Namaste Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation) I am Sunil Rao here. Today I would like to share with you an excerpt from “New World New Mind” first published in 1989 co-authored by Dr. Robert Ornstein & Dr. Paul Ehrlich

You can purchase your copy from any of the bookstores near you or via any online portal that sell this book or by clicking on the link below:

https://www.malorbooks.com/new-world-new-mind.html

About the authors

Robert Ornstein, was the president of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge, conducted extensive research on the human brain and authored numerous articles in publications such as Psychology Today and Encyclopedia Britannica.

Paul R. Ehrlich is Bing Professor of Population Studies, Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University. He is an expert in the fields of evolution, ecology, taxonomy, and population biology.

The authors hope that the information presented in this book will stimulate the people to think about the roots of the ‘human predicament’, and how we might begin to adapt our society where we can learn to evolve consciously and address the challenges accordingly.

Excerpt

Human beings have always been the most adaptable creatures on the planet, and they should be able to chart a new course for themselves. Some of that charting is already being done. The old mind today is being challenged and changed by many scattered efforts.

All non-human species evolved to fit into their physical habitats, and people originally evolved to do this as well. Human beings, however, have changed the world more in the last ten thousand years than their ancestors did in the preceding 4 million. Much more than any other species, we have turned the tables on the physical environment and made it change to fit us. Clothing, fire, dwellings, and agriculture all enabled people to live where none could before.

We don’t perceive the world as it is, because our nervous system evolved to select only a small extract of reality and to ignore the rest.

Instead of conveying everything about the world, our nervous system is “impressed” only by dramatic changes. This internal spotlight makes us sensitive to the beginnings and endings of almost every event more than the changes, whether gigantic or tiny, in the middle.

Why, on a planet that has an exploding population, a deteriorating environment, and massive social problems, has the only genuinely creative species invested so much time, energy, and genius in building arsenals that can only be used to destroy it-self? Why has humanity not redirected its efforts instead into seeking ways for people to live together without conflict and to limiting the size of its population so that everyone can lead a meaningful life? Why hasn’t humanity tried vigorously to preserve the earth that people and all living species depend upon? The answers to these kinds of questions are not simple. The problem has much deeper roots than most people envision. To trace its history will take us into the world in which our species evolved, into the world that made us. That world has produced in us certain ways of interpreting our surroundings, ways that once enhanced our survival. But these “old ways” are not necessarily adaptive in a world that is utterly different from the one in which our ancestors lived.

More importantly, human beings have built entirely new environments: farms, villages, towns, crowded cities, ocean liners, even underwater dwellings, and more. Human beings can even live for brief periods away from earth itself.