I contend that in an inexorable march towards that idyllic world, we had to create a mess to begin with! This is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary factual evidence.
...Our story rationalizes most of these seeming imperfections as the necessary suffering that had to be endured in our Caterpillar phase as we built out the technological foundations of our Butterfly phase.
...In general, we orient ourselves based on a creation story, a story that places us within the Universe and imbues our life with meaning and value.
...Therefore, the difficulty is not with the creation stories per se, but with the cultural stories that rule our daily lives. When our cultural stories don’t match reality, we tend to do things that are not true to ourselves, that are against our core “Dharma”.
...It is necessary for us to correctly answer the "Who Are We?" question, at least from a purely biological sense so that we can put the puzzle pieces together on the much more important "Why Are We Here?" question later on.
...Unfortunately, humans are not biologically equipped to be like carnivores. Our biological characteristics such as our colons, intestines, saliva, jaws and teeth, which have been relatively unchanged for the past 200,000 years, are not designed for the consumption of animal flesh.
...When I immigrated to the US and came to know of the horrific conditions in which dairy cows are raised in the US, I justified my continued consumption of dairy products telling myself that it is different in India. I spun a cocoon of denial...
In the Hindu view, all that is “good” is God or Brahman. Truth is God, happiness is God, peace is God, and so on.
...When the cultural stories that rule our daily lives don't match reality, that's a sure sign that we have become truly disconnected from our core Dharma.
...We like to think of ourselves as dominating the Earth. The factual evidence for this perspective is abundant. We are destroying forests, killing wild animals, birds and fishes with little to no opposition from them.
...The question of free will is an age-old one that has exercised minds for millennia. Currently, Neuroscience has advanced to a point where it is possible for a computer to accurately predict the choices that an individual is going to make, well before he or...
Any relationship is a connection established to meet the needs of the two parties involved. Our relationship with the Earth is no different. Ideally, our relationship with the Earth must meet our needs as a species while also meeting the needs of the Earth and...
“Industrial toxins are now routinely found in new-born babies, in mother’s milk, in the food chain, in domestic drinking water worldwide… Humans emit more than 250 billion tonnes of chemical substances a year, in a toxic avalanche that is harming people and life everywhere on...
The Earth transitioned into the Holocene era about 12,000 years ago, an interglacial period of remarkable climactic stability, which allowed organized human civilizations to flourish[16]. Environmentalists and climate scientists have mainly attributed this remarkable climactic stability to good fortune.
...We must build parallel institutions and organizations that protect us from corporate assault and resist corporate domination. We must sever ourselves as much as possible from the vampire state. The more we can create self-contained communities, with our own currencies and infrastructures, the more we...
The industrial era is when most of the technologies that we see today got invented. In the process of creating and deploying these technologies, we have had to burn a lot of fossil fuels, destroy a lot of forests, pour a lot of fertilizers and...
Imagine that we are Earth doctors and we are being asked to diagnose the Earth's condition and prescribe a course of action for healing and reversal. Let's take each of the planetary boundaries and examine the root cause for the human induced perturbations in the...
Modern animal husbandry is a marvel of technology. From instruments that guarantee the impregnation of animals to machines that milk dairy cows and the disassembly line that is the modern slaughterhouse, technology has relentlessly squeezed the resource requirements for livestock production.
...It’s a human condition to be blind to our foibles. It is very difficult for us to correct for that blindness when the dominant culture encourages and subsidizes those foibles.
...The Nobel-winning behavioral economist, Daniel Kahnemann, said,
“We can be blind to the obvious. And we can be blind to our blindness.”
But the time is ripe for our globally connected industrial civilization to overcome culturally bequeathed habits that no longer serve their...
In Nature, both the Caterpillar and the Butterfly serve useful purposes and have their respective niches in ecosystems. But in order to understand the purpose served by human beings in both our Caterpillar and Butterfly phases, we must examine the human story in a broader...
Who or what is the Earth anyway? Is the Earth just a big lump of rock with useful resources on it, a "Blue Marble" as seen from outer space? Or is the Earth a more complex material object governed by the laws of physics and...
In order to comprehend why Life has spawned a tool-building species, we first have to embed the human story within the Earth’s biography.
...Our solar system orbits the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy with a period of 225Ma-250Ma, the Galactic Year or the Cosmic Year.
...Wayne Dyer, the noted self-help author and motivational speaker once said,
"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."
That is precisely what our story does by reversing the mainstream perspective.
Throughout his life, Gandhi urged Indians and the whole world to adopt a simple lifestyle for the true pursuit of happiness, for such pursuit is entirely inward looking once basic necessities are met.
...Dr. Vandana Shiva, the Indian humanitarian and environmentalist, said recently[18],
"There are two great trends sweeping the world: one, a trend of diversity, democracy, freedom, joy, culture, people celebrating their lives. And the other, monocultures, deadness, everyone depressed, everyone on Prozac. We don't want...