible units. Relationships such as above and below, inside and outside, before and after, and so on, give us a basic way of orienting ourselves to the outside world, of feeling our way through the environment
These relationships are conceptual, of course, and far from absolute: 'up' for example, would have very little meaning to an astronaut far from earth. But the cognitive processing of the binary operator turns these relationships into something tangible and absolute, and so makes better sense of the physical world. So, when the cognitive imperative, driven by some existential fear, directs the binary function to make sense of the metaphysical landscape, it obliges to interrupting that existential problem and rearranging it into the pairs of irreconcilable opposites that become the key elements of myth: heaven and hell; good and evil; celebration and tragedy; birth, death, and rebirth, isolation and unity. ~
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