Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation), let us look at a “A Little Anthropology”.
Also as we begin today ‘let us remember this about ‘Attention’. Our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to. Attention: is important and most of the times we are so indifferent to it. It is as fundamental as food; and we go blundering about, seeking ways to assuage the craving, instead of learning how to provide ourselves with what we need, sensibly and calmly. We feed the hunger blindly. Once the mechanism is brought to our attention and we begin to study it, it is as if a veil has been stripped off ordinary life, and we become freer in our action and choices.
“Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, and societies, in both the present and past”.
Now before we move further, The Commanding Self; here points to the “mixture of primitive and conditioned responses, common to everyone, which inhibits and distorts human progress and understanding”.
If you were to be asked, “Which would you prefer – a little anthropology or a million dollars?” most people would, surely say that they would take the million. Sociologists and others are nowadays aware, of course, that what people say is not necessarily what they do, and a number of millions of dollars are not available for the test. But it has been noted that, when asked which newspaper they read, so many people said “The Times” that had they spoken the truth, that newspaper would be selling – on extrapolated statistical analysis – several million copies everyday. So it not really unsafe to assume that most people would prefer million to the anthropology, anthropologists included. Those who would not, might not only be statistically unimportant; they might very well be rather abnormal as well…
Why the choice of the money and not the learning? We have to go back a long way, perhaps via anthropology but certainly beyond it, to see; though when we do, we shall see clearly.
Take a human being, an animal, bird or reptile. He or she is moving along, doing nothing much in particular, in a territory, and life is humdrum. The creature is running, as it were, in bottom gear.
Then he, she or it comes across a source of stimulus: let us make it a pleasant one. It may be food, it may be sex, it may be anything which gives a “buzz”. This event makes life worth living. It makes everything more pleasant. It is the equivalent of finding a treasure. The fruit just found tastes more delicious, just as the million dollars stand for something which can procure numerous pleasurable stimuli. Knowledge, study, anthropology do not give anything like that. Beyond the immediate pleasure seeking comes the phase when reason comes into it, or knowledge. Reason says that one needs a shelter. It is not exciting to build a shelter, not, certainly, as exciting as a pleasurable input like finding a delicious taste, smell or sight. There is a hierarchy of importance here.
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