{"id":337,"date":"2021-10-17T06:45:47","date_gmt":"2021-10-17T06:45:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qsconsultants.in\/blog\/?p=337"},"modified":"2021-10-17T06:45:48","modified_gmt":"2021-10-17T06:45:48","slug":"we-are-literally-in-a-race-with-ourselves-the-psychology-of-consciousness-dr-robert-ornstein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qsconsultants.in\/blog\/we-are-literally-in-a-race-with-ourselves-the-psychology-of-consciousness-dr-robert-ornstein\/","title":{"rendered":"We Are, Literally, in a Race with Ourselves \u2013 The Psychology of Consciousness \u2013 Dr. Robert Ornstein"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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, \u2018The Psychology of Consciousness\u2019<\/em>, by Dr. Robert Ornstein<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Excerpt<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We Are, Literally, in a Race with Ourselves<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n


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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


\u201cPrehistory,\u201d 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 living
in \u201cremotest antiquity\u201d\u2014cave dwellers, hunter-gatherers, those who lived just before the agricultural revolution, long before civilization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


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 \u201cdesigned\u201d to live when our species numbered hundreds of small bands. We were designed to respond to immediate danger quickly\u2014those who did lived long enough to produce us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


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\u2014billions 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201ccreate.\u201d We don\u2019t 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\u2014with computers, air and space travel, the threat of nuclear war, man-made climate change. All these are unprecedented. And
yet, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


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\u2019s 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, some of which we already experience? There are countless solutions proposed to the continuous<\/p>\n\n\n\n

problems of modern life, and I(author) do not wish to in any way reject any of them. However, it is in an understanding of our mental system that may well provide the clues to those who wish to effect changes\u2014for we do have some extraordinary abilities, but also the accumulated limitations of millions of years. At least now we know what some of our mental limitations are!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our biological evolution is, for all practical purposes, at its end. There will be no further biological evolution without human \u201cconscious evolution.\u201d And this may not happen without first an understanding of what our consciousness is, what it was originally designed to do, and where the points of possible change may be. That is what The Psychology of Consciousness is about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can buy your copy from any of the bookstores near you or via any on-line portal selling books or also by clicking the following link:  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/malorbooks.com\/psychology-of-consciousness.html<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Concluding today\u2019s session.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let us remember<\/strong>: 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.<\/p>\n

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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, \u2018The Psychology of Consciousness\u2019, 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   →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-human-pscyhology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qsconsultants.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qsconsultants.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qsconsultants.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qsconsultants.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qsconsultants.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/qsconsultants.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":339,"href":"https:\/\/qsconsultants.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337\/revisions\/339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qsconsultants.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qsconsultants.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qsconsultants.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}