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)

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)

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 of man’s greatest inventions was also one of his most modest the wick. We don’t know who first realized, many thousand years ago, that fire could be isolated at the tip of a twisted piece of cloth and steadily fed, through capillary action, by a reservoir of wax or oil, but the discovery was, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch writes in “Disenchanted Night,” “as revolutionary in the development of artificial lighting as the wheel in the history of transport.” The wick tamed fire, allowing it to be used with a precision and an efficiency far beyond what was possible with a wooden torch or bundle of twigs. In the process it helped domesticate us as well. It’s hard to imagine civilization progressing to where it is today by torchlight. ~ Page 231 Epilogue (The Big Switch - Nicholas Carr)

There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing. Consider the simple act of changing lanes while driving a car. Try this: close your eyes, grip an imaginary steering wheel, and go through the motions of a lane change. Imagine that you are driving in the left lane and you would like to move over to the right lane. Before reading on, put down the book and try it. I’ll give you 100 points if you can do it correctly. It’s a fairly easy task, right? I’m guessing that you held the steering wheel straight, then banked it over to the right for a moment, and then straightened it out again. No problem. Like almost everyone else, you got it completely wrong. The motion of turning the wheel rightward for a bit, then straightening it out again would steer you off the road: you just piloted a course from the left lane onto the sidewalk. The correction motion of changing lanes is banking the wheel to the right, and back to the left side, and only then straightening out. Don’t believe it? Verify it for yourself when you’re next in the car. It’s such a simple motor task that you have no problem accomplishing it in your daily driving. But when forced to access it consciously, you’re flummoxed. ~ Page 55 Chapter: Mind: The Gap - INCOGNITO Author - David Eagleman

americanveda.com/ Buddhism and Vedanta-Yoga have interacted and overlapped intimately in the lives of American practitioners, many of whom have drawn liberally from both. Each has helped to legitimize the other, smoothing the way to mutual acceptance in the West. Their compatibility makes sense, given the Buddhism is part of Vedic legacy. Siddhartha Gautama, the man we call Buddha, was brought up in northern India and became classic renunciate – a yogi, if you will. He was a reformer, much as Jesus was a reformer of the Hebric tradition, and the religion that developed in his name stands in relation to Hinduism as Christianity does to Judaism. Also like Christianity, Buddhism entranced in foreign lands even as it faded in its place of origin. ~ Page 4 (Introduction) American Veda by Philip Goldberg