Human Behaviour

Contents:

Articles, Videos, Recommended Reading

"These are the times we are the people." - Dr Jean Houston

The choice is ours: form a global partnership to care for Earth and one another or risk the destruction of ourselves and the diversity of life. Fundamental changes are needed in our values, institutions, and ways of living. We must realize that when basic needs have been met, human development is primarily about being more, not having more. We have the knowledge and technology to provide for all and to reduce our impacts on the environment. The emergence of a global civil society is creating new opportunities to build a democratic and humane world. Our environmental, economic, political, social, and spiritual challenges are interconnected, and together we can forge inclusive solutions." - The Challenges Ahead: The Earth Charter

Videos

Children see, Children do! NAPCAN 1.00min

Recommended reading:

Getting a Grip 2 By Frances Moore Lappe
Why are we as societies creating a world that we as individuals abhor?
This is the question at the heart of Getting a Grip 2: Clarity, Creativity and Courage for the World We Really Want. This book shatters tired, right–versus–left dogma and affirms readers' basic sanity — their intuition that it is possible to stop grasping at straws and to grasp instead the real roots of today's crises. Drawing on the latest findings in psychology and anthropology, it addresses topics from the impact of the Obama presidency and the global financial crisis.

A World Waiting to be Born – The Search for Civility By M Scott Peck
This book offers a needed prescription for our ailing society. Our illness is incivility: destructive patterns of self-absorption, callousness, manipulativeness, and materialism so ingrained in our routine behaviour that we do not recognise them. Using examples from his own life, case histories, and dramatic scenarios, Dr. Peck demonstrates how change can be effected and how we and our organizations can be restored to health.

A World Waiting to be Born – The Search for Civility By M Scott Peck
This book offers a needed prescription for our ailing society. Our illness is incivility: destructive patterns of self-absorption, callousness, manipulativeness, and materialism so ingrained in our routine behaviour that we do not recognise them. Using examples from his own life, case histories, and dramatic scenarios, Dr. Peck demonstrates how change can be effected and how we and our organizations can be restored to health.

The Act of Creation - Arthur Koestler
It is a study of the processes of creativity and imagination in which Koestler explains that humans are most creative when rational thought is abandoned during dreams and trances. Koestler affirms that all creatures have the capacity for creative activity, frequently suppressed by the automatic routines of thought and behaviour that dominate their lives.


The Center of the Cyclone By John C Lilly, MD
John Lilly gives a sensitive and insightful overview of his work on transcendent consciousness and its ramifications for society. The book looks at the inner life of a dedicated scientist experimenting and exploring inner space - the teeming universe of the human mind!

The Child in the Family By Maria Montessori
This book explains the Montessori philosophy. Emphasising that children from birth on should be treated with respect, the same respect we would have when we have a guest in the house. She talks about the newborn period and one wishes our kids doctors would read it, then she writes about kids and teens and their relationship with their parents.

High Noon By J F Rischard
In this age of instant communication and biotechnology, on this ever-smaller planet, what kinds of problems have we created for ourselves? How do we tackle them in a world where the accustomed methods used by nation-states may be reaching their natural limits? In High Noon, J. F. Rischard challenges us to take a new approach to the twenty most important and urgent global problems of the twenty-first century. Rischard finds their common thread: we don't have an effective way of dealing with the problems that our increasingly crowded, interconnected world creates. Our difficulties belong to the future, but our means of solving them belong to the past.

Person/Planet By Thomas Roszak
Roszak brings together the insights of deep ecology and humanistic psychology. The result is a powerful reassertion of Personalism, the philosophy that has most stubbornly resisted the dehumanising forces of industrial society. As bleak as the environmental fate of the Earth may seem, "Person/Planet" offers a daringly original and hopeful hypothesis: that the Earth herself is already working in the depths of the human psyche to heal our troubled urban-industrial culture. Google Books Preview

Affluenza By Oliver James
There is currently an epidemic of 'affluenza' throughout the world - an obsessive, envious, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses - that has resulted in huge increases in depression and anxiety among millions. He asks: why do so many more people want what they haven't got and want to be someone they're not, despite being richer and freer from traditional restraints? And, in so doing, uncovers the answer to how to reconnect with what really matters and learn to value what you've already got. In other words, how to be successful and stay sane.