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AWARENESS OF CULTURAL CONDITIONING
Dr. G. Chattopadhyay
I will focus on some of the aspects of modern society, of modern man, which create problems of which we seem to be totally unaware and for which we do not seem to be equipped to do anything through modern education or science. For these problems, yoga seems to be the only answer. Other speakers have focused on the various ways in which yoga can be utilized, so I will avoid that area altogether and focus on the problems which we do not seem to be quite aware of.
I would like to begin by talking about culture because I began my career as a social anthropologist, an area from which I later moved away. We are all creatures of culture, in the way that we are brought up at home by our parents. In a sense the parents are the culture bearers. The whole idea is that, by handing down culture from one generation to another, the children of the next generation are helped to survive and to grow. But we seem to be quite ignorant of some of the things that happen to us in the process of becoming sophisticated, cultured and civilized. First and foremost, our potential is severely curtailed, because culture puts a boundary on the behavioral repertoire. "This is what is done. This is what is not done." So, we may have a tremendous amount of behavioral potential in us, but right from the beginning we learn to survive by forgetting what we knew earlier. It is a peculiar kind of paradox in which we grow up. That is the first problem of culture, any culture.
The second problem is that we endow various aspects of our culture with positive feelings; for example, this is my religion, this is my language, this is how we eat, this is how we cook, this is how we build, this is how we greet, and so on. All these things are good. But what we are not aware of, and what comes out whenever there is a crisis, is that somehow there is an implication that that which is not within this cultural
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