Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation), This week again let me bring to your attention an interesting excerpt from this thought provoking work, ‘The Psychology of Consciousness’, by Dr. Robert Ornstein.

Excerpt

We Are, Literally, in a Race with Ourselves

We are now biologically obsolete, as we evolved to suit the conditions of a different world, a world that ended at the latest 20,000 years ago. We have not changed much during that period, although it seems a long time to us.

“Prehistory,” after all, takes in all this period, from the hunter-gatherers through the beginnings of civilization, to the agricultural, industrial, and other revolutions, and we are quite accustomed to thinking that twentieth-century humans in Western society are very different from those livingin “remotest antiquity”—cave dwellers, hunter-gatherers, those who lived just before the agricultural revolution, long before civilization.

But to anyone who is aware of the recent discoveries in human evolution, our own time scale must be reset. Human beings, and our predecessors, evolved over a period lasting hundreds of millions of years. Our predecessors stood up and probably shared food 4 million years ago. Five hundred thousand years ago there were organized settlements in what is now southern France. We certainly have not been able to change significantly in the last 100,000 years. The last 30,000 years are an insignificant amount of time in evolutionary terms: There has been no time to im-prove the development of our mental capacities, our ability to meet the challenges of the environment, our ability to think, reason, and create. We are the same people who were “designed” to live when our species numbered hundreds of small bands. We were designed to respond to immediate danger quickly—those who did lived long enough to produce us.

Our dangers, in the current era, are of a different kind: No one is prepared to view 15,000 murders during puberty (the average child, according to recent studies, does, on television and in the cinema); no one is biologically prepared for the destruction that might follow a nuclear war (think of it—billions could die within hours, and this to a race which numbered only in the millions for most of its history); no one is prepared biologically for the complexity of the crowds, the noise, and the pollution of the urban surround in many cities.

And there is no time for the glacial processes of evolution to produce those changes in us; our own brain took more than 500 million years to “create.” We don’t have that kind of time!Will we be able to make the changes necessary to understand our world and alter our course? Our own world has changed radically in our own lifetimes—with computers, air and space travel, the threat of nuclear war, man-made climate change. All these are unprecedented. Andyet, we have the same mental system that we had ages ago, one that tries, in the face of everything, to keep things stable, simple, and neat.

There are contemporary psychologies described here that allow us, perhaps for the first time, to understand these inflexible tendencies of mind. There are advanced psychologies that agree that the human being is an animal who wishes and attempts desperately to make his life as routine and stable as possible, keeping to fixed assumptions and paradigms, while the world changes continuously.In the next few years we will discover whether human beings will be able to adapt to the enormous changes that have occurred in the past century. Will we be able to feed the world’s population? We will know whether it is possible to educate our young to face the contemporary world as it is. Can we avoid a nuclear holocaust or the drastic effects of climate change,